Late last year I finally stopped delaying and purchased an 802.11 wireless router for the house. Because I had just gotten the Powerbook, which supports 802.11b and 802.1g, I was looking for a router that could do both and which could support WPA as well. After doing a bunch of research (including favorable online reviews), I settled on the SMC SMC2804WBR, which also had a rebate to bring the price down. Unfortunately, it seems that the old adage is true. The router works great -- it covers the entire house and supports WPA. Unfortunately, it seems to have stability problems. It takes anywhere from 1-3 days for it to lock up tight, requiring a hard reboot in order to solve the problem. I really like being able to take the machine and work somewhere else in the rest of the house, but its a royal pain to have to trot upstairs and reboot this thing every few days. I'm guessing that there are problems with the WPA implementation that need to be shaken out. Also, the dialogs for inputting WEP and WPA keys are horribly unfriendly -- type a 64 digit hex number? Twice, once for the router and once for the Powerbook? Insane. It's so error prone that I dread having to do it again.

[via Trevor's ETech notes]

become rude to make a phone call without first checking via sms. [this is becoming more and more the case in europe also]

I would love it if this became the etiquette here in the US as well. For all telephone calls, not just cell calls. People seem to believe that they have the right to call you simply because you have a telephone.

The talk descriptions for PyCon 2004 are now available. Here are some of the talks that look interesting:

• Faster than C: Static Type Inference with Starkiller
• Literate unit testing: Unit Testing with Doctest
• "Scripting Language" My Arse: Using Python for Voice over IP
• IronPython: a fresh look at Python on .Net
• Web Services for Python
• Introduction to Mod_Python
• GTK and Gnome Programming with Python
• Metaclasses, Who, Why, When
• From Python to PLT Scheme
• Distribution Basics - Using "distutils"
• Pypy - implementing Python in Python
• 60 Minutes of MacPython
• Cryptographic Channels in High Availability Python Systems
• The Natural Language Toolkit
• Epydoc: an API documentation generation tool
• How Python is Developed
• Using Python as an Extension Language
• Optimizing Python Code with Pyrex
• Implementing An Optimizing Compiler for Python
• Building C Extensions for Python with Pyrex
• The View From ATOP: Simple but Powerful Persistence using Python and BSDDB

A reminder that OSAF is holding a Chandler development sprint at PyCon. Please let us know (by mail and editing the Wiki page) if you are interested in participating!