This is going to be a rant. (Not.) I’ve installed the new Ubuntu (8.04, Hardy Heron), and… I’m not satisfied at all. It does recognise my wireless card (Broadcom 43xx) out of box, but no way it’s working. The config doesn’t help at all… There are a few things though that made me laugh. One such was that i configured the wireless through the terminal (since the nm-applet, the network config GUI couldn’t get it working), using the good old sudo iwconfig wlan0. It did set everything right, and it stayed like that (iwconfig wlan0 showed it clear and bright), the one problem was that it didn’t work at all. Not even sudo iwlist scan (claimed that the network is down)… It was right with that claim: i checked out the hardware with sudo lshw -class network, and then decided to come back to windows. Look: the dear linux does see and recognise both my wired (which i don’t use) and wireless cards — but both as wired. There is a separate wireless something, with the wlan0 logical id. And it’s “disabled”. I have no idea how to enable it, or how to bind it to the real hardware. I’m fed up. I could get the whole thing working in five minutes under that “oh-so-crappy” Windows. And on the Ubuntu site it says “You’ll never go back.” Well, i did.
Oklahoma
I’ve just read on Slashdot, how reckless is the american government. It seems that not only the higher-ups, but even those maintaining the US government websites are totally hopeless. Honestly, how can someone put a clear and bright SQL query in a url clear and bright, totally unencoded? Though it’s said that the site since then underwent “maintenance”, but still, anyone could get the very personal, more-or-less sensitive data tens of thousands of people, just because they simply thought that whoever would log into that system would be innocent, and surely not someone who knows the smallest bit of SQL. Though those people must be quite interesting, making such basic mistakes in a government website – honestly, even my blog is more secure than that (not as if i’d want anyone to try it out, but if you were trying, i hope you won’t find any such lame exploits – if it took more than a minute to hack me, it already worth my work). The most fascinating part of it all, how hard the writer of the above mentioned article had to emphasise the dangers of such an exploit before any measures were taken. This is scary – the whole situation kind of reminds me of the comic strip that a commenter at Slashdot mentioned. I hope this level of quality (meaning the exploit, not the comic) is not general among governments…
WPA, WEP, tovább is van, mondjam még?
Tegnap délelőtt maat-nak hála be tudtam állítani a vezeték nélküli hálókártyámat Ubuntu alatt. Már kezdtem volna örülni, de csak naiv voltam. Sikerült ugyan a kártyát telepíteni, de azt elfelejtettem, hogy Windows alatt is fél napos tortúra normálisan beállítani a hálózatot (amint azt később megtapasztaltam). Linux alatt természetesen, teljesen idegen környezetben, lényegében minden segítség nélkül csak odáig sikerült jutnom, hogy az “iwlist scan” paranccsal megbizonyosodtam róla, hogy van a hálózat, látja is, de kapcsolódni hozzá nem sikerült sehogy se. Hiába állítottam be 64 bites WEP kulcsot, hiába csináltam lényegében akármit, csak nem akarták megszólítani egymást.
Twelve
In twelve days the new Ubuntu will come out. I can only hope that it’ll support the wireless network card i have (Broadcom 43xx), because else i won’t use it. I have no intentions of playing around it for hours, just to get it working. It’d take hours i guess, because i’d need to download the required packages onto another computer, then put them on my pendrive, add the pendrive as a repo on this computer, and install the files. It’s complicated for me, because i’m a total newbie to linux, and i have no idea on how to do it. I’ve to use another computer because this one connects to the net via that very wireless card that’s not working. I decided now that i’ll give openSUSE a try… i don’t care what, i want to have a working linux on my computer, and since Ubuntu’s not working the way i’d need it. If that doesn’t support my card either, i’ll get angry and wipe all linux out once and for athe coming two weeks.
Never
It’s an interesting question how Winamp decides which songs i’ve never played. The past few days i’ve been listening to that playlist it generated on the “Never played” tab of the Media Library, but the strange thing is, that as i finally got to the end of the playlist (and could start with a new selection), and checked out the Never tab out of curiousity, it showed that i still haven’t listened to a couple of songs. That seriously made me think. Could it be that if i don’t listen to a song in a long while, Winamp takes it i’ve never listened to it? This is falling apart, since there were songs on that playlist that i clearly remember listening to in a few days. Such a song is Guano Apes‘ cover of Big in Japan, that i just listened to yesterday. And i haven’t changed the file path, i’m not that much of a noob. Most of the songs were added not so long ago, and i have songs to which i last listened last summer, and it’s still not “never played”. It’s again interesting, how its random play works, because there are songs which are played surprisingly often, while there are others, not less good ones, which are totally avoided. Strange. Winamp seems to be addicted to Stratovarius.
What?
What makes a blog good? What makes a good blog popular?
Italy
Now, this news is just hilarious. My God, inadvertently legalizing file sharing! Where does this world go if even laws could be passed without anyone professional reading them? Not as if it’d be such a serious problem for me, that in Italy now anyone could download virtually anything, since the law only says that the sharing should be for educational or scientific purposes, in lowered qualiy. But, as you may know, mp3 and jpg, the most popular file formats on the net are both not lossless formats, so they are in “lowered quality”, thus free to share. Fun. Europe seems to be against music companies—considering what great bands there are here, this could seem surprising, but their music is great anyway.
IM
Just a few days after my firewall gave up, Trillian also decided not to launch. Ideas are welcome on what to use instead. It should be just a multi-protocol im client, simple and user-friendly, as i’m not really planning to spend hours customizing it and downloading every single bit of it one by one (referring to Miranda IM). I’d really appreciate any suggestions.
