Guinea Pigs in People Clothes

This one goes out to Lance.

Hockey Time

OK, so there is probably a very small percentage of the world thinking about hockey today (although with only baseball to watch, how can you not??). There have been a lot of off-season moves in the NHL, notably the Chicago Blackhawks landed Brian Campbell, the all star defense man they sorely needed. They also got some more solid goaltending in the way of Cristobal Huet. Both acquisitions seemed over priced, but you have to pay free agents a little something extra to get them to come to loser teams. Combined with the decline of perennial Western Conference playoff teams (Minnesota and Colorado), the Hawks have a real shot at making the playoffs with their two budding all-star forwards, Kane and Toews. I just hope they realize they can become legends in a big town and don't skip out in a couple years.

Amazing what progress can be once the stingy old coot owner dies. Same thing happened to the Toronto Maple Leafs a couple decades ago.

Dining in the Dark

All across the world a new trend in dining has emerged -- blind dining. Patrons dine in a pitch black room while waiters use military-grade night vision goggles to navigate the dining room. At some restaurants the waiters are even blind themselves. Supposedly the sensory deprivation heightens your sense of taste while dining and removes your social inhibitions improving conversation and the overall dining experience. Sounds pretty scary to me.

McCain Gaining

I left my faith the the American electorate back in Bush '04. I held the sliver of hope that the people might redeem themselves this time around, but it looks like the other 98% of me that remains cynical has some more support. McCain's been taking all these ridiculous potshots during Obamapalooza '08 Europe, and the last hit at the hospital visit (among others) seems to have hit home. Well, I suppose if McCain loves visiting troops in the hospital, he's gonna have a great time as prez, because there'll definitely be plenty more troops in the hospital to hang out with. I take some comfort in the fact that no matter who America chooses in the end, we'll get the president we deserve.

Tree Shrews Thrive on Flower Beer

New research has uncovered a particular species of tree shrew in Malaysia whose diet composes of substantial quantities of alcohol fermented by species of flower in its habitat. The shrew drinks what would be the human equivalent of nine glasses of wine a day, yet displays no obvious effects of intoxication due to its superior ability to detoxify the alc.

I want to drink some flower beer.

Just in time for NVIDIA's stock to plummet further

It seems that everybody who bought a Macbook Pro within the last year or anybody running a desktop or mobile Geforce 8-series below the 8800's might be running on faulty hardware. According to the Inquirer, a British technology news website, "all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. No exceptions." The failure seems to involve heat cycles and the frequency with which the computer is turned on and off over long periods of time. I hope this is all paranoia for everybody's sake, but NVIDIA is already budgeting $200 million for repairs and predicts a 25% loss of share value.

God Proves Existance via Motor Vehicles

It's going to be a great week.

Shia LaBeouf was arrested for drunk driving and Lindsay Lohan was hit by a motorcycle.

News Jay Doesn't Want to Hear

Microsoft is increasingly opening its heart and wallet to open source endeavors. Whether this trend will end like the fall of the USSR, or when South Park's parents give in and decide to embrace chinpokemon is yet to be seen. I'd lol if the latter happens.

A Search Engine 3x more robust than Google?

Former Google employee Anna Patterson is trying to upstage her former employer's claim to having the internet's premier search engine. Patterson claims to have developed a search engine that is three times as robust as Google called Cuil (pronounced "cool"). Read more about it here!

Getting a Broadcom BCM4310 wireless card up and running in Linux

I recently purchased a Dell XPS M1530 laptop, and it is by all accounts a great computer, with a lightning-fast processor and a hefty graphics card. Awed by the sheer power of the machine when I was choosing the specs, I completely forgot to check whether each piece of hardware included would be fully supported under the GNU/Linux operating system, which I prefer to the included Vista.

As it happens, the computer shipped with a Broadcom wireless chipset, which is not well supported because the company does not provide enough information to the open-source community to write drivers. The firmware is proprietary, so it would not be included in any Linux distribution. I chide myself for accidentally supporting a company hostile to the free-software movement, but the upside is that bad hardware means a chance to delve deeper in my favorite OS and learn things I wouldn't have had to with my plain ol' Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG.

So I found these instructions on the openSUSE forums about ndiswrapper, which acts as a wrapper for native Windows drivers and allows Linux to use them, and have modified them to be applicable to more distributions. So in case anyone needs to get that Broadcom BCM4310 wireless card working, here goes. (For commands preceded by #, run as root or preface with sudo. Thanks to the openSUSE forums for providing the meat of these instructions.)

1. I assume you have already confirmed the existence of a Broadcom card on your system with $ lspci | grep -i broadcom and plugged in the laptop to a wired network.


2. Install the package b43-fwcutter, which will automatically download and install the firmware for the wireless card. On Ubuntu/Debian: # apt-get install b43-fwcutter.


3. Install ndiswrapper and, if necessary, the related kernel module, such as ndiswrapper-kmp-default on openSUSE. On Ubuntu, the kernel module is included, but install ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils: # apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils.


4. Remove conflicting modules/drivers from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. Use your favorite text editor (e.g. # vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist) and add to the bottom:
   
   
   
   • blacklist bcm43xx
   
   
   • blacklist ieee80211
   
   
   • blacklist ieee80211softmac
   
   
   • blacklist ieee80211_crypt
   
   
   • blacklist b43 (yes, this is correct—you need to remove the native driver because you're going to replace it)
   
   
   
   
5. In your terminal, download the Windows drivers (or, if you have a Windows partition, just copy the .inf and .sys files from C:\Drivers or wherever they are): $ wget http://www.wikilinux.netsons.org/Broadcom%20drivers.tar.bz2.


6. Unzip the archive and enter the directory: $ tar xvjf *.tar.bz2 && cd Broadcom...


7. Run the ndiswrapper driver installer: # ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf.


8. Run # ndiswrapper -l (lowercase "L") to confirm that the "driver installed" message appears.


9. To tell the ndiswrapper module to load automatically on boot, run # ndiswrapper -mi.


10. To make sure the module is running in the current session, run # modprobe ndiswrapper (not sure whether this is necessary on Ubuntu).


11. Now, when you run $ ifconfig -a, the wlan0 network interface should appear. And you're done! Configure the wireless connection using your favorite method (such as NetworkManager).