Archives for 2007

History… and we are not part of it!

2 June 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 23 Comments

On the 30th of May 2007, something historic happened:

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs sat down together for an interview at the fifth annual All Things Digital Conference to talk about technology and what the future holds!

This is historic because (i) those two are arguably the most important people in the (proprietary) computer business and (ii) they publicly spoke together only twice before.

The full transcript can be enjoyed here. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch the videocast because the connection speed detected will cause a potentially unviewable experience!

This is crap! We are in 2007. I am paying lots for my 256kbit/s MyT Internet connection and I can’t watch an historic video!!! And I’m sure I’m not alone in Mauritius in this situation.

One important quote from the transcript on the importance of video:

Bill Gates: You know, take what can happen with education now that video is mainstream and all these tools that let you do rich interactions are very mainstream. I’m very excited about that. You know, the idea of empowerment goes back to the very beginning of our industry and some of those dreams that this would be used by students or that teachers could get better and learn from each other in these new ways, we’re just at the threshold where some of those things can happen.

Ha! Ha! Ha! He should come to Mauritius and look at what kind of bandwidth we are getting even though we are paying for a lot more.

I’ve done a small test. I’ve downloaded a song I composed from noulakaz.net which is found in the USA. The song is 4,276,087 bytes long and downloading it took 6 minutes and 5 seconds. According to my calculations, this is a download rate of 88 kbit/s.

Now, this is only 35% of the 256kbit/s that I’m paying for. Can you imagine this kind of abysmal ratio in any other situation? What about a lecturer doing only 35% of his classes? Or a doctor healing only 35% of his patients? Or a fridge working during only 35% of the day?

Mauritius Telecom is pathetic. And the more I think of it, I think we might have a strong case against MT for product defect.

Thibor is alive!

30 May 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 10 Comments

The kids were delighted that I bought something with “pointed ears” (I couldn’t explain the real purpose of those antennas to them…)

I finally got hold of my Linksys WRT54GL today. I connected it, did some preliminary tests with the Linksys firmware, confirmed that it did not work as a Wifi-Ethernet bridge out of the box, took a deep breath and started the flashing process with a new firmware developed by Thibor.

And it worked!

I promptly followed this to transform my WRT54GL into a brand new Wifi-Ethernet transparent bridge featuring a 4-port Ethernet switch!

The only thing that does not work is DHCP relaying. I had to assign static IPs to my PCs but this is a very very minor issue. Apart from that, the Linksys rocks and now I can browse the web from three different computers.

Life is cool :-)

I’m buying a Linksys WRT54GL tomorrow

27 May 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 17 Comments

Why?

I need to connect my two desktop PCs running Kubuntu Linux to the Internet. As you know I already have a Sagem F@st3202 Livebox which has wireless and Ethernet capabilities. But as the Livebox is far from my PCs, I don’t want to have a wired connection. I’ve tried a Wifi USB dongle on the PC but (i) it is not reliable and (ii) it is a pain the ass to setup with Linux.

What?

I need something like the Linksys WET54G which supports (as its name indicate) WET which allows the device to work as a transparent Wifi to Ethernet bridge.

Unfortunately, the WET54G is not easily found here in Mauritius and is expensive anyway.

A better solution

I guess many of you have heard of the Linksys WRT54G which is a wireless router which has four Ethernet ports. It is powered by Linux and its firmware has been released under the GPL license. Notice that it is NOT a transparent bridge out of the box.

With the appropriate opensource firmware (either DD-WRT or Thibor (which is the one I want to use)), the router transforms itself into anything you would like (from a router to a firewall to a VoIP server to a transparent bridge etc.) just by changing some settings.

Just to be sure, I’m buying a Linksys WRT54GL which is certified to work with Linux. I am buying mine from a friend in Vacoas at around Rs. 3200 which is reasonable.

This means that tomorrow I’ll be able to connect my two PCs using Ethernet wired connections to the WRT54GL which will itself connect to my Livebox wirelessly and life will be cool :-)

MIPS32

One interesting feature provided by the Thibor firmware is a SSH server. I’ll therefore be able to open a terminal session to the Linksys. Of course, this is cool but (remember: it runs Linux!). What is even cooler is that the WRT54GL features a MIPS32-compatible processor. This means that I’ll be able to play with a pure RISC processor. I’ll even been able to write some simple C or assembly program on my Macbook or my Linux and cross-compile it to the MIPS32 processor using the GNU gcc compiler. For fun, I’ve downloaded a MIPS32 simulator called SPIM which seems to work well on my MacBook and it works on Linux and Windoze too.

Incidentally, the MIPS architecture is considered to be one of the best and simplest RISC architecture making it very nice to teach assembly programming. Heck, even Patterson and Hennessy are massive fans of MIPS.

I’ll let you know by tomorrow if everything works correctly.

Call me a geek :-)