Author Archives: admin

Out of Print

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I like O’Reilly’s books. They’re well-written, well-researched, and a lot of fun to read. They are also very cool, because O’Reilly, probably better than anyone else in the IT publishing business, know how to market their books (think The Camel Book if you don’t believe me, and resign yourself to “I need to find another blog to read” if you don’t get this particular geek reference). I would love to write for them some day.

In the meantime, I frequently surf over to their site, reading the blogs, browsing the catalogue, and planning my next buy. And sometimes I just read stuff here and there. Today, I browsed the list of out-of-print books and found this:
I LOL’d, as they say. Yes, a book from January 1900 is probably out of print by now, but I had no idea that XML was that old.

Anticlimax

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My persistent Debian-related WiFi problems finally got solved. The other day, I sat at a restaurant, working away, and decided to try the WiFi. The laptop connected, immediately, with no problems whatsoever.

This got me thinking.

Apparently, Debian and the Intel drivers couldn’t be to blame. It had to be a router issue. So I upgraded my Netgear router firmware (I have both a gateway and a repeater, so there were two machines to consider), and voilá! I had a working WiFi connection at home.

Not That Easy – WiFi Woes, Part Two

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Turns out I was too optimistic. wicd and the little adjusting I did does not deliver a working Internet, not every time. Today, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t connect (beyond the router, to which I can always connect) until I changed the laptop IP from dynamic to static, and the DHCP client from automatic to dhclient. All of a sudden, I was back surfing!

Only, just now, when I booted up the laptop again, I couldn’t connect beyond the router (which connected fast enough), not until I changed the IP back to dynamic… This is seriously weird and I can’t explain it. I wonder if it’s got something to do with my router, an instruction that is lost on the way, DNS services that aren’t updates… something?!?

WiFi on Linux is NOT easy.

WiFi Woes

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Just a little note for posterity:

My Lenovo T61 laptop that now runs Debian has an Intel 3945 ABG wireless network adapter. While the Debian (Lenny) installation and the subsequent upgrade to Sid went flawlessly, with the WiFi card discovered and listed, it wouldn’t connect wirelessly to my Netgear router (actually a repeater, fed from a Netgear ADSL modem/gateway). It connected to the router itself, I was able to ping the router and connect to it using a browser, but everything beyond that was inaccessible. I tried various interfaces stanzas, reconfigured TCP/IP, and tested all kinds of tricks, without any success.

Then I did some serious googling. A lot of people have had this problem and many probably still do. Also, the problem was pretty much the same, regardless of your Linx flavour. Finally, a Ubuntu forum suggested removing the network-manager package and installing wicd in its place. Said and done (luckily I had upgraded to Debian Sid; the package is not available in Lenny). I had to reboot but could still not connect.

As a last resort I tried explicitly pointing out my ISP’s DNS server IP addresses in the wicd configuration. That did it and I’m now writing this blog on a WiFi connection.

Sometimes it’s important to document these things. Maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else.

Linux on the Laptop

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Following the unfortunate events surrounding my presentation at XML Prague (a fabulous event, by the way; you should have been there), I now run Debian GNU/Linux as my primary OS on my work laptop. There is a Windows XP partition, so far, but my plan is to use Xen and virtualisation, and run the Windows operating systems as Xen domains.

The laptop installation that failed contained my first attempts at virtualisation, by the way. Microsoft’s Virtual PC ran Windows 2003 Server and Cassis, the Document Management System that I’m part of developing at Condesign Operations Support, and was connected to my XP installation through a loopback adapter. In theory, this is a very nice setup since it is possible to simply run a complete image of an OS and the server setup as part of a demonstration and then reset it to its pre-demo state for the next show. In practice, however, Virtual PC does not deliver. The hardware it emulates is very limited and everything it does is rather slow. It was enough to wet my appetite, however (together with my friend Niklas’ obsession with Xen), so I decided to do it right, now that I had to wipe the old drive anyway.

My Debian installation does not yet run a Xen kernel, but I’ll keep you posted.

I Hate Windows

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This blog is about blame. Specifically, it’s about Windows XP. If you’re into the Microsoft-friendly thing, quit reading.

I held my presentation at XML Prague today. It seemed to go reasonably well until I was about to switch to a demo. I was in Powerpoint and meant to show a little something on the actual application, so I switched to Internet Explorer, or so I thought.

NOTHING happened. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nothing whatsoever.

Nothing. Can you imagine the terror? WTF?

I kept on speaking, realising that my presentation wasn’t up to par. Another demo opportunity came up, with similar results.

Nothing.

And that is what happened. Nothing. You explain this, because I can’t.

XML Prague Nerves

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XML Prague is only a week away so I’ve been working on my slides. I’ve done stuff on resource naming (links identifying a resource by name rather than location), markup, linking systems (actually only one, XLink), publishing, “document trees” and more, but it all feels deceptively simple to me. Right now, the whitepaper’s most important (and only?) message, use an abstraction layer such as URNs to always identify whatever resources you are using, seems trivial, even. The question, therefore, is if I really am that brilliant at what I do (I’d like to think so, obviously) or if the whole thing is so simple that it doesn’t need pointing out, in which case I’m in trouble and people will fall asleep (or worse) at my presentation.

As I said, I do include some other stuff in the presentation, but in my mind it’s all a result of the basic premise.

Or maybe it’s just me being nervous. We’ll see.