At long last I was able to get Kismet running on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (these instructions did the trick). For the uninitiated, the Zaurus is a little handheld computer that runs Linux, and Kismet is a “wifi sniffing” program that lets me walk around with my wifi-equipped Zaurus and lists all of the wireless networks it encounters along the way.

So tonight I did a simple walk around the block to see what I could find in the neighbourhood.

To my surprise, there was a lot to be found:

• 15 wireless access points
• 9 of 15 were using WEP, 6 were free and open
• Manufacturer breakdown:
• Linksys: 4
• D-Link: 4
• Netgear: 2
• Gemtek: 1
• Zyxel: 1
• Siemens: 1
• Global Sun: 1
• SMC: 1

That’s 15 networks detectable over about 2 acres of land. This is about as close to “open wireless access everywhere” as you can get, I think.

Dragos posts a useful table, charting the costs of living in Bucharest. I would find it very useful to have a chart like this for every major city in the world. Dragos based his chart on a similar effort for Prague.

I have been reading the Disease Outbreak News from the World Health Organization’s Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response group for the past while. Like today’s Avian influenza – situation in Indonesia - update.

With all the “we’re all going to die” media hype surrounding avian flu, I find the style of the WHO bulletins pleasingly straightforward. Not that their contents are pleasing. Indeed, absent of hype as they are, the simple stories are starkly depressing:

The first patient was a 13-year-old girl. She developed symptoms on 6 January, was hospitalized on 12 January, and died on 14 January. The second patient was her four-year-old brother. He developed symptoms on 8 January, was hospitalized on 14 January, and died on 17 January.

Two other family members, a 14-year-old sister and the 43-year-old father, remain hospitalized with respiratory symptoms. The sister was hospitalized on 14 January and the father on 17 January. Samples from these cases are being tested to determine whether they were also infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus.

Investigations conducted by the Ministry of Health and WHO found evidence of a large poultry outbreak in the family’s neighbourhood. Chickens kept by the family began to die three days before the first patient developed symptoms. All family members had close contact with the diseased chickens and assisted in the removal of dead birds.

Regular readers will know that, although I am a staunch Formosa Tea House regular, I occasionally divert to Interlude. Indeed “Gong Bao Thursdays” have become a regular outing for the usual bunch.

Today I decided to mix things up a bit and go to Interlude for lunch on a Monday. And, Gong Bao not being on offer on Mondays, I opted for my old standby of the Buddha Special and an order of dumplings.

And I gotta say, the dumplings were fantastic today. They’re usually pretty good, but there was something about them today that sung.

Throw in a Ginger Black Tea (guaranteed to knock out any mid-winter-blah you might be feeling and fill you with summer sun), and it’s a solid Monday lunch.

Catherine and I showed up at the polling station at Holland College right on the stroke of 8:30 a.m. this morning, voter cards in hand, ready to exercise our franchise.

Unfortunately things didn’t go according to plan.

One of the pages in the register of electors — by chance the one containing the Rs and Ss — was missing. As a result, even though I had my card, and I appeared in the duplicate copies of the lists that the party representatives had on hand, I was forced to re-register as if I was a new elector.

I fear that my R and S brethren in poll 60 will suffer the same fate.

So I waited in a new line, waited while the registrar filled in a new form, and then picked up where I left off.

Which just goes to show that you can invest millions in a National Register of Elections, but if one link in the chain falls out, it’s all for nought.

The rest of the process went as planned; indeed I think, for the first time in my life, I voted with feeling.

I sent the following “talkback” to Island Morning this morning, and it was read just before 8:00 a.m. It was in reaction to a interviews with the University of PEI Dean of Arts and the President of the UPEI Faculty Association about Prof. David Weale’s offer to his students to give them 70% in his course if they didn’t attend.

It seems odd to me that in the discussion of the situation with Prof. David Weale’s class that neither the Dean nor the President of the Faculty Association seemed concerned at the conduct of the students  in the situation.

The fact that almost 20% of the students in a course opted not to participate when given the chance speaks more about “excellence” at the University of PEI than any other part of the story.

Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why on earth a student would attend university and sign up for a course if they’ve no real interest in attending (and presumably learning).

I don’t know Prof. Weale’s rationale for making his “get out of jail free” offer to his students, but I suspect it was intended, at least in part, to shine light on whatever it is about university that would corrupt students to such an extent — and make them feel that a course is a “jail” worth escaping from.

This has been upgrade weekend here at Reinvented:

• I upgraded the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the main server (you’re looking at it) version 3 to version 4. I’d waited a long time to do this, mostly because the upgrade path seemed foggy; turns out that it isn’t all that foggy — the RHEL 4 install CDs have an “ugprade” mode that did all the heavy lifting. The only thing I needed to do was install the compat-libcom_err-1.0-5.i386 package from the RedHat Network to fix some application breakage.
• I took the opportunity to upgrade to PHP5. I’d been running PHP4 for what seem like forever, and it seemed like a good idea to join the object generation. Again, I’d held off because I feared incompatibility, but I haven’t found any yet, and the combo Apache 2 + PHP5 compile install goes exactly like the PHP4 compile and install. I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t cause any problems, and I’m looking forward to taking PHP5 for a ride.
• Because Asterisk, which runs the phone system here in the office, has to be recompiled when the kernel changes anyway, I decided to upgrade to Asterisk 1.2.2 as well. I ran into some post-RHEL4-upgrade problems here, problems solved by:
  • Installing the kernel-devel-2.6.9-22.0.2.EL.i686.rpm package.
  • cd /usr/src
  • ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686 linux
  • ln -s /usr/src/linux /lib/modules/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686/build
  After doing that, Asterisk compiled and installed without problems. To get things working, I also had to follow the instructions here about making the swtich from devfs to udev.
• The third-party Asterisk application app_notify needed to have a #include <stdio.h> inserted into app_notify.c before #include <asterisk/file.h> — after that change, it compiled fine.
• I resisted the temptation to upgrade to MySQL 5 as part of all this — why tempt fate. I’ll get around to that next time I’ve got a free Sunday afternoon.

As a result of all this, if you notice that the blog is appearing in Russian or emitting strange siren-like noises, please let me know.

Recent versions of Mint support a non-administrative public view of statistics (you enable it under “Enable open, Client mode” in the “Login” section of the Preferences screen). So you’re now welcome to take a look around for yourself at ruk.ca traffic statistics.

In addition to the stock Mint installation, I’ve added a few add-on modules (in the world of Mint these are called “Pepper”); right now you’ll find Window Width, User Agent 007, Sparks! and Fresh View. Note that Fresh View requires an SVG-capable browser (it’s working fine in the latest stock Safari for me Safari requires the Adobe SVG Viewer v3.0 for Macintosh).

Later in Nicole Simon’s conversation with Stefan and Felix from Plazes they talk about their plans to roll out a new mobile-phone based twist on Plazes soon. Felix pointed me to these Flickr photos of the new “Plazes for phones” application; they’ve got it running on Nokia phones, and have plans to work on other platforms in the future. Cool.

“Once elected, we will ingest special giantification drugs that will allow us to grow to an enormous size, and lord over Charlottetown like gods…”