Hugo's blog

As I am keeping an eye on Maren’s bread baking machine while she is in Canada, I am sometimes experimenting with it. First trial was hilarious: I figured I’d like some fresh bread in the morning, and as I had to be at a conference in my home, the bread need not be finished until 20 minutes before the first talk. That did not begin too early, so fresh bread seemed a good idea — hence I set the machine to have bread finished at roughly 8am.

Miscalculation. Fresh bread is nice, but the machine takes about 3.5 hours to prepare it… and it is noisy. So now it was time for attempt 2. And the second problem I’ve discovered too: 3.5 hours is long. It’s close to 11 now, and I will not have my fresh bread for another hour… :(

Well, that underlines that really, the only possibility is to move the machine when it is operating. Which sucks, as I don’t have an easily accessible non-public location… (well, could put it in my office, but that would be pushing it, and would mean breakfast at work… hey… that might actually be an idea… ;-)

What I did want to confer, is that I also ran a bit to kill the time (and to exercise a bit, of course). Killing time is actually a powerful motivator. I felt like returning home quite often, but a glance at my watch told me roughly how long I would then have to waste time before fresh bread (which gives rise to the nice acronym and measure of time TTWBFB), and hence I ran on. In the end, I crossed the one hour limit, which was the rough idea I had in mind. I need to do this more often, but for today, I have other plans. To shed some light:

• work a bit
  Am working on the One Paper To Rule Them All, and still need to put in lots of stuff…
  Not to forget, I also should bring Mel up-to-date on WOTE 2008, and somehow secure some of the knowledge I gained while attending WOTE and PETS 2008.
• get my laptop/ubuntu combo to act as a damn internet bridge :(
  I mentioned this before. Since Maren is in .ca now, the need for this has expanded from just the pleasure of getting my Wii and DS connected to getting the Eee (which comes with a webcam) connected easily. Yesterday I tried the guides to getting my WifiMax running under Ubuntu. I can’t get it to work for now, because of the following:
  • The chipset in it is the Zydas ZD1211B (or so the internet rumours have it)
  • Neither the vendor’s open-sourced driver nor the community-driver based on that one compile on my system. Support for either is low, so also little hope of finding help getting this fixed.
  • The current community driver, the zd1211rw driver, does not support Master Mode. I had no clue what that was either, but that is exactly what you need — it’s the Access Point mode. (To my surprise, no article on “Master Mode” exists on Wikipedia — actually, even having some suspicions as to what it is, it is not trivial to find substantiation for this on Wikipedia.)

  So, for now, this seems like a dead end. [Edit: or does it?? Patch existing, developer has provided some updates too, compilation woes might be addressable??? [Edit2: oops, I might have been trying the version not suited to my kernel...]] Perhaps the zd1211rw driver will eventually support this feature, but I couldn’t find a timeline, or plans, or any indication for doing so. Actually, the development seems more oriented towards supporting “Mesh Mode”, whatever that may be :)
  So the next step is to do the obvious (isn’t it always?): I have a laptop with a wired connection to the internet, and a wireless port. So now to find out how to let that act as an access point. Funny thing is, there are some different suggestions out there, some suggesting bridge-controls, and others not. More investigation needed here.
  (though it is good to have a log of my attempts so far — even if no one else reads this, I can find this back and re-realise what is a good idea and what is not. Hence the lengthy explanation / side track in this post.)

• Welcome Marcella and Tim to Luxembourg!
  Let me quickly check…. I think it will be the Lasagna ice cream today at Veneziano’s :) :)

Lengthier post than anticipated… if this is the general result of me trying a hand at having fresh bread, I might do this more often ;) But now it is off to the shower for me, and then only another … 25 minutes till breakfast / brunch!!