The Obselete and interesting stuffs

My interests lead me to some obsolete techy stuffs. And my special desire of learning NLP routed me to some amazing and interesting stuffs. Let me come to them one by one.....

First, The Scigen paper generator, truly based on context free grammar and a sentence generator. It generates some fascinating computer papers, few of which have even been accepted in a few international conferences. Its a research on sentence generator by MIT. Try it out yourself. The link follows.....
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Second, this is not a tool, not a collection, but quite interestingly, is a museum. The Retrocomputing Museum is the one which receives these appreciations. Most of the softwares it contains are now a living history - environments that were once important, but are now merely antiques. And when you really try to look back on them, they would show you the paths to this modern computing softwares age. Here lies the museum......
http://www.catb.org/retro/

Third, here lies the mailing group of a unique community of classic computers. They discuss, describe and work on computers that are legacy and classic piece of the technology now. You might not get a chance to work on these classic computers, but can be a part of this community and know the computers which have really become classic today. Here follows the Classic Computers Community Website......
http://www.classiccmp.org/

Time's out for me now. Will continue with these collections in my next blog...... Cheer up till then.... :)))

Installing WLan on Linux

I installed Fedora Core 7 few days back and got a problem with the Wireless LAN. When trying to activate the eth1 interface, received the following error (followed up with the command in bold):
$ifconfig eth1 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory

When trying out to find the error, i finally got to the conclusion that the firmware files were missing. It really took a lot of effort to find this out and to get to know what needs to be done. So, I am listing out the steps that needs to followed to overcome this problem.

Try out the following: (It works finally)

Download the firmware file from the following location:
bcm43xx-fwcutter-005-1.fc6.i386.rpm

and extract it on your system using the following command.
$rpm -ivh bcm43xx-fwcutter-005-1.fc6.i386.rpm

Next, download the Broadcom 802.11g driver. You can find it in the following link:
ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_3020/driver/

Unzip the package.
$unzip WLan\ Driver\ Broadcom\ 802.11g\ 3.100.46.0.zip

Give the folder an executable permission.
$chmod +x 80211g/

Next extract the firmware from the bcmwl5.sys file (from the directory where you saved it).
$/usr/bin/bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ ./80211g/bcmwl5.sys

If the above steps completed succesfully, then you have almost finished up. Try out the following codes and you are ready to use the WLAN.

$su -c '/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManager on'

$su -c '/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManagerDispatcher on'

$su -c '/sbin/service NetworkManager start ; /sbin/service NetworkManagerDispatcher start'

This finishes the installation of WLAN on your linux system. Enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!