WiFi on the Pocket PC

Having proved to myself that the OpenZone service works pretty well it was an easy choice, when I had to order a new battery for my laptop, to sneak in an order for a Compact Flash WiFi card for the Axim. I got it from Technomatic, mainly because they were the only people who had Toshiba batteries in stock, and went for the D-Link Air Wireless card (DCF-660W).

It all arrived the next day and the installation couldn't have been much simpler. Plug the card in, install the drivers via the PC and accept the defaults in the setup program. Within minutes I was able to check email, browse the web, chat via MSN Messenger, etc. It all works very well. The only problem I have had is that when I delete a message from my IMAP mail store using the mail client on the PPC, it doesn't really get deleted. It seems to go, but then when you reconnect to the server it's back again - hmmm. Having had a read around it seems that this is a well-known problem which is supposed to be corrected in Windows Mobile 2003 (rather than the 2002 version shipped with my Axim), so guess what was ordered yesterday ?

Another interesting thing I came across today was a weblogging client for the Pocket PC, called Pocket SharpMT. It looks very nice but it needs the .Net compact framework to be installed on the handheld. Since that it built into Windows Mobile 2003 I think I'll wait until I have installed that before I try it out.

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 !

Wireless network service on the road

I've been looking for a while for a WiFi service with a decent number of access points and a pricing model that I could live with. When I first started looking the only game in town was BT Openzone but it suffered from the drawback that you either had to sign up for a monthly contract with included airtime or buy vouchers for a certain amount of connect time. The vouchers sounded OK until I found out that if you buy, say, a one hour voucher, you have to use it all in one day. You can't use 10 minutes one day, half an hour another day and the rest in quick two minute bursts to check email.

I then came across Swisscom Eurospot, who were handing out free 2 hour access cards at an event I went to recently. Unfortunately these free cards and the ones you pay for suffer from the problem about not being able to stop the clock once you start using your time allocation. I spoke to their Regional Sales Manager at the event and he explained that they were aiming at the overnight hotel or full-day conference market, contrasting the price/performance of their offering with the alternative of using a dial-up connection through the hotel switchboard where you have to leave your first-born child as a deposit for the phone bill charges you'll incur.

Well, today I had another look at the Openzone offering, to discover that they now do a Pay As You Go offering, which I think will be just what I want at the moment. You have to register with them before you can use the service but there is no sign-up fee or standing charge, just 20p per minute for all the net access you want. You can pay by credit card or direct debit. They do have plans which let you sign up for some time included at a slightly discounted rate then back to 20p per minute if you exceed this.

As well as the pricing model being better, the coverage has improved and they have set up cross-network roaming with a couple of other service providers, such that there are around 40 access points in both Edinburgh and Glasgow now. These are a mixture of hotels, bars, etc and their "Streetzones", where they have put an access point into what was a public telephone box on the street. Not great if the weather is bad but might be handy for a quick blast online if you need to pick up something important.

Anyway - I've registered and hope to try it out soon. If it works it will probably be justification enough to get a Compact Flash WiFi card for my handheld (Dell Axim X5, which Dell seem to have decided to start selling again after having only the X3 for a while). I'll report back once I have tried it !

Drive-by WiFi

A report on the eWeek web site yesterday said that there are plans for the Highways Agency to install up to 150,000 wireless broadband transceivers alongside the roads across the UK in street lights, traffic lights and other street furniture. The primary purpose is to monitor road and traffic conditions but there is supposed to be capacity to allow delivery of consumer broadband Internet access. There is no indication of likely coverage or pricing yet but it could mean a dramatic increase in the availability of WiFi access in the UK.

More on the Google Gmail service

According to a news item on the BBC site, a number of organisations have been digging in to the small print of the Gmail announcement and have identified privacy concerns over the way the service will operate.

Web-based project management

I came across a note today about the dotproject open source project, a web-based project management system. I've looked at a few of these things before and none of them has quite seemed ready for prime time, including earlier versions of dotproject. However, it has now reached v1.x (v1.02 at the moment) and it looks like it is maturing quite nicely.

The set-up looks very straightforward on a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment. By the look of it you should be up and running with it within less than half an hour if you already have the prerequisites (of which there aren't very many) in place.

Google - not so foolish after all ?

There has been a rash of articles in the last few days about the announcement that Google is testing a new email service (Gmail). Google put out a press release about it on April the 1st - most of the news media reported it as a straight news item but most of the 'digerati' were convinced that it was an April Fool joke. The consensus now appears to be that it is for real. Assuming for the moment that it is true, it seems to me that it's email Jim but not as we know it.

According to the information in the link above, Google plans to launch Gmail as a free service with 1Gb (yes, gigabyte, not a typo) of storage and a different way of looking at how people access and use their email. Not too surprisingly, the idea is based on the use of search technology - rather than sorting your email into folders it all stays in one folder and you use a search interface to find the message you want to read.

For me this is a significant change, based on habits accumulated over many years, but I have known people who operate their email in this way. Rather than filing things away in folders they just leave everything in their inbox and either sort by name or date when they want to find something or use the search function in the email client to track it down. With most email clients (like Outlook as used in most corporate environments) this just leads to things getting slower and slower as they weren't designed to operate this way. When they start up they try to read all the message headers in the folder and when you have a few thousand in there it starts to struggle. If your email is stored on a server (like an Exchange server) it gives that a bit of a hammering as well.

Presumably Gmail is designed from the outset to work this way so it should be a bit more efficient and with the Google indexing and searching engine behind it it should be quick. With 1Gb of storage (to most intents and purposes effectively unlimited), as well as not filing anything, presumably you would never delete anything either.

Now, the question is why ? Google is supposed to be readying itself for an IPO, so why would they want to launch a service for which there is no charge but which will cost them a lot to deliver, even although disk space and processor power is cheaper than ever ? Well, as one commentator noted, search is a vital component of most heavy Internet users' toolkit but email still remains the killer application on the Internet.

Google has been phenomenally successful as a result of their idea of using PageRank to order search results. Without going into all the details behind it (which are available in a paper by the founders of Google for anyone who is interested) this uses the democratic nature of the web to rank the pages it finds, on the basis that if lots of sites point to a page it is probably quite important, particularly if those sites themselves are important by the same definition. Thus a link to your site from the BBC web site is worth rather a lot more than one from the Parish Council web site. So far so good, but since the PageRank algorithm is well known, people have been trying for a long time to subvert it to get higher placement. Indeed whole companies exist for this very purpose and Google themselves think that its value is decreasing over time. It is also reported that Microsoft is going after Google in an attempt to unseat it as the leader in search technology. Whatever you think of Microsoft, when they come after your market it is wise to be concerned !

One problem for search engines is that they are not very 'sticky'. People use them because they give the best results but if another one comes along which seems to be better then there is little to prevent people from switching to it and the multiplier effect is such that these changes can happen quite quickly once they get going. Google's own rise to prominence at the expense of AltaVista, Yahoo, etc. is a testament to this. Another problem is that users of search engines are anonymous, so that although Google probably has one of the largest user bases in the world it knows almost nothing about them.

I think that Gmail may in part be driven by a desire to overcome these problems. To sign up for an email account, you need to hand over some information - at the very least they will have a valid email address for you ! How much information people will be willing to hand over will depend on how useful or valuable they perceive the service to be. This helps overcome the lack of information about the users. Also, once people start using an email address it is much more of an inconvenience for them to change it and let all their contacts know about it and update their address lists, etc. So, it is much stickier than search - once captured people are less inclined to leave. For people who are interested and can be bothered, it is very easy to register your own domain name and have an email address that doesn't change as you move service providers but the proportion of people who will do this is very small. So, Google gets some information about you and can make it less likely that you will stop using their services. I don't suspect any particularly devious motive for this - I think it is just reasonable commercial self-interest.

So, will I use it - probably not, but I recognise that I am not typical of the majority of people. Many people use Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. and for these people the Google offering will probably be quite attractive. If they can make the user interface as simple as the one on the search engine (although they just changed that, to less than wild acclaim) it could be an appealing option for a lot of people.