Statrix Redux

I’ve gotten my MacBook back, so why aren’t I using it? Simple, it works. The Toshiba, on the other hand, is a bit dicier. The hardware, such as it is, works fine. It’s Vista and Linux I’m dealing with, and, given my nature, it’s more fun to play with them till they work than it is to use the rock solid MacBook. When I say “rock solid” I mean sometimes it works perfectly, rock solid, and if you’ve read my complaints here, sometimes it doesn’t work at all and is like a rock. Solid. 🙂
In any case the big problem I’m having is with my AT&T Sierra 881 USBConnect Air Card. It can be run in Vista for a while, but then Vista decides that I should have only “local access” and drops me off of the internet. This seems to be a big problem around the globe for folks trying to use pretty much all versions of Vista. Typical Microsoft FUD would probably have this as “feature.”
In additions sometimes Vista just gets a BSOD. It seems to happen just before I save what I’m working on.

In short, avoid Vista if at all possible.
I’d install XP, but it can’t find my hard drive which means I don’t have an XP driver for it and I really, really, really don’t want to go through the hassle for either XP or Vista since I plan on ditching them just as soon as I get Linux to recognize my air card.
On the Linux side, it the air card is the big problem. I’m using a kernel that should have support built in (2.6.23.x) and I think I’ve got the right drivers and such, I simply can’t figure out where in /dev it all connects. It’s a bit frustrating, but I suspect I’ll get it sooner or later – after all, folks claim to have done it.
Aloha!

Okay, I’ve reinstalled Vista, shrunk the drive again, reinstalled the Sierra 881u driver and then stopped. I figured I’d need some help this time so I did a search and came up with some decent instructions for removing some of the kludge from the installed software base. For some reason the article (a post) looks fine in Firefox on XP and rotten on the laptop running Vista. I have no answers, but here’s the article…
Laptops: How to Setup Toshiba Satellite L45-S7409 Notebook Computer
Mine isn’t an S7409 so it’s not quite the same as far as I can tell, but following most of the instructions in the post sped this box up quite a bit thank you.
Now I can search in earnest for a way to get the air card up in Linux, then the Vista side won’t matter.
Aloha!

As soon as I get back the MacBook the new Toshiba immediately acts up. It seems it can’t find the Sierra 881u Air Card anymore and insists, whenever I connect it, to reinstall the driver endlessly. Since I primarily need this computer to work with the Sierra I’m more or less up the creek.
I really, really, really wish I could get Linux to work with the Sierra card and could do away with Vista Home altogether. While some of the software I use is fine on Vista, I’d much rather have XP and completely look forward to getting rid of all of Microsoft’s products.
The upshot is I am currently reinstalling Vista in hopes that it will solve the problem. Probably not, but there you go.
Aloha!

The MacBook came back from the mainland where it was sent for rehab. I was disappointed to discover my hard drive had been swapped again, I didn’t think anything was wrong there as I’d had a new one last August, but there you go. Now I’m in the middle of reinstalling my basic setup.
…the “free/donation” stuff…
TextWrangler
CyberDuck
iTerm
QuickSilver
(there’s more, but it’s a start…if you are really into more, go HERE)
…the paid stuff…
VoodooPad
MacJournal
Dreamweaver
Photoshop
Lightroom
…and because folks send me stuff in these formats…
Excel
Word
PowerPoint
The last three I might do away with in the future if iWork actually imports and exports well enough to leave Office behind.
The other news is that this may be the end for the blog as a new WordPress 2.3.3 is out and I’ll be upgrading. Now I’ve never had any trouble before, but given the way things are working right now (skin cancer, dead moped, dead computer, ???) I wouldn’t say it’s a dead cert I’ll do it right. 🙂
Aloha!

My skirmish with skin cancer took a decidedly ugly turn over the weekend. When I say ugly I don’t mean unhealthy, I mean ugly as in looks bad. Indeed the cure looks worse than the disease (though I’m sure it’s not).
The story so far has me deciding to get checked by a dermatologist before the holidays. I was going to be turning 50 and had never been to one. Since I live in Hawaii where, except when tourists I know visit, the sun always shines, it’s probably a good idea. The CDC says Hawaii isn’t the worse state in the Union, but any cancer can’t be good.

So I went to a doctor. He took a look all over and none of that I thought was a possibility turned out to be anything except stuff that happens when we age. But he did find a spot on my left cheek he suspected. To be completely honest, I couldn’t see a thing, but then, I don’t know what to look for and he does.
Out came the knife and he took a nice slice for biopsy. The results came back in a couple of days, a not particularly virulent form of skin cancer. They asked me to wait till my face had healed, then come back.
I did. The doc wasn’t sure they’d gotten it all, so he prescribed Fluorouracil topically. This stuff, rubbed in twice a day, is supposed to knock off the cancer cells underneath the outer skin. What it seems to do to me is kill my face, hopefully killing the cancer faster.
The doc did warn me of inflammation and a bit of pain, but I’ve got a silver dollar sized round welt on my face that looks like I just went a round with a heavyweight. The problem isn’t the looks so much as it is explaining that I wasn’t in a fight. It might just be easier to say, “yeah, but you should see the other guy.”
Here’s what some skin looks like and where these cancers start…

Here’s an article on the whole mess.
WebMD has this to say about Fluorouracil…

Side Effects
Side effects from fluorouracil (5-FU) treatment are common and include:
* Redness.
* Signs of infection.
* Burning and oozing.
* Pain and itching.
* Skin color changes.
It is expected that people receiving 5-FU treatment will experience pain and burning while the medication works to destroy the skin disease. It may be difficult to tell the difference between the expected action of 5-FU on your skin and an allergic reaction.

I especially like the part about not being able to tell the difference between expected reaction and allergic reaction. My, my.
Anyway, I go back on Friday and if my face doesn’t fall off by then, I suspect I’ll survive.
Aloha!

I spent a long weekend more or less doing the same thing over and over and over. I had to reinstall several times, and it’s not the fault of any distribution. Rather it’s on me as either couldn’t decide on which distribution to use or what size to give it. Thankfully Vista does let you “shrink” partitions on the fly (more or less), so I was able to go from my initial partition size of 20 gigs to something around 45Gb.
The real problem is still getting the Sierra 881u up and running. Vista, as [insert adjective here] as it is, would be gone in a minute if I could that going. Sigh. I fear it may be long week.
Aloha!

I’m now up and running a Linux distro on my Toshiba and managing to use WI-FI. It turned out to be much easier to setup WI-FI than I thought.

The Toshiba uses a RealTek card which isn’t well supported in any Linux distro I could find. I read all the docs I could find, the same with forum threads, checked under the hood of the laptop and then got to work…

On the bus to pick up a Linksys WUSB54GC USB dongle which worked right out of the box. That problem is solved. I’d prefer using the internal card, but eventually someone will make a working driver. It doesn’t have to be me.

The other part of the equation is the Sierra 881u USB wireless broadband card which still isn’t working. And that’s the reason I’m using Fedora. Not because it doesn’t work, but because I thought it might. It seems that Sierra includes some non-supported instructions for Linux on their site and suggest that a 2.6.23 kernel has been compiled with the right drivers and the 2.6.22 kernels haven’t. Fedora comes with 2.6.23, not so Ubuntu. Hence I’m running Fedora.

Of course it doesn’t really matter because neither allows me to run the dongle yet. I’m hopeful because at least it shows up, but I can’t get it to actually attach.

Enough for tonight though!

Aloha!

And what a week it’s been…let’s see…
The week started off with my MacBook getting a free trip to the mainland for rest and recuperation to repair it’s…well they didn’t diagnose it, so I don’t actually know. That was all well and good I suppose except I bought a cheap Toshiba to use and fool around with figure I could put Linux on it.
Indeed I can, but it appears the wireless card is strange so that won’t work and I haven’t been able to get the AT&T broadband working. Admittedly it works fine with Vista Home edition…”fine” meaning both cards work, not that I like it so it should all be possible, but it’s not looking great for ease of installation.
I can’t seem to contact the RoadRunner folks about getting their free CA security suite. They seem to be claiming I have it and, clearly, I don’t. I’ve got about 30 days left to get it before the suite that came with the laptop wants money. Sigh.
Finally on the way home from work my moped died completely with the same problem that sent it to the shop last week. Now I’m going to have to let it sit till I can afford the new engine which could be a couple of weeks or it could be a month. Sigh. Sigh.
In all it’s been an expensive week. One I can’t say I’m happy about, but what the heck, there’s nothing to do for it now. 🙂
Aloha!

A day or two ago I mentioned that I once had a Toshiba T1000 that lasted until the battery finally ran out of juice forever.

It was a great little machine and I wish it were still running.
Well I didn’t get an ASUS. It was a nice idea, but it seemed a bit more than I could deal with to figure out getting the my AT&T broadband dongle working. I’m sure it can be made to work and I’m sure I don’t want to deal with it right now.
As most folks probably know, CompUSA retail outlets are no more (or rather, soon to be no more). I decided to chance a visit to our local version here in Honolulu and see if they had any bargains. I’m not completely sure they did, but I ended up buying a “backup laptop”.
It’s a Toshiba L45 S7423 which is currently running Vista (Home Edition?).

It will soon be running some flavor of Linux, but I have to figure out the problem this computer has…the WiFi card is problematic under Linux. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
In any case, so far so good with this box. I had it up and running in no time and it’s fast enough that the downloading of fixes, patches, updates, and suchlike didn’t bother me while I played around. While this is no svelte little computer, it does have a nice screen for these old eyes and once I do away with Vista, I may like it!
Aloha!

I’ve taken the first steps in moving a site and inquired whether what I want will be allowed on the host I propose to us. It should be interesting to say the least. I hope that I haven’t, by requesting services, accidentally started the process of shutting them off…
I can just hear an exec saying, “We allow what?! Shut ‘er down.”
Now I don’t really think that’s going to happen, but there are unintended consequences.
Here’s essentially what I want…
1. The ability to run a closed two-way mailing list.
2. The ability to check a pop account from a cgi-bin script running on the same system as the pop account.
3. [All the other stuff I currently have both here and on Netfirms.]
That’s pretty much it. So for the host this site is on, AN Hosting, does allow this (or at least doesn’t disallow it), but I’ll find out soon enough.
I’ve also gone ahead and proposed a move to the powers that be in the organization that owns the site I want to move. I got sneaky and set up a little mail list for them and used that to send out the proposal. With groups it’s often easier to apologize than it is to get permission in the first place. If that sounds familiar, it should:

“If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it. It’s much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”
Grace Murray Hopper (American Computer programmer and Inventor of COBOL, 1906-1992)

One might wish she’d asked for permission before inventing COBOL though. 🙂
Aloha!