All entries for Sunday 01 February 2009

Lloyds lifts

Lifts on the outside of the fantastic looking Lloyds building in London.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 17:29 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Buy consume obey

Writing about web page http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/329419/thirst-pockets-high-school-musical-/

Sometimes marketing tie-ins puzzle me to the extent my brain hurts a little. A few weeks ago in Tesco I was perusing the discounted bakery goods section and noticed a packet of Hanna Montana cake rolls. Why does this product exist? How are small pieces of rolled up cake relevant to the secret identity of a fictional teenage girl that sings? A Hanna Montana karaoke machine I can understand, but what sort of minds came up with the idea of Hanna Montana cake rolls?

If you haven't already followed the writing about webpage link it goes to an entry on a deals website for High School Musical 3 branded kitchen roll. Again... who, how, why, WTF? I haven't seen High School Musical 3, nor do I ever intend to, but I doubt that kitchen roll plays any significant part in the proceedings. This product is if anything even more baffling than the Hanna Montana cake rolls. I can recognise that there is a good percentage of the Hanna Montana target audience would also be partial to cylindrical sugary snacks wrapped in shiny foil, but I find it hard to imagine an overlap between the target audience for High School Musical 3 and kitchen roll. How many twelve year old girls are interested in the efficient cleaning up of kitchen spills?

I guess what it all comes down to is the Disney's desperate desire to squeeze every last possible cent from their franchises regardless of how incongruous the endorsement, coupled with the knowledge that if they put a picture of unrealistic idealistically styled digitally tweaked tween idols on a box then there will be children who ask their parents to buy it regardless of what the product is and some of them will have parents who make the purchase rather than take it as an opportunity to explain their offspring the concepts of merciless brand exploitation and mindless consumerism.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 11:35 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Asus Eee PC vs WPA–PSK when all you have is a hex key.

So far the Asus Eee PC 901 with it's default Linux install have been capable of everything I've asked of it wireless wise. However the GUI configuration tool provided for setting up network connections hasn't been as capable and last weekend failed me for a second time (the first time) when I wanted to connect to a WPA-PSK encrypted wireless network.

The wireless at my parent's house is set up using WPA-PSK. When setting it up I gave the router, a Windows XP machine and a wireless ethernet bridge a randomly generated 64 character hex string as the key. So the only key that I have for this network is that 64 character string.

When connecting to the network using the Eee's GUI tool I was asked to enter a key and specify either WEP or WPA. So I gave it the 64 character key and selected WPA. The Eee then completely failed to establish a working connection.

I hit Google and discovered this thread where in April last year someone says that Asus told them "Linux Xandros is not compatible with WPA-PSK security". The next post is someone describing how to use wpa_passphrase to generate configuration for wpa_supplicant which when will then establish a connection to a WPA-PSK protected network. This looked promising but attempting to give wpa_passphrase my 64 character hex string made it tell me it wanted something ASCII and at most 63 characters long. Evidently what wpa_passphrase wants is an ASCII passphrase which can then be combined with the ssid of the network being connected to create a suitable hex key. The clue is in the name really. I didn't have a passphrase to give it, but I did have a hex key already. So I came up with the following solution:

$ wpa_passphrase ssid_of_network_to_connect_to  a_few_random_characters > out.conf

The contents of out.conf looked like

network ={
               ssid="ssid_of_network_to_connect_to"
               #psk="a_few_random_characters"
               psk=generated_hex_string
}

I replaced generated_hex_string with the 64 character string I had. Then used wpa_supplicant to establish the connection

$ wpa_supplicant -i ra0 -c ./out.conf &

Then I waited a few seconds until the output indicated that the connection had been successfully established then invoked the dhcp client

$ dhclient ra0

and I had a working connection. Convoluted, but it worked. I'm not really sure why the GUI tool failed to set up a working connection. Perhaps it too wanted an ASCII passphrase despite the fact that the field is labelled key.

I've been left with a slight nagging feeling that maybe my problems were caused by my not understanding WPA-PSK properly. But having read the Wikipedia description of how it works that seems to match how I think it works. Maybe I should have set the router up using a passphrase rather than giving it a hex key I'd generated myself but the fact that the other devices I'd attached all happily worked using that key would seem to indicate that using a key was a valid thing to do.

Mike Willis : 01 Feb 2009 11:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem