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]

In the Ecademy Clubs, after one week we've got:-
- 80 clubs
- 52 Club Moderators
- 219 members
- 427 Forum messages

This is great, but it doesn't happen by itself. It's time to take another look and put a little more in to it. For instance:-

- The Regional clubs are getting a lot more interest for their meetings than for their clubs. One example, Bristol had more than 30 registrations but only 15 in their club. Did you register or go to the meeting? Well join the club then!

- 52 people run a club but the "Club for club moderators" only has 10 members. If you run a club, go and join up.

- 209 people voted in the recent poll on running your own weblog. 26% said they run their own so go and join the Bloggers club

- At least a few of you ride motorcycles. Join the Ecademy MCC.

And so on. But this is not just a plea to get people to join my clubs. ;) It's also a reminder that there are like minded Ecademists with all sorts of interests. The Clubs provide another route to find and get to know them. [from: JB Ecademy]

Take a look at Wildgrape NewsDesk. If you need to keep informed and you read a lot of sites on the web every day, you really need a news reader. There's plenty to choose from here. [from: JB Ecademy]

BigChampagne - Online Media Measurement is producing charts for the music people are sharing on all the big P2P networks. Notice that despite the complete lack of payola, chart rigging and radio playlist manipulation there's a very strong correlation between the online and offline charts. So whatever it is that music companies do, it seems to be working in terms of guiding public tastes. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pretty detailed analysis of the The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm : The Sapphire Worm was the fastest computer worm in history. As it began spreading throughout the Internet, it doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. It infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes.

Wow! [from: JB Ecademy]

Wonderfully detailed description of the trials and tribulations involved in getting a Wireless link over Bristol Harbour for an Art project involving actors at one end speaking lines dictated to them by IRC at the other end, videoed and then streamed back to the "controllers". Done and performed by the Easton Community Wireless Network (CLAN) project.

"Always test all cables and connectors before going on site. Nine times out of ten, it is these that are at fault if something does not work properly.".

I'll repeat that. It's always the connectors. [from: JB Wifi]

Ross Mayfield has some updated results from his work on Networks and links in the blog community This ties together Ryze Friends, FOAF and Blogs. It's still a fairly small sample of 180 but shows definite small world characteristics where the average distance between people is only two hops. [from: JB Ecademy]

If you're looking for an Open Source content management system, look at opensourceCMS. What an awesome, awesome site. They've installed a huge bunch of systems so that you can look around them and give them a test drive. [from: JB Ecademy]

BT Pitches WLAN vs 3G

BT have a press release out promoting their BT Openzone rollout. This deserves some praise for getting more coverage. But again, they are attempting to justify their prices by comparing it with 3G. Like many other commentators I have some problems with this. I think if you're going to compare prices you have to look at the market and why someone would pay them as much as any apparent similarities in the technology. If I'm stuck in London for an afternoon and want to do some work on the net, I can go to an Internet cafe, go to my club, use a BT Openzone, or find some free WiFi, or maybe use an internet kiosk. Similarly if I'm stuck in an airport, I could use the dial up connection in a lounge, or use Openzone. So perhaps the real comparison should be with places like EasyInternetCafe or an airport dial up charge.

Then there's the fact that 3G may have some announced pricing, but there's no actual service yet. And even if there was, there's a big conceptual difference between a wide area relatively slow service that is available almost everywhere and a local aea high speed service that is available in tightly defined hotspots. What we actually need is a subscription that covers both and uses the best that's available at any one time.

The best response goes to mmO2 in Ireland. Eu10 per month for unlimited usage of their proposed WiFi network. That's more like it. [from: JB Wifi]

FreeNetworks Conference (FN-CON) 2003 In Las Vegas June 6-8 and with all the usual suspects speaking and attending.

I would love to go to this, does anyone want to sponsor me for my flight and expenses? ;) [from: JB Wifi]

We're getting a burst of activity from people who want to meet up locally with other Ecademy members. I know I'm going to miss somebody out, but here's some of the things going on now.

Bristol
Dave Hodgkinson
Club
Next Event 30 Jan

Essex
Sunil Prabhu
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Midlands
Donato Esposito
Club
Next Event 11 Mar

Sussex Downs
David Rosam and Ben Davidson
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Glasgow
Andrew Poodle
Club

High Wycombe
Bruce Wallace
Club

East Midlands
Michael Handley

Some comments:

If you're in the area, please support these people. Join their clubs, attend the events and invite others to do the same.

If you're going to an event, invite some non-Ecademy people as well

If you'd like to see something happening near you, start a club, post a blog to advertise it and see what happens.
[from: JB Ecademy]

This just in.

Open Content public swarming download net launches Justin Chapaweske, who developed SwarmCast (a "swarming" parallel download tech) for OpenCola, has started a new company that's building on his work, called Onion Networks. Onion's tech turns the Slashdot effect into a cooperative effort, where everyone downloading a popular file becomes a host of part of the file, so that the more popular a file is, the easier it is to get. To show off Onion's stuff, he's started the Open Content network, which allows the whole world to put its popular, high-demand files into the mesh to make 'em easier to download. Link  [thanks, Boing Boing Blog]

My highlight. This is one of those technologies and approaches that Cory calls "Sheep shitting grass". And one aspect of this is that upstream bandwidth from your home PC ought to be just as important as downstream. [from: JB Ecademy]