I decided to start doing some long overdue work on MWRP today. For those that don’t know, MWRP (Short for Melbourne Wireless Router Project) is a package I started writing a while ago to act as a captive portal on a wireless access point. What happens is that someone associates with your access point, it won’t let them onto the net unless they authenticate (or you’ve specifically let them). This allows us to offer free internet access to Melbourne Wireless members (using the Melbourne Wireless server as an authenticaion back end).

So after re-writing the authentication backend twice, and hammering out in the low to mid double digits worth of bugs, it’s all available for everyone to consume :). You can grab the code from the webcvs, or the package or the source code from the web site. More information on what I’ve just said above is on the Melbourne Wireless wiki page. And of course there’s the instructions.

Oh, and It looks like a german wireless group have extended on some of what MWRP does and tailored it for their group. Good stuff guys! and thanks for the credit :)

Version 0.0.13 of the adutux module has been accepted into the gregkh stream of the linux kernel. This means, starting at kernel version 2.6.19, you should see the option to add the adutux module by default in the main linux kernel. This also means that some distros will straight away have support for Ontrak ADU USB devices.

I’d like to thank Greg K-H for all of his help on this one - as there were a lot of changes required that I didn’t know how to do that were fixed by him - as well as making sure the module worked with PPC architecture (I’m a hacker, not a coder:))

The patch will show up here (called usb-adutux-driver.patch) in the next few days, and should be in the mainstream kernel by version 2.6.19. Thanks Greg!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this, and as there are now newer kernels out there that break version 0.0.8 of the patch, I’ve also published v0.0.13 of adutux. It successfully works with linux kernel 2.6.17.7 - so hopefully it should work on any recent kernel. The new guide is available here.

Earlier this year, I posted about a traffic cop who got fined by Workcover for a health and safety matter while handing out a fine to a workcover officer. It seems this one had been doing the rounds (email, web sites etc), however Michael Birt from Workcover Victoria left a comment that this may have happened in NSW back in 2004, as in Victoria, on the spot fines are not issued. Today I got sent a link to the March 2006 issue of Northern Territory Police News and sure enough, on page 49 there is this story.

Looks like this defenatily has Urban Legend written all over it! If only we could find out for sure :)

The title pretty much says it all really! Austin has started public testing on X-Plane 8.50 Beta 1. You can download it in the usual manner. You will need to delete your 8.40 preferences files to have 8.50 work correctly (which means setting everything up again), however it seems to be quite a few nice changes.

Update: As always, as soon as I publish this, Beta 2 is now out :)