This weekend, I'm at the annual Debian BBQ in Cambridge, and it's very nice weather. All the cool people are sitting outside with their laptops, a good 10-20 meters from the indoor wireless access point, happily using the internet. The problem is, by default, my wireless card just doesn't work at that range. So, today I had a look at the Broadcom bcm43xx driver code, to see what was going on. After reading a thread on the LKML bcm43xx-dev, it turns out that the current versions of this driver do not automatically adjust the bitrate. Manually setting the bitrate to a low value has got me at least double the range: ...

Lurking in #screen on freenode is paying off. I found out today that you can set your GNU Screen window titles automatically - so, while you are running a command, the title changes to that command. This will help when changing windows (such as when using the window list bound to C-a " by default). This requires two things: first, your shell has to send an escape code as part of the prompt. With bash, there's a convenient spot in the default Debian .bashrc where $PROMPT_COMMAND is set depending on $TERM. Add a new case for 'screen', with: ...

This evening, I have been made acutely aware that the gnomevfs Python bindings lack up-to-date documentation. Gnome-VFS is a pain to use anyway, but not having a complete reference manual is a bit of a problem. One of the projects with quite a bit of buzz at GUADEC this year was GVFS. It's going to fix all the bugs in Gnome-VFS, and make our lives much happier. It'll be based upon FUSE... so, a very Hurdish approach. In fact, it will probably get ported to Hurd translators, which will be quite fun. ...

With this morning's update of the 'base-files' package, I now have a shiny new copy of GPLv3 in /usr/share/common-licenses/. I'm slightly concerned that a lot of packages will still be pointing to the GPL symlink, when they are GPLv2 only, not v2 or later. Oh well.

As part of creating my new blog, I mentioned that I threw some CSS onto my website. I'd been a bit reluctant to do this before, because there's usually a lot of boilerplate CSS to write before you can do anything interesting. Last February, Yahoo! released a set of web development libraries under a BSD licence; among these were some CSS components. They are relatively painless to drop in, and simplify making fonts consistent across browsers, for example. The 'Grids' component makes creating columnar layouts without tables fairly straightforward. ...

My new blog is set up, more or less. I'm vaguely happy with it. This one is a self-hosted Pyblosxom install, with various plugins. I've added tags instead of the default categories system, and set up comments. I also got a MetaWeblog API plugin working, so I can post this entry with gnome-blog. (I patched the Pyblosxom plugin to support images, but one thing I can't do at the moment is tagging from gnome-blog - it would be nice to add the UI elements.) ...