Ho John Lee’s Weblog

One of the nuisances of installing wireless access points, VOIP phones, and other small networked devices, is the need for power in the vicinity of the device. This can be a major challenge, if you’re building a small wireless ISP using an access point on an antenna mast, which is why wireless user groups have come up with homebrew POE hacks. In the past, power-over-ethernet support has been for relatively expensive equipment geared toward commercial, large-scale installation, such as rolling out a building full of Cisco 7940 IP phones.

There are a some cheap power-over-ethernet adapters available now from Linksys and D-Link:

D-Link DWL-P200 (5V or 12V, list price $39.00)
Linksys WAPPOE (5V only, list price $39.99)
Linksys WAPPOE12 (12V only, list price $49.99)

Forwarded this morning from Andy Fitzhugh:

WiFi Wok and the Chinese cookware 2.4GHz repeaters (at Engadget).

As some of the comments point out, earlier versions of this appeared on Slashdot sometime last year, but the pictures with overlaid captions accompanying this writeup are quite nice.

Perhaps we can make some of these to go with the collection of coffee can antennas for the Kuppam wireless program, not sure how widely available woks or similar shaped metal pans are in India.

Not a new electronica group, but an ongoing project by New Zealander Stan Swan to make some seriously DIY WiFi repeaters out of — what else? — Chinese cookware, among other kitchen and household gadgets. Turns out cheap cooking scoops make great 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes. Who knew? We don’t see too many WiFi extenders with bamboo handles in the States — surely a missed opportunity for the wireless adapter market.

From the HP web site.

Snapfish’s expertise in online photo services, coupled with HP’s worldwide customer reach, will rapidly enhance HP’s ability to capitalize on the growing market for online photo printing.

Snapfish offers high-quality photo products and services. These include free online photo sharing, photo storage and management, free editing tools and software, online print ordering, wireless imaging services for camera phone and color handset users, and more than 70 personalized photo products, such as calendars, mousepads and the like.

Snapfish also provides infrastructure services to leading retailers, internet service providers and wireless carriers, allowing them to offer these same products and services to their own consumers.

“Bringing Snapfish into HP’s digital photography portfolio is a strategic move for both companies,” said Larry Lesley, senior vice president, Consumer Imaging and Printing, HP. “By offering a superior online photo service through Snapfish, we will be able to offer the home photographer greater choice when deciding exactly how, when and where they share, store and print their photos.”

Yahoo is running a simulated market for predicting interest and general sentiment about technology products and trends, such as IE vs Firefox, blogging, etc. There’s even a modest prize (Mac Mini) for the best forecasting performance during March - July 2005.

The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time.

Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you “put your play money where your mouth is.”

I like market-based approaches like this, although the challenge is in drawing a sufficiently diversified base of participants to draw on different information sources and make the market “liquid” enough, vs getting a lot of people who think the same way.

Lots of rumors for a while, official announcement today. I was sort of hoping for Google to buy Flickr to combine with Blogger, Picasa, Maps, etc. Yahoo seems to layer on a lot of cross promotion on their web properties, and also seems to provide less enthusiastic support for web services interfaces for 3rd party applications.

Flickr blog

Business Week online

Comments at the Flickr user board

Update - March 23, 2005
Here’s an article at News.com with a good overview of why user content tagging is significant. It’s sometimes difficult to explain the potential effect of user tagging to people who haven’t seen or used any of the pieces, and this might be a good introduction for them.

The AOpen XC Cube EY855-II mini-barebones system is built around a Pentium-M motherboard, and provides an interesting alternative to Pentium 4 desktop systems. I have started paying a lot more attention to power/heat dissipation and noise levels in the past few years, and have been thinking that it might make sense to get a desktop system based on notebook hardware, but without the mechanical space constraints of a notebook form factor. The noise output from a dual P4 system with graphics accelerator is fine in a room full of computers, but these days I find even my notebook computer is loud for my taste.

Price for the barebones system is currently around $325.00 (not including CPU, memory, etc).

The EY-855-II review at TechReport.com includes a nice graphic of idle and maximum power consumption for a range of systems based on processors including Pentium 4, Athlon, and Pentium-M. Check out the 220+ watt power consumption for all of the P4 systems against the 84 watt peak consumption for the 2.0 GHz Pentium-M.

This came across my desk this morning:

From EE Times:

India software firms on terrorist radar

BANGALORE, India — Police in India’s capital New Delhi who shot and killed three terrorists on Saturday night said that some of Bangalore’s software firms had been targeted by the slain terrorists.

According to a top police officer in New Delhi on Sunday, the terrorists had visited Bangalore in December and surveyed the locations of many software firms here. The police gathered this information from a diary seized from two captured associates of the slain terrorists. A military training academy was also a target, police said.

From Computerworld:

Documents seized from three members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist group killed in an encounter with police on Saturday revealed that they planned to carry out suicide attacks on software companies in Bangalore, Karnal Singh, joint commissioner of police in Delhi, told reporters.

Google now provides 4-day weather forecasts for queries such as “weather palo alto“.

I don’t usually read Smart Money these days, but a privacy-related article popped up in My Yahoo which has some pointers to web sites that you may find yourself or someone you know listed on.

Fundrace.org got some exposure a few months back; it provides an interface for browsing and searching the US Federal Election Committee campaign contribution database from the 2004 presidential race. The site provides some interesting national and regional maps of donors by party. The problematic part for online privacy is that you can search by name, zip code, or get a map with addresses of all the donors in any neighborhood. Everyone who donated between January 1, 2003 and October 13, 2004 and over $200 (and some under $200) is listed, along with their address, title, and employer. I tried queries for various locations here in the Bay Area, L.A., and Malibu, and got listings with many recognizable names, in addition to assorted neighbors. Many of the listings are for office addresses, but a surprising (to me) number of recognizable TV and movie actors turn up on the list with home addresses. They must have good security, a lot of patience, or move frequently.

A former Imaging Systems Lab engineer’s view of life at HP Laboratories under Carly in Technology Review.

I remember the first time she walked into the Hewlett-Packard labs. She said that our new company slogan was “Invent.” Then she told us that the technology industry would never again be as exciting and profitable as it was in the ’90s. That we’d all need to grow up now and face that fact.

I knew from that moment that HP’s best days were behind us.

I have a box full of various PDAs and related accessories in the closet, waiting to make their way onto eBay. Over the past several years, I have lived with Palm-based organizers, WinCE-based organizers, Psion-based organizers, and other widgets intended as personal information devices of one sort or another.

During the past couple of years, though, I’ve noticed that I have gradually shifted away from using PDAs and notebook computers, and toward using paper and various phones, mostly cellular. I had decided that although I liked having my contact data and calendar with me on the PDA, I didn’t like carrying yet another item, and have learned to live with the more limited directories on the cell phones. I’ve noticed that the cell phones mostly have organizers on them now but have been reluctant to make yet the investment in time and effort to learn to work with yet another system, as I seem to be doing ok checking in at my desk to look at the calendar periodically. I’ve looked from time to time at getting a Treo or PocketPC or Blackberry phone, but what I actually use these days is a Nokia 6820, which is small, has a simple camera, and also has a foldout keyboard for the rare occasions that I send text messages from the phone.

In my e-mail this morning, I see that In-Stat’s latest research report confirms that I’m not alone. They want $3,495 to read the whole report, probably not worth it unless you’re already subscribing to their service.