2006-08-28

On entrepreneurship and Tallinn

Lars mentions in the same article that he is thinking about starting a business and that Tallinn is nice.

I agree.

Now, what if we combined both statements?

Not surprisingly, other Finns had the same idea, including former collegues of Lars and I, who took advantage of Estonia's outstandingly welcoming taxation laws, of Tallinn's luxurious variety of restaurants and coffee shops, of Estonia's comparatively more affordable cost of living and of the omnipresent country-wide wireless network.

Given this, is it any surprise that I keep on spending more and more time there?

Now, if someone on Toompea could only take a hint and realize that a québécois kes räägib eesti keelt natukane and who has been living for more than 8 years in the neighboring country very much is a local and ought to be equally welcome to immigrate as any EU national...

GNOME Network Manager annoyances

Having recently gotten around buying a WIFI card for the old ThinkPad 240x that my friend Marcus gave me and installed Dapper on it, I began to look for a simple method for selecting wireless Access Points. Someone on #ubuntu recommended network-manager, which I promptly installed. Well...

The NM version in Dapper wouldn't even cooperate with a common 8139too Ethernet card! First, it would correctly fetch the IP from the router, but then the network-manager-gnome applet would keep on spinning and only stop after resetting the IP to some 169.254.0.0 private network meant for Bluetooth and other similar networked consumer devices.

I then cautiously upgraded to Edgy, just enough packages to get a newer network-manager daemon and a 2.6.17 kernel, then tried again. Ah! It at least finally retained the dynamic IP whenever using the 8139too Ethernet card, but it still refused to connect to a wireless network whenever I switch to the DWL-G650 card. Hmm...

Just to check that the Atheros driver (AR5212 chipset appearing as ath0) was correctly loaded, I did a test by opening a terminal and manually setting the ESSID to the nearest Internet café's AP, using iwconfig, then launching dhclient3. Look, ma! It works!

Inspecting the logs revealed that connecting to a non-encrypted network with network-manager systematically fails, because NM bombards the Access Point with wpasupplicant, then sits there wondering why the AP doesn't request authentication, thus eventually reporting a failure to associate with the AP.

How do we fix this? Any Network Manager developer who is reading this that would care to comment?

2006-08-24

GTK2 coder wanted

I'm putting together a startup with some friends. Our product is based on diet versions of GNOME components. At this stage, the missing part is a diminutive control panel, to select the keyboard map (console + X) and to toggle between left/right -handed mouse (gpm + X). This could probably be extracted from GNOME components (e.g. capplets) as well, however keeping in mind the fact that we aim for GTK2 -only applications, to avoid unnecessary dependencies normally appearing with fully GNOME -compliant software. The result shall be published as Free Software, under a license matching whichever code the product was derived from. Our budget is small, but everything you code as a part of this project is immediately contributed back to the Free Software community. If this gig interests you, please drop by my homepage for my contact info and send me a summary of your skillset.