The Substantially Similar Weblog

Are there any WiFi gurus reading this? I’ve been banging my head against a problem for a couple of weeks now to no avail.

The short story is that my SMC 2632W V3 can see my WLAN perfectly; my Xircom CWE-1100· (Cisco 340 chipset) is connecting to a neighboring WLAN which (from the essid) appears to be quite far away. I’ve tried numerous network scanners (including kismet, airtraf, wavemon) and the local WLAN just doesn’t show up on the Xircom card. I have two of the Xircom cards, and they both behave identically. My local wireless access point is a USR8054 (actually a router, but set to run in access point only mode). I’m using the airo_cs Linux driver for the Xircom card, which seems to communicate fine with the device.

I’ve posted a more detailed description of my problem on debian-laptop·, as well as a request for help to linux-elitists· and a newsgroup posting on comp.networks just for good measure. I also contacted tech support at Xircom (now Intel) and USR and have not received any helpful advice from them.

Please send tips or pointers to other resources! I’d like to get these cards working and have run out of ideas. See my debian-laptop posting· for a more complete run down of my problem.

I recently received an email from a “free local reuse” list offering a free bassinet.

I had no idea what a bassinet was, or whether I wanted one, so I did a quick Google search, only to find that Fischer-Price has recalled its portable Bassinets:

Fisher-Price has received 24 reports of fingers getting caught or pinched in the bassinet frame, including 10 children with cut fingertips, one infection and one broken finger.

Apparently it’s a sort of baby seat. The recall notice was quite scary. Does “cut fingertips” mean a cut on the fingertip, or that it cut the fingertip entirely off?

So my first impulse was to think of ways to spread the word about these deadly bassinets. Even though I have nothing personally to do with them, if it’s going to cut off babies’ fingers, then we should all know.

But then I remembered how I had come across the notice in the first place: it’s the top result from google. Apparently enough other people also felt that this was the most important thing to know about bassinets and had linked similarly back to the recall notice.

I think this is an example of google doing it’s job well: emulating and amplifying “word of mouth” communication. If the CPSC posts recall notices on its site and no one linked there, I doubt anyone would have ever come across the notice. I mean, how often do you check to see if any of the thousands of household items you own have been recalled? But the weight of enough people coming across this has pushed it up to the top result.

I also noticed another bassinet recall, which seemed to apply to a slightly different product: “Although the drop leaf shelf is not intended as a support shelf for infants, when used in this manner, the drop leaf shelf support mechanism will fail to support the infant. The infant could fall causing head or other bodily injury.” In fact, a search for bassinet recall reveals an extraordinary number of problems! One of them says “infants can become entrapped in an opening between the bassinet’s side and mattress platform and suffocate.” Who would have guessed?

So my advice to prospective parents: stay away from bassinets entirely. I think a traditional crib is probably the safest way to go.

My “Popular Search Strings” section has been entirely invaded by Paris Hilton. At the moment, I see “paris hilton video”—251 referers since Sunday. That is to say, 251 people searching on msn.com for “paris hilton video” came to my weblog. And were sorely disappointed.

I’ve noticed also that I do much better in MSN’s search engine for Paris Hilton-related searches than in google. Google, as it turns out, only returns results for my site when the person is actually looking for what I have to provide: e.g., my super popular fix for the CUPS client-error-forbidden error. MSN, on the other hand, is completely content to keep referring entirely irrelevant searches to my site, perhaps solely on the basis of the words “Paris Hilton” appearing here.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

This blog is now syndicated on Planet Debian·, a site which aggregates the blogs of Debian developers and hangers-on (I’m somewhere in between, being at the very final stages of the Debian Developer application process). The site is modeled after Planet Gnome, a similar service for Gnome· developers’ blogs.

A lot of my blog entries are not specifically related to Debian although many relate to free software generally. I noticed Scott Dier started up a separate blog for Debian related entries·—I wonder if I should do the same.

For those of you who are reading this via Planet Debian, what do you think? Would you rather have Planet Debian be full of all sorts of ramblings by Debian Developers, or only those that are “on topic” for Debian? And how broadly would you define “on topic”?

The Triplets of Belleville· was the most delightful film I’ve seen in a long time. I give it my “best animated feature” award 2003-2004.

It’s best not to know too much about the story, I think, going into it, so I won’t say anything here. (Why am I even bothering to write about it at all, then? So you’ll go see it!)

My favorite little detail was in the Triplets’ apartment: just for a second or so, a poster for Jacques Tati·’s Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot· appears. The film pays homage to Tati throughout, and most likely alludes to other French films and directors that were beyond my surface knowledge.

If you want a more detailed description of the film, check out Roger Ebert’s review·. I have to agree with his hesitant characterization of the film as “Marquis de Sade meets Lance Armstrong.”

(courtesy Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug)

I often have questions that don’t really belong in any particular forum and that aren’t readily answered by googling. I’ve decided to try fishing for answers in my weblog, to see if any of you have ideas.

So my first question is: has anyone found a method to stop the tabs at the end of CAT5 network cable from breaking? I carry a network cable with me everywhere, and inevitably the tabs break off every month or two from getting pushed the wrong way or simple wear and tear. It’s not that the cables are that expensive, but it just seems silly to keep going through them like this. So I’m wondering if anyone has come up with a brilliant home remedy to fix this problem.

If you don’t have a solution, you could at least sympathize with me if you also experience this problem.

Ironically, after banning Paris Hilton referers from my weblog, I’m getting more Paris Hilton-related traffic than ever. I can imagine this all turning into some great farce where the harder I try to dissociate myself from Paris Hilton, the closer linked we become. In fact, this entry itself will probably generate a bunch more traffic.

But in case you didn’t get it: you won’t find any Paris Hilton videos here! None at all! (if you don’t know anything about the Paris Hilton thing, just move on, there’s nothing for you to see here either).

Okay, so Pittsburgh rocks too, although the WiFi hot-spot at the Pittsburgh Airport is a little less “hot” than in Florida. Still free and open access, though, with the catchy essid of FlyPittsburgh.

In other news, the newspapers here seem to be somewhat proud that Pittsburgh has “won” the official designation of “distressed city.”

The Fort Lauderdale Airport· in Florida is the first one I’ve found where there appears to be free and ubiquitous WiFi. I’ve been quite frustrated over the past few months: every airport seems to have WiFi supplied by T-One Mobile where you need a subscription or day pass. I just want to check my email for 30 seconds—I don’t want to spend $7 for “unlimited” access for the day when I’m only passing through briefly.

But at Fort Lauderdale, you just turn on your WiFi and you’re instantly assigned an IP address, no firewalls, no payment schemes, just Permanet· (temporarily). And you get something like half a megabyte per second bandwidth—both up and down.