… on an apple bluetooth keyboard. Well, that didn’t take long, did it 
And taking the Logitech back to Dick Smith was a lot easier than I expected. I figured saying “This doesn’t work with my Mac” wouldn’t make me any friends, especially as it turns out the box says “System Requirements: Windows XP”, but the lady was very nice, and didn’t even look in the box to see if everything was in order. Big ups to DSE for that one.
Add comment January 30th, 2007
Oh yeah, so we’re like the first country to see the sun, which means we’re the first to get Vista! Woo!
I just went over to Ascent to check something out before hitting the sack, and was greeted with a nice big graphic proclaiming Vista’s arrival with what appears to be Vista’s slogan, at least in NZ…
“The ‘Wow’ Starts Now!”
…
Wow.
Add comment January 30th, 2007
So I went out and got myself a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse today, as my shiny new MacBook Pro has Bluetooth and I want to use it in lid-closed mode at home. Plus, you know, it’s wireless.
I should point out that in my quest to find a wireless setup, I specifically wanted Bluetooth, as I didn’t want to have to use the USB dongle that comes with most (non-BT) wireless combos. Turns out Bluetooth isn’t as wide-spread as I hoped it would be and most setups use these proprietary wireless dongles. Anyhow, I found a very nice BT combo in the MX5000 Cordless Desktop, which comes with a MX1000 Laser mouse and MX5000 keyboard. The package also includes a USB BT dongle for people without built-in BT.
The MX1000 Laser mouse that comes in the combo is superb, and it was picked up by OS X immediately. Much, much nicer than using the built-in trackpad for extended periods of time, and certainly nicer than my several year old USB mouse I was using.
The MX5000 keyboard however, is a completely different story. The keyboard itself is very nice, and paired with OS X pretty much just as easily as the mouse did. That’s where the fun stopped though. Upon pairing with the device, OS X detected the new keyboard and tried to ascertain it’s layout by asking me to press the key directly to the right of the left-shift key. So I did. And nothing happened.
Hrm. So the alpha keys aren’t working - but the volume control, power button, etc, work. Ugh. Googling presented me with several blog posts and forum threads of people complaining that their new MX5000 wasn’t working, in exactly the same way as I have described. Gutted. Really should have looked that up before hand, but it’s Bluetooth, right? Thats why I avoided the combos with proprietary wireless dongles, cause they likely woulnd’t have Mac drivers.
So I take a look at the big “Read Me First” packaging insert and see that by default it’s paired with the included dongle and you have to install the (XP only) software first, before you can use it with built-in BT (It uses some “Secure Connect” thing to stop people snooping on your keypresses, which is odd, as BT already has encryption). OK, I grab my XP box thinking that I’ll unlock it after installing the drivers and I’ll be able to use it fine with my Mac. After an incredibly painful set of drivers and application installs, the keyboard worked with XP (It even replaced XP’s built-in BT stack). Unfortunately there was no obvious way to turn off the Secure Connect stuff. I assume that by replacing XP’s BT stack it implements it now anyway. I don’t have an XP box with built-in BT to see if it will connect straight away, so that’s out of the question.
I really don’t want to take this keyboard back (mainly cause I like the mouse so much and I can’t seem to find it separately), so I try plugging the BT dongle into my Mac and hey presto, the keyboard works. It doesn’t integrate with the Mac’s BT interfaces, I assume the dongle just presents a standard looking USB keyboard.
But that’s not cool - I’ve got built-in BT but my BT keyboard doesn’t work with it. I really don’t want to have to screw with this dongle thing every time I get home. I just want it to work…
So I remember looking through the developer tools included with OS X and seeing a BT packet sniffer. I unplug the BT dongle and unpair the mouse. Start sniffing, pair the keyboard with built-in BT, and start pressing some keys. I can see “HID Interrupts” being generated, and the keycodes they produce. It seems as though the keys are working and are producing consistent key-codes, but OS X doesn’t know how to interpret them. Interesting.
So, the next step is to figure out how to get OS X to remap those keycodes. I’ve spent a couple of hours trawling through the IOKit documentation (kernel API for developing drivers), the HID docs, the BT docs, etc, but nothing has stood out. It seems I’m looking at it from much too low - I shouldn’t need to write a driver for the damn thing!
I’m sure I’ve seen something in Linux that would let you sit on a terminal and view keycodes and their mappings as codes are generated. Something like that in OS X would be nice - I’m sure it exists, but I’m still pretty much an OS X n00b. Once that’s found and I can be sure that the keypresses are making their way up the stack (all I can see now are BT packets and HID interrupts caused by them), then a way to remap keycodes is needed. Easy!
*sigh* Of course, I could just take it back tomorrow and buy an Apple keyboard instead. Writing all this out has pissed me off so much that it’s pretty tempting. We’ll see what happens.
13 comments January 30th, 2007
A lot has gone on since my last post. The patch I spoke of earlier to add absolute signal and noise values to radiotap headers in madwifi was committed as well as these three patches. The first adds measured noise support to madwifi, which I discussed in my previous post. The second fixes a bug where tx feedback frames were not having their hardware padding removed and the last one fixes various issues with prism and radiotap headers in monitor mode.
I’m still thinking about the measured noise stuff during scanning, but it’s not immediately necessary for what I’m trying to achieve with madwifi, so it’s going to have to be a background thing for now.
Add comment September 20th, 2006
Here is a copy of my full proposal that I’m about to hand in. Now I can actually start doing some real work
Add comment August 30th, 2006
What have I been up to lately? Well, I’ve been working on implementing a point-to-multipoint wireless MAC protocol. The interesting thing about it is that it was first designed in SDL, then using Dean’s sdl2cpp translator and the WAND Protocol Development Environment (WPDE), I’m able to get it going in actual hardware (using the WAG cards at this point). Eventually, I’ll write a wrapper so that we can deploy it using Atheros based wireless cards - although that’s going to take some hacking. Essentially the last couple of months has been designing the protocol, learning SDL, implementing the protocol in SDL, and then working with Dean to work his WPDE stuff into a useable state. At this point we’ve nearly got the WAG framework working with a simple point-to-point MAC, and once that’s going I’ll be able to get my point-to-multipoint MAC going.
The MAC is based around token-passing, which we hope will help to avoid the hidden-node problem, as it’s being designed with long-distance, rural networks in mind. There is very little overhead due to not having to use interframe spacing, etc. It should be good to see it going.
In the next six or so weeks I have to write a full proposal for my Ph.D, which will involve sorting out exactly what my research is going to be. At the moment it looks like I’ll be continuing to look at wireless MAC protocols, specifically how to deal with packet loss. For example, we would like to see whether it’s feasible to selectively acknowledge portions of a frame, etc, rather than having to re-transmit entire frames. Looking at modelling loss/bit-errors would be a part of this. During this, I will be attempting to argue that to effectively test MAC protocols we need to use real hardware, rather than just relying on simulation results. Hopefully I will be able to use the WAG environment to validate (or invalidate) simulation environments, and possibly come up with better simulation models. Things are still up in the air, and the next few weeks will involve a lot of literature search to try and narrow my focus a bit more.
Add comment July 13th, 2006
Thought I’d drop a plug in here for the coolest app I’ve seen in a while, LyX. LyX is a “document processor”, essentially a nice GUI front-end for LaTeX. It’s very very impressive, and also integrates very nicely with BibTeX. Should make writing my upcoming Ph.D proposal quite a bit easier.
Add comment July 13th, 2006
I’ve posted a bit of a HOWTO to get J.River’s Media Center 11 working under WINE on Linux. Check it out.
1 comment February 26th, 2006
Hey, they’re both set in space, right?
http://fbo.com.au/movie.asp?ID=24784
*sob*
Add comment February 18th, 2006
I’ve just signed up with CiteULike, which is a cool little system for managing libraries of academic papers. Visit my library to see what I’ve been reading. The only problem that I see with CiteULike is that it’s hard for me to look at someone else’s library, and then link directly to the Waikato proxy’d version of it. Also, when I find a good paper through the Waikato proxy, and then I citeulike it, I’m left with a non-working link back to the original ACM or whatever website, so I still have to download and then upload the paper. It kind of defeats the purpose of the system in the first place, but oh well, it’s a nice way to organise and BibTex stuff, so I’ll keep using it. From now on I’ll link to my citeulike entries when summarising a paper.
1 comment January 27th, 2006
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