and now I see with eye serene, the very soul of the machine

[annathyst]

Lots of driving today; about five hours worth, to be specific. My neck, shoulders, and left arm hurt like hell - I think I badly need to readjust the driver's seat, as this happens every time I drive for a long time in that car...

Driving into downtown Albany to pick up Adrienne from the train station[1] was...weird. The ramp complex coming off 787 and the brief glimpses of the city that I got made me feel like I was inside some immense machine, built by giants for some unknown purpose.

I got the ipw2100 card Alex lent me working in snark. Well, mostly working - I get "Fatal interrupt. Scheduling firmware restart" in my system log every few minutes, but it does seem to work overall. Will test WPA with it when I go home for intersession - hopefully I'll have better luck than I did with the Atheros card snark came with[2].

It snowed while I was gone. Everything's white, and the cratergiant pothole in the driveway is under a deceptive white blanket. I feel sorry for whoever fails to notice it and breaks an axle.

The end of the semester is nearing. Doom.

--
[1]: Not that I was in downtown Albany for long - I ended up missing my turn and going quite a ways down 9/20 before realizing "hey, I was here when I dropped her off before" and turning onto 4 and going from there to pick her up, on the off chance that anyone cares.
[2]: God, the drivers (both madwifi and madwifi-ng) for Atheros cards are such an unbearable clusterfuck. Even this thing that spams my syslog has got to be better.

Comments

[yellowpigs.livejournal.com]

I'm having a heck of a time with an ipw2200 card in ubuntu; the driver module crashes at (seemingly) random intervals. Wireless drivers suck.

[annathyst]

<rant>
The (now old) Atheros drivers didn't have working WPA with my card, even though it supports it. The new (still pre-alpha!) ones probably do, but, among other things, require futzing around with some new custom overkill tool called wlanconfig before it even deigns to give you a network interface you can poke with wireless-tools. Oh, and did I mention that power management support is iffy in the new ones and nonexistant in the old ones? If I unplugged with the atheros card, I could sit and watch my battery meter go down alarmingly quickly.

The ipw2100 drivers support WPA (yes!) and power management (yes!!), but turning it on is useless, as I get a firmware restart and lose the PM setting every few minutes anyway. Lose, lose, LOSE.

The NetworkManglerManager guys wrote a rant about how much the current state of wireless on Linux sucks. I don't think they even scratched the surface of the crust over the bottomless pool of suck that is wireless on Linux now.
</rant>

[yellowpigs.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's a nightmare. Between that card, an Airport (limited encryption capability), and an Airport Extreme (absolutely useless), I'm ready to give up on Linux wireless. And I can't believe how many wireless questions there are on mailing lists, etc.; I'm at the point now where when I see the word ndiswrapper, I just hit delete. The OpenBSD team has been trying to get wireless vendors to open up chipsets and work with F/LOSS developers, but the response hasn't been so great. *sigh*

[mstrjon32.livejournal.com]

5 hours? Lame.

Jake and I did 4987 miles over thanksgiving break, so, what, figure a conservative average of 80 mph, thats about 62 hours in the car.