The Ubiquity of Wireless

The school year at UT started on Wednesday. One of the manifestations of this is that the apartment complex is once again bustling (and parking spaces are once again hard to find). The new generation of students has settled in, and this year, they've come packing wireless

A year ago (a month ago!) it was occasionally a crap shoot as to whether or not I could find my own AirPort (since the earlier generations of PowerBooks were a little woefully underpowered in the antenna department). Last week, though I noticed something strange -- another 802.11b network, Savann0821. And today I noticed another one.

We live in the corner of our apartment complex, on the first floor. So one of these networks is in the apartment next to us, and one is in the apartment above us -- the range isn't far enough for them to be anywhere else. So of the possible apartments for me to find WiFi -- I've got 100% coverage. That's pretty impressive, if anecdotal, evidence of the penetration of this technology.

Unfortunately, I didn't find anyone else on iChat's dynamic Rendezvous buddy list when I tried joining the other networks. So we're still working on that Mac-head ubiquity.

11:27:12 PM  (comments [])   

Just picked up this, part 2. Haven't watched it yet; still halfway through re-watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is a damn fine series (my memory of it was tarnished because of how awful the last episode was, but damn, there's some fine stuff in the meat of the series -- looking forward to watching the actual real ending).  8:48:40 PM  (comments [])   

I feel very very good about the spam filter in Jaguar's new Mail.app. It seems to correctly classify nearly every piece of spam I get correctly -- and more importantly, it seems to also correctly recognize most of my non-spam. So I'm taking the plunge -- the e-mail address on this web page now points to my main IMAP mailbox, not to my Hotmail account. I've never been excited about Hotmail; I seem to get a lot of spam from them just by virtue of being signed up for Hotmail. It may well be that this doesn't increase the amount of spam to my main inbox, since most of it may just be directly shlepped into the Hotmail account in the first place.  8:43:01 PM  (comments [])   

Before		After

The flaws I'm trying to address in the old design include: no space for my chair to back up or turn; no easy access to the closet (the upper-right door); and a general profusion of crap everywhere.

The new desk will probably be this one, which is notable for having a keyboard tray that's almost as long as the desk itself, and for being on wheels. The ability to store two towers underneath will also be handy.

So now the main remaining piece of the puzzle is the new white box in the upper part of the "after" diagram, which will hopefully be some kind of rolling tray that I can put printers on to. And I may have to see if I can eliminate the wires between the desk and the printer tray while I'm at it.

I still have to figure out what do about the general profusion of crap -- the solution will probably be to mercilessly get rid of (or at least store) a bunch of it, and to get some extra display shelves for the rest (especially my fine, fine giant robot collection).  6:44:23 PM  (comments [])   

I think Rendezvous/ZeroConf is a supremely cool piece of technology.  6:31:11 PM  (comments [])   

Also, Netscape 7 also supports tabbed browsing, for those craving a less bleeding edge adventure than Mozilla.  2:54:33 PM  (comments [])