After much buggering about, I finally got this *&#$# Huawei e169 working. This method requires no mucking around in the kernel, just the usb_modeswitch utility and wvdial. For reference, this was a unit supplied from Optus in Australia for their Optus Wireless Broadband service. It’s set up on an old laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. There’s no good guide out there for the e169 at the time of writing.

First, grab usb_modeswitch from http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/

There’s nothing to install, you just need the compiled executable. There’s a config file, but I found it far simpler to just use command line arguments. The commands for the e169 need to be executed in order, and they’re as follows:

./usb_modeswitch -v 0×12d1 -p 0×1001 -d 1

./usb_modeswitch -v 0×12d1 -p 0×1001 -H 1

Once that’s done, the device should be recognised and /dev/ttyUSB0 should be created. Yay!

Now, you need to spend a second setting up /etc/wvdial.conf The below should be pretty universal:

[Dialer Defaults]
Phone = *99#
Username = *
Password = *
New PPPD = yes

wvdial looks for a device at /dev/modem, but ours is at /dev/ttyUSB0. My somewhat hacky solution was

sudo ln /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/modem

Jerome in the comments has suggested adding this section to the conf file instead of creating a link as above. It’s untested by me, but looks like it should work fine. It’s a much cleaner solution than the crossed out one above, too. Add it right at the beginning of the file.

[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0

If you use this solution (which you should) remove the “sudo ln…” lines from connect.sh.

Now, just executing wvdial in a terminal should get you connected. It takes a little while, about 30 seconds I guess, but the important thing is that it works, and it’s pretty simple.

Since this connection is on a laptop intended for my grandfather, who is a fairly new computer user, I wanted to make the connection automatic in order to simplify things. I put this script in /etc/init.d/ which worked a treat. http://dbe.cc/pub/connect.sh

Don’t forget to run sudo update-rc.d connect.sh defaults

The script will need to be tweaked to include the location of the usb_modeswitch executable on your system. Unless your username happens to be brian and it’s in a directory called .huawei under your home folder. That’d be a pretty crazy coincidence though. If people are actually finding this post and using the script I’ll update it to be more user friendly. Naturally, if you don’t want it executing on boot, you can just save the script as an executable and run it (as root) when you please.

Also:

Because this connection doesn’t run through network-manager, it confuses firefox a little. All it means is that firefox starts itself in offline mode. You can just untick “Work offline” in the File menu. I solved it more permanently with instructions from here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=767045

It’s late, so if there’s anything I’ve missed or anything that’s unclear, please let me know in the comments. I’ll do my best to help out.

It’s really, really paining me to watch the beating that the openmoko project is currently taking. I’ve been majorly into this idea for some time now, about half way through ‘07. FOSS is a brilliant thing, and it’s only a matter of time before the telecommunications industry wakes up to that. After all, Linux sprouted from Unix which sprouted from a telco.

Sadly, it looks like the openmoko team has set the effort back a fair ways. It’s been released before it was ready and Dave Fayram has pointed that out. I thought Dave gave a reasonably fair assesment. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time with the manual, but most users don’t. His review has unfortunately been leapt upon by every Apple fanboy out there and it’sgaining a life of it’s own.

I’m a rank outsider, no involvement in the project whatsoever aside from voraciously reading news about it for the past 12 months. Frankly, it seems that it’s been mismanaged by FIC. There has been a fair amount of disgruntlement coming from the developers working for the company. The fact that they switched from the original GTK platoform to the qtopia stack at the eleventh hour smacked of desperation.

This wouldn’t really bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that openmoko had gained so much media attention. So often you hear outlets talking about the triumverate of iPhone, Android and openmoko. Up until this week I’ve been really proud to see such a rabidly open source project be given that much airtime. It’s frustrating to now find out that they weren’t deserving of it.

I think those of us looking for an open source phone now need to turn towards the slightly-open-source-but-not-really Android, and hope like hell that something great comes out of Nokia’s plans for opening up Symbian.

Trent Reznor recently released the latest Nine Inch Nails album in a really, really interesting way. The confluence of marketing-geekery and copyleft-geekery that it represents tickled my fancy.

While his decision to release several SKUs at various price-points is the best new-wave digital distribution technique I’ve seen to date, it’s his choice to license the work under a version of the Creative Commons license that I think is really interesting, and has been overlooked by a lot of the comment I’ve read.

Basically, you can do whatever you please with Ghosts I - IV provided you don’t sell it to anyone, provided you don’t pretend that you or someone other than the original artists created it, and provided that you keep the license intact if you remix it.

So, I could take the FLAC copy I just paid Trent for and stick it on The Pirate Bay perfectly legally.

I see this as a watershed moment for Creative Commons. This is the first mainstream use of the license that I’m aware of. If Trent makes money despite the fact that people can legally give the album to everyone they know, it will say a lot of profound things about the emerging marketplaces for creative works.

First and foremost, it will make the RIAA’s ceaseless lawsuits look a bit silly. They’re telling us that the entire reason the music industry’s profits are declining are because of sharing. And yet here’s an artist that has essentially given his work away for free, and yet by all reports he’s made $750k within a few days. Granted, he had to apply some novel thinking to do it. He had to be a little bit *gasp* creative!

Maybe the mainstream record labels could do the same. I’m not saying they should adopt Trent’s model completely (although they could do worse) but just to inject some bold, fresh, risky thinking into their own models.

I’m still using Ubuntu on my laptop and it just keeps getting better. Clare and I have started up a website project which has meant I’ve been doing more in depth php development work. I really love how easy it is to get a LAMP system up and running for seamless local web development. This makes it really simple to tweak and play with things on the fly. This discovery was really great and I’ve been loving it for the last couple of weeks. However, I’ve just now discovered something that might make all of that obsolete.

I started reading the Official Ubuntu Book and it casually mentioned the Connect to Server feature. Basically you drop out the Places menu, hit Connect to Server and give it the ssh details of your remote development environment. It then opens up the remote filesystem as if it were a standard window. I’m now accessing my server on the other side of the world as if it were sitting on my local system. Admittedly it’s a little slower than working with files locally, but it’s a damned sight better than buggering about working through ftp on a Windows system. Additionally, ssh is nice and secure whereas ftp is most certainly not.

Until now I’ve been working on my site locally with the idea of gzipping up all my files and my SQL database and uploading it to the server as a job lot once I’ve done. Now that I’m armed with this knowledge, I’ll likely just start working directly on the server. It’ll mean less uploading hassles ultimately. The only danger is that I may be tempted to use more absolute paths in my code, which is just poor form. Oh well, I’m a bad man. I might just stick the whole site behind an .htaccess file to avoid the great unwashed getting a look at it while I’m done and buggering up my brand integrity. (Shit, can you tell I just did a marketing subject? It’s getting into my brain.)

I just got Ubuntu installed on Clare’s laptop. It only has 256meg RAM that’s shared with the video card so it was running like a pig even with XP. Honestly, who manufactures a system with only 256meg of RAM? It was a battle because the Ubuntu and Kubuntu livecds require at least 256 to run, and they were both failing. Xubuntu started up, but ran like a dog.

Any of the three versions will run on systems as low as 128mb, you just need to use the standard installer rather than the livecd. Only trouble is, because I’m stupid, it took me a while to figure that out. Anyway, I downloaded the alternate installation cd and eventually got it happening, and now I am the smartest man alive.

Also, the kde desktop looks pretty cool except for the fact it uses Konquerer. If there was a version of kde that used Nautilus and Firefox I’d be sold. Nevertheless, I might check it out in the near future, since it looks cool.

I bought a Wii recently with a bunch of vouchers I scored from work. While this entire thing is undoubtedly awesome, there’s one problem for me. I have a projector in my loungeroom, and the Wii needs a “sensor” bar for the Wiimote to work. What’s annoying is that this bar needs a cable that has to run across the centre of my loungeroom in order to work.

Luckily, all that’s in that “sensor” bar is a bunch of infrared LEDs. Nothing more. So, why not build your own? There are plenty of people out there that have done so, and I decided to do it as well, with a few differences from what else is out there. I’ll leave the gritty details to a future post on garagehacker. This post is merely to highlight my retardedness.

I spent an hour or so wiring up the circuit, and spent a decent portion of that calibrating a potentiometer to the right level of resistance. Unfortunately, I then wired up both points to the same leg, completely removing the resistor from the circuit.

Niiiice.

Needless to say, removing 440ohms resistance from your circuit results in Colonel Dave’s Crispy Fried LEDs. I’m not sure how many I’ve burnt but I’d say it’s at least 4-5. Financially, they’re only $1 a peice. It’s still bloody annoying, however, and I feel like a real moron.

So hence the title, don’t try and hack if you’re retarded (like me).

And I’m really loving it. I spend most of my non-work computer time using Linux, I read slashdot and I get the sudo jokes on xkcd. It’s good to be part of yet another geek subculture.

Anyway, onto the nuts and bolts of it. I started using Vista on my laptop a while ago and, while I liked it for a little while, the performance and the nagging started giving me the shits. A few weeks before Uncle Kev had been telling me about Linux and showed me Ubuntu on his macbook. While it looked kinda cool I wrote it off at the time as “linuxnerdbullshit”. When I got the shits with Vista, however, I decided to have a crack at Ubuntu rather than just reinstall XP, which seemed like a step backwards.

So I downloaded an image and loaded it up. One of the really cool things about Ubuntu is that the default image includes a LiveCD. This basically means that when you boot from the CD it loads the whole OS from it. It’s obviously a bit slower than an installed operating system, but it’s a great way to get a feel for the OS and see that everything in your system has appropriate drivers.

As it turned out for me, everything worked on my laptop (it’s a Dell) and I was really impressed with the Gnome UI that comes standard with Ubuntu. I went ahead and installed it in a dual boot scenario. Protip for people migrating from Vista to Ubuntu, the default partition resizer will bone your Vista installation. From all reports it works fine with XP, however Vista does something different with NTFS… or something. Anyway it ended up with me needing to reinstall Vista. Not a big deal since Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions (natively with Feisty, with another thing installed on Edgy) so I could back up all my files.

Install process for Ubuntu went flawlessly. It automatically installs Grub, which is a bootloader which lets you choose between operating systems upon bootup. Everything Grub related is automatically configured, however when I reinstalled Vista it overwrote the master boot record and fubarred Grub. I used the Ultimate Boot Cd to get back into Ubuntu and it was then a fairly trivial matter to fix it up. I forget how exactly, but google is your friend here.

While I did initially set it up as a dual boot, I’ve been using Ubuntu almost exclusively since I installed it. When I tried to boot Vista a couple of weeks ago I realised it had actually been expired for some time. There’s nothing I miss about XP and only two things I miss about Vista. I really like the start-menu-search feature of Vista and Office 2007 is great. However, I really hated the constant goddamned nagging of Vista. XP SP2 was bad enough but Vista takes it to a whole new level. I read a blog a while ago that lambasted (isn’t that a great word?) Microsoft’s nagware approach to security. The reasoning being that if you give someone a security notification every time they try and perform the most benign of tasks, they cease to become imporrant security warnings and start becoming “some crap I need to click in order to get my work done”. They already annoyed competent users that understand security, and now they don’t even serve to educate standard users who have no idea what’s going on.

Ubuntu, I feel, has the balance right. It’s secure-by-default so it still asks for a password when you modify system settings and things like that. However, there’s none of this garbage about asking you twice whether it’s okay to open a file you’ve just downloaded. Also, there’s no need for virus scanners since with Linux vulnerabilities are patched as they become apparent.

Since my first install of Edgy I’ve done a bit of tweaking. I used the beta of Feisty for a while, then ended up upgrading once the final release became available. I’ve also toyed with a few applications and plugins, which I’ll detail in another post.

To sum it up, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu for anyone not entirely satisfied with windows. Even if it’s just some tiny thing that bugs you, fire up a LiveCD. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. It’s really easy to get a hold of (no more Linux of old, no manually mounting drives) and really easy to use. Get it done.

I finally got around to modding my PSP to Dark Alex’s new 3.03OE Rev A firmware last night. I’d been putting it off since it looks like an absolute nightmare to do.

Thankfully, however, this is just due to the fragmented nature of all the information that’s out there. The guides suck, but the actual tools are excellent and the process was really simple. I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5, then back up to the custom. Peice of piss.

The best bit is that I can now play game images from the memory stick instead of UMDs. Also, I can play emulated PS1 games. Added to that, I can play ROMs and run homebrew programs and all sorts of other great stuff.

It’s definitely a change from the state my PSP has been in for the last 6 months or so, sitting uncharged under a pile of crap on a shelf in my bedroom.

Also, 9pm tonight is 0-hour. I find out whether I’ve been offered a university placing in the first round of offers. I’m kind of freaked out, but staying cool about the whole thing.

Things I have learnt today:

1. I still hate my job
2. Chilli jam is completely awesome

I’ve also been learning php which is great. It’s something I’ve meant to do for ages since until yesterday my programming knowledge has consisted entirely of half forgotten and mostly stolen bits of mIRC scripting, excel’s version of VB and html. I’m by no means proficient in php yet but I’m getting my head around it, which is more than I’ve been able to say for anything else I’ve ever tried to learn (especially javascript, that was a bitch. I even bought a freaking book for that. Bought!).

Hopefully I’ll be able to put my newfound skills to use in getting a better job with Optus. I know exactly the one I’m aiming at, too, the only issue is that it’s filled right now. However, it’s filled by someone from Adelaide. Thus, it’s filled by a mentally retarded person. This gives me hope.

Thanks to the largesse of a friend dbe.cc is on new (free) hosting, and it beats the crap out of my old hosting, too. It’s a good thing.

I’m not going to bother moving anything over from the old site since a) it’s been nuked and b) there was bugger all there anyway.

In terms of news, spent the entirety of last night cooking which was kinda cool. The other day I got a craving for the sweet chilli jam that Sam had when he was living with me. Upon searching this hear innerweb I found a recipe, and also turned up one for sweet chilli sauce. I figured they both needed to be made.

The jam turned out really well, which is great since this was my first foray into jam making. The sweet chilli sauce seemed okay, but it’s not the sort of thing you can really sample on it’s own. I’ll need to make some fish cakes or something and try it then.

Peep the recipes in the pages section.