Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

Since a few days Jakob Westhoff - a good friend, university and usergroup collegue of mine - has a blog. I convinced him to set one up, because he produces a lot of geeky things, which by now stayed on his harddisc.

Yesterday Jakob has published a first piece of his work: An enhanced way of configuring wireless devices on Gentoo Linux. Usually you define all your settings in the /etc/conf.d/wireless file. But if you have to manage a lot of access points with a lot of advanced settings (like post assignement scripts), this file gets large and unmaintainable. Jakob enhanced the wireless configuration to use a directory /etc/conf.d/wireless.d/, where you can store a single configuration file for each AP.

I did not try it out myself (mainly because of the lag of time), but what I saw on his maschine looks great! I hope the Gentoo people will possibly intergrate it into the system.

Great work, Jakob!

I really love it: I'm currently sitting around in a car repair shop and have to wait for about 2 hours for my car to be repaired. Dead time you think? Not really, since a T-Online-Hostspot is available. :) I wish there would be WiFi all around the world... And maybe even a bit cheaper! ;)

As some of you may already have noticed, I'm 95% offline again in the last couple of days. My net connection in my new home is still broken and today I finally managed to get online through the university WiFi. Not the best solution (since I have to hang around in the uni to be online), but the best currently possible. I still try kicking the technicans in my new home in their asses to make them work a bit faster. But since they all are students, too, the chances are not the best to get online their so fast... :(

It's really horrible. I moved my home last weekend from Schwalbach to Darmstadt and calculated to be offline for about 1 or 2 days. Indeed, I've been more or less offline for 1 week now, because of some technical issues in my new home.

I'm sure, that most geeks out there can imagine what this means. Beside the lack of communication (I guess more than 50% of my daily communication ammount takes place in email and chat communication) it's in general a terrible feeling to be offline. No fresh news, no possibility to check a documentation quickly, no up2date debian packages, ... And I guess worst of all is, not being able to fulfill the tasks one has taken over. I promise, you will not recognize how important a net connection is for you, until you lost yours unexpectedly.

So, I finnaly fled to my parents home again for a week (my studies start on the 11th, so I have another week of free time left), where I only have an ISDN dialup connection. But that's ideed better than nothing...

Praying to be really back in action soon...

Following articles on Slashdot and Heise, the new standard UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) will allow seamless roaming between the wireless standards GSM, WLAN (WiFi) and Bluetooth.

This is a huge benefit, in my eyes and a huge shot against UMTS (which is IMHO really senseless in times of WiFi). A new generation of mobile devices can make heavy usage of UMA. I imagine a mobile device, which uses GSM by default (since it's mostly everywhere available), switches to Bluetooth / WiFi at your home, to connect you through your local phone device, or to the WiFi of a public hotspot, if available, to communicate e.g. by VoIP.

A nice dream...

While chatting with people I developed a realy crazy idea I guess. Beware, the following is really just an idea! I neither know, if it's possible, nor if there is something similar in work, nor if people are interessted in it. So, basically I was thinking about proting the open source idea to wireless LAN (wifi). Can you imagine a huge network of private access points, connected over germany and having free wireless access all over germany by that? The idea itself is very easy. What you need is some kind of structure to build up such a network. Everyone would be free to join the project by adding his access point to. A common infrastructure is needed to connect access points between each other (either outside or inside the internet) to let them know each other and autheticate people who want to access them. By adding your access point to the network you will be enabled to let a specific ammount of people (e.g. 5) use all other access points. This will avoid tons of people on the net without enough access points. This effort / benefit solution is pretty easy. The network is not really "open", because you have to offer your own access point to it for getting access. Your benefit will be to (hopefully after a time) have access at multiple places (or maybe even all over germany and/or other countries). I don't really know, if this is feasible/realizeable/usable or even senseful. I will think and talk about that some more in the future to get an idea how to try setting something like that up and maybe there is anyone out there interessted...

After having heard that there are no wifi crads available for rent at the International PHP Conference in Amsterdam, I decided to do what I ever wanted to do: I bought a card for WLAN. And as stood in front of the shelf in the store, I realized, that if I want to test the wireless freedom, I'd have to buy a WLAN router, too. And so it went... Before going to buy a card, I searched the web for a Linux compatible product. The Netgear WG511 was the choice. As it has a Prism54 chipset, the driver is available as open source. Beside that, it fulfills the 802.11g standard, which allows comfortable 54MBit bandwidth. After upgrading my laptop from Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 (which I wanted to have done all the time, too), I just inserted the card into it's PCMCIA (or now it's named PCCard, IIRC). Nothing really happened, but the HD started to run and the busy LED flashed. Calling "lspci" on the console showed me: The card was already knowen and active. A little download of the firmware put into the firmware dir. "ifconfig eth1 up" and "iwconfig" to configure some options. And everything was done. Ok, beside setting up the router (which is cool, because it can be used as a normal access point, too) over it's web interface. Pretty easy and pretty cool! :)