Right Now

• Right now, Ed is playing the piano.
• Right now, people are having unprotected sex.
• Right now, opportunity is passing you by.
• Right now, justice is being perverted in a court of law.
• Right now, blacks and whites don’t eat together very much.
• Right now, you could be outside.
• Right now, the light from a star in M-5 is heading toward earth.
• Right now, light that left M-5 a thousand years ago is getting to your house.
• Right now, god is killing mom and dogs because he has to.
• Right now, guilt is turning someone inside out.
• Right now, Van Halen is planning a world tour.
• Right now, there’s a bomb factory hard at work.
• Right now, you are sitting too close.
• Right now, somebody’s got the wrong idea.
• Right now, oil companies and old men are in control.
• Right now, its business as usual in the woods.
• Right now, nothing is more expensive than regret.
• Right now, people who can’t read/breathe are bumming.
• Right now, is just a space between ice ages.
• Right now, youth is king.
• Right now, maybe we should pay attention to the lyrics.
• Right now, is good time to repent.
• Right now, the truth is being obscured.
• Right now, science is building a better tomato.
• Right now, pigs are becoming lunch.
• Right now, someone is working too hard for minimum wage.
• Right now, a convenience store is open.
• Right now, Mike is thinking about a solo project.
• Right now, your parents miss you.
• Right now, oysters are being robbed of their sole possession.
• Right now, no one is safe from loneliness.
• Right now, it’s cold when someone you love is.
• Right now, it’s nicer in Cabo.
• Right now, a man is wandering the streets of the town you live in.
• Right now, a tired man with a wounded heart is sitting in a coach seat on an eastbound transatlantic flight looking out the window wondering how to say “dog”, “howl” and “moon” in french just in case it comes up.
• Right now, she is going on with her life.
• Right now, time is having its way with you.
• Right now, forces are aligning against you.
• Right now, someone is walking onto a nude beach for the first time.
• Right now, Ed’s got his hands full.
• Right now, you wish you had a larger tv.
• Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do.
• Right now, you aren’t doing what you most wish you were.
• Right now, is harder than it looks.
• Right now, your memory is getting longer while you life is getting shorter.
• Right now, Dogs have it good.
• Right now, is not the fault of the Japanese.
• Right now, there is no cure.
• Right now, people are doing it for money.
• Right now, a bowl of soup will be nice.
• Right now, keeps happening.
• Right now, we must be going.

XMPP Messages

My friend Tuomas informed me today that he developed a sort of RSS feed that you can have on your instant messenger.  The service takes the rss feed of BBC news and publish them to the subscribed user.

If you have a gtalk account in your IM client, like kopete, pidgin or similar you will receive a chat message with the headline everytime there’s new news, also (for me, using kopete, not sure about other IM clients) you can scroll from headline to headline with the previews and next buttons.

This is the official anouncement on PubSub mailing list: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/pubsub/2009-April/000187.html

If you haven’t checked his web page yet, give it a look, you can always find some cool stuf: http://www.lobstermonster.org/

Mother

To my mom, wherever she may be, thanks for keep an eye on me

Slackware 12.1 & Wi-Fi

A couple of weeks ago I was surfing the internet as usual, and found a forum about Slackware and new kde 4, there was one guy that was complaining about kde 4 because it lacks the wireless (wifi) configuration applet.

This post tries to explain how to configure Slackware Linux for wireless use. The trick is done similar to ethernet configuration, but with the use of wpa_supplicant, for this you need to install package wpa_supplicant-0.5.10-i486-1.tgz in slackware/n directory.

Let’s suppose we have two interfaces (common in laptops), eth0 will be the ethernet (wired) and eth1 the wifi (wireless), our /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf must be like this:

# Config information for eth0:
IPADDR[0]=”"
NETMASK[0]=”"
USE_DHCP[0]=”yes”
DHCP_HOSTNAME[0]=”"

# Config information for eth1:
IPADDR[1]=”"
NETMASK[1]=”"
USE_DHCP[1]=”yes”
DHCP_HOSTNAME[1]=”"
WLAN_WPA[1]=”wpa_supplicant”

Noticed the WLAN_WPA[1]=”wpa_supplicant” entry, this tells the rc.d scripts to use wpa_supplicant, if for any reason your wireless interface is not called eth1, fear not!, you can include IFNAME[1]=”wlan0″ or whatever name your interface has.

wpa_supplicant has several modes:

• hostap (default) – Host AP driver (Intersil Prism2/2.5/3). (this can also be used with Linuxan DriverLoader).
• hermes – Agere Systems Inc. driver (Hermes-I/Hermes-II).
• madwifi – MADWIFI 802.11 support (Atheros, etc.).
• atmel – ATMEL AT76C5XXx (USB, PCMCIA).
• wext – Linux wireless extensions (generic).
• ndiswrapper – Linux ndiswrapper.
• broadcom – Broadcom wl.o driver.
• ipw – Intel ipw2100/2200 driver.
• wired – wpa_supplicant wired Ethernet driver
• bsd – BSD 802.11 support (Atheros, etc.).
• ndis – Windows NDIS driver.

If you want you can specify this with WLAN_WPADRIVER[1]=”wext”, for me, I haven’t set it and it works fine, so my guess is that you would have to try it without it and then change it if needed.

Now you need to configure wpa_supplicant, this is done with /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file, mine is:

# See /usr/doc/wpa_supplicant-0.5.7/wpa_supplicant.conf.sample
# for many more options that you can use in this file.

# This line enables the use of wpa_cli which is used by rc.wireless
# if possible (to check for successful association)
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
# By default, only root (group 0) may use wpa_cli
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

# WPA protected network, supply your own ESSID and WPAPSK here:
network={
scan_ssid=0
ssid=”HOME_WIFI_NETWORK”
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk=”this is my super duper password”
}

# Plaintext connection (no WPA, no IEEE 802.1X),
# nice for hotel/airport types of WiFi network.
# You’ll need a recent version of wireless-tools for this!
#network={
# ssid=”any”
# key_mgmt=NONE
# priority=2
#}

network={
ssid=”officenetwork”
scan_ssid=0
key_mgmt=NONE
wep_key0=B7A21715223F55AC7B21D4C23E
wep_tx_keyidx=0
}

In this example you can see two networks, officenetwork who has simple WEP encryption, and HOME_WIFI_NETWORK who has wpa encryption. The nice thing about this setup is that you only have to configure it once, when you boot up, wpa_supplicant will check which network is available and will take the one with better signal. So no need to reconfigure your network every time you change place.

There’s a commented block with ssid named any, this allows wpa_supplicant to connect to the first open network with best signal, I have this commented out because I want to be sure that I’m connected to a trusted network all the time, but feel free to change and give it a try, also remember to read the man pages for more information.