Month: January 2004

The INDEX breaker

I am wearing the pointy hat now. Yesterday evening I broke the INDEX.
The index is a database-like file to search the FreeBSD ports collection. It contains names, descriptions and dependencies of all ports. It is generated by “make index”. index breakage usually occurs if someone wants to be extra clever and the commiter is not suspicious enough.
I made the commit yesterday, just before i went home, and at home i prefered to read the newspaper before checking email. After I have found the bunch of emails from the Tinderbox, I fixed it immediatly, but bad luck, the tinderbox now has a problem and did not pick up my fix. It continues to email failure reports to ports@FreeBSD.org just to make me feel guilty.

Categories

Finally I have categorized around 120 Blogentries from the last half year.
There are three classes of blog entries. One Third fits into a specific Category (e.g. FreeBSD). One Third fits into no category, and the last third fits into multiple categories. Which algorithm do people use to stuff there blog entries into categories? What are they doing if they can’t find a specific category?

Icons?

I just played with MT Plugins. This entry should have an icon, If i installed everything correct.
I noticed that the MT Plugin API sucks. If I place a random file in my plugins folder, the MT CGI dies 🙁

WLAN woes

Yesterday I took my iBook to university for the first time to test the new 802.11g accesspoints and the WLAN stumblers for Mac OS X. The result was disappointing. I tried KisMAC, Macstumbler and iStubmler. None of them was able to discover the university’s WLAN, although I was connected to it. I guess this is because the Airport Extreme Card only works in passive mode, because it is a Broadcom chip. And Broadcom sucks regarding release of specs.

Another lack of MacOS X, I couldn’t find any information about Signal strengh and at what connection speed i am connected to the Accesspoint. On FreeBSD wicontrol(8) and ifconfig(8) give me all the information I need. But I have found no equivalent on MacOS X.
The ifconfig output looks really poor compared to FreeBSD’s:

# ifconfig en1
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::20a:95ff:fef7:1d4c prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 192.168.1.24 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
ether 00:0a:95:f7:1d:4c
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect