Wireless is the way of the f...[NO CARRIER]

One advantage of having 20 or 30 notebooks at your disposal is you determine pretty quickly when something in the hardware/firmware/os/userland sucks. So my army of Lenovo / IBM T43p's have an interesting issue. Power on with mains power, and the 802.11g wireless works perfectly (under windows, and various linux distros). Power on from battery, and crapness sets in. No wireless ... right the way down to "Device ... what device?" kind of errors. I'm troubleshooting now - first under windoze - and even with the absolute latest patch thanks to a bunch of threads on the thinkpad forum (ThinkPad Wireless LAN Adapter Software v4.1.102.147) it still kicks the bucket at power on, returning a good old "Device failed to start (error code 10)" (or something like that ... the error code 10 is the key).

It sounds like some kind of quirky bios power saving feature ... if no mains, then cripple random part of the CPU. Meh ... I'll just get used to powering on with the power plugged in. Of course, the kicker is that I can pull the power plug as soon as the POST is complete and it works fine - so much for wireless.

Things in common

What do Lighthouses and the English cricket team have in common?

Whitewash!

Seriously ... 5-nil! What the hell happened there? And it's not like the English team lacked talent. Here's hoping in 2009 they get their act in gear and at least put up a decent struggle when we beat them :-)

What do you mean this blog doesn't write itself?

Apparently, I'm slack ... I've not written a post in two months. I plead extenuating circumstances, such as

1. Australia thumping England in the Ashes cricket (will some poor sod please teach the English how to play again ... another 20 years of Oz domination will be dull).

2. All things Googly (yes, ongoing cricketing pun intended).

3. My single-handed attempt to drink the country's wine supply. So far the score is Wine Supply: 1, Fuzzy: -liver (that being a perfectly reasonable imaginary number!)

So maybe I'll be less slack in future and blog more ... but then again, it's not like there isn't more wine to drink ;)