Search Results: "Ralph Amissah"

27 July 2010

Daniel Baumann: The World's most powerful Wireless Network Card

About two weeks ago I got a Wifly-City G2000, the world's most powerful 802.11bg wireless network card. It features 2000mW which is 10 times more than the legally allowed limit of 200mW in Switzerland (or 2 times more than the allowed 1000mW in the USA, 5 times more than the allowed 400mW in Brazil, or 20 times more than the allowed 100mW in the EU). Contents The adapter is sold as a set named Wifly-City AVATAR-4PA with some accessories.
click on the images for full resolution The box prominelty lists Linux compatibility and contains the following part: The adapter has a Realtek 8187L chipset. This is particulary nice since there is no firmware needed for this chipset (therefore no questinable binary-only firmware blob). Also, it works out of the box with any Linux as of kernel version 2.6.30 and newer. I tested it on lenny with kernel backports, vanilla squeeze and vanilla sid. In all of these setups, it works out of the box without any configuration whatsoever - just plug it in and it works. I know that this is how it is supposed to be but still, I am always surprised again when things just work. For those who care, this is the output of dmesg when plugging in the card...
[...]
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8187
usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-1: Product: RTL8187_Wireless_LAN_Adapter
usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Manufacturer_Realtek_RTL8187_
usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxxxxxx
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
phy1: hwaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, RTL8187vB (default) V1 + rtl8225z2, rfkill mask 2
rtl8187: Customer ID is 0xFF
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::tx
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::rx
rtl8187: wireless switch is on
usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready
wlan1: direct probe to AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: direct probe responded
wlan1: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: authenticated
wlan1: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=5)
wlan1: associated
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan1: link becomes ready
wlan1: no IPv6 routers present
[...]
...and this is the output of lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter
Special Offer I have played with the card for some time now and am really pleased with it. It works nicely with all the standard tools (aircrack-ng, kismet, etc.). The only bummer is that the card is quite expensive. Fortunately, we could arrange a good deal for Free Software people where the store selling it does not make any money on it: instead of 89 USD you can get it for 68 USD (including everything). If you are interested in getting one and you are comming to DebConf 10 in New York between 2010-07-25 and 2010-08-08, you can write an email to Ralph Amissah or speak to Ralph personally during the event. 1 I have no idea why they are shipping with a Y cable because the adapter does not need one. However, it does not disturb and in case I ever need an Y cable, I now have one :)

16 October 2008

Biella Coleman: SISU Strikes Again: Two Bits Online

I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

Biella Coleman: SISU Strikes Again: Two Bits Online

I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

15 July 2006

Joachim Breitner: Bringing Free Software to Ghana

In less than a month, I'll be flying for one year to Ghana, where I was offered a job as a teacher and network administrator at an International College in Tema. The school wants to get started using Free Software and so Ralph Amissah, a fellow Debian Developer, asked me if I'm interested. I was, so I got the job.I don't know yet my exact tasks there, and I don't know yet if I can make a difference, but if I can, I'll try to spread the word about Free Software. In my opinion, Free Software can play a role in giving a country like Ghana technological independence and allows for their own developments in this area. My favourite Linux distribution will be Debian, of course, and I'll keep you, especially on planet.debian.org, updated on my progress. I have orginially looked for a project in the developing world to work on after my Abitur (German Highschool Diploma), but I haven't found something in time, so I started my studies in mathematics and computer science. Last year at DebConf 5, I talked with a few people about things to do to fight the Digital Divide, including Kurt Gramlich, Mark Shuttleworth and Ralph, who contacted my in the winter. @Ralph: Thank you!Note that the non-technical reports are blogged in German and won't appear on the planet, so if you're interested, see my blog directly. Pictures will appear at the usual place.

17 May 2006

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Three, Part II

X Window security. Wandered outside the hack lab to sip a drink and cool down. There I saw Keith Packard and Bdale Garbee. Quickly introduced myself to them both, then asked Keith what his take was on the recent OpenBSD complaints that X11 is insecure by design [1] [2]. Keith said he wasn't going to respond to those complaints, because DRI/DRM already provides what Theo de Raadt says he wants in the way of kernel control over dma and register access on video cards. Many X11 video drivers are not yet converted over to doing things the DRI/DRM way, and so Theo is correct that X11 has huge security holes. But they are not permanent; the future is already arriving. Although DRI/DRM is positioned as a 3d technology, it is intended that even 2d drivers in the future will conform themselves to its API. Keith also said that OpenBSD's representative on the X11 team is easy to work with and cooperates well with the team, so there is hope that if OpenBSD turns its attention to X11 support, everyone will soon benefit from the comprehensive security audit. Although the DRI/DRM design solves the security problems, it is a bitch to implement. Mode switching alone is so finicky and is so tied into both the video hardware and x11 server optimizations, that it has never successfully been implemented in the kernel. Keith said he supported the idea of isolating the mode switching code out into a small, privilege separated userland utility. There were many other things said, which sounded positive, but without the aid of a tape recorder, I can't remember them. Putting packages out of main. Learnt a trick today, courtesy of Phil Hands and Ralph Amissah. If you want to upload a package into a part of the distribution other than main, you alter the Section: field of the debian/control file in your package. Suppose your package fits into the text section, because you use it to process text. Maybe you reimplemented awk. If you put Section: text the package will go into the text portion of the main repository. If your version of awk depends on a library that is in the non-free section, you would put it in the contrib section. So you would put this in your debian/control file: Section: contrib/text and Bob's your uncle. Politics. I find myself doing vastly more politics at this conference than coding, although I am getting some of that done too. When people are deep inside their own worlds, it takes a lot of work to bridge between the worlds. So far it seems like time well invested. Embedded. If anyone needs any embedded work done, Wookey is your guy. Send him an email with a proposal.
  1. 2006-05-11 22:00:04 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)
  2. 2006-05-13 20:07:35 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)

10 April 2006

Enrico Zini: What package is eating up my disk space?

My 5Gb /usr partition is full. What do I have installed that's eating up all the space? Let's see:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
# pkgsizestat - Display the installed size of packages in a filesystem
#
# Copyright (C) 2006  Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
# Display the installed size of packages in the given filesystem
# Defaults to /usr if non specified
#
# Usually used as "./pkgsizestat /usr   sort -nr   less" to see what packages
# are filling up your /usr partition
dev = File.stat(ARGV[0]   "/usr").dev
def pkgsize(name, dev)
      size = 0
      IO.foreach(name)    line 
              begin
                      st = File.stat(line.chomp)
                      if (st.file? && st.dev == dev)
                              size += st.size
                      end
              rescue
              end
       
      return size
end
Dir.glob("/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list").each    file 
      puts "%d %s" % [pkgsize(file, dev), file.gsub(/.+?\/([^\/]+)\.list/, '\1')]
 
Neat little useful ruby script. Ruby is nice in making scripts short clean and compact. Now I need a shorter version of the GPL :) Update: Florian Ragwitz suggests to use dpigs(1) from debian-goodies instead. What my script does that dpigs doesn't do, however, is counting only those files provided by the packages that reside in the given partition. I could for example use my script to see what's filling up the root ('/') partition when /usr is mounted elsewhere, and I find out that the top package is not openclipart-svg, but linux-image-2.6.15-1-686. Update: htom sent an updated version to sum all sizes and show only up to a certain size:
dev = File.stat(ARGV[0]   "/usr").dev
def pkgsize(name, dev)
      size = 0
      IO.foreach(name)    line 
              begin
                      st = File.stat(line.chomp)
                      if (st.file? && st.dev == dev)
                              size += st.size
                      end
              rescue
              end
       
      return size
end
pkgs =  
Dir.glob("/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list").each    file 
  pkgs[pkgsize(file, dev)] = file.gsub(/.+?\/([^\/]+)\.list/, '\1')
 
pkgs = pkgs.sort
pkgs.reverse!
to_size = 1024**3 # show up to 1 GB
size = 0
pkgs.each do  a 
  size += a[0]
  puts "%d %d %s" % [a[0], size, a[1]]
  break if size >= to_size
end
Ralph Amissah posted a different variant:
# [License part omitted]
dev=File.stat(ARGV[0]   "/usr").dev
def pkgsize(name, dev)
  size=0
  IO.foreach(name) do  line 
    begin
      st=File.stat(line.chomp)
      if (st.file? && st.dev == dev)
        size += st.size
      end
    rescue
    end
  end
  return size
end
def space(file,dev)
  "%d %s" % [pkgsize(file,dev),file.gsub(/.+?\/([^\/]+)\.list/,'\1')]
end
@used=Array.new
Dir.glob("/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list").sort.each do  file 
  x=Array.new
  x << space(file,dev).split(/\s+/)
  p [x[0][0].to_i,x[0][1]]
  @used << [x[0][0].to_i,x[0][1]]
end
#p @used.sort.each    x  p x  
@used.sort.each    x  puts "# x[0]  # x[1] "  
#redirect to file?
Thank you everyone for the nice feedback!

18 October 2005

Joachim Breitner: Cell phone stolen, camera bought

Isn’t it ironic: I just wrote Tapu, a game for my mobile phone and spend quite some time typing 450 playing cards for it - and then, before ever having played the game, my cell phone, a SonyEricsson T630, gets stolen! And that in a very bold way: At night, from my dorm room, while I was sleeping there. And since the theif did not take my laptop or other expensice stuff, I assume he was not planning on stealing, therefore he (or she) is most likely from my dorm. Which makes me uncomfortable.Also uncomfortable is the Siemens S35 that I still got lying around here, and so is the fact that I had to order a new SIM card, that I had to notify the loss at the police station and that I lost some contacts on the phone.Out of frustration (ok, it was planned for a while now, but this gave me the rest), I bought myself a new camera (the old one went to pieces, as previously blogged). Now I own a shiny new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. It’s not a pocket size camera any more, but the 12x zoom and the large lense was just too tempting. It was actually at DebConf 5 when Ralph Amissah enthuiastically showed me his Lumix, making me interested in this kind of Camera.
I uploaded a few pictures, though nothing special yet. Have a look at this zoomed in picture versus this wide angle picture for a demonstration of the 12x zoom and compare these two pictures, both fully zoomed in, first one with image stabilizer, second one without. Again, for zoom demonstration, the wide angle view.