Status Update

Well it's been three weeks since I finished work. I have made some progress in brushing up on C++, otherwise nothing else from the list of todos has been done or started. My progress is a bit disappointing, but I put this down to 1) the Olympics, and 2) biking everywhere. I'm not overly complaining or stressed out as I have enjoyed the Olympics and biking everywhere means that I save money :) But what is surprising to me, is that it's the end of my third week of leisure!

Odd Stuff: at swimming today there was a mouse just going for a casual swim in the pool. Just swimming between the lane ropes, getting some exercise...

So I'm now in my second week of 'Leisure'

This is my second week already? wow, the time really does fly by when you aren't doing much at all... So what have I been up to? Well my dad came to visit, he was on his way home so he was just stopping by for a couple of days. It was nice to catch up with a person from the family :)

Other than that, I have been stuck inside escaping the heat - Thirty+ degrees Celsius... Thankfully the Olympics have been on, and I have been able to watch them late at night, so when I finally get to bed, it's a bearable temperature to sleep.

You could say I haven't exactly been following my initial plan of things to do, however I have another couple of weeks to go, so hopefully I will be able to get through them all and feel productive with the time that I have had off.

Linux World

So today I went to Linux World in San Francisco. I simply went because I had nothing else better to do. Well it just so happened that I decided to install the openSUSE linux distribution and they were having a community day at Linux World. Oh right, it was free too! So yea I learnt more about how to operate and use my openSUSE distro :) It has some nice desktop effects reminiscent of what vista and OS X have...

For the geeks out there, I have openSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.1, and I am quite happy with it. No problems thus far, well I haven't managed to setup up dual display to work properly yet... and I had some trouble with wireless - I would probably say that I hate knetworkmanager it doesn't give you nearly enough information about what it is doing. But I got my wireless working with my Atheros card after finding a decent post on figuring out what steps to take [to find out what's wrong]- which you can find here.

Note: I forgot to take my camera, so the only photo I took was with my phone... hence the lone penguin...

Cisco Aironet 350 and WPA

This is purely a blog post to let anybody who was in the same situation that I was, that no body has successfully managed to get WPA encryption working with the Cisco Aironet 350 with Linux. Wireless works, but the Linux driver only supports WEP encryption, and using the 'ndiswrapper' with the Windows Driver that supports WPA did not lead to any success as something didn't work. So save yourself some trouble and just buy a supported network device for $20-30...

Finito

Yesterday was the last day of my internship. Meh. I guess it will hit me on Monday, as everyone will leave for work... It was a nice internship and what I learnt easily surpassed my expectations of what I wanted to get out of it.

I now have about six weeks to relax... well I don't know how much relaxing I will be able to handle, but to keep myself occupied I have some geeky projects I want to experiment with ;)

They are:
- upskilling on linux
- doing some top coder problems
- brushing up on C and C++ programming languages
- dabbling with a facebook application idea

But yay! Onto the next chapter of life...