Wavemon - a bit more interactive than iwconfig...

There are times when I'm looking at wifi problems and I use iwconfig to check out link quality, signal level and noise level information. I did get into the habit of using the following rune:

watch -n 1 iwconfig wlan1

..to check out the status on my wifi interface wlan1.

There's always a tool out there that does the same kind of thing, but in a more presentable form - in this case it's wavemon.

To install use:

sudo apt-get install wavemon

and using it is as simple as:

wavemon

or one can specify the interface using:

wavemon -i interfacename

It's a minimally interactive screen based curses application, one can switch between display modes using the function keys. Pretty straight forward and easy to use.


One can configure the refresh rate, so one can poll the stats at the frequency you desire. Not bad at all.

LinuxCon 2009 Videos

A bunch of videos from LinuxCon 2009 last month are now available thanks to the hosting of linuxfoundation.org. Worth watching is the LinuxCon Round Table talk "The Linux Kernel: Straight From The Source" led by James Bottomley with panelists Linus Torvalds, Jon Corbet, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted Ts'o and Chris Wright.

Also, the closing Keynote talk by Mark Shuttleworth on "Coordinated Software Releases, The Linux Ecosystem, and the Impact on the Global Marketplace" is worth checking out too.

There are more LinuxCon 2009 videos available here.

Hacking the Arduino

I acquired a 16Mhz 8 bit Arduino micro-controller development board last week from my colleague Steve Conklin. The Arduino is a cool little open source electronics development system and allows rapid prototyping - ideal for hacking up small controller projects. I downloaded the C toolkit and GUI development environment from Arduino.cc and configuration was very simple and straight forward.

Basically, one can cruft up small C programs and download these to the board using a USB interface - the code is flashed onto the board so it can run stand-alone - sweet. Just compile, download and go!

Anyhow, today was my first opportunity to get some quality time to get hacking. I rummaged around in my loft and found a bread-board and a bunch of LEDs and resistors that I bought over 20 years ago and rigged up 4 LEDs to be driven from from 4 digital output pins. I quickly hacked up some code to enable the pin outputs and then drive the LEDs, see the video below:


The Arduino has a bunch of digital input/ouput pins and some analogue pins too - although I need to now read up about this to see what I can really do with this kit. Anyhow, thanks to Steve for getting this kit into my hands and walking me through the elementary stuff on how to select the right resistors so that I don't kill the LEDs and the Arduino; I knew I should have remembered all that basic electronics jiggery pokery when I did my Computer Science degree 20+ years ago...

My hope is to hook this up to various bits of hardware to enable me to do the usual debugging and hacking around. I've got various ideas of projects, such as an interface between my PC and my old Commodore 1541 disk drive, but I need to get some reference books out of my loft and do some more research before I get my hands grubby with real code.

What's neat is that I'm able to some relatively fast low-level 8 bit hackery without all that unnecessary OS nonsense making life more complex :-)

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Beta Ready for Testing

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test. I recommend testing it out on your system now and filing any bug you find on LaunchPad as it helps to improve the final release product.

If you don't want to download it, here are some reviews worth checking out to give you a taste of 9.10:

Softpedia
ZDNet
TuxMachines.org
Fileforum.betanews.com

As it is, I'm running the Desktop release fine on a HP Mini 1000 (32 bit), a Lenovo 3000 N200 (64 bit) laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6400 (64 bit) laptop and server release on a Quad Xeon build box.

Enjoy!