Hi, I’m here at the AirPort, using the T-Mobile wireless. I’m sharing it by Ethernet to my brother Ben, who’s sharing it back via wireless so the rest of the family (and the airport) can use it without paying T-Mobile again.
On the way over I was marvelling at what a great idea autosensing Ethernet cards are. Before the intelligence was in the cable: you had to be sure to use the right one depending on whether you were plugging into a hub or an uplink port or whatnot. Autosensing puts the intelligence at the ends. I suspect this is a novel use of the end-to-end principle.
While I’m talking about neat technical things, I had occasion to use my bootable membership card. (If it’s good enough for Jon Johansen, it’s good enough for you!) There were a bunch of files we wanted to take on the plane with us, but they were on my brother’s Windows computer which required a password we didn’t know to log in. So I pulled the card out of my pocket and stuck it in. It found and mounted the hard drive automatically. I typed trivial-net-setup and hit return a couple times and it found the network and got an IP. (I’ve never gotten Linux to get an Internet connection that easily before!) I typed /etc/init.d/sshd start and it set up an SSH server. I copied the files off. It was great!
Back to the flight. Since we’re flying internationally (to Japan) I didn’t get to see if O’Hare has a “Children With An Adult Fly Constitutionally!” thing.
We’re AA 153, and we’ll be boarding soon. Watch us!