Fighting with computers

Some weeks ago I mentioned Ubuntu's Feisty was having a weird printing problem that I and many other people reported. It was unclear what was the triggering action and where the fault might be. And it seems it was for a a reason: While everybody thought the problem was in cups code, in the end it turned out the error was on another package. D-Bus is a library that offers a high-level interprocess communication. This library might be used by cups if available. There was a bug on the last version on the library (used by both Debian and Ubuntu) that eventually caused pipes not to be closed properly. The net result was that the cups process was gathering more and more file descriptors till a limit was reached. Thanks to the joint work of many users, Martin Pitt provided a fix for Ubuntu . Your printing blues is over.

I've got a call from a friend who was desperately trying to get Wi-fi working at home. The brand new PlayStation 3 was not able to use the home network as the broadband router was not configured as a DHCP server. The WiFi access point they had did not show up on any menu. When I get there I realized the WiFi access point was either dead or the power supply was not fully operational, so the whole thing was actually dead. As I was trying to be of some help and because my friend did have two wireless cards I suggested he could use the so called ad-hoc mode to network wirelessly his two computers while the Playstation was connected using and Ethernet cable to the broadband router. To get this working you need to connect one of the computers to an Ethernet port of the broadband router and then you share this connection so a second computer can use it too while it connects wirelessly to the first computer (no access point is involved here, so that is what this mode is called ad-hoc mode)...

I bought some cheap airline tickets over the weekend for a family trip. I was asked to provide not only the names of the passengers but also their ID number,gender,title and birth-date. Quite annoying but I guess that might be of some use. This morning I've got the tickets delivered from the online company and my son discovers there is an error in his lastname. I email the the seller to ask for a fix as, though there is yet enough time left, I do not want to procastinate about this. My email gets answered quite fast but the directions given are somehow confusing: I should cancel the ticket and I should buy a new one. This approach in itself has two problems: On one hand being the tickets non-refundable cancelling means losing all the money (so I do no see any advantage for cancelling such a ticket) and paying, again, for the same ticket just to get your lastname fixed. But secondly, there is a chance of not getting the same schedule on sale in this second attempt of buying the tick...