This website IEEE Standards "Get IEEE 802"(TM): Wireless (IEEE 802.11) provides free versions of the IEEE standards documents on-line in PDF format.
I am often asked what is Wi-Fi? This webpage, the Frequently Asked Questions the Wi-Fi Alliance, answers this and other questions. Effectively Wi-Fi is a certification process for wirless networking products to ensure interoperability.
The TERENA task force on Mobility TERENA - TF-MOBILITY discusses the various schemes for allowing academics to roam within each others' institutions and use Wi-Fi access in each loaction. The Swiss model is based on re-routing between a predefined set of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Other solutions involve distributed authentication. Needless to say, this models may be equally appropriate for other constituencies who require Wi-Fi roaming.
There is now a large group of Wi-Fi hotspot operators who have a roaming agreement: Pass-One - roaming Wi-Fi. This is an intersting, relatively traditional, approach based on agreement between operators to enable roaming over each others'infrastructures.
[From University College London Wi-Fi Hotspot] CardScan.Net is a useful service for scanning business cards, and for integrating the information automatically with local PIMs. It also has a feature for storing this information on-line via a web interface. Even better, it can let all your contacts know if you update your own details.
NTT Europe have announced the launch (in April 2003) of a commercial IPv6 service in Europe (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid) which is interconnected with their IPv6 activities in other parts of the world via their IPv6 backbone. See their newslelease for full details NTT Europe to Launch European IPv6).
I am attending IPS2003
Inter-domain Performance & Simulation (In ternational Workshop) Salzburg, 20th-21st Feb 2003. Starting off there is an excellent detailed discussion of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-4) presented by Pedro A. Aranda Guitiérrez (Telefonica Spain). BGP is used to route IP (Internet Protocol) between so-called Autonymous Systems (AS), i.e. networks each controlled by one set of administrators. The rest of the IPS2003 workshop is made up of a single stream of sessions looking mostly at low level IP-related network and Quality of Services (QoS) issues.
The full papers presented at this workshop will all be available on the workshop website shortly. The TSSG's main interest in this area is driven by our link with Salzburg Research who we work with on the EU IST project Intermon, and by work we have done on the EU IST project Torrent.
There are some cross-overs between this activity and the IPv6 Cluster. In particular, the complex routing rule sets, which keep growing, required by BGP to route IPv4 (over 160,000 network entries in many US BGP nodes, and approx 34 Meg to hold the routing table c.f. Looking Glass, see the extended entry below for a sample result) is one of the strongest arguments for moving to IPv6.
I queried one of the sites listed in Looking Glass 20030220 @ 11:40 CET and received the following results showing nearly 170,000 network entries:
BGP router identifier 165.117.162.132, local AS number 2548 BGP table version is 48722885, main routing table version 48722885 169888 network entries and 501968 paths using 39415168 bytes of memory 34280 BGP path attribute entries using 1919736 bytes of memory 1302 BGP rrinfo entries using 38384 bytes of memory 25261 BGP AS-PATH entries using 635252 bytes of memory 222 BGP community entries using 6064 bytes of memory 25113 BGP route-map cache entries using 401808 bytes of memory 0 BGP filter-list cache entries using 0 bytes of memory Dampening enabled. 112 history paths, 4 dampened paths BGP activity 3804110/90197066 prefixes, 46234586/45732081 paths, scan interval 60 secs
Uniting under Groove (InfoWorld) is an article by Jon Udell showing how Groove has embraced .NET and thus enabled use of Groove by a much wider range of users and developers. His weblog entry announcing this article gives further examples of the new flexibility.
Recently it has been announced that theUK gets 'virtually' free wireless hot spots - customers of sandwich bar Benugo get free access codes with every purchase, entitling them to 30mins free access.
Shane Dempsey (of the TSSG) recently pointed out to me that you can now access many IPv4 web sites (e.g. Slashdot over IPv6) over IPv6 by using this SixXS IPv6 to IPv4 Website Gateway. The website servers need to not already be IPv6 enabled, and the web clients need to be IPv6 capable.
This query shows the latest uptime for tssg.org Netcraft What's That Site Running Results: tssg.org.
I have been doing some background reading on PURLs (Persistent URLs) and shortened URLs like metamark (as used by the Perl6 developers). It may well be worth setting up my own short/persistent URL server. The PURL code is free for reuse. The main difference seems to be that PURL requires you to register as user to create new references, whereas metamark can be anonymous (but cannot edited afterwards). There are some others to look at. Interesting that PURL was created by OCLC (mainly famous for providing a library cataloguing MARC record service) who seem to be very active in the IETF working group on URNs which may solve this issue more gracefully.
I recently read: Jonathan Brazil's Weblog: Space Weather an interesting link to an on-line space weather site which would be very useful if you were thinking of launching a satellite.
However, I have an ulterior motive in linking to this message on Jonathan's weblog, I'm experimenting with the Moveable Type feature called: Trackback. This system allows weblogs to cross-reference each other and maintain lists of these references. Effectively this allows other webloggers to add value to your site by citing your weblog entry as the source for their ideas.
The system of peer referencing closely mirrors how we behave in groups. We often value people who others have referred us to, and we often judge the value of things by the number of times they are referred to by others.
Ben Hammersley has listed a number of related mechanisms in this article on his weblog "Trackback in the Saddle Again". See also Samy Ruby's article on cohesion and "manufactured serendipity".
Other weblogging systems use similar mechanisms to this. In particular Radio Userland (as it maintains a central index of all postings) can auto-create these cross-links by parsing its own feeds. Also, Radio maintains a lits of the most accessed radio weblogs on its site.
As usual, Jon Udell has been instrumental in making me see the power behind these concepts of automated social engineering, particularly his post on Crossing the bridge of weak ties.