This thumbs up needs to be published

While some of the rare to find readers of this may have noticed that I am following more or less loosely other blogs, too, there is one among the crowd where the following is an appreciated task for a great variety of reasons. It's this one, The Barreness.

While reading it I've actually discovered that, contrary to former belief, there is an archetype of women that makes me wiggle in my seat, less for the optics and more for the mind, though. Interestingly enough they all have an obsession for cats and seem to have an education and interests not really related to technology. That's kind of a shame as I think that mathematics and informatics bare a huge connection to the less applicable sciences on a meta level. Understanding e. g. the concept of communication Luhmann outlines in his works is way easier if you know the concepts of communication existing in the field of informatics and vice versa. And especially the recent developments, meaning the last couple of centuries and especially decades and years, in the way society works and changes can, in my opinion, not be understood without understanding the impact of technology. And I so love (mean hate) it when people talk about the advent of the internet as a caesura and a paradigm shift when all they know is browsers, email and twitter. But I didn't want to rant about (that kind) of ignorant folk, there's something better to waste words on today!

Follow the link above, read and figuratively stroke your genitals in a sense of wellbeing. If you follow the the first link in her posting you can read that other people find the style of writing as good and intriguing as I do myself, which is sparing you a lot of drivel from my end as I just second what's written there. Especially the part about having read a lot of books and also posts, be it from blogs or boards, and still thinking that the Barreness' blog's damn well written. Did I type still? I meant because of that!
The general topic of the post is the connection between appearance and inner state as much as the question what forms the appearance. That's a topic that has attracted the thoughts of many great minds, even back in ancient Greek where Diogenes is said to have lived in barrel, although this is likely the result of a mistranslation. I personally can relate to the idea of such a live a lot. Due to reasons in my own personal history I am greedy for any kind of profane treasuries like money an possessions, but the only things I really value are immaterial and can only be gotten by using one's own mind and brain. While you may get a nice car and a big house by inheritance or the lottery, true understanding of anything cannot be gained in such a way. Even money in vast quantities and wise men as a surrounding won't teach a fool the merest insight. Character and culture, which I, unlike Diogenes, regard highly, are also things that can only be achieved actively by usage of your brain in various ways. I say mainly because e. g. proper manners of eating can be learned on a purely phenomenological level by imitation and seem to be learned this way mainly today, completely ignoring that these weren't habitus of the fine men in older days, but instead developed out of practical reasons mainly.

There's another old quote from, iirc, Iuvenal, a Roman writer, from, iirc again, his satires that says a sane mind lives in a healthy body. It's an idiom in Germany, but as often the source has been misinterpreted. But let's take a look on this postulated coherence between body and mind. Science says it's true and there's many studies that have shown a clear connection between mental health, the subjective content with oneself and one's situation in general and physical health, interestingly enough from both sides you approach this. E.g. people with depression have not only a severely reduced rate of  especially facial movement and expressions and at the same time a lot of physical conditions. On the other hand people who described their mental state as balanced and overall happy had way less (especially severe) medical conditions than expected by the statistics. Of course we get no answer for the question what is cause and what is result, but we only asked for coherence and that's definitely there. But actually this complete paragraph is a digression...

The counterpart of a life philosophy inspired by Diogenes and a life in a barrel, valuing the ideas of insight, understanding and wisdom above all physical goods, has maybe been established by the rise of the it girls. And as I have kind of a history as a type setter I have to congratulate the Barreness on the layout of her post. Having the line "the pathetic wastes of space" appear just under the image of Paris Hilton might be coincidental, but I couldn't have done it any better! The exclusive group of it girl's is in no way self defined, as girls having earned their money themselves are already excluded from being part of this phenomenon. If not directly, then indirectly by not being able to reach the state of mind of a suckling, lacking all the accomplishments in human development that Freud describes as "Ich" and "Über Ich", again. The decision whether you are an it girl or not is one not made by yourself, but by your reception of other people. Deciding that yourself would require a level of reflection that needs to be missing to become one.
And yes, by my own set of morals people are not equal in any way, but equivalent at best. Whether there's a worth to your life or not is a difference everyone makes through thinking and acting. While I'm not sure whether there's a proper scale to determine the absolute worth of a person and how the the things to be factored in should be ranked in their importance, I am absolutely positive that there's people whose life has no worth in any way. But I'm digressing again!

Let's think a second about morals, demands and roles that society has been passing on as traditions since ages. While tradition has been a good mechanism to pass on knowledge and morals in the long gone past, this is starting to get a problem in the last decades, where basically every part of everyday life has been changing or is still changing. If you need an example think about traveling. For hundreds of years the speed of travel was limited by the speed of a horse. At the beginning this was a rare privilege and it got more common later, but for hundreds of years no good or information could travel significantly faster than a horse could run. How unimaginable this is today gets clear if you read what kinds of reservations were mentioned when the first trains emerged. It was seriously questioned whether the human body would really be unharmed traveling at such crazy speeds. That was just 150 years ago and we are now close to making space travel a tourist attraction and the idea to not leave one's hometown ever sounds silly and retarded. So while your grandparents might have been struck with awe when someone arrived with a car in their childhood, the closest thing to that today is maybe picking up trampy High School girls in a used Seven Series to fuck them on the backseat later.
Under such circumstances the step of a single generation is fucking huge and if that certain one of my neighbors would pass on his attitude towards the internet to his son he would make an imbecile out him, too!

Of course tradition doesn't strike as hard in that areas as the realization of the changing circumstances does not need abstraction. And that's where women are actually boned, and not the good way of boned that you should enjoy, but the bad one, that some enjoy none the less. In older times the weak social role of women was not really justified either, but at least the existing differences in physical strength for example did matter. In most cases that's not the case any more, but the still passed on role model is way behind with reflecting that and hence are most women. And that brings us in the middle of the situation described in the post mentioned above, where a literally retarded (as in delayed, slowed down) and obese woman starts attacking one that is none of that - and is able to do so with moral superiority!
The traditional womanly value of giving birth has lost a lot of its worth to me in a society like the current one, where individuals pursue their own freedom and happiness instead of living to serve society and the currency of power has shifted from food and weapons to information. Giving birth to a child is something basically every woman can do without putting effort into it, which does cohere to the fact that the group of individually successful women tends to lose something worth being called birth rate. While moralist bitches might be raging now I'm rather sure that all kinds of feminists would be willing to give a leg for a world in which women aren't limited to and judged by their bodily functions, but instead have the chance, as much as the burden, to prove themselves with more than breasts and their choice of men. I personally highly endorse the ideal of women being equivalent to men. Why exactly is a good question, but in the worst case it's because my role model wants me to conquest a woman and that's a boring a game if you can get submission by simply providing better food and shelter in exchange for doing the nasty. It's also adding a moral dimension to relationships that I don't like. If the oven of love has lost its fire (or to add some bad machismo: tightness) I don't want to think whether to break up or not because someone I still like is financially dependent on me and would have to suffer from this. I'm not cold hearted enough to simply tell myself "she could've chosen otherwise" and way too less altruistic to not keep my money and possessions for myself.
I'd go as far as to say a good relationship that provides freedom to both partners needs to be made of partners that are off as good alone except for the relationship. Otherwise it will end more or less like with my aunt who's been chained to the son of the village's drunken bum in the older days - or my grandfather who couldn't ditch his stupid and lazy wife because a divorce would have become a social problem.

So that's basically a public thumbs up from my end for slapping the fat cunt right to the face, dear Barreness. Keep them bitchslaps coming ;-)

Two fucking bytes can make a difference

Don't we all love the crazy shenanigans that some vendors make us deal with?
The concept of building just a single piece of hardware and selling it for different prices by locking features is nothing new. Ask for the Siemens HiPath series and what it costs to use the basic hardware with all it can do. Even without additional hardware you easily pay 10k bucks for some small sized company if you want IP based telephony and you do not have a single phone to plug in yet.

What Intel and some notebook vendors have done (again!) now is not a thing for all of us people who like to play around with their hardware. No, this time there's no sexual innuendo intended.
Some time ago I bought myself a new Wifi card for a new toy i have for some time already. You'll hear about that toy and what I have done to it soon, too. Well, exchanging a miniPCIe card in a laptop is usually nothing challenging or complicated. It's the old in-and-out-game, getting drivers and then being happy - usually. But if the card you wanna push in as some intel Wifi Link 5100 or 5300 you might face some challenges. Google for "Code 10" and intel wifi link, then you'll see there's a lot of people who wonder why those things do not work in their units. The usual, completely useless, answer is, that it worked like a charm for some others. Why that is you seldomly hear, but there actually is a "special version" of those cards made for IBM/Lenovo and HP/Compaq. Those things simply won't work like they should, likely even in units from these brands because they are known to use BIOS whitelisting. And unless they sell you their version of the Wifi cards explicitly for your model, it will likely not be whitelisted. And if they sell it to you expect the price to be at least twice what the card would cost as a normal, not brand specific version. And I guess that's the only thing this is about, being able to force their customers to pay unreasonable prices by artificially restricting their stuff from working together with standard hardware.

Of course, I got such a crippled Wifi card and was pissed like hell after I found out about this. Curious as I am, I at least wanted to know what the actual difference is and if I could give my oversized soldering iron a shot in turning this thing from crippled to normal. I found nothing about any such mod, not even later when I knew how it all worked. Soon enough I found out that the same thing already happened some time ago with the Intel 2200BG miniPCI card and that there was a fix. Intel just used a different set of hardware ID and subsys ID for the specially crafted kind and those were saved in the EEPROM of those cards. Google soon confirmed my suspicion about this being at least one difference this time, too. I didn't find a single post or anything about this where someone suspected or stated that, though, but only a lot of diagnosis logs from people with a laptop that showed this difference clearly and consistent. So why not do what had been a success in the past and change the EEPROM with ethtool and some linux live disc?
Because it does not work. I tried my standard Knoppix and also mint linux, which was quite newly released, and ethtool does not support dumping the EEPROM from those cards. By chance I stumbled upon some GoogleCode project that was developing a tool for axactly what I wanted: dumping and writing the EEPROMs of Intel Wifi cards. It's here: http://code.google.com/p/iwleeprom/
As I did not find anything better, I decided to check this out, second meaning intended. Compiling worked as wonderfully as dumping the ROM. In some old fashioned hex editor I immediately saw what I wanted to see...

PCIVEN_8086&DEV_4237&SUBSYS_12118086 and PCIVEN_8086&DEV_4232&SUBSYS_12018086 are the 2 ID sets of the Wifi link 5100, the earlier being the IBM/HP one, the latter being the sane one. Now look for yourself.

Oh yes, as simple and obvious as one could wish. And soon after that even the MAC address is stored, which is why I chose to delete this. If you wonder why the words are seemingly swapped google big and little endian.

Ok, altering this was dead simple and guess what happened after writing this thing back to the wifi card. Yes, it worked. Goodbye crappy Atheros card, hello 802.11n. Now I can finally have sufficient network speed while in bed on the second floor and forwarding in some video file won't take ten VLC ten seconds to cache data.

If you know who had the idea to ask for a crippled version of the wifi cards to rip off customers at IBM/HP or who has agreed with that deal on Intel's side, please greet them from me and smack them in the face heavily.

OMFG, I did it!

Wow. I can't believe I am doing this. I was always looking down upon those  web 2.0 people who stuffed their mindless dribble into blogs for the whole world to be disgusted. Now I am about to do the same. And I am sure that at least 95% of the people who somehow stumble upon this will be bored and close that browser tab immediately.

Hello scumbags. I will be for you what you've been to me.