Seattle.BloggersPub

Spotted in a “Create VPN Connection” dialog in Ubuntu today:

It will require some information, such as IP addresses and secrets.

Love that wording.

One of the nice things about AIR is that it lets you break out of the browser and create any kind of application experience you want. as part of Adobe TV I did a quick tutorial on using custom chrome in your AIR applications. You can check out the video below and grab the source […]

What a great tournament. Luckily, for me, as basketball in the Seattle of Seattle completely turns me off the the NBA, we have great international soccer to keep me intrigued.   The Euro 08 finals are set,  Germany vs Spain in a classic soccer power match-up. 
I think Germany out plays the Spaniards with the support […]

After a redirect from espn.ca:

90% Of What You Learn In Strip Mall Dojo’s, Martial Arts Schools, Self Defense Seminars And DVD’s Will Get You Killed In A Real Attack On The Street.

Definitely don’t stop reading there.

I’m playing around with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on a laptop (all of my prior experience has been on a PC) and one of the problems I immediately encountered (other than a botched partitioning on the first install attempt, which I lived to tell about) was lack of any acknowledgment that the Dell Latitude D630 I’m working with should be able to access wireless networks. Unfortunately for me, this ended up being one of those experiences with Ubuntu that is not so pleasant, so I figured I’d share my findings here in case someone else finds it useful.

The first step was searching Google for anything that would at least get me started down the right path. It wasn’t long before I saw a common thread in the “solutions” I was finding. All signs pointed toward using NDISwrapper, which is available in Ubuntu via the Synaptic Package Manager (and therefore sudo apt-get install). Furthermore, the steps to follow in getting NDISwrapper set up and then referring it to the proper Windows (yes, Windows) driver were all relatively similar. The best summary of these steps can be found in the Ubuntu Forums.

One thing to keep in mind when following those steps is that you don’t have to get too worried when you get a message like “ERROR: Module bcm43xx does not exist” after running the sudo rmmod bcm43xx command. I received this error and was able to get things to work properly anyway. I think the error is a little bit misleading in that it really just means that the module wasn’t active when you ran the command (or something to that effect).

Furthermore, a big key to this whole process is making sure you have the right driver. I went through the process using a driver linked to in one of the step-by-step tutorials (not the one previously linked to) and ended up seeing the “driver present” message but not the corresponding “hardware detected” message that is equally important. Once I found the right driver, which for the Dell Latitude D630 I am working with ended up being the driver for the Dell Wireless 1505 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card, I saw both of the aforementioned messages after sudo ndiswrapper -l and knew I was in business. After a restart, I then saw wireless networks showing up after clicking on the Network Monitor icon in the taskbar.

Now that I’m past that hurdle, I can start digging around for the next one.

I don’t spend a lot of time on MySpace anymore but I noticed Ciara was messing with her profile and there was a little WYSIWYG editor over on the left hand side. Since I spend a lot of time with Flex applications it was pretty easy to see that they were using Flex for their […]

True or false: Most major news organizations (e.g. The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ESPN, etc) would be better off running their entire online publishing operations through a modified blogging platform (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Newsvine, or a home-grown solution) than through an enterprise CMS.
In other words, in five years, will mainstream news sites essentially […]

My mid-year resolution is to do more video and incorporate it into my job. Sometimes it’ll be interviews of people at conferences (I’ve got one with Alan Lewis from eBay coming later this week) and other times it will be random bits of video that only loosely apply to my job but are meant to […]

Mike Chambers posted what I think is the absolute most important talk from the on AIR Tour. It’s Ethan Malasky’s presentation on Developing Secure AIR Applications. Security is one of the things that gets talked a lot about with regards to AIR and the team spent a huge, huge amount of time thinking about the […]

Matthias sent a note about RIA Alltop and I think it’s the best collection of RIA blogs/information that I’ve seen. Alltop is a “headline aggregator” it basically has a collection of blogs on a subject and then lists the most recent posts for those blogs. The RIA section covers everything from Flash, Flex, Silverlight, JavaScript […]