Category: Bug

Hawking Range Extender and Vista

I’m pretty sure someone else will be searching for an answer to this so I figured I should post.

The Hawking Hi-Gain Wireless-G Range Extender (HWREG1) doesn’t work on Vista unless you upgrade the firmware to version 1.26 available here. (Mine was originally 1.21..)

Don’t bother trying to contact the apparently fictional “24/7 Customer Support”. Upgrading is actually pretty simple:

  1. Identify the IP address that the Range Extender is running on from the setup wizard. (Typically 192.168.0.235 if set manually or possibly .100 if set via DHCP.)
  2. Point your browser to that IP.
  3. Go to “Upgrade”.
  4. Upload the firmware .bin you grabbed from the Hawking site.

It took me a couple of tries to successfully upload the .bin and get the Range Extender to reboot itself. Since then, however, no problems on Vista.

By the way, the Range Extender is a signal repeater that extends the stength of your WiFi signal. I’m using one to pipe signal into the more remote nether regions of our home.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

mod_perl on Gentoo

mod_perl doesn’t play so nice with Gentoo. Perl and, specifically, g-cpan still seem to have problems.

I’ve been scratching my head (read: driving my head into my desk) over the following error:

Can't locate lib.pm in @INC (@INC contains: blah blah blah) at /etc/apache2/modules.d/apache2-mod_perl-startup.pl line 1.\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /etc/apache2/modules.d/apache2-mod_perl-startup.pl line 1.\nCompilation failed in require at (eval 2) line 1.\n

Thanks to an obscure post at the bottom of a thread from a couple of years back I was able to fix it with

# perl-cleaner reallyall
# emerge libperl

perl-cleaner appears to be like revdep-rebuild, but Larry Wall style.

Now I can run Apache::ASP.

Thank you crazy Larry Wall people.

Posted on by nurikabe 1

WebApp Weirdness

For some odd reason webapp-config didn’t want to upgrade my applications (namely this blog); it kept complaining that I hadn’t installed Apache and didn’t seem to know what Apache2 was.

* Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache"
* Fatal error: but the corresponding package does not seem to be installed!
* Fatal error: Please "emerge >=net-www/apache-1.3" or correct your settings.
* Fatal error(s) - aborting

I finally discovered that manually remerging webapp-config fixes the problem. Not sure why as the list of servers remains the same..

# webapp-config --list-servers
apache
aolserver
lighttpd
cherokee

Which leads me to the question, who in Sam Hill is running aolserver on Gentoo?!

Posted on by nurikabe 0

Problems with the Printing Assistant

I recently wrote about what a nifty tool the Outlook 2007 Calendar Printing Assistant is. And it is nifty, yet a few annoying issues that have left us relying on printed screen shots instead. Hrrm. Unfortunately, the Printing Assistant:

  1. Doesn’t render items in the calendar in the same left-right order as Outlook. (Neither does OWA for that matter.. This is a really minor point but seems to drive some people absolutely crazy.)
  2. Doesn’t apply category colors.
  3. Doubles-up appointments on occasion for no apparent reason.

The last two points, especially, justify our decision to just bang on the PrtSc key when needed.

That and I can’t quite seem to figure out how to rework some of the .xcal templates so that we can change working hours. (Which would ideally already be read from the calendar settings in Outlook.. Double Hrrm.)

Posted on by nurikabe 0

mootools madness

mootools is a spectacular little JavaScript framework, but the “tricks of the trade” you need to know to get anything done with it on a timely basis can be a bit maddening. Here are three examples:

  1. The API seems to change randomly, drastically, and constantly. In v1.00 we could getElementsByClassName(), but seemingly no more in v1.11. Looking ahead at subversion, lots of API changes seem to be coming down the pipe.
  2. When using the Accordion, don’t make the mistake of downloading the automatically selected dependencies from the mootools download builder and expect it to work. The Accordion demo illustrates how to use accordions with “domready”, for which you will also need Window.DomReady as well as Element.Selectors and it’s dependencies. (To complicate matters, Element.Selectors seems to have become a stand-alone Selectors class.)
  3. When testing in IE, make sure you have a doctype declared. eg:<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

    If not, the accordion will not collapse properly, leaving lower panels filled with vast tracts of dead space, and you with a rising stress level, and even less hair, and all because you can’t, for the freaking life of you, figure out what is different between your freaking code, and the virtually identical freaking stuff on the freaking mootools site and in the end it turns out it’s just a freaking missing freaking doctype.

    (I guess IE won’t fork over DOM support unless once declares the doctype.)

So, overall, great little JavaScript framework. But.. Freaky.

Posted on by nurikabe 0