Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T (DVB-T)

In a break from our regular program (prism54 and linux) I spent a little while playing with my Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T card in my main machine, tom.

I occurred to me that the Red Hat kernel might be causing me some problems (I couldn't even compile linux-dvb...). So I copied vanilla 2.4.22 from the laptop (sylvester) to tom (via ethernet, because the wireless network isn't working). Guess what? Compiled and installed the dvb modules first time.

I went to bed a smug happy git.

prism54.org

Things look up for my network card as the groovy hackers involved have made some headway in integrating the two different card types, renamed the module and purchased their own domain name (the important bit !)

Now prism54.org is the place to go for all things prism54 related...

Loving your work folks.

A gratuitous waste of space and time

Richard Dzien has pointed out that no-one has ever or will ever read this and that its even more boring than his journal/blog. True.

Saturday, October 25, 2003

Wireless closer

It looks as though I'm close. The card is detected and iwconfig once showed that it had seen the AP. Apparently I've got to play with the setoid command. (Looks like a low-level, dirty hack, but it gets your card working).

All this, so I can have 54Mb arount the house (and still 56k to the outside world!)

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Wireless update 2003

On Tuesday afternoon I rebuilt a stock 2.4.22 kernel (+ ISL3890-0.1.0 patch, obviously) with /usr/bin/gcc32 and it can see the card fine, but I wasn't willing to take my laptop home on the bus, so it'll have to wait until tonight to get some proper testing.

At least with Linux, when something fails you can dig around and get it working. With XP (best desktop version of Windows or "Glorified service pack"[1] depending on your opinion) you're just plain f*cked.

[1] As my colleague Richard Dzien put it

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Wireless shmireless

A bit quick off the mark there.

The card will not work under XP (despite the fact it is meant to). In fact XP seems a bit shit with respect to adding hardware. (The Hauppauge Win Nova-T card I have at home doesn't work under XP either).

As for Linux - I have been a miserable failure in getting this working with Red Hat's Fedora kernel. Bugger.

Friday, October 17, 2003

Wireless update

dabs rock! ParcelForce delivered the goods within 17 hours of my order. Some other online retailers never manage such a quick turn around.

Setting up the WG602 access point was a piece of cake. I already have a DHCP server (and BIND) on my main machine at home (tom) so I just added the MAC address to the DHCP server and, hey presto, web access to the router. All totally configurable from Mozilla. Excellent - it took under 20 minutes to secure the AP.

The PC card (WG511) installed seamlessly under Windows 2000 Server on my laptop (sylvester) and again once I (finally) overwrote that with Windows XP Pro.

Under Linux (Fedora 0.95) lspci recognises it as a D-Link DWL-g650 (which has the same chipset). In fact a quick google shows that these dudes have drivers and firmware for this card. Let's see if it works.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Wireless

So I decided to waste some more money and splash out on some (cheap) wireless kit. Why? You may well ask as I only have (and thanks to the total inadequacy of BT and the cable providers, only can have) a 56k analog line at home.

The reason? So I can surf when Debbie is watching something I don't like on the TV, or do the shopping at Tesco without buggering off upstairs.

I ordered a Netgear WG511 card (rumoured to work under Linux) and their WG602 access point from dabs. Fingers crossed it'll all work.

It's a shame that only Apple make a Wireless Access Point with a built in modem, and that it costs a whopping 180! (Over twice as much as the Netgear). So I'll have to have the upstairs PC acting as a router (like I do on the Ethernet network at home).

Fedora 0.95 doesn't use RHN

PBKAC Alert! Disregard my previous comment about RHN and 0.95. This comment on the fedora-test-list says that you just use the yum channel.

An advantage to that is that you can get updates from your favourite mirror (e.g. mirror.ac.uk). Cool!

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Fedora Core 0.95 / RHN / up2date amusement

The new up2date 4.1.5 in the latest Severn beta updates allows you to talk to apt and yum repositories which is really cool.

More amusing is that once you've updated the redhat-release RPM you can't access RHN via up2date anymore as it (currently) doesn't recognise 0.95 as a valid version number! Fairly amusing, and I'm sure I'll be able to connect tomorrow.

XHTML

Updated my own website to XHTML 1.0 Strict from HTML 4.0 Strict. Pretty painless. Although obviously the site is still pretty ugly, difficult to navigate and ultimately pointless.

Trying to do the same at work to a site I wrote 5 years ago is a bit more painful, but I expect I'll get there.

I used Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards book to learn about XHTML.

Personally, I think the book contains too much talk and not enough reference material, but it's not so much aimed as standards zealots like myself but other so-called "Web professionals" who write web-sites that only IE can parse. Still, due to the chatty, backgroundy-nature of the book it does explain some of the harder parts in great detail, where a reference manual might have just confused me.