The big news in consumer computing this week seems to be the
announcement of Apple switching processors to Intel chips from IBM’s
PowerPC. I come to this news with quite a bit of scorn and derision,
but partly that is because I started out with bitterness towards Apple.
I spent the years between 1986 and 1996 using Macs, and in that time I
became an application user – not a computer user. I could invent
nothing, develop nothing, and there was no hint that there were creative
properties to computing devices in those years. I am not the only one
who found the Mac to be too confining – Neal Stephenson wrote an essay on the
subject. I frequently wish that I had spent those years learning and
using Unix, which would have given me a much broader set of skills than
the ability to double-click. So I did not come to this news with an
open mind, and further thought on the subject has led me to the opinion
that Apple has, once again, made a massively bone-headed move.

I am not suggesting that Apple should have stuck to the PPC chips – they
have not been advancing and are not providing an advantage to the
company. You can be as big a fan as you like of the architecture, but
if no one can make it speed up, and no one can make it’s
"better" features actually perform better, then it is time to
move on. That said, going to Intel is idiotic. Intel has been getting
it’s butt kicked by AMD for a few years now, and they are still
providing us with 1970’s technology today. Most importantly, by going
to a commodity chipset, Apple has paved the way to having their precious
software work on cheap, generic machines, which will radically undercut
their hardware sales. Apple is a company that needs to focus – either
make hardware or software, but stop trying to do both as a seamless
"experience". Some suggest that assuming Apple doesn’t sell
OS X for generic hardware, it will get ported to generic hardware and
widely pirated. I think that this is true, and it will hurt both Apple
and Microsoft, because neither one will make money from it. Some
suggest that the lack of support will dissuade people from this, but
that is not th case for the home user at all (though it is a major
deterrent for business). How much support is provided by Apple or
Microsoft now? Sure, there’s someone you can call, but I’ll tell you to
reboot for free, and I can ignore you just as well as a big company.
User-level support is practically non-existent for any OS – you need a
community or a third-party service vendor to get any real help.

Perhaps the most important issue is control – with both Windows and OS X
you get very little control over the system you use, and if you exert what
little control you have, you frequently find that you have voided your
support contract. On Windows you have control over your hardware, but
if you change too much you’ll have to re-register your copy of Windows.
Also, if you want to change a behaviour or fix a bug you have to wait,
and to buy a new product sight-unseen in hope of fixing it. I am no
longer willing to do that. I no longer up proprietary software because
it denies me that ability to control my computer for no benefit.

I decided that I wanted to see accented characters, other character sets, and basically move out of the 70s on my terminal screens. So, I went hunting for the settings to make my system think in Unicode. I started here and it seemed to go okay, but I still couldn’t see most of the characters in this. After much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, it turns out that Eterm, which I understood to be Unicode compatible, isn’t. At least, mine isn’t. So, I decided to use Urxvt, which is Rxvt with Unicode support.

The funny thing is, once I decided to use urxvt I ended up spending more time configuring it than I ever did getting Unicode (specifically UTF-8) set as my default character set. I’m pretty happy with it now though – you can check out my config file over in the configs section. The only problem left is that I don’t know how to type accented characters, but I figure I’ll figure it out eventually.

U of T is moving towards ubiquitous wireless access on the downtown campus. That means you want access, but the University doesn’t want iSquatters™. To that end they are using WEP and MAC address authentication. I want access via Linux, but the myopic twits are afraid to support anything for fear that it won’t work. Better to inconvenience everyone rather than risk having one unhappy student with a screwball setup. So, in the interest of promoting wireless access at U of T, I wrote up these instructions for accessing the Campus Wireless Network under Linux.

1. Make sure your wireless card is supported in your running kernel.
Contrary to the documentation provided by the Campus Wireless network,
any card supported by Linux and capable of WEP and 802.11b will work.

If your kernel does not support your wireless card, but it is supported
under Linux, you will need to recompile your kernel. This is beyond the
scope of these instructions, so get on the Internet and get some advice.

2. Note the output of iwconfig. It may look something like this:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"UTORwin"  Nickname:"Prism  I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:01:F4:6B:0E:CC
          Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=46/92  Signal level=-78 dBm  Noise level=-149 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:15  Rx invalid frag:2
          Tx excessive retries:2  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

The key fields are ESSID, Access Point, and Link Quality and the name of
the interface (eth0, eth1, etc.). If the Access Point field is
44:44:44:44:44:44 and the Link Quality is reasonably high, then you have
not been authenticated by the Access Point.

3. As root, log onto an access point with the following command:
iwconfig eth0 essid UTORwin enc s:UToronto1home
The only difference will be the interface name. You may wish to alias
this command to something convenient, or set it as the default for the
interface.

4. Log onto a web browser, and any page you receive will redirect you
to the Campus Wireless Network, where you will have to register the
MAC address of your wireless card and then authenticate yourself based
on your UTORID.

Getting a UTORID I leave as an exersize for the reader.