c133.org/blog
all clee, all the time
Thu, 17 Feb 2005
.: lseek(fd, 0x5c, SEEK_SET) ::

Our Intel rep managed to secure me an 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI card for my ThinkPad. Direct from Intel. Totally sweet.

Somehow managed to get the ThinkPad apart, and dropped in the new card, and connected the antennae, and turned it on, and was greeted rather rudely by two beeps and the infamous Error 1802.

I was prepared for this though. I expected to spend the rest of the day hacking around IBM's evil authorized-miniPCI-card whitelist and being otherwise 1337 just like mjg59. But instead, I found the source for a neat little hack that resets part of the nvram to a magic value and disables the whitelist check.

All this means for those of you who don't speak Geek is that I overrode some IBM stupidity and made my hardware work the way it should. Which should have been much easier, but hey, this is Linux, and we like things like lseek(fd, 0x5c, SEEK_SET) just fine.

[17:49] | [tech/redhat] | # | G
.: Google Dinner beta ::

I spent most of this week at LinuxWorld in Boston (and the very beginning of the week at the XDevConf, which ajax took notes of) so my legs are killing me. But last night, Google sponsored this amazingly kick-ass dinner for a few dozen of us free software hacker types, and it was completely badass.

They had some issues with their food distribution algorithms though. Hopefully next year, if they roll out Google Dinner 2.0, they'll have that algorithm sorted out. (It took an inordinate amount of time to get our food since everyone had to wait in a huge line to get served - there's definitely room for optimization there, I think.)

I talked Dave Jones into coming along and we had an awesome time. As soon as we walked in, we were accosted by Google folks who made us fill out some registration cards. One of the fields on the card said "Desired position" so I asked the woman (who had an amazingly kick-ass Google shirt, one with a female symbol on one of the 'o's in Google, but I digress) "What does this 'desired position' field mean?"

"We want to know, if you were to work for us, what position would you want to have?"

This stunned me. What an amazingly smart way of getting people interested. So davej and I filled in "spaceman" and "Batman" respectively. I mean, if Google is going to be hiring someone to be Batman, I certainly hope that they'd consider me for the position, because I think I could do really well in that role.

Got to meet some cool people there, including Mako who apparently wanted to meet me because he knew who I was. Finding out that other people know who I am and want to meet me.... that's kinda freaky. I mean, granted, we're not talking about Havoc Pennington-style rockstar status.

Yet.

[09:32] | [tech] | # | G