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

Quote of the day

“I think that FreeBSD can best be visualized as a vast desert full of
committers who are totally lost.” Silby on the freebsd-cvs-src Mailinglist

Tired…

Okay, One week without an entry in my blog. This does not mean nothing has happend, just that I have been to busy with university. Now I am already awaiting the February-holidays.
I am also awaiting the spring. It started to snow again today and I have seen enough grey snow this year.

arved.at

Three and half years after moving to Vienna I have finally decided to register arved.at. Now I just have to find a good drawing application for MacOS X to modify the logo. It has been on the page since ca. 4 years and was drawn with a Windows Shareware that I can’t find anywhere on the web (and I don’t have Windows anymore…).
arved.de will continue its life as a pointer to my webpage for a while, but the MX records will be removed soon, so update your addressbooks

New rssfetch script

Spent the day with rewriting the rssfetch script.
It now uses XML::RSS::Parser which should be a lot smaller and more liberal than XML::RSS. I also replaced LWP::Simple with LWP::UserAgent, so that I can overwrite the UserAgent string :-).
Additional I tried to reduce hardcoded information, so that I can put it on my homepage one day.
Of course the new version will have bugs, so be patient.