Month: September 2006

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some really strange problems with my laptop’s wireless connection to the office network. At home everything works like a charm, but my attempts of getting connected in the office were becoming harder and harder. Sometimes I’d get online instantly. At other times I’ll try for a couple of hours and than it works. Yet some other days I won’t get any connection at all. No matter how hard I try.

After talking to a few people “who know things” the solution has been found. The problem, it turns out, appears in the busy WiFi environments, with several access points. Each access point has its own channel. You can either specify the channel manually, or rely on the automagic.

The automagic thing mostly works, but if it doesn’t, try choosing the channel manually. In Linux, it is done by executing the following command on the command line:

iwconfig eth0 channel 1

In the example above, I am selecting channel 1 for my wireless device eth0. If you want to try another channel, or apply the command to a different interface, just change the appropriate arguments.

It was so simple after all…

Olga, Maxim, and I attended the WRC Cyprus Rally 2006 Closing ceremony today. As always, there are dual feelings about Finish ceremony. On one hand, it is sad that the rally is over. Last three days passed a single moment, even though this year we managed to see only one stage. On the other hand is joy of seeing cars and teams once again, and having a chance of getting close to them.

Speaking of getting close, I didn’t manage to get close enough to the Finish podium to get pictures of awards and shampain. But. But, I got lucky on the parking lot which is right after finish. Drivers get out of their cars, chat, autograph, and do all sorts of other celebrity things. I am particularly glad because I got very close to Peter Solberg – my rally hero. I was so close, I could touch him. Instead, though, I put my huge lens right into his face and made a portrait so huge, his nose barely got into the frame.

You can see that shot and more in this album.

Today is a rather slow news day. Not on the web, but for me. I did some stuff here and thought of something there, but nothing worth blogging about. So, instead of just missing a day and breaking the habbit, I’ll post some statistics from my WordPress panel.

As of today, I have posted 3,505 posts not including this one. Some of those were bad, some good, some short, some long… But many of those posts didn’t go unnoticed. You guys came in and commented. And I responded. And than you commented some more. And so on, and so forth. This led to some 2,397 comments. This number includes comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks. But it excludes all SPAM.

Speaking of SPAM, my all times favourite plugin SPAM Karma 2 caught 50,944 SPAM comments and trackbacks (average karma, for those in the know, is -4,058.72). The plugin also approved 931 comments (average karma 149.85) and asked me to moderate another 255 comments. These SPAM stats are gathered since I installed SPAM Karma 2 plugin some time in January 2006.

You can see some more statistical details including most commented posts, per user comments statistics, and counter for unique commenters’ names, on the this page, which is always available as the menu option at the top.

Feel free to blog about your stats and trackback to this entry.