Tom's Insights - Week of 12/10/01

Week of December 10th, 2001

Most Recent : December 12, 2001 -- 21:30 hrs
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Monday December 10, 2001

Greetings. Welcome to Monday. My Dell wireless card arrived this morning (at 8AM!! I must have been the first delivery on her route...). Plugged it in, XP recognized it immediately, installed the appropriate driver(s) without any further prompting, and there it was -- working. Connectivity. The signal strength on the card has been varying (hold your cursor over the network icon in the taskbar) between "good" and "very good"; my Linksys card never showed a network icon, but the bundled configuration utility has a signal strength bar and it never exceeded 50%. Note that I haven't changed a thing regarding the position or settings on my WAP.

John Biel was right -- the card is both nicely finished and nicely packaged. It comes in a nifty hard plastic case, with a manual (never opened it; no need), and a driver/utility CD (no need for it either, although I'll probably install the configuration utility on it just so I have it). John tells me there's XP drivers on the CD. The card itself looks "rich". The other nice touch I noted was that on the back of the card are all required pertinents: MAC address, serial number, supported encryption (128 bit), etc.

While I'm on the subject of this card, I generated a fair bit of confusion last week when (a) I referred to the card as being OEM'd to Cisco, and (b) said that I didn't think Cisco even made wireless cards (they DO... Roland shot me a URL moments after I posted that [grin]; Roland works for Cisco and took personal offence). In defense of my faux pas(es), it's no wonder I was a tad confused. Mr. Biel sorted me out:

Just read your web page, I'm afraid I've not been very clear in differentiating the cards I've been talking about so I'll try a list:

Dell Truemobile 1100 series: rebranded Cisco 342 card which is itself a rebranded Aironet 4800 card. The confusion here is that Aironet is the actual manufacturer and was bought by Cisco. However prior to Cisco buying Aironet, Dell had an OEM agreement with Aironet which is why the 1100 series exists.
Dell Truemobile 1150 series: rebranded Lucent Orinoco gold card. This one also gets confusing as Orinoco is now operated by Agere systems and once you have this card installed and working, then go to the windows update page, the windows page will offer you an updated driver for it by Agere systems.

So there you go. I have the 1150 card.

The good Mr. Bilbrey sent me a URL last night; it appears that OpenMail is about to be revised (Details). Cool. When it comes out I'll see if I can't snag a copy and post a hands-on review.

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Tuesday December 11, 2001

The thermometer outside shows a relatively balmy -18C. Thermometers can lie, however. Ours is out of the path of the wind howling in from the north. A quick trip to the garbage (VERY quick) turns on my warning sensors -- it's cold; time to plug the car in and batten down the hatches. The girls will have to be driven to school tomorrow. Note to Self: Buy a battery blanket. I was outside no more than 5 minutes, and my hands had already begun to numb. That's what happens when you freeze your extremities too many times -- resistance to cold weakens. Inside, I check the temperature on-line: Environment Canada reports Saskatoon's weather, as of 22:00, to be -19C. With the wind chill factor: -39C. For my 'Merican friends who are not familiar with the Celsius scale, it meets the Fahrenheit scale at -40 degrees. Minus 40 Celsius is minus 40 Fahrenheit.

Joy and Rapture.

Me-thinks it might be a long winter.

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Wednesday December 12, 2001

Warmer tonight -- about -20C according to my internal barometer (and my senses when I took the garbage out). To answer the 10 or so queries I got today in one fell swoop: The coldest weather I've ever experienced was in Beaver Creek, YT about 15 years ago -- Minus 72 degrees fahrenheit. It was routinely -60F for weeks on end when I was hauling fuel from Watson Lake, YT to Cantung, NWT (that was 10 years ago; winters have warmed considerably since). What's it like being in that kind of temperature? Well, one tends to work quickly and get one's buns back into a warm environment. Unprotected hands freeze within minutes. And you always make sure you have a scarf or the edge of your parka covering your mouth. If you don't, breathing is difficult; the violently cold air instantly freezes water molecules in the upper part of your lungs. Other than that, it's a blast.

I spent several hours last night updating and configuring the Slackware installation (on the back end of Phaedrus) I started about two weeks ago. I've got a ways to go yet, but I'm getting there. So far I've added all the latest slackware-current packages to the base install (including an update to KDE 2.2.2), upgraded the kernel to 2.4.16 and stripped all the shit out, and tweaked up a few configuration scripts. Still on the To-Do list: get X up and running with the new nVidia drivers, plus add some apps. Hopefully I can get things to a workable state this weekend. The reason I'm suddenly pushing on Linux is because I've got a self-motivated learning project coming down the pike: learn as much as I can about PHP and using PHP to access a backend DB (like mySQL).

Oh, BTW... The only thing I had to do to get my new Dell wireless card working under Slack was to plug the pertinent IP/routing stuff into /etc/pcmcia/network.opts. It's using the wrong driver (the wslan_ng, I think; should be using the Orinico driver), but it works. I'm pleased.

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