Taking Fiji Head On - Snorkelling and Playing Chicken

All the islands of Fiji have a collective population just below 1 million, this makes for a rather scenic and empty country in spite of its small size.

Day 1 was more like night 1, we arrived exhausted at 4pm. Had dinner on the beach at First landing resort in Vuda point. Next door is a Marina owned by a famous surfer. The Fijian apparently first arrived here and they have built something akin to a foot with sand to mark this.

Day2 was Sunday and everything seems to be closed. We borrowed a car and went off to play chicken ... Er for a drive down the Queen's Highway towards Suva. The highway goes all around the island, but is unfinished in some of the north-east. Fiji seems like sugarcane island from the highway. We strolled around the relatively new Intercontinental in Natadola, rode around in horses and dashed off to Sigatoka. Making a run to Suva seemed pointless at the end of the day, with deteriorating light and people tailgating and overtaking at 110km/h inspite of national speed limit being 80km/h. Finally dinner was at the steak house in Denarau, while checking out the boats which take people out on cruises to the smaller islands.

Day3 we hopped onto a refurbished english tall ship with Captain Cook Cruises. We were back after a remarkable day of snorkelling, shouting at a snake (possibly tiger snake) and the first Kava ceremony for the tour. Dinner again at a Fijian restaurant at Denarau.

Day4 was another trip back to Sigatoka and a bumpy ride upriver to Cannibal caves. We rafted across a very shallow river, silted up and prone to flooding. Water comes upto the waist if you walk in it. We were guided by a member of the Fijian cricket team into a limestone cave featuring a natural cannibal oven.

Day5 went past before we noticed, most of it was spent in the pool and the aeroplane. That's what happens when you plan holidays 1 day before hopping on a flight.

Introducing the Dog to the world - Prolink PHS101 modem on BeagleBoard

I seem to have sprouted an impromptu holiday to Fiji. So tonight ended up a rush in completing my papers for IGARSS 2010 in Hawaii. Time has passed so very fast. Some of my colleagues who started their PhD at the same time as me have written 1/3 of their thesis already. I in my turn have been distracted by life and side projects, but overall the extra curricular activities have made my PhD life much much more interesting.

While copy pasting content from my original draft into the conference template I decided to have another look at the tricky dual-device USB based 3G modems. The Prolink PHS101 is plugged into the BeagleBoard and appears as a pesky CD device on /dev/sr0, you can use mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr0 to access this device. The newer kernels fortunately and unfazed by this, using eject /dev/sr0 gets rid of the CD device and loads up the usbserial driver with the right vendor options to make it appear as 3 serial devices on USB. I did not have to use usb_modeswitch, though I managed to native-compile and install it on the beagle.

Only 1 of these 3 is a functional internet device. In Australia the wvdial.conf to make use of it looks something like:

Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
username = username
Password = password
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud =460800
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","vfinternet.au"

Then I hit another brick wall, there is apparently an issue with wvdial which prevents it from working on arm based platforms. Modem-Manager and NetworkManager can be tasked into filling the hole left by wvdial. A bit of snooping with AT commands and ModemManager shows up the Qualcomm heritage of the chipset.

root@beagleboard:~# microcom /dev/ttyUSB0
ATI
Manufacturer: QUALCOMM INCORPORATED
Model: C-180
Revision: 120016_062_001         1  [Feb 09 2010 23:45:26]
IMEI: 358093021714293
+GCAP: +CGSM,+DS,+ES
OK

 Wonder how soon I will be able to connect up using this.

PS: After finishing off my IGARSS papers I finally managed to get it going with  a melange of dbus,nm,mm and pppd. So this modem officially works on the BeagleBoard, hurray!!