Windows and wireless

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From: Leon Brocard
Subject: Windows and wireless
Date: 17:27 on 20 Feb 2007
I apologise for not writing in a while. Software has been very
hateful, and I should get it off my chest.

I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in Germany and installed a
wireless network in their house. Their house is nice and full of
wooden beams and not really a faraday cage at all. I provide a
wireless router thingy and buy a generic A/B/G wifi PCMCIA card from,
I think, Linksys. This is where the fun begins.

The first instruction on the PCMCIA card is to disable Windows
wireless networking. This is slightly worrying, but as I see later on,
the wireless card provider is really giving us a treat. Instead of a
simple, workable wifi selector, what you instead get is a brain dead
UI with flashing red status updates telling you it's failed to connect
to a router in channel 1. Channel? Why would I care what channel it is
failing to connect to, as long as it connects to the perfectly working
wifi?

Eventually I beat it into submisssion, getting it to connect to the
access point whenever Windows boots up. I check this. I check this
again. I check it a third time, knowing full well that I won't be
there to fix it after that weekend.

I return to London. The wifi works swimmingly. The wifi skype phone
works great. Everyone is happy. The sun is shining.

Until a month afterwards, when the stupid non-windows wifi selector
decides to no longer connect to the frickin' access point which is
30cm away from it. This is annoying to debug over the phone, and we
just give up. The software is all hateful. Windows is hateful. The
access point is still there, but the laptop can't talk to it.

Ninjas, please strike out at all network card manufacturers that
provide their own custom software.

HATE. Leon

ps on the plus side, I'll get some nice wurst for fixing it

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