Monthly Archives: November 2004

Belkin Pre-N Performance

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Wi-Fi Networking News reports on a review by PC World that contains some performance numbers from the Belkin Pre-N wireless solution (the one with the Airgo Networks chipset in it). While PC World and Wi-Fi Networking News seem to be impressed by the 40 Mbps actual throughput from the Belkin solution (router + cardbus card), I was disappointed.

I have seen similar performance numbers with Atheros’ Super AG (some even better), so I was expecting to see much better (around 80 Mbps say) from the MIMO solution. If they are to reach the 100 Mbps actual throughput that is the goal for 802,11n, then I’d say they have a bit more work to do. Both Atheros and Broadcom have range extending technology too (Atheros has XR, and just recently Broadcom added BroadRange).

It would have been more interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of all four proprietary speed enhancing technologies: Connexant’s Nitro, Atheros’ SuperAG, Broadcom’s Afterburner (a.k.a. Linksys SpeedBooster) and the Belkin Pre-N. I think that since Pre-N is so far ahead of the actual 802.11n standard that for the moment it really has to be seen as another proprietary solution. There will probably be elements of all of these speed & range enhancing techniques in the final standard.

Also interesting would be a comparison of the range extenders (Atheros’ XR, Broadcom’s BroadRange and Belkin’s Pre-N) to see how they really stack up in the same environment using the same test.

Epson’s PowerLite 835p / EMP-835 Wireless Projector

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Had a chance to play with Epson’s new EMP-835 wireless projector a week or so back. This is being sold in the US as the Powerlite 835p. At first glance it seems rather large, but that soon becomes inconsequential when you discover just what this thing can do…

At power up it proceeded to beam a series of vertical lines onto the wall, and then auto-focus. Next up a checker-board effect appeared and it adjusted its keystone setting as well. Then it presented the EasyMP setup. Not so easy for us at first since it was in Japanese (the model we were using was brought over from Japan), but once we had it switched to English it was all much clearer.

In addition to its auto-focus and auto-keystone, it has a feature called ‘wall shot’ that will attempt to compensate for off-white walls as well. Oh, and a neat preview mode where you get a freeze-frame of what is currently on every one of its inputs. From there you can select one to view live. What are these inputs? Three video sources of different types (composite, S-Video and VGA), and perhaps the best feature: wireless input from a computer running their EasyMP NS Connection software.

Biggest surprise of all was that this wireless software supported my PowerBook and displayed the wide screen format perfectly. If the projector is part of your corporate network, and it supports both WPA and Cisco’s CCX (LEAP) security modes as well as the older WEP mode, then it will be automatically discovered. If it is running in ad-hoc mode (which allows anybody to walk up and connect), then on the PowerBook at least I had to join the projector’s ad-hoc network in the normal way before the tool would see the projector. Once connected it worked perfectly, and in theory I can connect to more than one projector too (if I had them).

This has made it onto my shopping list in place of a large screen TV. Not only can I use it for high quality movie and TV viewing, but I can wirelessly connect my laptop to it for some living room surfing in style. Now I just need the house to put it in πŸ™‚

Panoramic Photos

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Was playing with the Canon utilities that came with my little S100 on the PowerBook (I hadn’t even bothered installing them since iPhoto was able to import the photos from the camera automatically), and in particular the PhotoStitch application that is included to help take advantage of the camera’s panoramic helper modes. As luck would have it, I had taken a few shots in that mode while up at the Golden Gate Bridge recently with some visiting friends. I didn’t have the tripod with me, and I was interrupted by a phone call mid-sequence, so the last of the three did not stitch in nicely. I think that the first two look good though.

While researching this process of stitching photos, I came across the website of a photographer who does this kind of thing all the time: check out the Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery for not just information about producing stitched images, but also for some fantastic photos. A few of my favourites are:

The list could go on and on… there are so many amazing photos on the site.

Bayport Phase 16 – I Quit

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Another lottery, another waste of time. That’s it for us unless Warmington Homes scraps this ridiculous lottery scheme and starts to sell the more than 300 houses still to be sold in a fair way.

We have now wasted almost 6 months without our number even being drawn once in any of the six different lotteries we’ve attended. I would happily have waited a year for the house to be built had they just sold me one when we first started looking at them. Now we will be looking for houses elsewhere, and anybody using a lottery scheme to sell will be excluded immediately.

Good luck to everybody left hoping that they win the chance to buy a house. There is one more Harbor release from block B in early January, and then nothing for a little while (spring time was best estimate they could give). That will probably be from block D (behind the models – see the master plan).

I would love to be able to suggest that people boycott Warmington until they scrap the lottery scheme and just sell the houses in the normal way, but that would never work in the current market. Perhaps there would be more chance of getting Alameda City to force them to drop the lottery scheme, but probably not while city employees retain the privilege of being able to bypass the lottery.

Anyway, here are the updated graphs. I looked at putting the values on the data points, but it made the graphs very cluttered. The main reason for me creating them was to show the trends more than to provide the exact numbers, and I think they do that pretty well as they are.

MacOS Backups

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A hard disc failure at work (luckily the OS drive and not the data one), made me think a bit about backing up my MacOS drive in the PowerBook G4 I am using more and more. The most critical data on there, my photo collection, is backed up onto DVD and also (mostly) cloned on my Windows XP box. But there are an increasing number of little utility apps and documents that, while not going to be the end of the world to lose, would be annoying.

Hardware

So, while in Fry’s Electronics picking up a replacement drive for my work machine, I picked up a new Western Digital 250 GB drive kit (for $109 after the mail in rebate) I then picked up a Metal Gear Box (with a “light bar”) to put it in. This is a dual USB 2.0 and Firewire/IEEE1394 external IDE drive box, which meant in theory that I should have been able to use it on both my PowerBook and my Windows XP box.

Sadly, WinXP would not talk to the drive once a MacOS extended partition had been created on it. I could create a number of FAT32 & NTFS partitions which MacOS X would see, but they were not useful for my backup needs, so the drive has now become a backup drive and an external storage drive for the PowerBook – I’ll get another one for the WinXP system perhaps. None of that is the fault of the enclosure though – it works perfectly on both systems.

Software

While in Fry’s I had been debating getting one of the pre-assembled USB/Firewire drives because they came with backup software. In the end I went with the enclosure and drive because of the price (around half the price of the equivalent size pre-assembled drive units). Back home I found an excellent donation-ware backup solution for MacOS X: Carbon Copy Cloner. I have made a complete clone of my laptop’s internal HD onto the firewire drive, and then tried one sync operation to update it. All seems to be working well.

Recovery, if I ever need it, should be trivial too since the external drive is bootable; I just boot off of the external drive and sync back to the internal drive. Let’s hope I never have to test that theory though πŸ™‚

Factory of the Future?

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MSNBC is running a story about a possible Factory of the Future? where the product is essentially ideas, or intellectual property. The core theme in the article is a discussion of Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold’s new company, Intellectual Ventures, which appears to be a company of patent lawyers out to build a library of patents.

Some of these seem to be coming from brainstorming sessions with groups of scientists, others are being bought. The real question is how will they be used in the future. Given the backers he has (including the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, eBay and Google), one can only wonder about how much trouble smaller companies will be in should they attract the attention of one of these monsters.

Phase 15 Information

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Thanks to Peter for the average prices of the phase 15 (Pointe) release tomorrow I have updated the three price tracking graphs. I will update the master plan tomorrow too.

Remember that if you’ve looked at the graphs recently you might need to refresh the images in your browser’s cache (hold shift down and click the reload button does it in most browsers).

Update: Master plan now updated as well.

Photo Mosaic

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Been playing with the MacOSaiX photo mosaic software recently. For those that don’t know what photo mosaics are (where have you been living?), they are images made up from lots of smaller images. You provide the software an image that you’d like to convert to a photo mosaic, and a collection of photos to make the small tiles. MacOSaiX is slightly different from others here in that it also allows you to specify Google Images search terms as sources for the tile images.

An article at Engadget was what pointed me to this software, and it also has a recommendation for Windows users (Andrea Mosaic). So far it has not done badly, though I am only trying the stable version. The newer version is for 10.3 (though it says it might run on 10.2 machines), so I haven’t tried that yet.

The example below shows the original, the pure mosaic and the mosaic with an almost transparent overlay of the original image (this was added in Photoshop afterwards). These were done using images from my entire iPhoto library (click on each for a slightly larger version).

Government Wi-Fi Security

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An excellent article over at Wi-Fi Networking News discusses a report on USA Today’s website that claims reporters from Federal Computer Week found wireless networks on government property that were not properly secured. Glenn Fleishman does an excellent job of explaining why 802.1X alone is not better than WEP (it is a comparison of apples and oranges), as well as putting down the notion that T-Mobile’s move to support WPA encryption with 802.1X authentication is necessarily more secure.

That said, I would be concerned about the possibility of unauthorised wireless access points in the network, whether at a government site or just a regular company. It is far too easy to plug in a $40 access point and open a hole in the network. Using 802.1X on the wired connections, as suggested in the Wi-Fi Networking News article, is not a bad solution to this. It can also prevent people plugging their personal laptops or other devices into the network, which in a secure environment is essential.

Newer enterprise solutions also include rogue AP detection features to help a network administrator monitor the wireless environment looking for potential problems. Wireless setups should include something to allow continual monitoring of the wireless traffic, and if something is detected that does not match the known networks an alert should be issued so that somebody can check out what the new wireless device is. It could simply be an access point that has been reset to factory defaults and is now offering totally open access to the network.

10×10

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In their own words, “10×10Ã’Ò€žÂ’ (‘ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time.” What does that mean? Well, it is an array of thumbnail sized photos, 10 across and 10 down (hence the name), that are derived from the top 100 keywords in the news. The site automatically scans several news sources once an hour, selects the 100 most important words and a photo associated with each one, and then renders it as an image.

There is also a flash application that lets you see the word associated with each photo (or vice-versa) as well as navigate through past hours, or even days to see what the images were since it started running earlier this month.