April 12th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
(Computers)
As most of you linux users probably know, implementing wifi capabilities on your desktop (and even laptop) seems to be a thing of the “future”. I had recently purchased a Dell Vostro 400, and the first thing I did was wipe my hard-drive from the bloated, poorly-written, slow, and annoying Windows Vista Home and installed Fedora 8. Is it just me, or does it take a lot of patience and cursing to get anything actually working correctly in linux?
I would like to start out by saying that this desktop was a steal when it was on sale about two months ago for under $1000, including a 24″ LCD monitor. After eBaying the monitor (since I already had a nice one) and selling off my old desktop, it came out to only about $300! I recently added 8GB of RAM (after installing a crucial BIOS update), so my total became a paltry $450 to turn this machine into a beast.
Installing Fedora 8 on any system has been relatively straight-forward, and their base install has been quite good by including many of the important libraries necessary to build other software from source. However, on the Vostro it was non-trivial. After a lot of googling and yelling at the computer, I was able to get Fedora 8 installed using a kernel option irqpoll during bootup, since the SATA drivers I needed didn’t come with the install DVD.
After getting most everything up and running, I had to deal with the 50 foot ethernet cable running from my bedroom to my study/office. I decided to use my old wireless card and figure out if it’ll work with linux. To make a much longer story short, the answer was an emphatic NO (after working on it for about 2.5 days). During my research, I came across madwifi which is a group devoting their time and efforts to build drivers for wifi cards that include an Atheros chipset.
Unfortunately, their compatibility list leaves much to be desired, since it hasn’t been updated often and many of the cards are discontinued or impossible to find. After wasting even more of my time, I settled on a handful of cards that are available online, but are not carried in any local store. Finally, I happened to come across the D-Link WDA-2320 PCI wireless adapter, shown below.
I read that this card apparently works very easily with most newer and older linux distributions and kernels. I also happened to have found it in stock at my local Officemax (the only local retailer that actually had them). After $50 and a simple one-click install, I was on my way to wireless freedom!
Needless to say, I am very happy with the price, performance, and installation ease that this desktop wifi card has provided, and I recommend it to anyone who uses linux and hates running CAT 5 around their home or office.
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April 9th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
(Miscellaneous)
The question is simple… according to the White House website: “Vice President Dick Cheney spends an afternoon fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.” You be the judge…
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April 9th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
(Personal)
Ok, perhaps I’ve distorted the truth a tad bit… being über lazy would be a better title. I apologize for not updating my blog for the past… oh… two and half weeks, but I have my reasons. To give you the low-down on my exciting life, let me get you up to date in the following lengthy run-on sentences.
I have been very busy at work trying to juggle three different projects at the same time, while trying to avoid the fuzz on the way to work since I recently was handed a $174 jaywalking ticket for not crossing at the crosswalk, even though there were dozens who crossed the street “illegally” while the ticket was being written to me. If I wasn’t in the lab doing my work, I was trying to relax at home trying to fight this recurring cold that I’ve been having for the past two weeks, and have since been drained of some energy because of it, and have not been able to enjoy the beautiful spring weather outside. I have submitted two abstracts for two different conferences and am planning to submit a third later this month, with the hopes of actually being able to go to two of them later this year, perhaps to do a presentation as opposed to just a poster viewing session, but since we’re on the topic of potentially traveling to different places I cannot wait for a much-needed vacation, a vacation anywhere but here, and here as in Ohio. Finally, other than doing some coding for work related stuff, I have tried to do some coding for the iPhone, and unfortunately since I had very little free time, coding for my little toy has been unfortunately slow, but I do hope that before the iTunes applications store comes around in the next couple months I’ll have a sweet little application that many of you will find use.
Well, I should get back to writing some more useless… err useful posts to my blog with the hopes that someone out there reading this may not waste their time entirely.
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April 9th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
(Photography)
Since photography is one of my passions, I am truly amazed at how beastly the new Hasselblad H3DII is. At 39 megapixels one would expect this camera to outperform pretty much everything else out in the market. After looking at some reviews and sample photos, I can say that without a doubt it indeed does! But is it really worth the $34,000 pricetag? Even at $500 a day rental it still isn’t exactly affordable to those who don’t take pictures for a living (and are exceptional at their craft).
Needless to say, it’s not about the body (although for $34,000 it kind of is in this special case), rather it’s all about the glass. It seems like they have quite a nice selection of various prime and zoom lenses available for it. Unfortunately, they are pricey as well at around $3000 a pop. When compared to the L-lenses from Canon, I can’t really say if they are worth it, since Canon makes some very nice products, a larger variety, and cheaper. However, if money is no object (as it probably isn’t if you own this camera) then $3000/lens is a drop in the bucket.
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