In a Country Far, Far Away...

On the 26th of August I will go to China again. There are a lot of things I will do; family, business, travel and spotting nice stuff. Probably some of them I will post on GeekFM. I have been invited by Wilco to participate by posting on the blog. A job I am happy to do :oD. I will return on the 4th of October with Shan on my right hand and hopefully a business license in my left.

What grew my interest for Linux

My adventures into the world of Linux started in 1994. It was taken to a greater height with the release of RedHat Linux 0.9 on the 31st of October. This release was better known as 'Halloween'. It was not a very serious endeavor since Linux was still in the early days. I was still an avid user of my Amiga computers. Most of the time I also played games with my friend Jordey; 'Syndicate' and others. And even some on the PC. I still considered most games on the PC pathetic, with a few exceptions like Dune 2 (which I also played on the Amiga)... I downloaded a lot of games and other stuff from Aminet, read the CU Amiga and participated in the Amiga scene. For me, it was still all about Amiga... since we bought one in 1986. I still have the information leaflets. This all changed a little in 1995 when I saw C&C. It seemed the PC did have potential. My reaction? I bought my brothers Amiga 1200! Till 1997 I wrote all my essays for school in a professional DTP application which I got with a CU Coverdisk. My teachers were always amazed by the quality.

It was 1996... while still being involved in the Amiga scene, I read an article in the Dutch Amiga Magazine. It was about some software written by Bernd Schmidt called UAE. I quickly looked on the internet and found this news posting. I was kinda stunned... since the Amiga's architecture was complicated to emulated due to the use of those custom chips; the Denise, Alice, Paula, etc. Somehow, he managed! It grew my interested and I had to use it!!! Not long before Courbois Software, a Dutch distributor of public domain, sold me the famous Amiga Hoax for use on a PC. This development made me feel twofold. First, a familiar feeling of the connection with Amiga... and second, hopefully the Linux community would feel like the old community.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Eventually Commodore went bankrupt. It was bought by Escom... it suffered a bad time. In 1998 RedHat launched a CD set called 'Roughcuts' which included the build for m68k! I was pissed it did not run on my Amiga. The assets of Amiga were sold to Gateway, sold again to Viscorp and now owned by Amiga, Inc. During that time Linux has gone a long way and kinda revived the interest for unices. And it got me completely hooked. For several years it was even my primary OS. Since I started with RedHat I kept going back to it... 'it had a familiar red color'???.

I also have to admit I had a Microsoft period in my life... :-( I thought the integration of applications was a good thing. I guess the games were the reason I used the PC :-P, 'Elite II' (also on Amiga), 'System shock', 'Wing Commander III', 'Quake', 'Blade Runner', 'Half-Life'. Anyone can make a mistake in his life.

Deep inside, still the old Amiga holds many memories for me. Playing games all night long, like 'Beneath a Steel Sky', 'Lotus Trilogy', 'Wing Commander', etc etc. So when I used Windows, I always was happy I could install WinUAE. It was a version of UAE for the Windows platform. At a certain moment it was even more complete than UAE itself. WinUAE could emulate some AGA, while UAE was just an Amiga 500 with OCS. There was even a product on sale called Amiga Forever which was based on the Windows version.

With me, a lot of people still can't let go of the Amiga. So when I saw this I felt the urge to download the schematics and built it myself. So perhaps soon I have another machine I can add to my collection. Currently I have an Amiga 1000, several Amiga 500's, Amiga 3000, Amiga 1200, Commodore CDTV and an Amiga CD32. At some moment I also had an Amiga 2000 and Amiga 4000... I still don't know why I sold those :-/. All of them are operational, since I always fixed them myself. All in all... it was the computer on which I started programming in assembler (and hex editing), evil AmigaBasic, Amiga E and eventually C/C++.

Nowadays I still use Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu, openSuSE, etc). Still look for everything Amiga... Even have a MacBook from work, which I suggested to have. I have noticed it also has a community... but a quite 'different thinking' one :-P. Development I now do in Java, C#, some scripting languages and a little C/C++.

Some of the history of Amiga is published in this article. The original UAE website does still exist after 11 years. Although these new resources contain more mature versions of the software: UAE, E-UAE, WinUAE, WinUAE. There are a lot of Amiga resources available... Amiga.org, Amiga.com, Back2Roots, Amiga Board, Amiga Games, AmigaWorld... and just search on Google for Amiga. I made UAE run on Amiga itself, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable, Palm, and more... For the real Amigans also try UADE.

PS: I am still looking for some hardware (anything welcome... even Atari)!

Apple updated wireless?

As I mentioned in the Apple Discussions I had issues with the 10.4.10 update of Mac OS X. It seems they finally issued an update for wireless named 'Airport Extreme Update 2007-004'. It says it will improve the reliability. I hope so, since without the power plugged in, the notebook will crash when using wireless! I can accept having a problem with software reliability, since I used Windows a lot for work... but I don't like companies that deny they have a problem. I doubt they completely fixed it. Some reports can be found here and there.

WangQi in the news

Today WangQi told me his photo is selected for a news article. You can find his photo here. It just briefly mentions the sales of Windows Vista are good. Well... I am not so sure about it. The sales are not even very high in Europe and about 3 months ago only 400 legal copies of Vista were sold in China.

When not to use WPA and (P)EAP

As most people know, WEP is a very poor algorithm for securing your wireless network. For a long time I have used WPA2 Personal at home in a WDS network (four AP's). WDS stands for Wireless Distribution System and allows for interconnection between access points. This way you can have unwired AP's to also function in your network as supporting systems. Handover between AP's when you walk happen without interference to the user

But at work they still used WEP. Almost unbelievable... so a few days ago I had changed it to a setup with two AP's in a WDS and WPA (with DD-WRT as the firmware). For added security we also decided to give RADIUS a try. Today Sven and I tried it Windows 2003's IAS and the security on the AP's set to WPA Radius. This way laptops have to authenticate against Active Directory with their domain credentials. We closely followed the instructions as mentioned on this page.

Notebooks don't seem to have any difficulty to connect; Windows XP needs the authentication set to 'Protected EAP'. When you don't your eventlog of IAS will fill up with errors almost 16 times every second when the client tries to connect. Vista had no issues as also Mac OS X. Some clients which are not in the domain had hiccups (needed the server root certificate) and issues with trigger-happy wireless drivers. All in all, for a large wireless network this is the way to go: very secure due to WPA Enterprise.

Although it might seem like a good choice, there is a big BUT. When you have small devices connecting to your network, expect to have a full day of issue management. We had two HTC phone with Windows Mobile who refused to connect. We installed the certificate over Bluetooth... used the format 'DOMAIN\username' for the username and left the domain field empty. When they were able to connect, they didn't open any internet website. When this happens be sure you set the correct connection for using internet. Windows Mobile is so NOT user intuitive :-/. I quite got lost in the menu structure. In the end... many devices were not able to connect. From telephones with WLAN (Nokia E60, Nokia N95) to my Nokia 770 internet tablet. The Nokia 770 did install the certificate with no way to select it in the wireless settings.

Eventually we decided that this is not the way to go... the configuration is to cumbersome. Every time you change your domain password, you also have to reconfigure the settings for all smart devices. Until now I haven't found a way to easily configure those devices. Perhaps if we can also use Nokia client provisioning using OMA and manage Windows Mobile devices. It is certainly not usable for home... I don't know if my Apple TV can even use WPA with EAP, let alone the PlayStation Portable.

Conclusion: use WPA and (P)EAP in a large scale network when you can also make the compromise 'no small devices'.