I bought this to replace a Wi-fi card in my laptop (Thinkpad X300) since the standard card had flaky Linux support. The 7260HMW is a half-length miniPCIe card with 2xU.FL connectors.

Good:

• 802.11ac support
• Good Linux drivers, works out of the box on Debian testing
• Built-in Bluetooth 4.0
• Supports AP Mode
• Low power usage

Bad:

• General signal strength is slightly on the poor side (happens on both Linux and Win7 so it’s not a driver issue)
• Only 2 spatial streams supported, only 2 antennae. If you currently have 3/4 spatial stream 802.11n APs, this card could possibly see worse performance than a 3/4 stream client.
• AP Mode is completely half-assed, only supports 2.4GHz band which means no 802.11ac Also it only supports 1 AP or STA at a time. See the dump below, section “valid interface combinations”.

Other:

• If your laptop has a Bluetooth LED in addition to Wi-fi like on many Thinkpads, this card won’t interact with it. In fact, having multiple BT cards (this card+builtin BT) can even cause the LED to not even work with the builtin BT if you choose to leave it installed (Easy enough to remove on my X300 but difficult on my W510).
• The Wi-fi LED will just be on solid, rather than on+blink on activity. Does this on Win7 and Linux, and none of the settings in /sys/class/leds/phy0-led/trigger seem to get the desired behavior. If you want this functionality, you’ll have to write a script to manually toggle the LED (There’s a netdev LED trigger out there, but it was very unstable for me).

Stuff:

Dump of phy info. Note the no-IR flags on the 5GHz frequencies, meaning 5GHz AP mode is not supported.

After not being able to get this card’s GPS to do anything, I forgot about it for a while. Now that I’ve had some time, I revisited it and was able to get it working. Read on to see how.

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I recently came into possession of a Firebox X550e Core that was thrown out due to a bad power supply. Turns out OpenWRT (or almost any OS for that matter) is pretty easy to install on this thing. Read on for some photos and a how-to.

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As I mentioned in my review, the Routerstation Pro only has a single user-programmable LED. However, it has 7 GPIO lines that can easily be attached to more LEDs. Read on for instructions and pictures.

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After finally deciding to replace an aging WRT54GL, I decided to not get a typical poor-performing home router and go for a more professional product. The RouterStation Pro fit my needs perfectly, with its expandability and performance being far beyond most home routers. Read on for the review and pics.

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Just a few minor fixes, new version should be in SVN.

The bot now supports “hot reloading.” The bot can now reload itself without losing connection due to a new wrapper.

You need to run ‘mvpybot.py 0’ because start.py is broken now. Substitute the zero with a different server number if you want to connect to a different server.

There is a somewhat-major bot update in the works. The plugins system has been completely redone. Instead of plugin files being used for whatever functions can be found in them, they now have to explicitly register functions. Here is an example, the rewritten ping plugin:

#!/usr/bin/python

def register():
 registerfunction('ping', ping)
 addhelp('ping', help_ping)

def ping():
 outstuff=''
 print "ping called"
 if (len(cmd)<2):
  return('PRIVMSG %s :Incorrect usage. Syntax: ping (4|6) <address>.' %(channel))
 else:
  if cmd[1]=='4' or cmd[1]=='6':
   if cmd[1]=='4':

    output=syscmd(['ping','-c','5','-i','0.2',cmd[2]])
    outsplit=output.split('\n')
    outparts=outsplit[-3:-1]
    for part in outparts:
     outstuff+='PRIVMSG %s :%s\n' %(channel,part) 

   if cmd[1]=='6':

    output=syscmd(['ping6','-c','5','-i','0.2',cmd[2]])
    outsplit=output.split('\n')
    outparts=outsplit[-3:-1]
    for part in outparts:
     outstuff+='PRIVMSG %s :%s\n' %(channel,part)
  return(outstuff)
  else:
   return('PRIVMSG %s :Error: protocol must be either 4 or 6' %channel)

def help_ping():
 return('PRIVMSG %s :Pings an internet address. Usage: ping (4|6) <address>.' %(channel))

A plugin’s register() function is called when the plugin is loaded. It can use registerfunction(), addlistener(), and addhelp(). You can use each function as many times as you want, in case you have multiple functions and/or listeners, or if you want to include help with your plugin.

Read more to find out how to use the new plugin features.

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First of all, while I figure out how to have a system for hosting modules, I will put modules in mattventura.net/mvpybot/modules. Secondly, a bug tracking system is being set up.

Lastly, I will be improving the plugin system, and I will try to make older plugins backwards-compatible, but the new system will make the plugin system more efficient. Instead of always having to scan for functions in plugins whenever a certain command is called, all function plugins will register in a list of plugins upon being loaded. This has the advantage of also allowing plugin authors to specify what functions are actual functions for the bot to use.

I just did another major update to MVpybot. Listeners have been implemented. A listener is a function that gets called whenever the bot receives data, or it can be set to only be called when a certain type (privmsg, join, part, etc) is received. As usual, the source is at the SVN repo.

Now for the technical stuff. A listener is just a python file in the listeners folder, with functions defined in it. A function’s name should be botfunction_type, where type is the type of message to listen for (privmsg, join, part, etc) or it can be ‘any’ for all data received by the bot. Here is an example logger function:

#!/usr/bin/python

import time

enabled=1

logfile=open('log','a')
timestamp=time.strftime('[ Session starting at %y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S ]')
logfile.write(timestamp+'\n')
logfile.close()

def botfunction_any():
 logfile=open('log','a')
 timestamp=time.strftime('[%y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] ')
 logfile.write(timestamp+line+'\n')
 logfile.close()

As you can see from the example, plugins can be quickly enabled or disabled by toggling the ‘enabled’ flag. Also, ‘line’ is passed to the plugin. Not that anything outside of function definitions will be run when the bot starts.

Listeners can use the ‘socket’ variable to send data to the server, as shown in this example:

#!/usr/bin/python

enabled=0

def botfunction_privmsg():
 print "called"
 out="PRIVMSG %s :Botfunction_privmsg called" %(channel)
 print out
 socket.send(out+'\n')

Note that in the example, it uses botfunction_privmsg. To make listeners easier to write, the main program will automatically figure out these variables from privmsgs and pass them to the function:

info         #user info
msg          #the message
channel      #the channel the message was from (set to the sender for private messages)
sender       #the sender of the message
senderstuff  #info of the sender
isprivate    #whether or not the message was a private message as opposed to a channel message.

This only applies to privmsgs. All other events only get ‘socket’ and ‘line’ passed and have to figure out everything from ‘line’

That’s all for now.