Another Wireless hot spot provider touches down in the UK. Surf and Sip Locations Found has 31 locations currently in the UK with lots more coming. And £5 for 24 hours for casual use. [from: JB Wifi]

Latest issue of Get Your War On is out. As usual they totally nail it.

>Sorry. I've been ranting. I didn't even ask how you're doing. Is your brother-in-law over there yet?

>He left last week. My sister is totally freaking out. I'm like "What - you don't want your husband engaged in small-arms combat on the streets of Baghdad?" she said "What - You think there are gonna be any streets there by the time we touch down?"

>Wait a minute - where will the kids play if there aren't any streets?

March on Saturday. Just be there.

You know how on the internet there's just never enough interesting new stuff to read? well this page should solve that problem.

Technorati: Top 100 Interesting Newcomers : Ranked by proportion of new links from blogs in the last 24 hours

Basically it's a list of weblogs tracked by Technorati where the number of blogs that link to them has rapidly increased. That's quite a good indication that the blogs are interesting and worth reading.

One side of Ecademy I'd really like to improve is to increase the number of sites that link to us. If you can help this in any way because you run a website or have influence over someone who does, please link to Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

You're license fee at work. BBC NEWS | Talking Point | Taken a good picture lately? The BBC is asking for digital photos or pictures from cellphone cameras to be sent in and they'll publish the best ones each Friday. They specifically ask Are you going to the march against military action in Iraq?.

I can smell Matt (BlackBeltJones) Jones' influence in this one. It's a brilliant move in turning your readers into content providers. [from: JB Ecademy]

I need some help with style sheets. Are there any experts out there? Two problems:-

1) I'm trying to do the classic Slashdot style page with no tables, basically replcating the current Ecademy page. There's a one column header area, then a three column main area, then a one column footer area. I can get the first two to play ball, but I can't find the combination of absolute/relative positioning, margins, borders, top, left, right etc to get the footer area to float below the longest of the three middle columns.

2) I've got quite a few places where I need a block of text aligned left and another block of text aligned right but with both aligned top. This is trivial with tables, but I can't see how to do it via CSS.

Any ideas? [from: JB Ecademy]

Guy Kewney exposes 802.11g's tan lines: The Register : If this standard is rescued, it will take time; and by the time it is sorted out, many dismayed buyers will find themselves with obsolete gear. The WiFi Alliance turned out to be helpless to intervene, and its credibility will be hard to re-establish.

Guy's pretty damning about the current chaos surrounding 802.11g. He makes some good points, but I prefer to think of this like the time in modem development when there were several competing and incompatible 56K modem standards. We got through that one and I don't see why we can't get through this one. But the manufacturers, yet again, need to be persuaded of the advantages to everyone of compatibility and inter-operation. It's worse this time because there are huge economic pressures to ship product. Not least because cheap 802.11g products will significantly hurt sales of 802.11b devices. The result is on the fly debugging of the firmware as the manufacturers try to at least make their product work correctly to the draft standard.

But providing they do in fact work to the draft standard I'm not sure there's actually a problem. The IEEE can just rubber stamp the draft and we can move on.
[from: JB Wifi]

The next "Stop the war" march in London is on Feb 15. Details here.

Now I don't want to get in to a huge debate about whether the proposed military action in Iraq is correct or not. But I'm sure there are people here who feel that War is not the best course of action in this case. If you do feel like this, then make the effort and add your presence to the protest.

Don't be concerned about being linked with the far left or radical Muslim groups. Even though the media will undoubtedly spin the coverage to make it look like the protest is purely from these groups, the reality will be that there will be many other reasonably well informed, moderate, and concerned people there from all walks of life. It doesn't matter what your reasons are, only that you turn up.

There have been some suggestions that if there is a war in Iraq this year, it will happen around Feb 18-19. This makes the timing and size of the march particularly important.

Let's make this march the biggest there's ever been. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Guardian | Revolution? It's all go on the western : Frustrated at the slow roll-out of broadband access, people all over the UK are clubbing together to do it for themselves in the hope of building a free network for all.

Detail about free WLAN network efforts in Kingsbridge, Cardiff, Loch Lomond along with consume.net [from: JB Wifi]

Here's the relevant part of the AUP.

user policy :

(h) in excess of "normal use" bandwidth limits set out in this section.

ntl: home's broadband and dial-up services are intended for normal recreational or educational use by individuals and families and our pricing and network architecture have been designed accordingly. Customers who use the services more heavily than a normal home user will reduce the performance of the network for other customers.

"Normal use" of the service is defined as up to 1 gigabyte downstream of data transfer daily (which equates to approximately 200 music tracks, 650 short videos, 10,000 pictures or around 100 large software programmes downloaded per day).

1 gigabyte per day download, even on NTL's 1Mb service is going to take some doing. I think you'd have to build an automated robot to suck files off Kazaa or something like that to break this. Interestingly, they don't propose any cap on upstream data transfer. So providing you don't break any copyrights, it seems to be entirely within the AUP to run a P2P file sharing node and have that max out your upstream connection continuously. of course if you did that, you can bet they would change the rules again.

The other bit that's worth noting is the restrictions on LAN and particularly Wireless WLAN.

The residential broadband internet service ("Broadband Services") is designed for connection to a single PC. If you connect more than one PC at any one time to the Broadband Service you agree that this shall be entirely at your own risk. ntl will not support your PC's, the network used, or their configuration and technical support shall remain limited to your Internet connection only.

You must not connect more than three (3) PC's to the Broadband Services at any one time.

You are permitted to use routers, and the connection of a dedicated hardware router or firewall shall not be considered a PC for the purposes of this section.

In connecting to the Broadband Service, you must only use a PC you own or lease, and you must not attempt to connect your PC to the Broadband Services from outside your home. This includes the use of wireless or non-wireless networking technology to connect your PC or any other PC to your Broadband Services from outside your home or the connection of your PC to anyone else's Broadband Services.

So your allowed to have a WLAN. But you're only allowed to use it with your computers within your home's boundary. So no sitting in the car in the road then! Clearly this is designed to stop you sharing with your neighbours. And clearly it's also completely unenforcable. So should you do this, ahem!, you'd be well advised to keep quiet about it. They don't say anything about putting appropriate controls in place to ensure that you don't inadvertently break the AUP, but I guess you'd be sensible to at least use WEP.
[from: JB Ecademy]

Are you a power networker?
Have you filled in your fifty words?

Then you can find people like you!

This does a full text match of your fifty words on the fifty words and profile notes from everyone else and then orders the results according to how many matches there are. [from: JB Ecademy]

Check it out. Where is Raed ? is a blog from ground zero in Baghdad. Iraq doesn't seem so far away now, right? [from: JB Ecademy]

Early days and a bit thin, but here's a web site Kingsbridge Link - Community Mesh Network about a 5 node mesh being built with Locustworld's technology. [from: JB Wifi]

In my continuing quest to wean myself off Internet Explorer, I've gone back and looked at the bookmarklets I was using for posting to Ecademy Weblogs. Just a reminder, load this registry hack and you get an extra right click entry. Just highlight some text on a web age you're viewing, right click, choose "Ecademy Blogit!" And a new window opens up with the Ecademy blog entry screen. The URL, Title and you're highlighted text are already entered waiting for you to add some pithy wisdom for us all.

I've now got a set of bookmarklets as an alternative. Just drag these to your "Links" toolbar and they do the same thing. Highlight some text, click on the link in the toolbar and the same thing happens. Cool, huh?

IE Bookmarklets
Ecademy: Blog It
Wifi Ecademy: Blog It

Mozilla-Phoenix Bookmarklets
Ecademy: Blog It
Wifi Ecademy: Blog It

Notice that I've also got a second set for Mozilla and Phoenix. If you've got the time I'd recommend taking a look at these two as I reckon they are now realistic alternatives to IE.

The other project I've been messing around with is the buttons above the textarea data entry on Ecademy. These provide a very lightweight way of entering html. I'd been stuck using an IE specific way of doing this which also meant that I had to keep using IE as I spend so much time in Ecademy text data entry. I finally worked out how to do this with Mozilla as well and in the process improved the way IE works. There's a test rig and source code for this here. You should note that this depends on a bug fix for Mozilla that went in Jan 8 and hasn't made it through into the mainstream builds yet so if you want to take advantage of it right now you'll need to install a recent nightly build.

Let me know if you like, dislike or improve these. [from: JB Ecademy]

BT Wholesale is about to roll out an SDSL service. This gives up to 2Mbps both up and down over copper telephone wires.

"Two lists of the exchanges involved in each rollout can be seen in our Announcements forum, March 2003 and April 2003."

I've been unable to find wholesale or retail prices for this. Anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent Analysis: SQL Slammer

Here's a few Q&A

This infects corporate servers running SQL Server 2000
Most victims were infected through MSDE 2000, a lightweight version of SQL Server installed as part of many applications from Microsoft (e.g. Viseo) as well as 3rd parties.

"Companies need to take applying patches against new security threats seriously" - Graham Cluley, Expert at anti-virus company Sophos
How seriously? Making sure that 99.9% of all patches are applied? That's what they are doing already.
...
The main problem here is not patches but hardening. Port 1434 was unnecessary to almost everyone. When application vendors embedded MSDE, why didn't they close down port 1434? Most importantly, my FIRST and LAST step in hardening a system is looking at ‘netstat' and closing down ports I don't need. My personal website http://www.robertgraham.com/ has been running on an unpatched Windows system for 5 years with no problems. I don't need to bother patching it because I have hardened it. Patches solve the "known" vulnerabilities, hardening solves the vulnerabilities that are there, but haven't been discovered yet.
[from: JB Ecademy]

BT Wholesale is about to roll out an SDSL service. This gives up to 2Mbps both up and down over copper telephone wires.

"Two lists of the exchanges involved in each rollout can be seen in our Announcements forum, March 2003 and April 2003."

I've been unable to find wholesale or retail prices for this. Anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Amazingly complete in 15 pages. 802.11g NTK - Part 1 : Small Net Builder : Real Help for Your Small Network from Tim Higgins [from: JB Wifi]

Announcements of lots of hotspots in Ireland including ElectricNews.net:News:Dublin museum launches free hotspot Also,

The intensity of the race among Ireland's telcos for public Wi-Fi dominance is evident. On Tuesday, O2 Ireland said that it had signed up 12 locations for its Wireless Zone paid Wi-Fi service. Esat BT will also make its first foray into the market at the end of February with a hotspot in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, as part of the BT Openzone network. The company is also rolling out a WLAN in the Imperial Hotel in Cork.

Meanwhile, BT Northern Ireland has switched on Northern Ireland's first public WLAN with the launch of a network in the Europa Hotel in Belfast, as well as in three other Hastings Group hotels in the region.

[from: JB Wifi]

Is VoIP (Voice over IP) the killer app for broadband? What will it take to encourage people to routinely use their broadband connection for phone calls rather than the phone?

This was prompted by seeing a bunch of articles recently in this area. In the USA, Vonage partnering wth Earthlink and one of the baby bells. Work on SIP to provide you with a single "phone number" for your VoIP connection regardless of location. Rumours of stunning growth (67% per qtr!) in Japan for Yahoo Broadband when they started bundling a VoIP service with their DSL offering. Another unsubstantiated rumour that 10% of all international calls are now via the internet (really? That sounds really high).

I can see this tipping into mass adoption really fast once a small set of problems are overcome.
- It's got to be really transparent so you don't need to think too much about what's happening technically
- We have to solve all the problems of getting voice through NAT firewalls. this is all just too hard at the moment.
- We need something that looks, feels and works just like a phone but attaches either to the PC or directly to ethernet. And at the same sort of price as a dumb phone is now.

It's time for another of my time questions. How long will it be before 10% of all fixed line phone conversations involve VoIP at one or other of the end points? 1-2-5-10-20 years? [from: JB Ecademy]

blogging ecosystem lists the top 500 blogs in terms of who links to them. In parallel with this, the top 500 blogs in terms of number of people they link to. Then we have a new system on Technorati. A list of the top 100 interesting blogs in terms of new links to them in the last 24 hours.

I'm constantly in awe of just how much stuff there is out on the Net. [from: JB Ecademy]