Finally, I no longer have the pain of not being able to connect to the wireless network on campus (without having wicd installed).

I got it working using the network-manager applet in Gnome that comes installed by default (cause I like it and it makes my life easier). I’ve had people poke fun at me because I don’t feel like traversing the console and running wpa_supplicant manually, I have better things to do, like expecting things to work with the least hassle. But that’s a rant for another time.

Sadly CIS or whoever is responsible for the wireless networks has decided that Ubuntu, Fedora, or any other flavor of Linux won’t be supported. Thanks to one enterprising Maurice Rahe, I had enough information to get started. Since I was working with Ubuntu 9.10 (Jaunty Jackelope) Alpha 6, I needed to update the instructions a bit and turns out we didn’t need to do the manual wpa_supplicant.conf at all. Simply attempt to connect to tamulink-wpa and when it asks for the connection details:

Security

WPA & WPA 2 Enterprise

Authentication

Protected EAP (PEAP)

Anonymous Identity

Leave Blank

CA Certificate

/usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/ValiCert_Class_2_VA.crt

PEAP Version

Version 0

Inner Authentication

MSCHAPv2

User Name

NETID

Password

NETID Password

VOILA, it works! Reconnections kinda suck, but what’ll you do.

So my dinky default (6-cell I believe, maybe 4-cell) battery that came with my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 has been giving out on me. I believe my problem was I never flexed the battery when I first got it and now I was only getting about an hours worth of work out of my laptop.

While I didn’t have super high expectations of battery life out of my 15″ laptop, I did specifically get the Intel graphics adapter to shave off my power draw and did everything available to reduce power (Intel speed step turned to power saving, turning down the backlight, increasing writeback time, turning on laptop_mode, disabling the bluetooth radio, disabling compiz, etc.), I was still getting an abysmal battery life out of my laptop (it wouldn’t even last through a single class).

Well i finally got tired of it, walked down the street to the batteries plus, and got myself the ‘off brand’ Rayovac Extended Capacity battery for the T60 (which is almost exactly the same as the T61).

All I can say is I’m so happy I’m getting 4+ hours out of my laptop now and I don’t even have to disable compiz or do excessive tuning! The battery jutting out of the back of the laptop (as you can see in this image, with thanks to notebookcheck.net and Google image search for the image) doesn’t bother me at all, and in fact it provides a nice grip for when I’m holding the laptop up and walking around.

Hopefully now I’ll be able to get more work done on my laptop and not be tied to a wall outlet (which defeats the purpose of a laptop in the first place)…

Holy crap my ThinkPad T61 got here FAST!

Lenovo informed me on Wednesday that my laptop was shipped, cool right? Shipped from Hong Kong. I had 2 day shipping so sweet, I get my laptop on Friday.

Nope, Thursday morning. At 10. A.M.

First thing I did of course was completely obliterate vista (I downgraded to Vista Home Basic to save $45 bucks since (a) I have a copy of XP Pro and (b) I can get a copy of Vista Ultimate through A&M if I so choose).

One snag is that XP hates AHCI mode for SATA (won’t even see the disk at all), though when I get the Intel Matrix Storage Drivers installed I could turn it back on.

Sadly XP Pro doesn’t have any drivers on a fresh install to do anything of value on the laptop, so a quick CD burned with the LAN and WiFi drivers along with the “ThinkVantage Update Center” software and .NET 2.0 redistributable gave me everything I needed to install ALL the drivers.

Seriously, Lenovo, I’m actually impressed with your “craplet” software. It gets the job done WELL (the update center is AWESOME for getting all my drivers setup). Granted it runs a ton of processes, but I haven’t noticed any lag in my performance (though we’ll see how my battery stands up).

One thing I must note thats interesting is after all the pictures I was expecting the 6 cell batter to stick out the back. I didn’t like this so much, but I had come to terms with it and moved on. But, Lenovo’s website LIES. My 6-cell doesn’t stick out the back (unless its a 4-cell that’s been mislabeled…). Weight is amazing, and its a lot smaller than I was expecting.

So far I couldn’t be more impressed with this laptop, other than the off center screen.

Next step: ThinkWiki shall aid me in getting Ubuntu setup on this machine and purring like a small kitten.

I don’t really have a particularly programming themed idea for a post today, however I’ll have one up very soon (this weekend), discussing tackling web payments and using OOP to simplify. I have some code I’ve been meaning to post, though I think my PayPal object may not see the light of day (with about 20+ member variables, written for 4 without using __get and __set, I think I’ll pass for the time being).

I’m rather impatient about waiting for my ThinkPad T61 “Unholy Powerful and Impossibly Indestructible” edition. The Lenovo website estimates a ship date of the 26^th! I can’t wait that long, I need my magnesium-alloy roll-caged crack now!

Oh well. In the mean time I’ve been entertaining myself with Lenovo’s corporate blogs (in particular “Inside The Box“). I find it frightening that I make a quick humorous post with a man showing off the durability of the laptop (that I borrowed from Inside The Box), and one of the blog authors comments on that post.

I haven’t exactly been advertising or pushing my name…

However after a quick investigation to Google, I can see one possible entry, however that doesn’t seem likely as I’m not seeing anything like this through my analytics account. So that leave only 2 possible answers:

1. He was looking for information on Plesk workarounds (that article tends to be popular).
2. He is a terminator from the future hell bent on concludifying me.

I am inclined to believe that it is not #2 as there are very few “Daniel Cousineau”s in this world (especially in Texas), and that would turn out very poorly for me. You know, health and longevity wise.

That man is 210 lbs…