Charlie Stross would be so… proud?

I started with his first book “Starfish”. The author is quite proud of Starfish for getting flagged as “too dark” to be translated and published in Russia. I found it interesting if a bit slow moving but he has a bit of a distinct style and something new is nice. The book ends a bit oddly, but as it turns out, his next books continue on and form what is known as “The Rifters Trilogy” so I will be back to pick those up later. As his first novel it flows a bit weirdly, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy it and won’t be back.

Then I got to his newest book “Blindsight”. It was exactly what I was looking for. Dark and depressing as it explores many different ways of mental functioning and shedding some new light on discussions I hadn’t seen before. I loved it! Additionally he cites a lot of material in the references section of his book and I’m probably going to give reading a few of those a try too. I don’t really want to spoil much, but it was a breath of fresh air to get some speculative fiction from this decade exploring consciousness issues. A lot has happened since some of my old favorite fiction was written. I just finished reading Blindsight so I’m still caught up in its hype, so we’ll have to see how it sinks in, but right now it feels like it’s one of my new favorite books, sitting up there with the very aged “Destination Void” and “Dune” [Frank Herbert].

I think part of what makes his style different from most authors is that he is a trained marine biologist and has spent an awful lot of time thinking about deep dark far away places with weird creatures in them that are already surprisingly alien. As an interesting side note, Peter Watts hails from my home town of Vancouver and went to the same University I have. Neat.

He’s not rich, so I’d love it if you too would go out and buy a book or two of his, it’ll be a good time. If you aren’t yet convinced, and have half an ounce of cunning, you can find all his books under the Creative Commons on his site too.

Excerpt from the H+ interview with Peter Watts
“… but blindsight doesn’t posit a crew of rejects and outcasts;
they’re an A-Team at the top of their respective fields.
We baselines may regard them as dysfunctional because
we don’t live in their civilization, but they do just fine
in the late-21st Century circles they move in. They do a lot better
than we would. From a purely pragmatic perspective, I chose
them to illustrate the theme; each character illustrates an aspect
of consciousness relevant to the overall argument. but again, why
regard them as evolutionary blind alleys? These folks are supremely
adapted to their habitat; to regard them as blind alleys because they
wouldn’t be the life of the party in 2009 is a bit like describing a fish
as ill-adapted because it can’t breathe air.”

Blindsight blurb:
Who you do send to meet the alien
when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you
only knew what was waiting for them…

Anyways, through all this, planet.mindstab.net grew less and less reflective of what I’ve been reading, but I finally got around to refreshing it’s list of feeds, so go take a look, thats what I read or skim every day. It’s a massive flow of information on things I wish to stay informed on. (The full reading list is displayed on the right side of the site, it’s not small :))

As a note, the PlanetPlanet software that runs it is glitchy. I cannot seem to make it do times properly, and it insists on adding my timezone onto everything (+8 hours) even though no other webapp or app on the server has this problem.

But the moral of the story is I can now post pictures and text to my website from my cell phone from pretty much any where. I feel very connected ;)

Anyways, since no one I know actually has a Twitter account, obviously it won’t be too useful as it is for anyone I know, so I’m integrating it into my site (WordPress) and then my other Journal that wordpress auto posts to will also ‘benefit’ from this. So now I have Twitter fairly integrated. However some of my readers may not want that. I’m aggregated on Planet Larry and I’m not sure how much a Planet dedicated to the technical goings ons of Gentoo users cares about my current goings on and whereabouts. So I’ve rearranged my wordpress categories and now I have an RSS feed for everything but Twitter.

My RSS sans Twitter
My Twitter: twitter.com/dan_ballard

Next it might be interesting to look for a service that I can tie into WordPress so I can update my blog with pictures from my cell phone…

I went out and bought a DLink DBT-122 Bluetooth adapter (USB). Cheapest one they had, plugged it into my laptop (Ubuntu Feisty) and it was recognized right away. Installed bluez and bluetooth related packages and started to play.

First thing I did was enable the bluetooth applet that runs in the notification area. It can also be accessed from System->Preferences->Bluetooth Preferences. Once that was on and my cell phone’s (Sony Ericsson k510a) bluetooth was on I was able to use nautilus’ sendto to send files via bluetooth to my cell phone. Then after turning on Applications->Accessories->Bluetooth File Sharing, which starts an applet in the notification area, I was able to send files to my laptop from my cell phone via bluetooth. So that was all cool, but it was also just warm up.

Next I wanted to get internet on my laptop through my cell phone. While impractical in the areas on cost and speed, it does have far greater coverage than random unsecured wifi access points around the city (especially as of late as people are finally starting to use WEP and WPA) and it’s coverage out of city is of course no contest either.

So I installed a few more tools, ppp (Point to Point Protocol) related, like ppp and pppconfig.

The first tool I used was ‘hcitool‘ which is used for establishing bluetooth connections and other bluetooth related issues.

# hcitool scan
Scanning ...
         00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2       phone.mindstab.net

This will scan for all bluetooth devices in range and return their name and MAC address. Next I had to connect to the phone and laptop or ‘pair’ the devices. For my phone, the Sony Ericsson k510a, I had to do this on the phone’s side. I went to Settings->Connectivity->Bluetooth->My Devices. Then I selected New Device and after it scanned, I selected my laptop. It then bid me enter a ‘password’ so I choose a few numbers, and then the bluetooth manager on my laptop notified me a device was trying to ‘pair’ and asked me to enter the number there. That done my cell phone accepted my laptop. I selected my laptop/device on my cell phone and told it to always accept connections from that device. Also, to be safe, I put the password/number in ‘/etc/bluetooth/pin‘ although I’m not really certain if that was necessary.

Now the devices were set to connect to each other on a regular basis so back to hcitool to handle that. The ‘cc‘ argument establishes or breaks a connection and the ‘auth‘ argument authenticates the connection.

# hcitool cc 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2
# hcitool auth 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2

Now a bluetooth connection with the phone was established. Next up it was time to configure the ppp connection that would run from my laptop, over bluetooth to the cell, and from there over GPRS (or possibly EDGE?) to the internet.

First, I needed to further setup Bluez (Bluetooth handler on Linux) to facilitate this by creating a /dev/ entry for the connection. And I needed a bit more info. The command ‘sdptool‘ delivered this to me. It can be used to list all the supported features of a device and their details. I was specifically interested in the ‘Dial-up Networking’ section.

# sdptool browse 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2
...
Service Name: Dial-up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
  "Generic Networking" (0x1201)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0100
...

In there I found the ‘Channel’ that the protocol was operating on, in this case ‘2‘. Now I opened up ‘/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf‘ and setup the device.

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

rfcomm0 {
        bind yes;
        device 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2;
        channel 2;
        comment "Bluetooth PPP Connection";
}

Then I restart bluetooth. On newer Ubuntu versions the service is just called ‘bluetooth’ but on older versions it’s apparently called ‘bluez’.

# invoke-rd.d bluetooth restart

Now I had setup a connection to my cell phone and created ‘/dev/rfcomm0‘ for it. I was now ready to setup a ppp connection over bluetooth.

pppconfig thankfully does most of the hard work here. It configures the ppp/peer files and the even more convoluted chatscript (some kind of text file that contains the initial connection protocol text that is used to establish the connection).

# pppconfig

pppconfig gives you a menu. I chose ‘Create Connection’. Called it whatever, I chose ‘gprs’. Next I selected ‘Dynamic’ (for DNS). Then I selected ‘Chat’ for the Authentication Method. I entered no password or login, and then deleted the text when it asked for a User name and another password. The default speed of ’115200′ baud was fine. ‘Tone’ is the choice for the ‘Pulse or Tone’ section. The number to dial was a bit tricky. It’s in the form of something like ‘*99***slot-of-internet-on-cell#’ so for me ‘*99***2#‘ was what I entered but others might try ‘*99***1#‘ or possibly ‘*99#‘. I entered the port to use manually and entered ‘/dev/rfcomm0‘. Then it gave me a chance to review and then write the file. I did so.

The two main files it creates are ‘/etc/ppp/peers/gprs‘ and ‘/etc/chatscripts/gprs‘. If you are lucky you should just be able to connect now, but I had problems, so I had to tweak the files a bit. In ‘/etc/ppp/peers/gprs‘ I had to comment out the ‘remotename‘ and ‘ipparam‘ lines with hashs [#].

/etc/ppp/peers/gprs

...
user ""
#remotename gprs2
#ipparam gprs2

and in ‘/etc/chatscripts/gprs‘ I had to comment out the ‘ogin:‘ and ‘ssword:‘ lines again with hashes.

/etc/chatscripts/gprs

...
# ispname
#ogin: ""
# isppassword
#ssword: ""
# postlogin

Now all the ppp config files were properly configured to work with my phone, so it was time to try the connection out. Before that though, I turned other networking off, which is easy enough with NetworkManager, I just right clicked on it and unchecked ‘Networking‘. Then to turn on the connection over bluetooth, ppp, and gprs, I just used the ‘pon‘ command.

# pon gprs

and gave it a few seconds. My cell lit up and told me it was connecting and then it connected. Then I was good to go. Sadly gprs internet rates are expensive here at $0.05 / kB. Also, it’s a bit firewalled so the standard ping google.com test to see if the connection is working fails. I just loaded a small web page in my browser. It worked! Then tried to ‘ssh’ to my server, and that also worked! When I was done, I just

# poff gprs

to turn the connection off.

And that’s it. Now I can get files to and from my cell phone and get internet from it for my laptop as well.

When I was having trouble, I looked in ‘/var/log/syslog‘ to see where the trouble was coming from.

Also, for some reason, the next day, ‘sdptool‘ was reporting that the ‘Dailup Networking’ service had moved to channel 2 so I had to change ‘/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf‘ file to represent that and restart bluetooth with ‘invoke-rc.d bluetooth restart‘, so keep an eye out for that if your connection starts failing later for no reason.

References

• CLUG Wiki: GPRS Internet over Bluetooth
• Bluetooth Setup – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• BluetoothDailup – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• HOW-To: GPRS Connection Via Bluetooth – Ubuntu Forums
• UbuntuHelp:BluetoothDailup – Ubuntu中文
• A few more pages turned up on Google under various bluetooth + ppp + gprs + error searches