Here’s the screen shot showing the contradictory state I managed to get into setting up my wireless network on XP …

And now I have the picture! Maybe it just didn’t like the GIF format of the previous post?

Here’s my exciting picture of my wireless fiasco. Well it’ll be exciting IF it loads as I’ve never added a pic to blog before…

Wireless should be easy? Now I have a wireless access point & my work laptop is connecting no problem I thought it should be easy to connect up my daughters PC. I had to plug in a cable to download the driver for the wireless USB adaptor (fair enough, I shouldn’t have misplaced the CD) but after that it seemed fine, driver loaded, adaptor found, wireless found (strength “excellent”), WAP key entered (after a bit of head scratching!) but it never gets further than “acquiring network address”. I tried a hard IP (10 on from the DHCP on another PC) but even that doesn’t seem to work, I can’t even see the firewall on my router.

Any bright ideas?

Why (oh why etc) can’t someone design a better way to attach peripherals? No, not some clever Bluetooth advance or wizzy technology, just a nut that doesn’t come undone when you screw / unscrew monitors, serial connectors, printer cables,… to the back of a PC.

Years ago I had this problem as I was often working on serial comms solutions and customers (and colleagues) insisted on tightening the screw that held the adaptor to the back of the PC. In these modern times there aren’t so many serial ports in use but I’m often swapping monitors even with my Belkin switch and (especially with my Belkin switch) you need to screw the cable down as it is so thick it untwist itself & pulls out. A real irritation with my laptop as it cleverly (hah!) realises there is no external monitor and switches to internal display only - requiring much fiddling with display properties to get back to the correct twin head resolution.

Processors advance, peripherals advance, cases advance but we still seem to have these crappy little nuts. Captive ones rather than screw in ones would do the job. Is there a solution out there? Maybe I just get naff PC’s!

Some guy on the radio was protesting about the Orange Prize for Women Writers being discrimination against men. What really annoyed me was the response of Shami Chakrabarti who chairs the judges which was to dismiss with a chuckle the issue without even answering any of the points. As director of the human rights organisation Liberty she should have more respect than to laugh at any complaint of discrimination. Obviously, something open to women only is discriminatory - whether it is wrong or even significant is debatable but not dismissible.

I was somewhat disturbed by the strap line to the new online mag Gizmo

Technology eh? It changes the language, often adding but sometimes taking away. I have often used the phrase “It’s like painting The Forth Bridge” since I discovered that by the time they get to the end it’s time to start again at the beginning. So much in life seems like that. However, it appears advances in paint mean the next coat will last several years and so the painters can lay down their brushes, at least for a bit.

 According to tradition we Brits believe foreigners will understand us if we shout loud enough so by rights we should just TYPE IN CAPS to get Johnny Foreigner to understand us online. However it is all a bit more complex than that - just getting the ä’s & ë’s displayed (that’s accented characters if they don’t come out in your browser) can be a problem. I’m just getting my UI translated in Chinese - we have several European languages already but this is the first crack at a CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese if you’re not into the internationalisation jargon) so my mind is tuned to these things at the moment.I found a really nice intro here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html so I won’t try and explain the basics - I think he’s done it better than I can. However I can improve on his opening comments about not having to go as far into history as EBCDIC - I use EBCDIC all the time but then I do do legacy systems!

If your interested, EBCDIC maps all the printable characterss into code points 0×40 to 0xFF and which code page you select will change what glyphs are displayed for any given code point. The most obvious for us Europeans being 9F which display as ¤ (international currency symbol) on code page 285 or € (euro) on 1147 etc. The easiest code points to remember are 0xF0 - 0xF9 which nearly always map to ‘1′ - ‘9′ (0×30 - 0×39 in ASCII). The only encoding for CJKV in EBCDIC is to use DBCS (double byte character sets) where each character takes up 16 bits.

So now you now you know! 

No not metres vs. feet & perches but ways of measuring performance. More and more we seem to be lumbered with dubious ways of telling how good a system is performing. Fortunately for techies it’s fairly simple - if you deal with numbers you can record & compare them without too much hassle. Unfortunately for the rest of the world they need to try and convert things into numbers so they can do the comparisons.