mattw.fn_blog()

After a day of travel, I’m in Urbana, IL. Home of cuwireless, and host to MobiHoc 2005. I’ll be speaking on a panel titled ‘Openness’ and the Public Airwaves thursday as an open source / free software type wireless nerd, and I imagine, starting many an ad-hoc conversation with the rest of the attendees. Checking out the schedule, it looks to be a pretty fun time, and since it’s been moved to the Seibel, I’ll get a first-hand look at The World’s Smartest Building

Sascha has been kind enough to show me a little bit of Champaign and Urbana, including the old Urbana post office, which is now the de-facto “global headquarters” for Indymedia

In Laptop News, my iBook showed up at the house while I was sitting at Seatac this morning. Hopefully when I get back next week, it won’t need to be sent back. Lucky for me, my Thinkpad240 I abandoned when I got my first Mac still runs like a champ. I did some drive juggling (no CDROM on my 240) on Saturday and installed ubuntu linux, a distro that I’ve been meaning to try out for some time now, and for the most part, I’m pleased. It’s got all the makings of a nice distribution, including a slick package manager. I still haven’t worked out all the kinks in my Bluetooth/GPRS setup yet, but I was able to ping the phone and do a basic file transfer late Sunday night.

Since I knew I was going to need to do some heavy wireless action, and Atheros is really a must, I gutted out my modem jack (with wire cutters!) and dropped in a CM9 with a U.FL->RP-TNC bulkhead. Probably not the smartest thing to do on the eve of leaving, but it works like a charm, and I won’t have to worry about snapping pigtails or bad signal strength ever again.