Title

Good Stuff

Ruby on Rails is great with a clean framework, fun language, and an active community.

Why the Lucky Stiff

Ruby on Rails

Ruby

Two things melt my face: fire, and Nine Inch Nails. Their latest album Ghosts is very nice.

Nine Inch Nails

I love this site. Play ’’Bammi’’.

PointlessSites.com

Want to train and don’t know how, or don’t want to pay for an on-line e-coach? Meet Athlo. It’s my latest project. We just rolled out an alpha with tons of development forecasted for the next few months.

Athlo

OmniNerd is like my first child. It the first “real” site I ever wrote. I play a much smaller role these days, but it’s still a great site.

OmniNerd

Power Book Broadcom Wireless In Fedora 8 Linux

Linux Wireless

Man do I hate Linux sometimes.

So I’ve got an old PowerBook G4 867Mhz that is just not keeping up with the latest Mac software. Rather than scrap it, I thought I’d see if I could give it a second life. I decided to try Fedora 8 as I’m very familiar with that OS. My wife only really uses this computer to surf the net and check email, so I figured a base install would be perfect. All went well until I got to the wireless card. It didn’t work out of the box so I started Googling only to find tons of incorrect information.

The most common was the application of a program called bcm43xx-fwcutter which is used to extract data from a proprietary driver and create useful drivers for Linux. Well, 99% of the information surrounding this kept leading me to the same error:

# /sbin/modprobe bcm43xx
FATAL: Module bcm43xx not found.

# sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory

After literally 2 days of trying variations of the bad info, I had a sudden flash of common sense: check dmesg to see what’s failing. I ran the following:

dmesg | tail -n 30

Buried in the output was a message telling me to go to linuxwireless and get new drivers. I followed the simple instructions there and bam, it works like a champ. Spread the good word!

Posted 31 March 2008