Web Worker Daily has a post about the city of Atlanta hooking up with Earthlink to provide a city-wide wifi service. Check out the Earthlink press release here. It probably won’t be cheap, but its better than nothing.

I had posted previously that even though Bill Gates probably isn’t the most scrupulous man around, his Gates Foundation goes a long way to saving his soul.

Till I read this article in the LA Times:

An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill just can’t do anything right.

While not exactly gourmet, every college student in America has taken advantage of cheap Ramen noodles. Flags should be at half-staff at all institutions of higher learning for the passing of its inventor: Momofuku Ando.

I’m sitting at Octane, a coffee bar here in Atlanta. I order a quad espresso, sit down, and fire up the laptop. I go to System -> Administration -> Networking. I select the Wireless connection and the properties button. Click on the drop down arrow for a listing of available networks.

Nothing.

WTF?!? There are about 10 people around me surfing. There has to be something. Then I remember. This bug got introduced in Ubuntu 6.10.

But this is only a GUI bug. There must be a way of scanning for networks. Thats right: iwlist. From the iwlist man pages, iwlist will “Get more detailed wireless information from a wireless interface.” Awesome. I do a

iwlist eth1 scanning

I get a list of access points, protocols supported, and whether or not they require encryption. I see the ESSID for the hotspot router, type it into the GUI.

Bingo. Connected to the Internet again.

Thank god for the CLI.

Update: In Ubuntu 7.04, I’ve noticed that the above command only lists the network you are connected to at the moment. So to see all networks use sudo:

sudo iwlist scanning