vanderwal.net

Apple's Network in Hell poster with Akbar and Jeff

In the fun category Apple's Matt Groenig's Network in Hell poster.. This poster features Akbar and Jeff's ability to network to IBM Big Iron with their Macs. This poster should be updated to highlight Panther's ability to network easily on Microsoft networks, including VPN.

Death of E-mail

Ray Ozzie discusses the death of e-mail as a work process tool. Of course Ray has an interest in this as his Groove application provides encrypted shared workspaces for workflow and sharing. If you rely on e-mail for document sharing or an Intranet, Groove is a large step above and beyond these technologies. E-mail was not designed, many many years ago, for the type of tasks and volumes that are required of it today. As every work environment struggles with privacy and security most e-mail solutions do not provide a sufficient level of support, particularly with e-mail storage limitations.

E-mail also does not often provide portability and tracking across various work environments. Groove however does do this. I was testing and using Groove in a beta mode and the free version a year or two ago. Groove had these capabilities then.

Yes, secure e-mail is available on many e-mail platforms, but the portability and retention of state of work does not work as easily on other applications. The one downside of Groove for me is it does not yet have an OS X version,

Slight changes

I have been running an incredible amount of running of errands the past few days since Will and Joy have been home. Many of the errands are just general errands, but as Joy is not able to drive for two weeks there is a lot of trips to make. We are doing well with the feedings and sleeping, so far.

We have been amazed with the amount of laundry that is generated. We knew that it was going to be a change in laundry, but not to the extent it has grown.

I also made a few modifications to the Airport WiFi in the house so that I can get a very good signal in the living room and in the bedrooms. I was going to add an antennae to the TiBook, but found that the Airport is not Omnidirectional as I had thought. By turning the apple on the Airport toward the room I really want coverage and moving the Airport six feet closer really helped. I have a 80% signal or higher. I can now hang out with Will and Joy in the living room and possibly the screen porch and in the bedrooms upstairs.

Learning for lack of power

Over the past few days I have had a little more pondering time than normal. We were with out power, but thanks to the Net (wired and unwired) I could still post here, chat with friends, and had a site that was still up and running. I still had a means to communicate that allowed for updating from a mobile device, which my parents checked from a mobile device.

We did not have power, which meant no DSL (to me the dial-up was fingernails on chalkboard, only at last resort sort of endeavor. The Hiptop go me through to post. I could also e-mail with folks I had e-mail addresses for (found Hiptop truncates all my address book entries to only the primary address info, which is mostly work, and that was not were folks were the past four days around here). I really did not miss the power too much, although we cheated and went to a friend's house who had power and was out of town to do a load of laundry and recharge phones and laptops.

I did get to finish the book I started on vacation (The Discovery of Heaven), I still had nearly 300 pages left of the 735. I was rather disappointed by the ending, but the book made for a wonderful literary journey none-the-less. Much of the reading was on our screen porch and any snippet of time that was not tracking down places to get food or running errands, which took-up a great amount of time the past four days.

I not only grew with appreciation for our distributed information system, but I grew to miss the answering machine very quickly. We had a couple wired landline phone plugged in, but since Joy is still not greatly mobile I was getting the phone when it rang, well most of the time. I rarely answer the phone at home as the calls are rarely for me and I usually let the answering machine do the work for me. I also grew in appreciation for refrigerators and envious of neighbors with generators that powered their refrigerators so as not to throw out all their cold food.

InfoWorld CTO sees it all in Mac

InfoWorld CTO switches to Mac OS X as he replaced his Linux server and two PCs. This was a three year old G4 box that made the other boxes obsolete.

I have had a the similar experience with one Apple Powerbook. My PC, which has been relegated to games and a Windows test platform, has been in the shop for over two weeks getting a proprietary power supply (PCs have been commoditized?). I have not missed it, actually it has been ready to be picked up for four days now, but I do not need it. I do want to burn some stuff off on to discs that is resident on its hard drives, but that is all it really means to me.

Mobile video iChat with WiFi

Mike demonstrates iChat unteathered. Yes video chatting from the South Street Seaport in NYC all with WiFi (no wires). I am so glad Mike got to test this and posted it so we all could see it works.

Busness Week floods on WiFi

Business Week has a section focus on WiFi, which made me feel so ahead of the game, but most of my fiends were on board long before I was a year or two ago. There are many good articles for those that are just catching up to WiFi (pronounced like why-fi (as in sky)) and even some info for veterans.

Wireless Network Drive

Seemingly cool technology from Martian Technology, a wireless network drive with 120GB of storage and USB printer sharing.

Now less competion in the tech marketplace

Wall Street Journal reporting Cisco is buying Linksys. In all I think this is a good idea as I like Cisco products and they care about their products. On the other hand the lack of competition in the technical sectors can not be good in the long run. We need options, much like when I got fed up with Windows and switched to Apple (actually Apple provided a better solution and I switched last January and found a much easier and reliable way to do computing, which caused me to question why we put up with inferior products from Microsoft). In the U.S. we were educated to believe competition was good and the evil empire to the East did not allow competition. Now the U.S. government seems complacent to allow, and even encourages (at the FCC) the removal of competion. The lack of competion was un-American. Where is the U.S. now if we are removing competition from the marketplace?

BBS 25th Anniversary

It is the 25th Anniversary of BBS. The BBS or Bullitin Board Systems were dial-in digital resources for software, discussions, patches, hacks, games, sounds, and other digital goodies. The BBS' were run by hosts that gave out the phone number to their service, some charged and others were free. These were great resources that offered a glimpse of what was to come with the Internet. The BBS' were all test based and companies grew up around providing software to run the services. One company Mustang Software (or Mustang Software description) seemed to have the corner on the hot and easy to use BBS' by the early '90s. Oh, those were the days, but do I want to go back? No, I like where things are now.

Networked PIM

Victor quickly discusses and points to a networked Personal Information Manager. This tool, which early Apple developer Andy Hertzfeld has helped with, seems to be a tool that would be of great benefit for digital projects.

Samba primary domain controller

Samba as a primary domain controller for PC and non-PC network can provide a solid home network, if you are not using XP Home.

Seeing and Tuning Social Networks

Seeing and Tuning Social Networks by John Udell is dense read for this evening. There is some great stuff in here. Must come back to it a lilttle later.

WiFi security

Seven security issues to watch with WiFi networks, a.k.a. 802.11 wireless networks. There are a handful of issues that we have to be aware of to either address or live with. I find the benefits greatly out weigh the downsides.

Location Manager for OS X

The Location Manager for OS X, looks to be a very helpful app for folks like me. I like the network options that OS X offers in the System Prefs, but one that includes time zones and other helpful info would be great.