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My little bro got me tickets for AFI at Brixton Academy last night. I am quite a fan of AFI, and they played a very good set. I was quite surprised by the glittering pink eye shadow, which glows in UV light, that the lead singer was wearning. The girls there seemed to like the very tight clothing though…
The venue though seems to be worse than I remember it. It was incredibly packed, so moving round was hard - and I never had trouble on the numberous occasions I have been there before. The mosh pits were almost non-existent, which is a real shame as I really enjoy them. Also, everyone seemed to be more interested in taking a photo of the band on their camera, or mobile phone than actually enjoying the gig (I guess that is the result of the pervasiveness of digital cameras, not to mention how cheap they are getting).
The gig did leave me feeling very old. The whole crowd seemed to be just 12 year olds. Maybe I am just getting too old for it all…
The journey back to Southampton was less than convenient (especially as I am used to living in London where I can just catch a bus or tube back home). It took me 2 hours to get home, and that was with little waiting and a fairly fast train. Then I had to get a taxi as no trains actually called at my stop that late at night.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the gig, but next time I am going to arrange staying the night at a friends in London and working from somewhere in London the next day - IBM has several offices in London, so this plan might work 
EDIT: try this way first! It is a hell of a lot simpler
I bought this card to avoid cables allover my house, and when looking at cards (it was quite cheap on dabs) did a quick search for linux support. Satisfied I bought the card.
Well, it turned up today and the reality was that installing the driver was a little harder than i thought…
At first i thought i was going to have use ndiswrapper and use the windows driver, but I didn’t like that idea, so kept searching. I eventually found that there is a real driver from ralink http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
Getting it working though was not as simple as installing a package.
- I download the driver, extracted the tar and went into the module directory. Following the readme there to build the kernel module (I needed kernel sources and headers (apt-get can help you with that if you are on a standard kernel) as well as make, gcc etc.)
- That was fine, and insmod rt61.ko worked so next step was going to be getting my WPA encyption working.
- I installed wpa_supplicant, but found that I needed to patch it to make it support this driver.
- apt-get source wpa_supplicant; apt-get build-dep wpa_supplicant will get you the source and build dependencies.
- Following the patching instructions in the WPA_supplicant directory of the driver I downloaded, I patched wpa_supplicant (It would have been nice if they just gave a .patch or .diff file though)
- make worked fine, but I could not get dpkg-buildpackage to work as the patching failed. That is a shame, and I really should submit a patch to the wpa supplicant team for this driver so that this step won’t be required again.
- To get it working system wide I had to copy the three binary files from my wpa_supplicant build dir (wpa_supplicant, wpa_passphrase, wpa_cli) to /usr/local/sbin (that is where which wpa_supplicant said they should be)
- I had to edit my wpa_supplicant.conf (the default was fine, but I did have to copy out a lot of other definitions as it complained about them, and adding the wpa key was easy)
- Loading by hand now worked, and I could now disconnect my network cable
- insmod ra61.ko; wpasupplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -i ra0 -D ralink; ifup ra0 inet 192.168.1.2 up
To make it work on boot I edited /etc/network/interfaces to add wpa_options so that ifup knows about them
iface ra0 inet static
address 192.168.1.9
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
wpa-driver ralink
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
- I also needed to copy my rt61.ko from my driver build dir to my current kernel’s modules dir
- cp rt61.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net
I also needed to add “alias ra0 rt61” to the end of my /etc/modutils/aliases file so that the system knows that ra0 is a rt61 device (make sure you don’t edit /etc/modules.conf as it is created by modutils and will just be overwritten on the next boot)
I thought this should work, but instead /etc/init.d/networking restart complained that the ralink driver was unsupported. Turns out it uses a copy of wpa_supplicant in /sbin/
After copying wpa_supplicant to /sbin/ it now works
So what I really want is a debian package for the kernel module that will build and install the driver for me, and a copy of wpa_supplicant that supports this driver. I guess it is time to start investigating licences and emailing debian package maintainers and wpa supplicant developers…
Hope this helps somebody else, but drop me an email if you think I can help you
I finally have internet again after moving to Southampton (actually I got it over a week ago) though that was not without its difficulties. First BT decided that it would take them three weeks to send an engineer round to hook up our phone line, then Pipex (who I have been very happy with in the past) decided not to send me login details and wouldn’t answer my emails or phone calls.
Not happy.
Now I have found out that my old estate agent (Foxtons) have decided (well, probably my old landlord decided and foxtons, as the managing agent of the property, just went with what she said) to keep over a thousand pounds of my deposit for damage that was there when I moved into the property.
But not all is bad. I attended a large IBM performance conference for the first half of the week, and there were some incredible presentations. The best of which was the virtualisation on the newer P-Series servers from IBM. These Power PC chip based servers allow you to run several OS’ on the same box. You can either dedicate resources (i.e. disk/cpu/memory etc) to a specific OS, or have them in a general pool. This means that with a 2CPU box I could have 4 OS’ running on it, and if 3 are idle, then the one busy one can have all the cpu available.
There is some overhead for the virtualisation, as the virtual hardware manager needs some resources, but the idea is brilliant, and the actual overheads are not very high. The figures that were revealed (and don’t quote me or IBM on this) were that if you gave enough resources to the virtual hardware manager, you could have several OS’ running on only a few cpu’s and only lose 7% performance (obviously on maxing out one OS). [Actually if you put 5 copies of a program on 5 different OS' you only lost the same ~7% compared to running the 5 copies on the same OS]
The whole thing fascinates me, and I wish I had a P-Series box of my own to play with. Unfortunately these things go up to 64-way processors so aren’t exactly in my price range…
edit: Pipex, not Pipes
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