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In the late 1980s, Dartmouth College was the most wired campus on the planet, running 10Mb Ethernet into every dorm room. Today, Dartmouth is the most unwired campus on the planet, with 560 access points covering 200 acres. At a recent conference here, Larry Levine, the head of computing services, challenged attendees to find a single spot on campus and surrounding areas that did not have 802.11 coverage. Even the boathouse, adjacent sections of the Connecticut river, the ski lodge, and sections of the ski slope are covered!Read on for more...
If you wanted to know where wired communications were headed in the late 1980s, all you had to do was go to the Dartmouth campus and look at their homegrown email application, Blitzmail. As any regular user of Blitzmail will tell you, it included a server-side address book and remote private and public folders before almost any other email application. Watching a regular user of Blitzmail, you could have predicted the rise of LDAP, IMAP, and most importantly Instant Messenger - Blitzmail was so fast and so ubiquitous, that people used it for IM-style back-and-forth conversations long before IM became popular in the larger environment.
At the conference, I looked for similar insights regarding wireless networks on the Dartmouth Campus. A few observations:
Apparently at least some camera phones can tag jpeg pictures with GPS coordinates.
Web search powerhouse Google has contacted investment banks about an initial public offering (IPO) that could value the company in the range of $15 billion and $25 billion, according to separate reports in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.
Many observers believe a Google IPO, which has been the subject of rampant speculation in recent months, would be the most valuable public offering since the heady days of the dot-com era.
One report said the company was considering an open online auction to "acknowledge the millions of users who have turned the closely held concern into a cultural icon." However, final decisions on a number of matters have not yet been made.
The network in the office is down. Seems like the router went south, although it's hard to be 100% sure of this without a known working router to swap in. So off to the store I go. If the prices are close I'll pick up a wireless model and start my grand building unwiring plan. I'm sure this will all go without a hitch... <cue menacing music>
The NY Times has a nice preview review of Mac OS X 10.3 (a.k.a. Panther) which is due out tomorrow night.
New mobile phone from LG Electronics. On sale in Korea by the end of the year. No word on a U.S. release, but the specs are interesting enough to note. 1.1 megapixel camera, 192MB memory, 2.8 inch 262,000 color TFT LCD, USB, IrDA, and a nice looking design to boot. Runs Microsoft's Pocket PC OS.
Two issues: where's the bluetooth? And when is someone going to put jpeg compression software into these camera phones? To belabor this point yet again: I want to take high res pictures with my camera phone, but I want to download them over USB to my computer at my leisure. When I'm in the field I want the phone to make a second, reduced size image, suitable for sending over slow cellular data connections. Come on! That should be easy. One click produces a full size 1 meg image, and a user defined scaled down image (say 100k.)
Apple has quietly updated it's iBook line from G3 to G4 processors at 800 mhz., 933 mhz., and 1 Ghz. Also added an option for 802.11g. Everything else stays pretty much the same, including the price.
Number of spam emails I have received in the last month with the word 'vicodin' spelled correctly in the subject line: 106.
Kevin Werbach's positive comments after two days with a Treo 600.
Joel on Software explains Unicode and character sets. There is something about his tone that usually turns me off (probably it's that he knows more than I do!) but he also writes some really informative articles. I've been wanting someone to explain this whole mess, and he has done a great job. Thanks!
Sort of geeky programmer stuff, but might be interesting to others as well. How exactly is text stored in a computer?
But still, most people just pretended that a byte was a character and a character was 8 bits and as long as you never moved a string from one computer to another, or spoke more than one language, it would sort of always work. But of course, as soon as the Internet happened, it became quite commonplace to move strings from one computer to another, and the whole mess came tumbling down. Luckily, Unicode had been invented....His insistence that "There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text" is a real mind blower. I mean, of course, but it had never really sunk in before.
Unicode was a brave effort to create a single character set that included every reasonable writing system on the planet and some make-believe ones like Klingon, too.