Ta-da!

It was a bit of a struggle, but with the aid of the native Linux ACX100/ACX111 driver from the ACX Project and some hand-hacking of the start_net script supplied with it to eliminate a few bonehead maneuvers, I have wireless networking up and running — WITHOUT having to use NDISWrapper — on the Thinkpad 600E with a Linksys WPC54G card.  (I still don't actually have the wired Xircom 10/100 PC card working either, but with wireless working, that's a lot less important.)

That just leaves sound still to be sorted out.  Once it was pointed out to me that the CS4236 is an ISA device, not a PCI one (so I was looking for it in the wrong place), ALSA installs and appears to start up, but blocks every time I try to play a sound.  It works perfectly, unless you want actual sound to ever come out of the speakers.  So unless I can figure out what the problem with ALSA is, I'll probably just install the full OSS/Linux from 4Front.  I don't care whether the purists consider OSS to be obsolete; my entire history of sound-on-Linux experience thus far is that OSS has always Just Worked, and ALSA still doesn't.

(Side note:  Gad, I hate KDE.)

People's Republik of Kalifornia ....

So, let's see ....

• In 2005, Congress passed the RealID Act.
• In April 2006, New Hampshire more or less told Congress to take its RealID Act and shove it.
• In December 2006, Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) and Daniel Akawa (D-HI) introduced a bill to repeal the RealID Act.
• In January 2007, Maine followed suit.
• In the wake of Maine's announcement, similar bills are pending in six other states including Georgia, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Montana and Washington.

And meanwhile, what's happening in California and New Jersey?

Well, C|Net reports that they're looking into ways to EXPAND RealID.

Let's hear it for the People's Socialist Republic....

(Crossposted to neph_politics)

Kudos for BackupTapes.net

I have an LTO-1 tape drive that I use for all my full backups, which I run in rotating sets every couple of months (with weekly differentials and nightly incrementals to a separate device).  It's big, fast and nasty — fast enough that I have to back up four machines at the same time to keep it streaming optimally.  But tapes don't last forever, so a few weeks ago I ordered four new Verbatim 100GB (uncompressed) LTO-1 tapes from BackupTapes.

Two weeks later, the Verbatim tapes are still on back-order.  So they contacted me today.  Actually, it turns out that the price on the Verbatim tapes was what it was because they are reconditioned tapes, a detail which had escaped me.  But the main problem was they were still on back-order.

"So," they told me, "since they're still back-ordered, what we'd like to do is fill your order with new Maxell tapes instead, at the same price.  If that's OK."

Sure, I said.  (Oddly, I have no problem with getting four brand-new 100GB tapes for the price of reconditioned ones.)

"OK then," they said.  "We'll get those out to you today.  You should have them tomorrow."

Nice work, guys.