Jim Moy

Back to wireless. Here is an excellent article on the situation wireless Internet access is in, with respect to the FCC and existing carriers.

Sometimes it’s amusing to see the effect of my gateway going down for a period of time (but not too long). Here’s an image that MRTG continuously generates for me, measuring my 802.11b signal strength. Yup, I took it down when I went to bed and back up when I staggered into the basement in the morning to turn it back on and see if the upstream network outage was over…

I just noticed that my neighbor has put up the step-by-step instructions he created for assembling a wireless gateway, without having to compile kernels or otherwise learn too much Linux to get it working. His research was a large part of making our neighborhood WLAN work. Thanks, Pete.

I’ve been playing with an iMac that’s on loan to me for some volunteer web work. It has OS-X on it. A number of years ago, I was a pretty good Mac hacker. And in a lifetime even before that, I cut my teeth in the profession on Unix machines. Because those periods were so independent, and focused on such different products, code, and development strategies, it’s strange now, to see them together, and in a fashion that blends them so nicely. For the first time in a long time, I wouldn’t mind being a Mac programmer again.

The default installation of OS-X comes with Apache and Perl, already installed and running. Instead of turning on the internal toy web server like it used to, clicking the Start button for Web Sharing now fires up Apache. “Look, httpd.conf, wonderful!” The collective wisdom of Unix, and the happy Mac face up front, very nice.