Entries Tagged 'Wireless' ↓

If you were as bummed as I was that Tacoma Dorkbot won’t be meeting again until late winter / early spring you should know there are other outlets for your geeky attributes in this, America’s Most Wired City.

Every third Saturday the Tacoma Linux Users Group, Taclug, meets at the University of Washington, Tacoma. This meeting should be an interesting one. With the Cyber Defense Workshop kicking things off, open source network monitoring geekery, WiFi hacking and virtualization shenanigans it is one not to miss.

Francois Caen (RHCE, CCNA), long time member and former president of Taclug, will be lecturing on open source network management tools. Folks, it gets geekier than SNMP but not much. Francois is also the president of Turbosphere, a provider of turn-key proactively managed dedicated servers for your business applications and soon to be published author.

In addition to Francios’ presentation there will be a hack session on creating WiFi captive portals. What is a captive portal? When you open your laptop in Starbucks or Firehouse Coffee (sorry, Origin 23 Degrees) you are redirected to a page before being given access to the Internet. This hands on session will be centered around creating a captive portal for everybody’s favorite local watering hole, Doyle’s Public House. Several people are bringing a variety of computer hardware to experiment with different WiFi captive portal solutions.

Finally, in addition to the WiFi captive portal hack session there will be a hack session on Linux virtualization technologies. These technologies include Xen, OpenVZ, LKVM, QEMU and more.

More information is available at the Taclug website.

Things appear to have stabilized concerning WiFi on the Sounder. Sound Transit has put a page on their site concerning the “Expanded WiFi Project.” The web site states “Sounder cars with 100, 300 and 400 series numbers are equipped.” The connection varies depending upon the connection available and the activities of your laptop toting neighbors. Sound Transit discourages the use of streaming audio or video. Remember to sit in the first car.

(image courtesy romulusn).

Without fanfare SoundTransit has extended the wireless Internet pilot project to some Tacoma trains. There has been no official announcement of WiFi availability on Tacoma Sounder trains. The SoundTransit WiFi project page only lists the Seattle-Everett line.

WiFi hunting Sounder riders should sit in the first car and look for wireless networks named “Sounder_” followed by a number. My car was Sounder_109 but I saw one other Sounder WiFi network before leaving Freighthouse Square. The speed was a respectable 700 kbps down and 100 kbps up. It was fast enough to publish a blog post.

I wonder if Casey Halverson is still running the SeattleWireless TacomaSounder Node?

(Sounder image courtesy Troy Mason)

I have a love hate relationship with my new AT&T 8525 (aka HTC Hermes). When the device is working it is great! The device runs Windows Mobile 5, syncs with the MS Exchange server at work and connects to the Internet via AT&T’s 3G HSPDA network.

The problem is that it is usually not working. I made the mistake of buying a reconditioned device from AT&T. The first device arrived broken. It had intermediate radio problems. I had to RMA that device within the first week. The second device lasted a whole month before it had the same intermittent radio problems. A smart phone with no voice or data access is not so cool.

This wouldn’t be so bad if AT&T had competent and efficient customer service. To warranty return my device I made the mistake of going to a corporate AT&T store. No dice. I had to call the 800 number. The replacement process took over an hour and required that I be transferred no less than 6 times.

I’m watching the OpenMoko project with great interest.