WiFi deployment at Burning Man was a total success! The network consisted of a 2.4ghz long haul link back to Gerlach and then a 5.8ghz backbone for the playa which was then rebroadcasted at 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00. We used my gear for the 3:00 and 9:00 nodes and they fit in perfectly. Everyone loved Brad Templeton’s “Playa Phone” and the Internet Cafe was in constant use despite no advertising.

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I’m doing my first burning man. I came up with two art projects, but vetoed them because it’s my first burn and I figured it would be better to assist another ongoing project.

Somehow I got the bright idea to assist BMorg in doing some of the wireless distribution for the camp network. I’m busy building LEAF boxes and I’m reminded of exactly how much I completely hate their broken development environment. Somehow over the years, they managed to build a cross compilation environment that doesn’t work on anything other than an X86 running linux and gcc-3.4. Absolutely brilliant. Somebody clearly did not understand the first principle of cross compilation environments and I’ve been too lazy for the past two years to fix it until it broke when I upgraded to gcc-4. All I can say is thank god for Parallels Desktop. I brought up a Debian VM running on my Macbook Pro and whacked B-U enough to at least cross build under recent Linux distributions.

The other LEAF developers don’t feel that having a clean and reproducible cross compilation environment is a priority (being able to reproduce binaries? being able to support branched development? seems pretty basic to me). We’re so totally behind the times in distribution design, that it’s probably time for me to hook up with folks more in tune with my own goals (despite the fact that the LEAF guys are really great people). I think I’m going to go with porting OpenWRT and MADWIF-NG to a PC Engines WRAP target as soon as their buildroot-ng stuff is stable.