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VNC problems. There was an article on Slashdot recently about how the Windows XP licence prohibits the use of VNC. We knew that already; the Windows 98 licence basically prohibits it too.

Apple have released their own remote desktop system for OS X, at a price. But there are good versions of VNC for it too.

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Wireless ‘HotZone’ network comes to downtown Palo Alto. Six blocks of the downtown area are now covered by WiFi.

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This is the first post to my AT&T intranet weblog. I’ve created this as part of my experiments with the Radio Userland software.

Some things here (such as the earlier postings below) will be cross-postings which also appear on my main weblog at Status-Q. Others will be AT&T-only stuff. This page is on the intranet and so only accessible within the lab.

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Steven Wright. “It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.” [from Quotes of the Day]

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After 2.5 years of Linux, I’ve finally found joy in a Unix operating system“, writes John Hummel about his conversion to Mac OS X.

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Peter Martin in the FT: ruup4 multimedia messaging?. The service-providers’ enthusiasm for the new MMS phones is because “At least in its WAP form, there has been very little public appetite for third-party content. Meanwhile, user-generated content, in the form of SMS messages, continues to grow. ” Will this apply to multimedia?

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Computerworld: Wireless LANs gain over cellular. “A growing number of U.S. localities, including the California cities of Glendale and Oakland and counties of Orange and San Diego, have embraced Wi-Fi technology as the high-speed wireless backbone of their networks.” [Tomalak’s Realm]

Wi-Fi (802.11b) really isn’t designed for this kind of deployment but, hey, if it works, then I guess that’s already an advantage over 3G. I’m dubious about covering a county, even a very small one, with just 12 base stations, though.

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I’ve installed the ‘htdig’ search engine here now, and the search box on the right will use that instead of Google. The Google link worked well, but sometimes wouldn’t index Status-Q often enough, and would discard bits from time to time. I realised that I was having trouble searching for things and I’m supposed to know roughly what’s in here. I think the new one’s a big improvement.

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The Tipping Blog – How Little Links can Make a Big Difference: "On the Internet, nobody cares if you’re a shy introvert."

John Hiler produces some good stuff. He wrote an interesting article a couple of weeks ago about the effect of weblogs on search engines. In this latest piece he discusses weblogs in terms of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”.

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Excellent New Scientist feature on Open Source ideas. [from John Naughton’s weblog]. I hadn’t come across the Wikipedia before. It’s rather good. Topics for discussion in your coffee break:

  • We all know that you should take everything you read on the web with a pinch of salt, but we’re used to reading things in reference works and assuming they’re fairly authoritative. Does presenting information in that form make us more likely to believe it?
  • Is an encyclopedia which anybody can update more or less likely to be ‘authoritative’?

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser