Today, instead of having double maths, my teacher decided not to turn up, so I had double spare - great! I was knackered (even though I had gone to bed at 10PM the night before) and tremendously hungry (even though I had four slices of toast with chocolate on, and milk, for breakfast) and I was looking forward to lunch. On a side note, looking forward to lunch is a terrible thing and should not happen (except it's Friday)- On one hand, your dreams can be fulfilled and you get a nice lunch. However, the probability of this happening is extremely low. On Fridays, there is the routine FCB (Fish, Chips & Beans) so all is well!

Anyway, I went up to lunch to fill my stomach just before the dreaded "Study Centre" came up and took over the dining hall (I say dining hall, but I much prefer the term Monastic Barn- it does down the awesome building to call it a "dining hall", ahem). So I grabbed my tray, plate and cutlery and went to be served. This is where my day was ruined: The so-called Dining Superviser came up with some rubbish stories to stop me eating lunch. I'll refer to her as MC from now on, as it sounds funny! Here are the series of events at lunch that stopped me eating:

1. According to MC, there were not enough seats for us to sit. There were roughly 5 out of 15 tables free.
2. After arguing this point, she said that she would have to serve all the others from Senior School (my school). However, there were only 6 of us up there at this point.
3. Then out came the usual excuse: "I don't make the rules...". Oh my God...
4. So as we were forced to wait for our food, we all knew what was going to happen- the Study Centre were going to come up, and we would be forced behind yet another queue.
5. The dreaded deed happened and my lunch went from bad to worse.

I know, I know, this might be a little petty, but it was very big to me...

I've been putting off getting the bcm43xx driver (for Wireless LAN cards using Broadcom chipsets) for a while as I thought it was in the kernel from version 2.6.17. So while using ndiswrapper, I waited and when 2.6.17 came out, I wget'd it and installed it.. It turned out I hadn't quite read everything on the bcm43xx website, and I had to install the driver separately..

Debian unstable has some nice source packages for bcm43xx and ieee80211softmac so a nice and easy m-a auto-install bcm43xx and m-a auto-install ieee80211softmac sorted me out with some kernel modules. Once I had blacklisted ndiswrapper so there were no conflicts, I found that iwconfig gave my Broadcom 4306 driver! Success! Or not... Upon executing ifup wlan0 everything seems fine but I can't actually get an IP address- great! Also, iwlist wlan0 scan gives a "device not found" error.

Admittedly, I did not try for hard to get it working as I got a little bored, but I'm not sure what's up here! I will try soon. Maybe I need a new version of dhcpd or wireless-tools... Who knows?

The stupidity of making everyone in the entire year to visit the UCAS website to apply online at 2PM today was obvious! As everyone slowly started signing up, the connection to the site got slower and slower until nearly everyone's timed out, or just took aaages!

However... it's great when you have a proxy installed at home, and you tunnel it through SSH! This way, I was able to finish my application before most people, even though I mucked around quite a bit and had to talk to my tutor!

Ah- finally getting broadband is really paying off in a strange number of ways!

After just starting to use Thunderbird as my primary mail client, so I can view and check emails in windows and linux, I'm convinced that I don't like it! So now I'm looking for a replacement, and I currently have this in mind:

A backend or server, that is constantly running that holds all the emails, but isn't accessed directly. Instead, there are frontends, and can be many! Eg:

• A graphical based mail client much like the design of Slypheed, Thunderbird, Evolution etc. for linux. This would probably use something like GTK+ or Qt.
• A console-based mail client much like Mutt, or Pine for linux. This would be great because one could read their mail through SSH and therefore anywhere with an SSH client.
• Another graphical based mail client but this time for windows. This is not entirely necessary, but would be nice.
• A web-based mail client like IlohaMail, or QD-POP.

All of these would access the same server, and output all your emails in the same folders, in the same way. The only difference would be the interface.

Just talking about that now though makes me think what I'm suggesting is a Microsoft Exchange replacement! Exchange has a great web interface, uses Outlook for windows (a great client), and can be used by Evolution in linux. Of course, Exchange is a lot more complex, and has groupware kind-of stuff that is just not required. However, as I think about it more, the following features would be great to have in this server and clients:

• Mail client (obviously)
• Calendar
• Tasks

Which moves more and more into the realms of Exchange. As I own a Windows Mobile phone, I'd also love to have push-email, although that would cost in terms of GPRS and isn't entirely necessary.

Anyway, that's my thought of the day, and would love to make it, as a quick look on t'internet earlier for something like this revealed nothing. Let me know what you think...

I am currently subscribed to the SynCE-WindowsMobile5 mailing list and have been for quite a while. The reason for this is I want my Windows Mobile 5.0 running Smartphone to work under SynCE in linux, so I followed the development of this new driver. Everything was pretty radical with this version as Activesync used the RNDIS protocol with WM5 instead of a serial connection in earlier versions of WM. Background information over...

A week ago or so, the following was sent to the mailing list:

Hi all,
Thought this might be of interest to those of you having one of those PXA-based PDAs (which rndis_host currently doesn't cope with because of their buggy USB client implementation):
usb switch is an app for the wm5 device that changes the USB sync protocol from RNDIS to Serial
let me find the link
http://www.pcdebolso.com/notVer.asp?ID=1351
it's in portuguese though
the direct link for download
http://t005.tgv.net/USBSwitch_PPC.cab
Which means you should be able to use the ipaq driver and access your device the legacy way. If this works there's probably a few of you owing le0n a beer.
Regards,
Ole André

This was interesting, but not that interesting as my device had an OMAP processor inside. However, after only just realising that I had compiled USB1 support out of my kernel, but leaving in USB2 (was really confusing!), I was able to get linux to see my device and I thought I would take the plunge and try it out. However, there were a few things against this whole idea:

• This app was for Pocket PC. However, this didn't put me off too much, as I remembered reading somewhere that the difference between Pocket PC and smartphone apps was getting trivial.
• This app was to fix problems concerning devices with Intel processors, and I didn't have one!
• My luck!

So first, I followed the HOWTO on the SynCE website. This was fairly simple and required a few apt-get install's to install required stuff, like synce-serial. Everything seemed fine, as I steamed through the HOWTO, ticking off all the boxes! Then I reached part 6.4 and realised that I had not read the first part properly- I needed a patch on my kernel. However, this seemed pretty normal, as it was for smartphones and after all, this is a smartphone! This is where it all goes kaput- I download the kernel-2.6-driver but it can't compile- I think it's something to do with my kernel being too new (2.6.17 is a 2-3 days old). This is my luck kicking in. Now I'm not sure where to go from here. The output from make is here, and if anyone can help I'd much appreciate it!

I certainly know of one other person who would gain something from this working!

Today (or should I say yesterday, looking at the clock) I had my final exam- physics. I've just finished going through AS June modules, and I'm terribly pleased to be over with them.. I only had nine modules in total (other people I knew had 15+) but that was nine too many to me:

• Maths: S1, C1, C2
• Phyics: Physics in Action, Understanding Processes
• Chemistry: CHM1, CHM2, CHM3
• Music

I am generally pleased with the outcome of the exams but I'm pleased they're behind me. I have several aims for this summer:

• Get started on PHP-Site properly and get it sorted out.
• Learn C++
• Get a job
• See loads of friends..

These will be more documented in later blogs me thinks, so stay tuned for another exciting installment. Hopefully I'll get into this blogging malarky soon and this'll flow more! After all, I only got this site up and running a few hours ago!

Starting in the same way as all programming tutorials, this blog has finally surfaced! This site is basically for me to tell you about what's going on in my life and what i'm working on. Keep posted for more extremely fun information on what's hot and not in my life...