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).

My Other Car is a Man-Dalorian

So as if Episodes 1-3 weren't enough to boil the blood of Star Wars fanboys everywhere, George Lucas has created a fully animated 30-minute mini-movie called Clone Wars coming to theaters August 15. Realistically it couldn't be worse than midichlorians, Jar Jar, General Grievous, a terrible romance, terrible acting, terrible dialogue, a completely irrational turn to the dark side, the world's worst child actor, a giant lizard beast, R2D2's new powers, the stupid clone army concept, various technological anachronisms and any other problems you can recall from the new episodes. Still, I'm not getting my hopes up...

John McCain = More Creepy than Anthony Hopkins

My friend Tomek reminded me of this video:



Yes, that really is Sen. John McCain asking "shall I loofah your back?" This was from his SNL appearance in 2002. Very presidential.

Things I Want

Nerf's newest creation: the N-Strike Vulcan EB-25. It's a fully automatic, belt fed, battery powered fire support platform of pure pwnage. With variable firing modes and a fully functional tripod (cuz those darts blow back like your mom), this thing will be escalating many an office arms race.

Available late August 2008.

Internet history revisited via Weezer

The new video from Weezer for their song, Pork and Beans, features a plethora of the popular videos and crazes that have swept the internet over the past few years. Those featured include classics such as: All your Base, Afro Ninja, Chocolate Rain, Dramatic Gopher, Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa Guy, PBJ Time, Miss Teen SC "the Iraq" response, GI Joe spoofs and many many others. It reminded me of that South Park episode with all the internet characters in one room. Enjoy reliving all of those glorious interweb memories.

Guitar Hero 4 Track List Leaked

The new Guitar Hero 4: World Tour coming out this Winter looks like it's going to have a pretty awesome song collection including tracks from some of my personal favorites: Dragonforce, Muse, Buckethead and Iron Maiden. If this list is accurate, the song variety should keep most people pretty happy. Of course you can always pick up Frets on Fire, the open source Guitar Hero clone, program your own songs and share tracks at Keyboards On Fire, the FoF community forum.

Things Bunnies Do

I wish I could open letters that well.