Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

Oh... Something else...

A very helpful utility to find wireless networks is MacStumbler Here's a screenshot:

BTW, I think it is worth noting that this is not my home network :).

-- Fred

Backyard Computing

I had to do it... I just had to buy an Apple Airport Express. I justified it (to myself) as a way to provide wireless networking when I had meetings at Sun. Most of our facilities do not have wireless networking installed, mainly for security reasons. The idea is to be able to setup a temporary wireless network when needed and to allow other meeting attendees to use it.

Anyway, I did some research and came across instructions on how to configure the Apple Aiport Express to act as a repeater for my Linksys WRT54G (which I had upgraded with the Sveasoft firmware). The instructions are located at http://ryanschwartz.net/2004/08/05/airtunes-airport-express-and-the-wrt54g.

So I am geeking out and posting this from my backyard. I'll promptly retreat back to the warmth of my home though as it is getting a bit chilly out there...

UPDATE: Here's a picture of my patio:

This is where I posted this entry from. Mollie and I put this together in a couple days of a long weekend.

-- Fred

RSS In Thunderbird

There is now an extension for both Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird for receiving and reading RSS feeds within the mail tool. It is pretty cool, and it is pretty easy to use.

I have installed it on my Mac (yes... That's the PowerBook 15" that did survive a full cup of joe). It is very convenient to have Thunderbird gather all of the RSS feeds that I am interested in and gathering them in one place.

The details are available at http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/. Definitively worth a look.

RIP Netscape 4.79...

Something wonderful is happening. Sun IT is finally EOL'ing and removing Netscape from servers within Sun! Soon, everybody will be using Mozilla to conduct business. This is great for one simple reason: I don't have to worry about getting layouts, scripts and other components of a web application to work on Netscape 4.79 anymore.

Of course, the supported version of Mozilla is still a bit behind the times, but I'll take it.

Installing Gentoo

I have been an Red Hat/Fedora user for a long time. Red Hat Linux was my first succesful Linux experience, I am very familiar with the product, and it was working just fine for me.

That is until I tried to install Fedora Core 2 on my system. First, Anaconda wouldn't go past detecting the monitor. I then thought I would be clever and attempt to install it through apt-get. The end result was an unusable machine.

I was always curious about Gentoo, so I gave it a try. The whole process went very well. I got a stage 3 install done, connected to the internet and emerged the Gnome desktop. After 3 days of automated downloading and compilation, some X.org configuration, and a bit of head banging, I finally had a running desktop. I thought that having OpenOffice.org would be a good thing, so I emerged it. It only took 2 days before it was done.

I am slowly discovering that although Gentoo might not be the distro for me. It just takes too long to get everything I need downloaded, compiled and installed. Of course, I could go the way of binary packages and save some time, but that would go against the Gentoo spirit.

I've therefore decided that I would give Solaris x86 yet another try. I downloaded an internal build, burned the CDs and will take some time over the next few days to do the installation. Worst case scenario, I'll end up having to find something else to install there.