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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 opnevpn tunnel on connection. I wonder if it could be extended to help with my other projects??

I know its been a while. I got an RHCE, got a new job, and moved to NYC. I want to build a GSM -> UMA tool. I can use wifiroamd.

Port upgrade all, installs all ie. tells darwinports to install everything in the tree.
Port upgrade installed; naturally just upgrades the ports you have installed.

I am now using ratpoison as a window manager on my mythtv frontend. I saved myself some ram managed to shave a few seconds from boot to ui. Here is my .xsession.

#!/bin/bash
#xfwm4&
ratpoison -c focus&
#xterm &
mythwelcome

I also added VideoModeLin = 3 to the ~/.zsnes/zsnesl.cfg of the mythtv user in order to get the image centered and stable on my tube.

I got fired. It was painless; like a girlfriend that has gotten fat breaking up with you just before you started gnawing your arm off to get away. Thats life. I made a sample widget using dashcode that basically just pulls the rss feed from slashdot. Its big as hell, and here it is. Enjoy. Oh, and I apparently have a family history of high cholesterol so I am scheduling daily visits to the gym. I may as well get in fantastic shape with all this newfound free time. ** No more cell phone, thank god. ** I feel like I just got a new laptop.

I have learned a little more C. Now I know how to open/modify/close files using fopen, fclose, fprintf, and fgets. Als always sample code and universal binaries are available here. Todays programs are called openandreadfile.c, and openandwritefile.c. I am looking into using libosip, and libexosip2 to write a sip client that only a geek would love. Beyond SIP I have enough things that I want to do with the language to keep me going for quite some time, embedded development in particular. This is fun.

Although this is not my first time around the block regarding gcc, I have never gone much further than editing makefiles, and use flags under gentoo. Here is what I learned today; I am writing it down in the hopes that I will not have to learn these things again.

1. gcc, the Free Software Foundation’s C compiler, does not comply with the ISO/ANSI standard unless you include the -pedantic command line switch. (-ansi just turns off various GNU extensions.)

2. To get the full effect of the built-in error-checking, you need to use -O along with -Wwhatever. I recommend using -Wall -O until you feel you know C, then you should use whatever additional -W switches you feel are appropriate. The -O switch has to do with optimizing code but it also enables checking for uninitialized variables.

3. To make a universal binary that will run on my laptop + my home ppc based macs I have to use “-arch i386 -arch ppc”

Final: I am compiling now using “gcc -pedantic -Wall -O -arch i386 -arch ppc filename.c -o filename” -Peace-

I discovered opensetreetmap.org a few days ago while reading a post in the openmoko mailing list. and to quote the project page “OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I am sure I could come up with something using self gathered data and maybe the google maps api. That leads me to my second point. Its about time that I learned C, so this weekend I am doing nothing but that. I am going to read and go through every online example I can find, and post my progress here so I can tell the world what I have learned.

Finally a real open source cell phone. No more of that well our phone runs linux, but you can’t touch anything crap. The FIC manufactured Neo1973 runs linux and uses the apt style ipkg package manager.
Hardware specs include…

• 120.7 x 62 x 18.5 (mm)
• 2.8″ VGA (480×640) TFT Screen
• Samsung s3c2410 SoC
• Global Locate AGPS chip
• Ti GPRS (2.5G not EDGE)
• Unpowered USB 1.1
• Touchscreen
• micro-sd slot
• 2.5mm audio jack
• 2 buttons
• 1200 mAh battery (charged over USB)
• 128 MB SDRAM
• 64 MB NAND Flash
• bluetooth - yeah…

and software includes

• Dialer
• Contacts
• Application Manager
• Calendar

Thats just the basics for now but I for one am all over this. There is information at openembedded.org on porting your apps. I for one am thinking softphone/ SIP client. Something lightweight that has already been proven to work on another embedded platform like minisip perhaps. If anyone wants to help I will provide a free SIP account for testing. How does agps work? Will I be able to develop a google maps/ agps mashup as a navigational system solution? Will batman be juiced by the joker and his squad of jolly henchmen?

This project is done. I got one on ebay and opened her up. I removed the hard drive, took it to another machine, the immediatly blew out the existing xp embedded install and applications with cfdisk. After I finished a fedora core 6 install on the drive I re installed it into the akimbo case. I had to edit /etc/fstab to fix some paths but afterward it boots.

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