Month: November 2007

I like it here.

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Living on Roosevelt Island….
cheaper; higher quality foods…
katz pastrami in any form…

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The staff at Gabes school taught him to refer to Native Americans as “Indians”. They need to be corrected, and I need to find a better school for him. I thought that I would be able to try public school for a while until I found him something better; but it looks like that is not going to work out. That is unforgivable. Its something akin to saying colored. While most don’t care, the few that are affected take it at great offense. I do not want to offend anyone at all but if you still don’t understand the idea that I am trying to convey try one of these words. While they may mean nothing to you, they are very offensive to some and should just not be used. Bad form NYC Public Schools.

Google released the Android SDK today.

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They have sample code and videos on the website. The points that I have gathered so far include…

  1. Android applications are meant to be coded in java. They used eclipse in the sample video. I can learn java; this should be fun.
  2. There is support for Opengl ES; this means if the hardware supports it you can get interfaces that are as good looking as anything on my iphone. (clutter??)
  3. There is a high level java layer method to interface with the dialer. The sample app video shows one example.
  4. There is a ton of available documentation already, and of coarse a google group.
  5. Google is holding a contest for the best application. I for one am going to enter.

Wifiroamd manages wifi connections under Linux.

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Last night I rediscovered wifiroamd. I had been using OS X for so long that I had forgotten what it was like trying to configure wireless under linux; let alone have some form of functional roaming from work to home. I used to always make two scripts.

1. for connecting to my wireless network at home
2. for connecting to the wireless network at work

These scripts would always bring the wireless adapter to a usable state via ifconfig, use iwconfig to get on the right channel, essid, etc… then run dhclient, ping something, and echo “OK”. When I was at neither location I would have to get the list of available networks with iwlist then use iwconfig + wpa_supplicant (if it was a wpa enabled network) + dhclient to get a connection. Frankly thats a pain the the ass. Wifiroamd handles all of that and things are seamless. By default it connects to the first unencrypted network with the highest signal reported by iwlist. But that behavior is easily modified.

After initial configuration it “just works”. I have it set up to start on boot. It finds my home network, starts wpa_supplicant, connects to it on the 802.11x layer, gets an ip, and tries to ping the gateway to check for connectivity. If I plug in my cat5, then the two connections are automatically bonded. You read correctly, automatically bonded, not bringing one down and using the other. It comes with samples to do other things like start an openvpn tunnel on connection. I wonder if it could be extended to help with my other projects??