The Register : Wi-Fi in the real world - pt. 1 Wi-Fi Internet access may sound like the best thing since sliced bread, but does it yet make mobile working a reality? The Reg went wireless to find out. Here, Nico Macdonald checks out the UK capital's hotspot scene. Next week, we take a trip out of town.

Essential reading if you live or work in London and especially if you work for a WISP. [from: JB Wifi]

Here's a lazyweb request. Anyone up for a small Python project?

Merge Mark Pilgrim's Ultra Liberal RSS Feedparser with Bittorrent. Somebody with a flow of Torrents could then publish an RSS feed of new torrents using the enclosure tag. I'd subscribe to that feed and the system would download (and of course serve) the torrents to my machine in the background.

This was inspired by Disney who are doing something like this to serve large quantities (Gigs per day) of multimedia content to their corporate customers.

Does anyone use the bCentral Microsoft site for SMEs.

I only ask because of this article in El Reg. "British Chambers of Commerce urges gov to cut red tape. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) today promised to kick off a campaign of lobbying which it hopes will force Whitehall to cut the Government red tape tangle that is increasingly ensnaring Britain's small businesses. The BCC initiative forms the main plank of a three-year collaboration with Microsoft and also aims to boost IT skills and raise awareness of e-security issues. "

This is an admirable goal. I just question whether it should be tied into a single supplier like this. And this problem is rather larger than simply a question of IT.

BTW. Is anyone here involved with their local Chamber of Commerce? [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

There's a good weblog run by Steve Stroh on Wifi. We used to read the headlines into the WiFi TN as part of the Dailenews.

I discovered today that he's moved to Blogger as a weblogging platform. And the blog now only exports headlines in the new Atom format and not RSS.

This makes me really angry. We're just at the point where RSS is getting some real traction with sites like the BBC producing it when the standard fragments and we have competitors. This means that I now have to go and write more code to read and parse another standard. Or simply ignore it which is what I will probably do until I absolutely have to have some feed or other that's only available in Atom.

IMHO. Google as owners of Blogger and Blogger themselves are doing the internet community a major disservice by not supporting the de facto standard as well as the new one. "We're not evil" Yeah, right. [from: JB Ecademy]

Firebird is dead, long live Firefox.

Firefox 0.8 has just been released along with Thunderbird 0.5.

The download servers are being hammered right now so you'll probably want to wait a day or two before downloading it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Today I got a cheque from Google for Ads placed on my personal site. $45 for 7 months. Wow! I think I'll go and buy myself a CD.

AdSense is generating rather more money for Ecademy but it's not going to make anyone rich. I probably shouldn't encourage you to click through the Google ads, but if you see something interesting, don't hold back. [from: JB Ecademy]

Brits pay more for Wifi

Wi-Fi users in Europe are paying much higher rates than those in the US, according to a price-comparison web site, W-Fi Rates. And we pay more for our hardware too, with IBM Centrino laptops costing at least fifty percent more than in the US. Surprisingly, UK users can find themselves worse off than people in the rest of Europe.

The average hourly rate to use Wi-Fi at a hotspot in the US is $3.75, while in the UK it is £4.41, or nearly $8 (let's compare in US dollars, shall we?). US users can surf for a whole day for $7.70, while the average daily rate in the UK is £10.78 (or $19.37).

I guess £1 == $1 Bah! [from: JB Wifi]

I've just gone back and updated a couple of bookmarklets for blogging on Ecademy.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=4663

Surf round the web and when you see something you want to comment on and show other Ecademy members, click on the bookmark and it will cut and paste highlighted text, the title of the page and a link into the Ecademy blog entry form ready for you to add your pithy commentary.
[from: JB Ecademy]

broadband » News » Get More From Your Router - Tinkering with modified WRT54G firmware The main reason the author was playing with this was to get QoS bandwidth shaping for VoIP sessions. It worked! [from: JB Wifi]

Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog says "Upon Cleaning Out My In-box This Morning -- A passing thought...Who needs social nets when we've got friends of friends automatically delivered to our inboxes via email worms?"

Ah bless. Who can avoid being touched by the tragically absurd paradoxes of modern life?
[from: JB Ecademy]

Swisscom to connect UK Premier Lodge hotels They're aiming for 140 sites with 3 live this month.

Has anyone got the Travelodge franchise? This seems like a no-brainer to me as they get so much commercial traveller business. A quick search to find matches between Travelodge locations and nearest hotspot didn't turn up anything. [from: JB Wifi]

Rupert Goodwins talks about using the GNER Wifi train from London to Scotland and back. On the way up he has almost uninterrupted internet access, rigs up a webcam piinting out the window and at fellow passengers. On the way back signal failure means the wrong train, no Wifi and a 1 hour wait outside York "while the train in front of us is abducted by aliens from Doncaster."

Sounds about right. [from: JB Wifi]

We had some fairly strange explanations last night on TV as to what might happen today, but the gist of it seems to be true. Maybe there's actually no connection between the MyDoom virus, Denial of service attacks on sco.com and Microsoft, and poor network performance. But this morning I am seeing major packet loss on a whole range of networks. NTL-LINX-Globix-Ecademy looks particularly bad, but I'm also seeing drop outs on Level3 and a few other routes. Curiously the NTL web proxy servers seem to be holding up as the Ecademy website looks ok to me, but picking up my email is almost impossible as there are so many timeouts. MSN Messenger keeps dropping out or failing to connect.

Hey-ho. The Internet seems to be broken. If this is being caused by MyDoom, it's worse than people thought. [from: JB Ecademy]

As seen on Orkut.

Bad, bad server. No donut for you

We're sorry, but the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way.

Hopefully it will return to its usual helpful self if you give it another chance. If it still refuses to play nice, please send an email to help+errror@orkut.com and help us modify this poor behavior.

We apologize for the inconvenience and our server's lack of consideration for others.

I guess it is in Beta ;-)

As well as gnews2rss.php there's also

Perl

here --> http://googlenews.74d.com/files/getgoogle.pl

and in python

here --> http://www.muselog.net/download/googlenews.py

My current favourite radio station is Monkey Radio. What is Monkey Radio? Well, some call it "Trip-Hop." And some call it "Acid Jazz." Some call it "Downtempo" or "Abstrakt Beats." Now take the intersection of all these. Stir in groove. Dust with sexiness. Simmer. Voila.Serve chilled.

You can listen to it with the highly recommended Winamp 5 [from: JB Ecademy]

Number of WLAN APs in London trebles in a year But 1 in 4 are still unprotected by WEP or other security mechanisms. [from: JB Wifi]

833786 - Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks : Do not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them in the Address bar yourself.

Has it come to this? I kid you not. This is a genuine MS knowledge base article telling us not to click on hyperlinks. Come on guys, this is ridiculous.

This link is completely safe. It goes to the Mozilla Firebird project page. ;-)

Incidentally, Robert Scoble had a post asking what Microsoft should do with Internet Explorer. Most of the vast number of comments asked for standards support and specifically fixing all the CSS bugs. But my favourite solution was to rip out the rendering engine and replace it with Mozilla. I now it's a ludicrous suggestion but MS could do worse than just ship Firebird and Thunderbird. After all if you go all the way back IE was originally based on open source code so it's not as if they've never done it before. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Times today has a 2 page spread on Wifi. I'd give you a URL but I can't find it. [from: JB Wifi]

Here's a few use-cases to do with linking SNs and other sites.

1) Alice signs up to a new site. She tells the site to get her details from her Personal Identity Server URL(PIS). The site gets a profile file in XML(RDF) from the URL and populates a new user record. It also gets a list of "Friends" identified by a hashed email address. It looks for existing
users with the same hash and builds an initial network in the site for her
record.

2) Bob tells a site to use authentication from a managed Personal Identity Service he uses. It redirects to the PIS login form. This authenticates him and then redirects back to the site. Tokens (nonces) are passed back and forth, and Bob is now logged in on the site. He's going away for 2 weeks skiing so he logs out on
the PIS service and is automatically logged out of the 50 sites that use the service.

3) Carol uses an SN site for a while and builds up a big network and lots of profile data. The site passes the data back to her PIS where it updates her profile and merges with the standard data she maintains. So new data is mirrored and synced between her personal store and the SN site.

4) Dave posts entries on 25 sites at various times. His personal weblog picks up all these posts and presents them as an aggregate blog automatically with links back to the originals. this drives traffic in both directions and increases pagerank for all concerned.

5) SNorati, aggregates both FOAF and RSS data from multiple sources including synthetic data derived from posting habits on IRC, Usenet and mailing lists. It's building a searchable map of the most active networkers on the planet. Within weeks, it's aggregated 2 million identities growing at 100,000 per day and
accelerating. People say it's amazingly useful but so slow as to be unusable.

6) RateMyFoaf.com proves stupidly popular. It grows extremely rapidly before getting slashdotted and blogdexed resulting in a huge bandwidth bill for it's student owner.

7) Bill and Miriam create a Perl based Personal Identity Server that requires only FTP and CGI access called "Fixed Class". In parallel they set up a managed hosted version supported by subscriptions. Matt duplicates and extends the code using Python. phpPIS is started on Sourceforge. Fixed Class compatible code is built into Drupal to act as both a PIS Server and Client and gets implemented in Deanspace. phpBB and phpNuke quickly follow suit. Blogger and Livejournal announce support for the Fixed Class protocols. Ryze and Ecademy support it, while Tribes, LinkedIn, Friendster, Spoke, Plaxo, Orkut refuse to comment. A huge flame war breaks out when Andy, Simon and Matt start a Wiki to produce a pure XML version
that is incompatible. A consortium of companies including Intel, EDS and Ford produce a hugely complex industrial-strength version that only gets one customer and that's Amex.

Microsoft announces PSI.NET which is Passport compatible and available 1st qtr 2007. Early betas seem to have major security holes and the code requires Longhorn AS and Exchange 2005.

So.

Is this blowing in the wind? Is the problem actually annoying enough that developers will want to scratch this itch? Are the use-cases strong enough or is this just a non-problem?