The Register : Wireless rural BB service names the day from WRBB

WRBB says it will have coverage within 10km of the main centres. 10Km is quite a way to go with 802.11 under ETSI power limits. Interesting. [from: JB Wifi]

Two events in the Linux world with 802.11g

- Linksys release source for the GPL bits of their WRT54G This is less significant than it looks as the really useful bits like the Broadcom drivers are binary and closed source. But it's still interesting that a major AP is linux based and this may well ope up possibilities for some interesting hacking.

- The first linux drivers for the Atheros A/B/G chip set have been released. At last the Linux world can start playing with 802.11g hardware. [from: JB Wifi]

Lots to mull over in The Lure of IP Telephony: Can it Work for Me? (book excerpt) Thanks Glenn.

[from: JB Wifi]

Dave's just noted that the RSS 2.0 spec seems to have disappeared from google. With all the noise about link and echo and stuff I'd been going to that page repeatedly. As I can never remember the url (and for some reason didn't bookmark it) I'd been using a Google search for RSS repeatedly. I too noticed a couple of days ago that it had disappeared. It's really bizzare. A search for "RSS 2.0" points to the old url not the current url. If you search for http://backend.userland.com/rss it finds it, so the page is still in the index.

I too am also concerned about Google's use of DMOZ descriptions on Google searches. I don't like it that a 3rd party provides the text for the entry in a search rather than the web page author.

While I'm on Google, I had the same thought about the Blogger button on the Google toolbar. I would have liked to have seen support for other blogging systems. but then I used it and realized that it really doesn't do much. It's not using the blogger API, it's just opening a window into the blogger edit. This is just like Manila Express or the many bookmarklets and IE menu hacks. So I'm really not sure how Google could have easily made it work with other systems.

Perhaps what we really need is a 3rd party toolbar that does the Google specific things that Google manage like displaying Pagerank. Then add in the Alexa specific things out of the Alexa toolbar. But to be honest most of this passes me by since I started using Mozilla Firebird all the time.

Uncle Dave wrote this not so long ago.theLizardBrainOfRss. Mark Pilgrim used this as a reason for leaving item.link out of his RSS 2.0 feed in favour of guid, saying "The RSS 2.0 spec introduces [guid] and clearly defines it as a way to express a permalink. The clarification of June 25th clearly deprecates [link] as a way to express a permalink, in favor of [guid]."

And yet I look at the Lizard Brain description and I see DW saying that the BBC, news.com feeds are using link correctly, but Simon Willison isn't, when all three are putting a permalink into link. Then he says "link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context". Unfortunately the piece starts with "Now for the third -- should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that's what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else. "

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. I don't know what DW is trying to say and why it's still ambiguous. I don't understand why Mark Pilgrim is saying that this article is telling him to stop using link. I'm still looking at all this and thinking that if you have a permalink, you should put it in the link element. I do agree that adding guid is a good idea. And if the most convenient guid to use is the permalink then by all means put that in guid. As well as link.

But. But I'm still where I was. Almost every spec, almost every feed that has links and almost everything DW has said tells me that link should be filled, if you can, with a permalink.

If you don't have a permalink, then leave out link. If you absolutely must, then put the most important link embedded in the description into link. But don't put the permalink into guid and leave out link altogether.

Please don't mess with the CITLD core of RSS. It works. Why are we still arguing about this? And why is still ambiguous?

Now the only reason I'm posting this here is that Mark has turned off comments on that thread. I'd post it to syndication@yahoogroups.com but despite having >600 members, nobody ever replies any more. I'm feeling intense frustration about all this because it all seems so stupid.

So I'll just continue to do what everyone else does (put permalink into link) and try not to get too worked up about it.

BTW. I tried out RSS Reader for Firebird. It's quite neat though I don't particularly like the approach. The problem is that it only uses title and link. Predictably it fails miserably on Mark's feed. Mark would say it's broken because it doesn't properly support RSS 2.0. I would say his feed is broken because there are aggregators out there who only use CITLD, the old lizard brain.

Yet another way to waste time on the web BlogChatter - Realtime Weblog Aggregation Is a page or popup window that displays the latest updated weblogs in real time. [from: JB Ecademy]

MIT has started a project called Open Government Information Awareness. It's very roughly an IMDB for government in the USA. A huge (hopefully) repository for information about the government. Source code is going to be available.

NTK asked at the weekend for people to port it to the UK. Perhaps an unemployed Ecademy developer with time on their hands could pick this up? Between us all I'm sure we could find somewhere to host it.

[Edited to add] Here's the Boston Globe story on GIA. [from: JB Ecademy]

If you have an opinion about music sharing, copyright law, software patents, IPR and the like you really ought to read Premise: 10 Hard Questions For Intellectual Property Combatants. It's a good basis for discussion whichever side of the fence you sit on. [from: JB Ecademy]

BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis has a preview of AOL's upcoming Weblog system. It's due to go into beta in the summer and full release in the autumn.

Hmm. Google-Blogger vs AOL vs a bunch of independents vs home rolled code. I think blogging is just about to go mainstream. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register

What we have here is a WiFi show with presumably WiFi specialists attending. A Security firm has big banners everywhere telling people they're monitoring traffic. Despite all that,What they found was that users checking their e-mail through unencrypted POP connections vastly outnumbered those using a VPN or another encrypted tunnel.

What will it take to get ISPs and Corporates to routinely provide SSL email and SMTP with Auth, and for their customers and employees to use it?

Passive eavesdropping is undetectable, but AirDefense picked-up 149 active scans from war driving tools like Netstumbler, Hmm. So its ok for AirDefence to monitor and track all traffic, but it's not ok for attendees to use Netstumbler to see what APs are running? Especially when Netstumbler really doesn't do a great deal more than XP or the typical wifi card client manager?
[from: JB Wifi]

On Wed night Pierre Danon had a very strange take on WiFi on trains. I've thought for ages that this is an excellent location for all sorts of reasons. Being able to work in comfort and relative quiet on a long haul train journey or a long commute seems like a great idea that would encourage people to switch from cars or planes. Pierre's take was that people would use WiFi in the station to collect email, work on it while travelling and then send email via WiFi at the other end. huh? Now if he'd said "We see the need but getting bandwidth on a train is really hard" I'd understand. But suggesting that people don't want bandwidth on the train makes no sense to me. I'd like to see every first and business class seat have a power outlet and an ethernet jack.

Anyway, we're now beginning to see airlines work this out with satellite comms. We've seen this wek an announcement from India that they're working on bandwidth on trains. So my feeling is that this is inevitable. The real question is how?

So to any wireless engineers out there here's the challenge. How do you get broadband connectivity to a moving train reasonably reliably. Banks of 3G phones? High gain parabolas on signal boxes pointing up and down the track? Leaky coax? Gymboled sat dishes on the roof (what about tunnels)? [from: JB Wifi]

I had a question for Pierre when he announced the BT Hotspot-in-a-box that didn't get answered. The story is that all you need is the £400 box and an ADSL Broadband line and you can set up a hotspot with Openzone doing all the billing. But exactly what broadband do you need? Can I use my Home Openworld line which expressly forbids this in the AUP or do I have to take a business line which is twice the cost? Does the backhaul have to be via BT or can I use a more sharing-friendly and cheaper ISP?

Anyone got answers to this? [from: JB Wifi]

Tired and emotional? Mad as hell and not going to take it any more? Sick of spending 45 minutes on hold? Got a bad attack of the Victor Meldrews this morning?

Then you need Bitch about Stuff. An anonymous blog for bitching about stuff. [from: JB Ecademy]

Contribute to the The First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference - In case you were wondering, images are work safe [from: JB Ecademy]

Arrrrrrgg! Right that's got that out of the way.

There's some confusion about the proper use of Link in an item in an RSS feed. As a developer my approach to this is to look at a)the spec, b)examples and c)the market, ie what does everyone else do. So let's try that.

a)0.91 " A channel may contain any number of <item>s, each of which links to a story, with an optional description. <link> is the URL of the story. Maximum length is 500.". Looks like a permalink to me.

0.92. "Why? When a RSS file reflects the content of a weblog or "blog" site, the structure required by previous versions of RSS was often impossible to synthesize. For example, there is no actual limit on the number of links a weblog item can have." Oh dear. How can a weblog item have more than one link? Only if we're referring to links embedded in the description.

2.0 "link The URL of the item. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/movies/07FEST.html". Looks like a permalink to me.

1.0 "5.5.2 <link> The item's URL. " looks like a permalink to me

b)So how about the examples. 0.92 has no item links but in the other two every single example of link is a permalink. In the 1.0 example, every item link is a permalink.

c) So far so good with one exception. Looking at the marketplace, every single example feed I can find that has a link uses the link as the permalink. So regardless of what the specs say, the de facto standard is to use link for the permalink of the item. I'm sure there's a counter example out there somewhere, but I can't find it.

So in all this I can only find two sources of confusion, the 0.92 spec and various comments from Dave Winer. And I find most of his comments on this subject to be ambiguous even when they're trying to clarify what was meant. What bugs me is that 0.92 spec. Everywhere else it seems completely clear that link should be the permalink where possible. But this comment on the reason for making link optional makes it seem as though that wasn't the intention at all. Given the overwhelming evidence, I'm forced to conclude that Dave is wrong and the rest of the world is right (on this point) which is problematic when he wrote three of the specs.

Back to Mark Pilgrim's latest stunt of leaving out link in favour of guid. I have to just quote Mark's words back to him. "LEAVE RSS ALONE!" The core of RSS, going all the way back to 0.91, is good enough. That means using item title, link and description where possible. Taking advantage of link being optional and instead using an element introduced much later in the form of guid is irritating at best and just smacks of being awkward to make a point. If this is making point to create discussion, well fair enough. But if this is what you think RSS feeds should look like then you're wrong, wrong, wrong.

LEAVE RSS ALONE!

The 3rd WorldWide WarDrive is happening right now. Is anyone in the UK participating? [from: JB Wifi]

Camera-phone dos and don'ts - Product Reviews - CNETAsia : DO seek consent before you take shots of strangers. The last thing you should do is to suddenly or stealthily sneak up and snap away.

Especially if you're dressed in drag in the opposite sex changing room at the end of a stag night...

"Look, I'm on the train!" Which reminds me, can you store photos for use later? Like, say, a shot of you in the office in the evening, for use when the other half doesn't believe you're not in the pub. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just discovered SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others. Well worth a read. I can particularly recommend Bob on Realizing the internet and We have Connectivity! There's plenty of truths in there for the Telcos and their relationship with the internet, customer and things like VoIP. [from: JB Ecademy]

O2 Plans UK WLAN

So that's another telco getting in on the hotspot market. mmO2 have had some success in Ireland so maybe they can make a go of it in the UK and Europe. "Central to O2's focus is providing business travellers and commuters with high-speed mobile data access and services across Europe via a range of wireless access technologies." I guess that will mean "business" prices as well.

Theres a story about this on The Register as well. [from: JB Wifi]

Keep an eye on this one. Kendra Initiative - Home - Content Delivery Research It appears to be a UK initiative to try to bring independent content (music, film etc) authors to customers in a way that allows money to pass between them. [from: JB Ecademy]