Here are some words as I try and type without making any typing errors. [from: JB Ecademy]

News - Wireless Internet startup to bring up to 30,000 "hot spots" to UK this year. Guy Kewney writes.

Next Monday, a thunderbolt will hit the British wireless Internet world, as Inspired Broadcast launches a "pubs and clubs" chain of WiFi hotspots in three thousand different locations, with the possibility of seeing this rise to 30,000 locations before the end of the year.
...

And what are we to make of this?

To the customer, these access points will almost certainly look like BT OpenZone, or Megabeam, or other big, commercial operations - and if you have an OpenZone account, you should be able to connect to these hotspots exactly as normal.

The full announcement is due next monday. [from: JB Wifi]

I'd like to see Google introduce a simple API so that my website (or Ecademy) could ping Google and say "I've changed. Please index me." I'd like to see this API be open, documented and implemented by all the other search engines and aggregators as well. In fact they could do worse than just copy the weblogs.com and blo.gs API. [from: JB Ecademy]

Has anyone succeeded in finding an alternate Windows client manager for Buffalo NICs like the LIIG and LIIGP? These cards are effectively cheap clones of the Orinoco cards but the client manager sucks.

There's been some talk over the years around netstumbler about using frigged Orinoco drivers with Buffalo kit to get netstumbler working. This is no longer necessary as the latest drivers and netstumbler release work fine together with one exception. Netstumbler doesn't seem to put the card into scan mode so you sometimes need to use the CM to do one scan, after which everything works. Anyway, when I tried messing with frigged drivers a while ago, I never persuaded the Orinoco CM to work. No matter what I tried, it always came back with some obscure Control panel .cpl error.

This issue came to a head for me yesterday. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in London with free WiFi. Netstumbler could see the AP, the CM gave me a series of confusing messages ending up with "no AP found". No matter what I did, the CM didn't show the AP in a list or appear to manage the DHCP process correctly. Meanwhile there's messages in the status bar saying 11Mbps, 85%. So I fired up a web browser to discover that the drivers had in fact found the network, got a DHCP address and associated. So in a nutshell, the CM just plain didn't do it's work. Now I can cope with this and hack my way round it, but it's not exactly consumer friendly.

This may or may not be relevant, but the Starbucks T-Mobile AP was a Cisco. I've previously had trouble finding and connecting to another set of Cisco kit in a public area, this time with WEP. In this case, the Buffalo code just plain couldn't see the AP at all.

Now I'm griping about one manufacturer's code. But reading between the lines here the whole industry is like this. Numerous point releases of drivers and apps that are all flaky to some degree or another. Not so very long ago, ethernet and dial up modems used to be like this. Graphics cards still are. It's about time some third party utility software appeared. So who's going to write the "Norton Utilities" Client Manager for common WiFi NICs? [from: JB Wifi]

Thoughtful and relatively complete analysis 2003 And Beyond It's relatively complete but with a pronounced Microsoft flavour. If you want an overview of the state of technology as of 2003 and particularly for SMEs, then read this. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm taking my own medicine and posting this from a public hotspot. It's the Starbucks in Farringdon road London. I haven't seen any promotional literature anywhere or any sign that they've got Internet access here. The signal at street level was pretty poor but downstairs in the basement, I'm getting full speed access.

When I first used the web, I got redirected to a TMobile page that asked for name and email address. After a 30 second wait, I've been enabled and am using the web with no problems. Email also seems to be working. DHCP gave me a 10.0.0.180 address with DNS on the DHCP server at 192.168.255.1 and a name of jblaptop.int.aptilo.com

My email is coming through with SSL (you should always do this on a public WLAN to avoid exposing passwords) so quite a lot of ports seem to be open. SSH and SFTP are also working.

The service is currently free so I guess that's it. It just worked. ZDNet are showing 4 sites in the city and one in Wardour st.
The Official site only shows 2 in the UK and not including this one.

A quick run of a speed tester shows

Downstream 928 Kbps (116.0 KB/sec) 1002 Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream 245 Kbps (30.6 KB/sec) 264 Kbps (inc. overheads)

Pretty damn good. [from: JB Wifi]

I'm looking for websites that cover the broadband industry (ADSL, Cable and fibre) in the UK and have a free RSS syndication feed. These might be magazines, community news sites, weblogs, free news aggregators or whatever. If there's no RSS feed they'll go in a list, but what I really want is the RSS.

Can anyone recommend any? [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a big conference going on about spectrum allocation in the USA. Weblogs covering it include: Scott Mace, Kevin Werbach, Cory Doctorow, Dan Gillmor, Lisa Rein, Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey, Smart Mobs.

Boing Boing has got some good coverage of several of the talks. Especially the discussions and presentations on community wireless. [from: JB Wifi]

Does anyone fancy doing a bit of mystery shopping of the various UK hotspot providers? All you need to do is this:-

- Visit a UK Hotspot, whether commercial, not for profit or free
- Try and use the service
- Write a short piece about your experience
- Ideally add a couple of photos of whatever promotional material you find at the site
- Post it as a blog on the Ecademy WiFi SIG. [from: JB Wifi]

Press Releases Details - NETGEAR : NETGEAR and Atheros to Deliver Dual-Band Tri-Mode 802.11a/b/g Wireless Networking Solutions

Is this the first A, B, G card and AP on the market? Scheduled ship date is March 2003. Note that there's no pricing in the press release. [from: JB Wifi]

Gguy Kewney's got details about the Harrogate seminar on mesh wireless. Locustworld are expecting to show their Meshbox in action. [from: JB Wifi]

I couldn't help but laugh at this graph on Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log : with this note. The I.Q of too many cellular marketing executives continues to be two standard deviations to the left of the middle of the bell shaped curve.



How many other industries could we apply this to? [from: JB Wifi]

Web-User : Internet Exchange, the European internet café chain, has rolled-out a number [30] of WiFi hotspots across the UK and claims to offer access at a quarter of the cost of BT. It costs £5 for 24 hours unlimited access [from: JB Wifi]

80211 Planet has a lengthy review Looking Inside the MeshBox of Locustworld's Meshbox. It consist almost entirely of quotes from analysts and Wayne Kawamoto has done a great job of collecting comments from all the major analyst houses. It would be very easy for me to be extremely cynical about their comments but why not read it for yourself and make your own mind up. [from: JB Wifi]

The Node DB database of hotspots now includes commercial hotspots as well as community ones. The Wireless Node Database Project If you provide a hotspot whether commercial, non-profit or amateur make sure you add it to the database.

Here's the map for central London. [from: JB Wifi]

Dave Writes: "Sergey Brin from Google asked if there was a way to tap into the flow of changes on weblogs.com. There is. Lots of cool stuff has been built on changes.xml. It's updated every minute of every day. Then and now, competitor or not, it would be an honor to help Google find the newly changed weblogs"

There's a big thought in here but it's not necessarily the one Dave is considering. What if Google ran weblogs.com? What if they provided a SOAP, XML-RPC and CGI service that allowed websites to tell them "I've just updated, please index me" How fast do you think we'd all run to that and ping Google as well as weblogs.com? A start for this is clearly to route all blogger updates through to the indexing engine as I've previously suggested. But why not involve everyone in helping. And not just bloggers but all the news sites that update frequently as well.

The other side of this is to then make all that aggregated data available in the style of weblogs.com, technorati, blo.gs, Blogdex, Daypop. And it should be available as structured but raw data so that new services like these can grow up as people come up with new ways of exploiting it.

Which in turn is related to something I would love to see from Google, RSS formatted output from their search, news search and product search systems. [from: JB Ecademy]

US and Britain pound Iraqi defences in massive escalation of airstrikes

Let's not kid ourselves any more. Regardless of the UN inspectors process, the lack of UN agreement, dissent by western governments, dissent from the people, the lack of debate or anything else, we're already at war with Iraq. Now you can argue that previous UN resolutions allow the use of weapons to enforce the no fly zones. Or you can look at the results. But you can't avoid the fact that the USA has already started. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a wonderful thread running at
YayHooray! Lite - General - ready.gov where people are adding captions and alterations to a set of US Gov graphics that are part of a guide to coping with Condition Red alerts and terrorist attacks. I particularly like this one.

Government Guide to Internet Acronyms:

R.O.F.L [from: JB Ecademy]

We are beginning to see more and more instances of the web and web techniques being applied to direct political action and hence democracy. This ranges from things like Faxyourmp to the Anti-War march organization.

Here's an attempt to re-write the Cluetrain Manifesto in a political context rather than a corporate one.

Networked democracies are beginning to self-organize faster than the politicians, companies, and clued-in marketing hacks that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, democracies are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business and political organizations.

The Doc has added to this and suggests replacing:-

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

with:-

We are not interest groups or polls or trends or parties. We are citizens and our votes exceed your cynicism. Deal with it.
[from: JB Ecademy]

News: Intel makes a mesh of wireless networks

So here's Intel talking about mesh networks in the laboratory and some brave new futures. meanwhile Locustworld are doing mesh networking now using nothing more complicated than a PC, WiFi card and a customised Linux distro. [from: JB Wifi]