I picked up a new camera yesterday, a Canon SD1100 IS ELPH.  Why?  It was on sale, and I felt like it was time I owned a slim camera with decent video quality and image stabilization.

The picture quality is decent - and it takes pictures fast.  I tried out the built-in timelapse function, but unfortunately it only allows a delay of one or two seconds between frames.  Supposedly, the CHDK firmware allows a bit more flexibility, but I haven't tried it out, yet.  The facial recognition amuses me, and I spent a bit too long messing around with it, looking at a mirror…

Ok, I'm sick of dealing with it.  Their Mini PCI and Mini PCI Express cards seem to suck.  I've had an AR5212 Mini PCI card in my IBM T42 since it was purchased in 2004 - and it just drops tons of packets every minute or two.  No amount of debugging revealed any problems.  I used to have an AR242x card in my Eee, but it was replaced recently, and provides a much more stable connection.

The drivers suck, too.  The older MadWifi[-ng] drivers were decent, but the development team decided to ditch them and completely rewrite the drivers (ok, I understand why - non-free drivers aren't fun).  This (so far) has produced filth like ath5k and ath9k that drop even more packets.  Totally useless… and it even made its way into the GNU/Linux 2.6 source tree!

I think I'm going to avoid the Atheros hardware, from now on.  I'll be picking up an Intel Mini PCI card for my T42, now, too - even if it doesn't have 802.11a!

</rant>

So, I hitched a ride down to Florida today with my parents.  Since I didn't drive, I was on the Internet most of the time with my Eee and Nokia E71, using JoikuSpot.  Connectivity over AT&Tingular's network was via EDGE most of the time, with UMTS becoming available when passing major cities.

SmokePing graph of the trip from nonce over OpenVPN:

Most of the PL is apparently due to the oh-so-buggy ad-hoc support in the iwl4965 driver that I'm using from compat-wireless.  My kernel kept spitting back this junk for almost every packet:

[189698.924802] wlan0: beacon TSF higher than local TSF - IBSS merge with BSSID 2a:16:66:1f:8a:61
[189699.240352] wlan0: beacon TSF higher than local TSF - IBSS merge with BSSID 2a:16:66:1f:8a:61

Dunno.  At least I'm in the sunny state new…

Either AT&Tingular's network has improved or the Internet is just faster tonight.  I just got T1-ish speeds via HSDPA, on my laptop:

% wget -O /dev/null http://69.9.189.182/32MiB.bin
--2008-12-15 20:44:51--  http://69.9.189.182/32MiB.bin
Connecting to 69.9.189.182:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 33554432 (32M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[======================================>] 33,554,432   162K/s   in 4m 2s   

2008-12-15 20:48:54 (135 KB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [33554432/33554432]

It routinely bursted up to 197 KB/sec (1,576 Kb/sec).  Not-a-bad.

I picked up an Intel 4965AGN Mini PCI Express card on eBay, the other day, hoping it would work in my Eee.  Strangely enough, it works well, and Debian had no problem detecting it (ok, it's been in vanilla kernels for awhile, I guess).

I couldn't find much documentation on which antenna did what, so I just hooked up the Eee's two connectors to 1 and 2.  Seems that it has some auto diversity setting in software - signal strength on 802.11g is great (I don't have any other 802.11n gear…):

Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B
Link Quality=97/100  Signal level=-56 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Kismet works great, too.  I changed the source type to be iwl4965, and away it went.  Again, I don't have (or know of any near my condo) any 802.11n gear, so I couldn't test if it actually would see the beacons.  I suppose I could do some warwalking…

The only problems so far seem to be ad-hoc mode and some small lockups during interface down events.  ad-hoc mode just doesn't work - and I'm not sure why.  Whenever the interface is shut down (ifconfig wlan0 down), the whole system will hard lock for a few seconds, then return to normal.  Doesn't bother me that much, so I'll ignore it.

Also, I think the card supports attaching a couple LEDs that possibly show some association status and activity information:

[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:radio
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:assoc
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:RX
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:TX

Too bad the Eee offers no physical LEDs for such purposes.  Oh well.

Also, in other news, I returned the other Eee that was discussed in this post.

Update: To get ad-hoc working on this card - I had to grab the compat-wireless sources from 2008/09/09 (available here, if they've taken them off kernel.org) and load the iwlagn.ko module.  Unfortunately none of the Debian kernels have the newest version, and the new compat-wireless sources break iwlagn.  Supposedly the ad-hoc fix was merged into 2.6.28-rc1, so we'll have to wait awhile for this to get into Debian and other distros, I guess.

Has anyone actually gotten it to work correctly?  I've tried on two different systems, now, and continue to get the the same errors everyone else is getting.  Running rebase doesn't help, either.

I set mine up yesterday, and took a time lapse of it:

Or, download an XviD version here.

So it looks like Sagonet (nonce is hosted with them) is having some nice routing problems, today.  I almost didn't notice it, since my VPNs rerouted:

Here's a traceroute from my workstation:

 1:  et3.starfire.prolixium.net (10.3.5.254)                0.520ms 
 2:  et0-0.e.prolixium.net (10.3.253.2)                     1.953ms 
 3:  10.218.32.1 (10.218.32.1)                             14.617ms 
 4:  gig2-2.chrlncdnb-rtr1.carolina.rr.com (24.93.65.161)  11.365ms asymm  5 
 5:  srp0-0.chrlncsa-rtr1.carolina.rr.com (24.93.67.161)   13.955ms 
 6:  no reply

I usually can get there via XO, so I'm assuming someone hosed up the BGP export list.  However, I can still reach nonce:

 1:  et3.starfire.prolixium.net (10.3.5.254)                0.611ms 
 2:  et3.starfire.prolixium.net (10.3.5.254)                0.606ms pmtu 1456
 2:  tu0.nat.prolixium.net (10.3.254.8)                    52.469ms 
 3:  nonce.prolixium.com (10.3.4.2)                       108.245ms reached
     Resume: pmtu 1456 hops 3 back 62

I just go through NJ, first…