So many sites look like utter crud on my Blackberry.
How have I not seen the Google Wireless Transcoder, which can take a site and strip it down to hopefully be readable.
It isn’t perfect, as people can do a lot of bad HTML coding, but it does a much better job than my Blackberry does itself for many sites out there.
When you are at a conference it is often really tough to have a smooth ride wrt wireless.
One of the key factors in my experience has been, that top notch stable networks are:
Sponsored by Nortel (or Linksys, or insert other company)
rather than:
Sponsored by [A non networking company]
James Duncun Davidson was talking about the challenges of setting up a conference WiFi setup.
There are issues such as how multicast on a WiFi network becomes N unicast messages. DHCP itself is multicast, so you can easily get into network storms if you are unlucky. You probably shouldn’t give leases for 2 years out to the nodes either…
Also, 802.11b screws up things, so a lot of places try to have two seperate networks for b and g.
Interesting challenges. WiFi is the #1 thing I look for at a conference (I don’t care about the food, or the back-pack!). Hopefully next TSSS will have a less frustrating situation ;)
Lufthanza is offering wireless internet on their planes. I am sure others will follow.
This gets me more excited about flying across the pond than before. Mainly, because I can get online and waste the hours away.
Also, I can combine this with the box that you can plug your TiVo into which broadcasts it online.
Now, I can be sitting at 30k feet, watching my TiVo. That is cool :)
NOTE: there is a primer on the new TiVo To Go setup in TiVo 7.1
CP talks about the problem finding power for your laptop, not wireless.
Slashdot reported on this and it is spot on.
This was particularly telling for me when I was in europe. I didn’t have all of the power adapters that I should so I had to chain them together at one point. For example:
US plug -> US/UK adapter -> UK/Euro adapter
One of the adapters was so bad that I had to wrig up something so it kinda tied itself to the plug, and wouldn’t just fall off when I plugged in my iPod charger. What a pallava!
I even have one of the iGo systems which lets you interchange ends.
Back to power for mobile. I thought I read somewhere a year about, that companies are working on wireless power. How cool would that be :)
My wife wants to have a daughter. I would love a son.
However it has been proclaimed that you can predict the sex of your child based on computer usage:
Men who use Apple iBooks/Powerbooks with wireless cards have a very high probability [>85%] of having female offspring that is far greater than the statistical average.
I am trying to do the math based on the fact that I only use Perl a little now, and use both PC and Mac.
(Really, we would be happy with anything)
Time to drive up to Breckenridge…. 2 hours
Price for a condo in the mountains…. $200/night
Beer for the party with friends…. $100
Steeling wireless and working on the deck with the lake/mountain view…. priceless
I found a link to a new type of Wireless router… the NetGear WGT634U Wireless Media Router. Now you have a 801.11b/g 108mbps router, with a port to plugin a USB device.
I was just about to get a nice USB hard drive, as they are getting cheaper and the storage space is massive. Now I can plug it into a wireless device such as the NetGear, and I don’t need a file server!
In addition, the integration of a USB 2.0-compliant interface makes the WGT634U the industry’s first home networking product to enable the connection of an external storage device, such as a high-capacity disk drive or other USB memory device, for centralized network backup or storage and sharing of files and multimedia content.
Links:
I have used EZ Goal Wi-Fi Hotspots in the past to find a wi-fi location nearby.
Now Google is in the act, and you can query via the new “Search by Location” service that is in beta in the Google labs.
James Duncan Davidson talks about running into a wireless network at a DoubleTree (which is a Hilton chain).
They are putting in wireless networks in every Hilton. When I talked to someone at a DoubleTree in Cambridge,MA, they told me that they hadn’t worked out the “how to charge” people yet (don’t know why it is hard…), so for now it is free!
So if you are in a Hilton (or sub-hilton chain), find the hhonors SSID :)
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I am honoured to be working with my long time friend and collaborator Ben Galbraith on helping to set the direction of the industry.