James C. Liu's Weblog

Wednesday October 24, 2007

Tried version 0.6 of the ath wifi driver?

I was playing around with installing Nevada b75a last night on my Toshiba Satellite M115-S1064. Yepp, that's the $449 Fry's laptop I got sometime around last Christmas which I mentioned has funky wireless last week in my blog about the lower cost wifi cards.

Most everything works on this laptop, and at 6lbs and wide screen, it's not the lightest, but it one of the cheapest and gets the job done. A problem since the summit that had been bugging me was to check for the latest and greatest atheros wifi drivers. I was checking the MadWifi website recently and swore I saw a table that said the new PCIe Atheros 5006 wifi chip was now working fine on Linux. I was wondering if that update had trickled in during the last few months in a beta driver on the OpenSolaris.org site. I was still running an older b70b Nevada on the M115 so I last night, I finally got around to kicking off a fresh install which completed, but struck out on the wifi. But I recalled something one of the Beijing engineers said in an email recently, which mentioned that the OpenSolaris site gets driver updates much more frequently than Nevada or Solaris 10. So I went and checked. And since the end of August, almost 2 months ago, the Sun China Wifi team contributed ath v0.6. And after uninstalling (pkgrm SUNWatheros) on my b75a, I pkgadd'ed the new SUNWatheros v0.6 and magically, the new chip is recognized, plumbs, and hooks up with WEP onto my home 802.11 network. Thanks guys/gals!

So those drivers in the formal distros might be bundled months after the actual beta driver has been posted and downloadable from OpenSolaris.ORG. I'm not sure how Project Indiana will merge the conflicts between beta drivers that give early access, and the formal distros that meet higher quality standards. And to make things worse, if you run "strings ath | grep -i ver" on the atheros driver binary, the formal one that ships with Nevada b75a said version 1.3. But if you run the same command on the OpenSolaris contributed and unbundled driver, you get version 0.6.

But I'm certain there's quite a lot of overlap in the QA/Testing suites for drivers that get contributed to OpenSolaris versus the ones that get bundled into Nevada and later S10. But clearly, even the contributed beta drivers seem to have been tested with many of the same suites that the official versions go through. So it's worth a try to keep checking.

But kudos again the Sun China wifi driver team. Wow! It's working beautifully. I'm hooked in now and writing this blog from that laptop using my home wifi net complete with WEP key support.

Also the Toshiba M115-S1064 had issues with strange noises coming from the HD audio codec. I'm not sure, but maybe they this was due to some host signal processing or "soft codec" being used with the ATI SB450 chipset. It does have a compliant Intel HD Audio "azalea" controller. I tried hacking around the opensolaris audiohd source, but only made the noise worse and louder when playing anything.

But Open Sound System (OSS) came to the rescue again. I'll mention it again that OSS is from 4front Technologies (www.opensound.com) and they've been doing cross Platform audio on UNIX for years. In fact, Dev Mazumdar, the head of OSS attended the Open Solaris summit in Santa Cruz. And he was in Menlo Park yesteday at Sun. I thought he lived in SoCal. Maybe he's finding shelter from the brutal fires and smoke down there. (Hope folks are breathing okay down there - this is always a bad time of year down in SoCal when the Santa Ana winds kick up and the dry summer has turned all the spring growth into kindling).

But I digress. The OSS download for Solaris is free and just requires renewal every 6 months. And it plays nice audio as well for this laptop where the shipping audiohd driver doesn't play properly.

October 24, 2007 09:27 AM PDT Permalink

Tuesday October 16, 2007

When websites lose customers

Losing Me in a Flash

Had a great morning today, and will be getting $392 in a check coming in the mail real soon.

Why?

Well, I cancelled my Citicard Cash-back rewards credit card. Been a customer since 1998, and used to use their card quite often when shopping, online and offline. My wife and I never had any issues really, until about Fall of 2006.

Some time last year, Citicards.com, and only that affiliate of Citigroup, started putting some really annoying flash media content on their home page/login page. At first it was just -only- annoying. On IE, it might look okay, but on Mozilla/Firefox, the flash blocked a quarter to half the screen. We could still login and access our account to pay. But in the Spring of 2007, the web developers up'ed the ante. They created a "chase-me" popup flash bubble that whited-out the whole screen and put a single marketing bubble that advertised a 7.24% equity line of credit or something like that. My wife was still fond of her Linux system, but she couldn't close the bubble. She tried to click on the [x] and the bubble kept re-appearing somewhere else.

She was late paying that month because we waited until the last day, and she forgot about the glitch and by the time, a few days later, that she told me about the browser problem, we were past due. I was able to login using Solaris Nevada with latest Firefox and it successfully negotiated the Flash bubbles and shut them down. And I made a quick payment for the entire card balance on line and told my wife to stop shopping for now with the card, since with most cards, they charge a late fee plus 2 months interest on the balance. So I called and told the customer service folks about the technical issue to discuss the possible late charges and interest charges. And because this was February/March, and the billing month was short, they gave me a 5 day reprieve and so I didn't pay any penalties or interest. Still, the hassle of having to make the phone call was irritating. Just to be sure, I used the online contact form (in Solaris Nevada) and wrote to them about the issue.

A month later, when all was good, we decided to use the card again. And again, the next month, when my wife was trying to pay the bills online, we couldn't get access. Again, I had to login from work and pay the bill. I wrote Citibank via their email/webform again and explained this situation, but this time, I threatened plainly that I would cancel the card and go away. I was/am a 1998 customer, excluded by a company because of foolish use of non-compliant content.

My wife and I put the cards away and stopped using them. It just so happened that I picked up a Capital One rewards offer in the mail that week, and decided to go online, and sign up. It was relatively easy and I got my new card in just a week or so. My wife got her card a few days after mine. And we've had no issues paying bills online. Solaris or Linux. We stopped using the Citicard and took it out of our wallet and left it at home.

The lack of activity on the Citibank card spurred Citibank to send me a notice. They sent new cards too, with the wireless PayPass chip inside to replace the old ones and sent us a little marketing brochure listing all the benefits of using the Citicard Master-Card. I did activate it thinking I might eventually use their card again.

This morning, in my regular routine of changing my online banking passwords and userIDs (which I do a couple times a year), I logged back into the Citicards.com site, and was greeted with a white blank screen. It was Flash. I checked and I have the latest Firefox and have the latest Flash available for Solaris x86 and yet, I had a blank white screen with nothing to click. I tried to turn off Javascript at first and was able to nullify the Flash load and login, but then got redirected to a page where their system said their site requires Javascript to run. I can understand if their site needs cookies, and I've designed cryptographic cookies that run cross browser (and implement a fully encrypted database with encrypted cookies with my kids' elementary school PTA website - which I'm webIT volunteer). But to mandate the use of JavaScript as well as Flash... well... I thought I could be smart and simply disable the plugin.

To disable it, I just moved the Flash plugin files from the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins directory to a temporary location and restarted the browser. After that, I was able to login and do my change my password and userID. But the thought came to me that my wife wouldn't know what the heck was wrong. This wasn't something she could do, and neither Solaris nor Linux would help her now. And we're now cut over primarily to Solaris. She hasn't booted Linux in quite a few months.

So I called Citicards Customer Support to cancel the card permanently. They were friendly. I talked with a "specialist" who made me some offers to extend my cash-back-reward to 5% for a year if I stayed with them. I said simply that I couldn't take the hassle of not being able to pay bills online because their web developers weren't testing and supporting other Operating Systems and browsers. Afterall, I had contacted them before on multiple occasions and told them exactly what the technical problem was. And seriously, I've designed a lot of web applications and done lots of cross-platform coding in my days and it doesn't take more work. It just takes awareness and not to fall into the trap of automated webtools that generate platform specific webcode.

Anyway, the agent finally relented in the marketing pitch and promised to send me a check for my remaining cash back reward for $392. Not bad. I wasn't aware I had that much remaining. That's a lot of online orders over the last year or so. I told him if his developers ever got their priorities straight and fixed the site, I'd come back. That was a promise. And their main site, Citibank.com, AmericanExpress.com, and Citimortgage.COM are all fine. Even their affiliate site, HomeDepot's AccountOnline.COM are fine. Those sites do use some flash here and there, but it's not overbearing or buggy on any platform I've used, including older Mozilla 1.7.x. So it can be done.

For now, if someone asks: What's in my wallet? Short answer: Capital One. I just went blazing through 45 seconds and paid my balance in full for last months shopping. Wow. Way too much fishing tackle and Fry's Electronics stuff. The only web feature I might want want from them is a masking feature that let's me obfuscate a merchant name with some other phrase - e.g. "Fry's Electronics" -> becomes "Hardware Electronic Education Materials," or "Cabela's Outdoor Outfitters" -> becomes "Recreational Outdoors Non-profit Endowment Foundation." October 16, 2007 10:31 AM PDT Permalink

Saturday October 13, 2007

pre-OpenSolaris-Summit Santa Cruz Wharf Fishing

Got up early this Saturday morning to head south to attend the OpenSolaris Summit. It's being hosted at the UC Santa Cruz campus during this weekend which is a change over traditional schedules and venues that would eat into normal office time during the work week. Plus, it's a chance for Sun and a number of prominent OpenSolaris community members to talk about a the future of OpenSolaris.

The UCSC campus isn't very far from the Santa Cruz Wharf. One of my proposed sessions was to do some fishing. And this would be open to all participants since there is no license needed on public saltwater piers in California. My target was to get there around 6:30am and then move out along the pier towards the end to wet a line or two until about 8:30am when we'd need to head over to the campus to start the conference.

And from the picture above, it wasn't all skunk. We did catch a large variety of fish - Jack smelt, kingfish, staghorn sculpin, and shiner perch. I'm seriously thinking, as I sit in the conference about more fishing later this evening.

Topics Discussed Today

The Summit will cover today a State of the Nation for OpenSolaris and specifically, the Project called 'Indiana.' This is a proposal to produce a branded Solaris version that is based on Nevada but completely open source and has improved packaging, install, and support for more types of x86/x64 systems.

So far, there hasn't been any all out fighting one might expect in Open Source debate. On the contrary, we've covered a lot of packaging and installation concepts. Some are borrowed from ideas and concepts used in Linux already or other open source. The primary goals are to make packaging more intuitive, higher performance, and easier to use.

I can't say I disagree with any of the ideas. I'm sure they have value. But I also can't help but think that there are major issues with the missing application that clearly hinder adoption more (or lack thereof of those apps hinders adoption). But install/update and packaging are, in general, a lower priority for me. I don't believe that people are constantly updating their OS, especially in Solaris. My impression is that people update OS as security requires and as their IT shops require them to do so. Otherwise, they run oblivious to updates.

And from working with software vendors, many decide on an OS version and stick with it and support it. For us to focus too much on install/update isn't the most optimal use of resources, IMO. But I might be swayed otherwise if a valid argument is made.

I guess I'll learn more as the afternoon goes on. October 13, 2007 03:47 PM PDT Permalink

Lower cost wifi solutions for Solaris x86

Airlink 101 - AWLC 4130 and AWLC3026

I picked up a few cheapy Airlink 101 AWLC 4130 cards recently at Fry's on sale. Cardbus cards for laptops with a PCMCIA slot. They were only $14 each, limit 2 per person. Unfortunately a 1 day sale only.

But these were plug and play with Solaris Nevada. The AWLC4130 is advertised as a "Super G" with Atheros chipset. And indeed, when we plug it in, the PCI DevID confirms it's a AR 5212/5213 series chipset, which has been supported by the Solaris 'ath' driver for quite a while.

I also decided to look in my spare parts bin and pull out some older AWLC3026 pc cards. These are regular 802.11G. Back about a year ago, I picked them up for $9 ea at Fry's as well. But there was no driver for the Marvell/Libertas chipset. But on a whim, I decided to check the OpenSolaris.ORG website and found the 'malo' driver.

It's currently provided as a source distribution only, but it compiled just great, and after just a couple of issues with rebooting correctly a couple of times, I was able to get the driver to load and function quite well and fairly stably.

Most laptops do come with WiFi today, but the chipset may not have any drivers yet, or use an NDIS wrapper type driver that isn't stable. I'm using the AWLC4130 now on my el cheapo Toshiba M115 laptop with still unsupported Atheros 5006 mini-pcie WiFi. Not a bad deal for just $14, or even better, $9 for the regular G version AWLC3026.

I know Airlink 101 makes quite a few regular PCI adapters that turn workstations into wifi workstations. I'm waiting for a sale now to get a few to find out their chipset as well. I've been searching for some low cost cards to refurbish cheap PCs to give away to needy families with kids attending my elementary school who don't have broadband today but would want to leverage free city wide wireless that is now available in our neighbourhood.

October 13, 2007 10:26 AM PDT Permalink

Friday October 12, 2007

A great life remembered - Professor Virgil E. Schrock - Dept. of Nuclear Engineering - UC Berkeley

A Great Man - A Great Mentor

As a kid, you grow up thinking to yourself what you want to be when you get older. I never really had much preferences until high school. I was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy who, sometime around high school, wanted to really get into Applied Physics, like maybe Nuclear Engineering. Well, I was fortunate enough to get accepted into the Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Program at the University of California at Berkeley, where I got a pretty interdisciplinary regimen of all the standard courses in Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, CompSci, and of course, Physics.

Around my junior year, I found a part time job up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. A great workout since I often biked up the hill to work and biked back over Grizzly Peak in the evenings to Orinda to commute back home. It was in the course of working up there, writing Data acquistion software for the VAX which was hooked up to the Bevalac Particle accelerator that I bumped into my undergraduate advisor who was working on Polymorphous Silicon and enhancing the photo-electric effects (i.e. researching how to make a cheaper, better solar panel).

He wouldn't become my graduate adviser, but he did introduce me to an undergraduate Nuclear Engineering design contest hosted by the American Nuclear Society. The challenge that year was to analyze the feasibility of consolidated spent fuel rods in fission power plants. Simply, many older nuclear power plants today, have been storing their spent fuel rods in large, deep pools on-site. Utility companies have been charging into their base rate a decommissioning cost which includes spent fuel processing and burial costs. The US Gov't has been remiss in it's obligations to find a spent fuel storage facility in the last 40 years, although we've come close to selecting Yucca Mountain Nevada as a site. (But due to certain political obstacles and an uneducated public - there's been much opposition to the storage facility).

This political dilemma actually got me interested in looking at spent fuel consolidation. The problem looked simple at first. Utility companies wanted to know if it was okay to remove the spacing guides on the fuel pins, then bundle them closer together and therefore get more storage room out of their existing storage pools. This could extend the storage pool capacity for another decade or even two decades at most plants.

Prof. Virgil Schrock volunteered to sponsor any UC Berkeley bid into this design contest. His speciality was Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics - i.e. a fancy term for Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics in Reactor systems. I got together with a couple of classmates and we decided to look at this problem. We were against some stiff competition from some other big name schools from around the country, and from the get-go, Prof. Schrock was a no-nonsense guy and a tough taskmaster. He never gave us answers. Only questions. And to answer those questions required a lot of research. But I was good at this. I was resourceful and quick. Still, it took the better of our last year at Cal and early part of my summer to finish up the thesis and submit it to the judges. It was during that senior year and early in my involvement just to scope out the problem that I really found love of research and problem solving. So I decided I wanted to go to grad school. Prof. Schrock must have seen some potential in me and he helped me file for a Dept. of Energy Nuclear Engineering and Health Physics Fellowship - A free ride to grad school with full stipend. Plus -More- money than an NSF Fellowship. But only 4 - 7 of these would be granted in the US a year.

I did win one of these, and then the offers from MIT, U. of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, etc. came rolling in. I took a few trips east, unfortunately in January, during a bitterly code winter, and I recall my face freezing upon exposure when I stepped out of my rental car in Madison. I decided then that East Coast cold or hot/muggy weather wasn't for me. I was going to stay at Cal and do my graduate work with Schrock. And not having gone much deeper into Nuclear Thermal Hydrualics, I thought at least the next few years couldn't be all that bad.

That was an interesting last semester senior year. I had quite a few more discussions one-on-one with Prof. Schrock. He clearly became my mentor. Tough, disciplined, thorough to every technical argument. I was the young, bright kid who could grasp new technical concepts fast, but I lacked focus and dedication. I was an officer in one too many student societies, throwing BBQs weekly, sometimes, 3 times per week for fellow Engineering students. I was thinking how I could make a comfortable life for myself as a grad student working for Schrock and partying with my fellow students. Schrock had bigger plans for me - he wanted to challenge me mentally and bring out the potential of whom I could be so that whatever the task, I could meet it head on and do a good job.

Certainly, my own father, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UC Davis was no academic or technical slouch. But as a Dad, he really has had no choice. He had to love me for being his son. And I never really disappointed him. I met every standard a Dad could really set. And while he did teach me how to labour hard doing physical chores like tilling soil/farming, fixing my own bikes and cars, and simple home improvement - all in the heat of the summer, he never forced me to reach deep and work at my true mental potential. Well, all that would change now that I had officially hooked up with Prof. Schrock.

I remember around June of my last semester as an undergrad when we'd already walked at commencement and effectively graduated, that I was finishing up the submission for the design contest. My two classmates had bailed on me and either gotten jobs for the summer or were taking time off back at home. I was on my own and Schrock's technical perfection really made me question why the heck I was doing this. He was critical on every point of analysis. He forced me to apply my software skills to develop a computer simulation of time-dependent two-phase flow for freshly spent fuel rods which would radiate more heat early after removal from a power-reactor. It was painful to get up at 6am, commute in on BART, then not get home until late at night, sometimes on the last train, then work at home to verify the code against hand analysis. I never imagined I would survive living on 6 hours of sleep a night for the nearly a month of constant analytical work I had to do. And all the while, I still kept my part time jobs as a dishwasher and a bike-shop mechanic.

I came up with quite a few terms for Schrock at the time. "Hard nose" and "Slave driver" were the more polite ones. I even had doubts sometimes if I wanted a graduate adviser this tough. But at the end of 4 weeks of "finalizing", the submission was truly something I was proud of. Schrock had indeed been tough, but always supportive. His criticisms were back breaking, but always constructive. When I was ready to give up, he would give me the idea to pursue that would bring the work to the next level of analysis. Now, with the final package bundled and ready to ship off to the judges, I was more proud than any of the hand-made fishing rods I used to craft starting in high school. We submitted the simulation software, the written analysis and results that showed for at least a pool similar to the one at PG & E's Diablo Canyon facility, spent fuel rod consolidation was feasible. I actually believed it was on par with anything in the industry. It was on par with any graduate work as well. And I remembered that Schrock was also proud of our work.

Suffice it to say, that we kicked butt that year and took 1st place in the undergraduate category. I made the presentation in Washington, D.C. and received the award for our team. Professors from other schools were there and very impressed with our work. The comments I received were that it was impressive work, good enough to win the graduate student category perhaps. And what really impressed me was when they asked me who my research sponsor was. I told them: Virgil Schrock, not even thinking it was someone they would know. But they all said, "Ahh! You're one of Virgil's kids..." as if award-winning work was a standard output for anyone working with Schrock. I realized then that working with Prof. Schrock would mean working at a wholly new world-class level. It would be tough, but it was something that I wanted to know if I could complete.

I graduated in 1993 from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. I was so privileged to have had the opportunity to work with a man who, over the years, shaped me mentally and disciplined me as a scientist. For a man who contributed so greatly to the understanding of science starting more than 5 decades ago, retiring and becoming emeritus before the Internet really became widespread, I am amazed at the number of hits Google provides when searching his name. Working with Virgil Schrock and graduating with distinction from Berkeley opened many doors for me. I did a Post-Doc in Turbulent Convection and heat transfer at Tokyo Tech, then found easy employment as a consultant deploying Trading Floors and Derivative Risk Management Systems for Tokyo Stock Exchange members. It gave me the skills to then easily come back to work at Sun Microsystems and do what seems like a completely different job than the what my degree prepared me to do. The truth, however, is that I still apply the same academic skills, discipline and tenacity that Virgil Schrock instilled in me starting nearly 2 decades ago.

Because of Prof. Schrock, I learned as much as I could and more; I experienced scientific understanding as deeply as I could and more; and I was able to contribute to man's body of technical knowledge as much as I could and more. No person could have had a better guide in life than I did.

Above: Picture taken of myself (left), Virgil Schrock (mid), and my Dad (right) at Graduate commencement at Berkeley 1993. I still remember my Dad dressing up in his robes as well to accompany me. Prof. Schrock has just changed out of his robes. It was warm that day. My Mom took the picture. Prof. Schrock is survived by his Wife, Mrs. Ginny Schrock, and two children and quie a few grand children. My own son and daughter (7 and 5 years old) still sleep with the stuffed beanie baby Felix Cat and the Baby Bunny that I think Mrs. Schrock picked out and sent us when they were born. October 12, 2007 12:47 PM PDT Permalink