September 11, 2001

Wireless timesink, filters

Massive amounts of time wasted trying to get wireless up and running, but admittedly most of it's my fault since I didn't do the proper research before a hasty purchase. I knew that my hardware (Linksys pcmcia and pcmcia + pci adapter) worked ok, but I didn't know about all this AP/base station/etc. stuff that's necessary to get a workstation/gateway to act as a wireless access point. My bad. And since it's still relatively young, the whole Linux wireless LAN community still has the feel of an underground cadre, so you really have to search for information and even then you only get a few touches/glimpses of the elephant. Exhausting.

Had some excellent ideas for a relatively simple (but powerful) OpenInteract improvement -- filters. Specify that a particular action should always be filtered, or should conditionally be filtered, and a simple API lets authors manipulate the text (or links, or whatever) as they wish. Thus it would be simple to create a 'wikify' filter that highlighted all WikiLike terms, or a filter that censors bad words, or a filter that does spell-checking, or...

Still a little stuck in general, but I think I'm coming out of it.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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