for keeping track of my digital experiments

After some searching around on the Google machine, I came across “Linux wireless LAN support“. It’s one of the most complete directories I’ve seen for a very long time. I had a suspicion that my DWL-G510 pci card might work, as it is old enough and I’ve read about other similar models of D-Link card being supported natively. It turns out that mine works seamlessly with stuff from the MadWifi project. Because I was feeling lazy and wanted a tried and true install method, I found “How To Install MadWifi On Debian 4.0 (Etch)” by Sumardi Shukor. The following is based on the article on his blog.

vi /etc/apt/source.list [add "contrib non-free" after "main" to the various lines]
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential module-assistant wireless-tools
module-assistant
module-assistant auto-install madwifi-source
modprobe ath_pci
ifconfig ath0 up [bring up the wireless interface]
iwlist ath0 scanning [scan for a wireless network to connect to]

I suggest using a GUI app to do the rest, such as wicd.

I was having trouble with some old CD-RW’s that I was installing Debian 5 from the other day, so since the machine’s BIOS supported booting from removable disk (usb), I decided on giving that a try.

Much of this is based on the great article – “Installing Debian Sarge
from a USB memory stick (USB key)“ - by Pascal Le Bail.

You are going to need a decent Internet connection that you can download the extra Debian packages from, and a BIOS that can boot from a usb disk. This assumes that your usb disk is the first that you have connected. Run dmesg to find out the exact dev name of your device if sda is incorrect.

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1
wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cp [netinstall or biz card].iso /mnt/


You can pick up a business card or netinstall cd iso from Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the Internet.

Over the past day or so, I have been doing some update/maintenance work on the I Am Super Rich MySpace application for Solitech GmbH. (You can also find its Facebook counterpart under the name I Am Rich.) I’ve done work on these application before, and have had success in picking up the code really quick, but I now have to transition the MySpace edition over the OpenSocial 0.8 to get the application to post on users’ event feeds. The (now old) 0.8 OpenSocial spec was released sometime in January 2009 on MySpace, and update from the really old 0.7 OpenSocail spec. Along with the 0.8 release on MySpace came the opening of Activity Feed functionality to 3rd party developers.

Here is what is required to get Applications posting to users’ event feeds:

1. your MySpace app must be running in the 0.8 OpenSocial framework
2. MySpace app must make use of the templating engine for Activies
3. MySpace app must not be using old/deprecated 0.7 OpenSocial Javascript. This was a real problem for the IMSR app … had to hunt through several hundred lines of Javascript. Check out this seriously helpful MySpace developer wiki entry on transitioning your app to 0.8.