Knew it was only a matter of time…VOIP over WiFi is on the horizon

DIY wireless ISPs and telcos should be hitting our neighbourhoods in a matter of months, or so says Robert X. Cringley (link).

As my new house is currently struggling to find affordable broadband (given our lack of NTL connection and/or lack of need for BT phone line), is this how we can fund our internet connection? Is White Road ready for us?

More discussion on Slashdot (link).
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High-Current Nanotube Transistors

A new paper has appeared in Nanoletters featuring SWNT FETs (link).

CVD-grown. Pd-contacts. Interesting source-drain-gate configuration that may be useful for my work.

Achieved FETs delivering currents of the order of milliamperes with on/off ratios of more than 100.
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Save the Thirsty!

There’s a growing campaign to save the Thirsty Ear bar in MIT (link).

An online petition is quickly gathering signatures, mainly thanks to emails to alum mailing list evoking all those once-forgotton hazzy memories (link). There are currently on 1832 signaturies, so add your’s now!

See the article in The Tech more details (and really sad quotes from a few outstanding geeks that must have been hanging around W20) (link)[pdf].

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Audrey Comes Home!

Brought Audrey home in preparation for the Big Move (link) and started readying her for her new central role. Firstly, I hooked her up to my (aged) XP box, using one of those NetGear USB adapters I brought back in America for my Virgin Webplayer (link), which never did get off the ground. The shiny unused red patch CAT5 cable I brought from ComputerWorld down by the Charles came in handy too (oops – really wanted ’straight’ one – still remember having panic attacks with Jesse and messing around Bexley’s RC rep over that one). Copying across fs-cifs via HTTP, I was finally able to get a share working; thereby increasing poor Audrey’s measley capacity for the first time! Keeping these mounts in place is a whole other business. I appreciate there are problems with the initialisation of the USB internet (see Linux-Hacker BBS posts [1] or [2]), but I would have at least hoped that my versions of boot.sh and go would have survived a re-boot intact. Rather riskly (or perhaps not as it turned out, but that may be spoiling what little excitement you may have reading this), I then tried to explore some more images. Using the guides on Audreyhacking.com (link), I was able to back-up the two year-old image of my virgin Audrey off my CF card. Having downloaded some images from the internet, I then followed the instructions to write those images to Audrey’s CF drive. Removing the CF to avoid corruption of the written image, it was then a simple matter of flashing Audrey with this new image. I first tried Infinity’s Ultimate1.1S image (available from AudreyHacking), but found the mix of original Audrey apps awkward when combined with QNX 4/6 apps. Furthermore, The original mail and browser software is really so limited as to make it practically useless (e.g., I can forgive the lack of IMAP support, but having no option to leave the mail on the server kills the mail application — there’s no way I want all my email stuck on this baby). I have since installed Jukebox’s Another QNX image (available here). This image basically has all of the original Audrey functionality stripped from it, but — hey! — what programs they’ve put on instead.

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Update

Been very negligent in updating this LJ, so just a bit of general news:

• Labviewing: jumped into Labview (link) programming a few weeks back. At first it struck me as very awkward with lots of unnecessary complications, partly because I didn’t find the help files particularly beneficial (I was even tempted to actually try the tutorials — that’s how desperate I was!). Having found the critical context help window, things went swimmingly and I did even try to think out the challenge on OpenG (link) (admittedly I actually failed).In recent weeks, I’ve extended existing VIs used at work — e.g., adding support for a Keithley 220 providing gate voltages for FET testing on top of the standard IVs — and developed some natty new tools, including reporting of the graphs to HTML. The latter of which I did in order to avoid more…Origin.
• An Awkward Strange Kind of Species — Origin: arghh, nasty. What more can I say? Unless I really need the data-fitting capabilities of this unwieldy package (link), I can’t see why there’s any gains to be had from its use. I didn’t learn MatLab (link) in 6.003 & 8.13 for nothing, did I?
• p-n diodes: finally got lots of good behaviour from my nanotube networks.

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