Archive for January, 2006

FreeBSD and Linksys WAP54G – solved

January 26, 2006, filed under BSD, Wireless; No Comments.

I finally got my FreeBSD laptop to authenticate to the company’s WAP 54G wireless access point. It turns out that the problem was with the Linksys firmware! I spent two days futzing with FreeBSD and trying to figure out why the iwi card wouldn’t associate with the access point, and finally in frustration I flashed [...]

MTA hacking

January 25, 2006, filed under Mail; 2 Comments.

Today has been a day for hacking mail infrastructure. First, I arrived at the office at 8 a.m. to cut over our old RedHat 7.3-based SMTP gateway to a new Fedora Core 4 virtual machine. The purpose of this box (or VMWare GSX Server guest, in our case) is to act as a final sanity [...]

hacking Outlook’s info line

January 24, 2006, filed under Mail; No Comments.

I started subscribing to the freebsd-mobile mailing list now that I’m running FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T42. Unfortunately, we use Microsoft [Virus] Exchange at work, so I read my e-mail using Evolution using the Exchange Connector.
I was amused to see that it’s possible to hijack the status line in both Outlook for Windows (the thick [...]

giving up on SUSE Linux 10

January 21, 2006, filed under BSD, Linux, Wireless; 1 Comment.

I finally gave up on SUSE Linux 10 on my ThinkPad T42 from work.
There were a number of reasons for doing so, but in general I just found that everything was far too complicated and had too many GUI layers and layers of abstraction upon layers of abstraction, such that I couldn’t actually do anything [...]

VMWare usability problems

January 19, 2006, filed under Education; No Comments.

As a follow-up to my last post about poor usability in Windows, I discovered that VMWare is guilty of usability problems, too. Take a look at this dialog box which appears during the creation of a virtual machine:

Huh? I looked at this and thought, how on earth can elect to only use a virtual IDE [...]

bad ideas in usability

January 18, 2006, filed under Windows; 2 Comments.

At my new company I unfortunately have to deal with Active Directory. I understand that AD is supposed to be the authoritative source for any information about users, groups, computers, and so on, but does the interface have to be so crammed with junk?

This has got to be the worst interface I’ve ever seen (Lotus [...]

home router replaced!

January 17, 2006, filed under Hardware, Networking, Technology; 3 Comments.

I finally decided to replace my FreeBSD-based Sun Ultra 10-based home router. There were a couple of reasons for this:

I was running FreeBSD 5.x, which meant that the keyboard wouldn’t work — I could only control the system remotely over SSH or through a serial console. This was fixed in later versions of FreeBSD 5.x [...]

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