Free Mohammed Maree

Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail,
originally uploaded by LCLD.

By now, you've all probably heard of James Buck - a university student jailed in egypt. After twittering that he was arrested, friends, journalists, bloggers and many in the online community rallied for his release.

While it's nice to see the world unite behind such a good cause it's unfortunate that James' friend (Mohammed) hasn't received the same level of attention.

Needless to say he's still in some Egyptian jail, having endured several weeks of torture: http://jameskarlbuck.com/


Interested in helping? Check out James' blog

Well I cancelled embarq... and I now have a new ISP

My new ISP,
originally uploaded by odiosam.

I've had embarq for about 2 years, and I think I'm fed up with them. I was paying ~$200/mo for business class DSL with a few static IPs. For that price, the connection should be FAST and rock solid.

It wasn't.

After about a weekend of downtime (which caused a permanent 35% decrease in BluWiki's traffic) - I was done. Here's my solution: I'm hosting my servers on slicehost for ~$130 / month, and for my personal internet, well, I'm using my friends' connections :)

In the attached photo, you see what I came up with to facilitate doing that.
Parts include:
- DLB 2300 Deliberant AP (no longer sold, had this laying around)
- Buffalo WHR-G125 (not sold in the US, you have to buy it off ebay)
- U.FL to RP-SMA adapter (for the buffalo's antenna)
- Hawking Hi-Gain Directional Corner Antenna 15db
- Yagi 2.4GHz 14.5dBi
- 4 port switch
- Power strip
- Cheap tripod

Basically, I followed the instructions over at i-hacked (www.i-hacked.com/content/view/261/42/), except I substituted the WHR-G125 for the router and the 90 degree corner antenna instead of the yagi. This setup will scan within a 90 degree radius for the strongest open network.

I then use the DLB 2300 in WISP mode to aim the Yagi antenna at the network and repeat it on the switch.

I've decided against repeating the network wirelessly to eliminate any WIFI interference.

It works pretty well :)

Error creating thumbnail: /path/to/wiki/bin/ulimit.sh: xrealloc: ../bash/subst.c:514: cannot reallocate 512 bytes

MediaWiki's software was giving me this error, and I couldn't find a solution on google. I thought I'd post one.

I was able to fix the problem by moving the bin folder to bin.bak, downloading a new copy of mediawiki, and copying the bin folder from the new installation.

I suspect that the error occurs when you set the permissions on ulimit.sh to global read-write (777). The ulimit.sh in the new bin directory was set with limited permissions:

total 20K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 88 Jun 5 04:18 svnstat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit-tvf.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 53 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit.sh
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 Jun 2 01:54 ulimit.sh.bak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit4.sh

Correcting the error may be as easy as changing the permissions, but if that doesn't work, you can follow the steps I outlined above.