Month: October 2008

I finally git it!!

I was so happy to learn that the 2.6.26 kernel had a free as in speech alternative to the madwifi Atheros driver, ath5k. I have not been so happy that it has been crashing my machine periodically. Since diagnosis of a hung machine without a serial console that is running X is nigh on impossible, I had no choice but to fold and go back to madwifi. However, since then, I have moved on to 2.6.27, which has some changes to two wireless APIs, causing the madwifi driver to fail to build. I wanted to leave my desk with its hard-wired connection but didn’t want my machine to hang again. So I determined to forward port the madwifi driver to work with 2.6.27.

Here’s where I showed myself that I am starting to get git. I was able to dig through the commit logs to find the appropriate changes and make applicable changes to the madwifi driver. Fortunately for me, I was able to make all the changes without too much trouble. I don’t know how many times I have “learned” git. I have been to tutorials, read the man pages, and gone over my notes time and time again. I guess that I finally have reached a critical mass of knowledge such that I was not so scared of not being able to do what I wanted to do that I could simply do what I wanted to do. Woohoo. Yes, I admit that while I may not be half as smart as this ugly brain-child of Linus Torvalds, at least I can learn to be its master. Next step: ditch SVN. No really, the next step would be to diagnose the ath5k hang issue and post a patch to LKML. Now that would be truly great. But it is a task for another day.

Mmmm. Buh-licious bread!!

Finally a crust and crumb that I can brag about. This is a loaf that I started as part of a Toastmasters speech. The speech was about how to make the best pizza dough ever. Since for demonstration purposes, the pizza dough and the pain a l’ancienne dough are identical to start with, I figured nobody would notice. Really the only difference is that the pizza dough has slightly less water in it, which makes it less sticky to the point that you can handle it. The pain a l’ancienne dough is so sticky that you really don’t want to touch it unless you are armed with copious amounts of flour.

The first and only time previously that I made this recipe, I found myself just a little bit rushed (smaller holes) and slightly over cooked them (dry crumb). This time, rather than shaping them as baguettes, I shaped a fat batard, which puffed up nicely. And differently than other batches of bread I have done, I did my final shaping right on the foil I was going to bake it on so the final transition to peel would not degas it. I think this was especially important on this loaf because the dough was so wet.

To round out the meal (It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone) Lauren made a batch of delicious beef stew with home-made noodles. I am telling you, we eat like kings (and queens) in our house.