Well, it works

I'm sitting in the Caledonian Hilton Hotel in Edinburgh as I type this and using Zempt to create an offline entry for the weblog. I came here because it has a BT Openzone wireless hotspot and I wanted to try it out. First point is that it doesn't extend to the far end of Chisholms coffee bar but it does work in the open lounge just behind the main reception.

I must admit it took a little longer to get the connection to work than I would have liked but that's my own fault for having played with the settings on my laptop previously. I had the wireless connection set up to get an IP address via DHCP but I had hard coded the DNS server addresses I use when working wirelessly at home and of course that doesn't work on the Openzone service. It took a while on the helpline before we worked out between us that that was the problem but the guy on the help line did know what he was talking about and we got it sorted. Having done that it works just fine. The signal strength is good and the transfer speeds work OK.

So far I have used http access and IMAP to get to my email and the local SMTP server I run on the laptop (Exim) managed to deliver a message - I wouldn't have been at all surprised if they had blocked that. If this post works then the remote posting to Movable Type is obviously OK as well.

Good stuff !