connectivity Archives

Backstage Pass- Login, login, login

9 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I estimated last night that I spend 1/3 of my time trying to debug and solve connectivity issues^[1] both at home and on the road. Though perhaps when I’m at home, more of that 1/3 goes toward updating software^[2].

Please note – This video isn’t intended to put anybody on the spot, but when Susan was having so much trouble on Monday getting connected to wi-fi at the Reboot Britain meeting, it just seemed like old times to me! At big meetings like this (several hundred people) the wi-fi is frequently the crunch. Just getting an IP address, and then being able to stay connected 30 minutes or more, can be a challenge. To their credit, the venue did have really good wi-fi signals in all of the rooms at the conference center! However, I stayed on my BT Mobile Broadband connection the entire time (the little illustration is their USB modem device), and though the bandwidth was challenged (inside a brick, steel, concrete building) it was reliable.

[1] Connectivity includes finding wi-fi, dealing with “blocking” problems (more on that later), spam overload, and helping others get connected (which is major).
[2] I probably update a program every 2 days. This isn’t just Microsoft Office, but dozens of other programs I use. I use MacUpdate as a paid service to notify me of updates, although I’d say that 1/2 of the programs I use will automatically alert me when updates are available.

On again, off again, the future of connectivity

15 January, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

If you live in the US and a few other parts of the world, you might think that “being connected 24/7” is the future of the entire world. That we will have mobile communication and memory and computing devices with us everywhere we go and that they’ll be connected to the network and consequently the rest of the world, at all times. That the world will be Twitter-like. Especially tweens may think this way. I suppose that US tweens don’t even think about there being any alternative. They’re just connected and that’s the way it is.

Well, there are more than a few barriers to “being connected 24/7” which lead me to believe that our real connectivity model will be “on again, off again.” And that what developers need to focus on is memory/computerpower that is self-sufficient and can operate standalone most of the time, but can instantly “sync” itself to the rest of the world when a connection is available. If you have a PDA or iPod or practically any device that utilizes large files, you’re already acquainted with the term sync.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about this. Vis the (last month) announcement of the Kindle, an e-book reader on steroids, that syncs itself whenever it has a network connection and otherwise doesn’t seem to care. (I’ve used e-books for years, but in the form of downloaded files and “reader” software on my computer.) Groove, which I haven’t used for a couple of years, also had this kind of model – opportunistic syncing. Google Docs (documents) currently works only when you’re actually online, but there’s lots of talk about how to enable it for offline work, including perhaps a big Ajax (Ajax==”lots of javascript on the browser side manipulating DOM objects”) effort that would allow offline work that would later on upload to the big server in the sky. And I’ve blogged already about Ecto and other tools that let you create blog entries while offline and then upload them when you’re connected.

What’s the real future? Well, it’s obvious to me. Ultimately we’ll all carry devices that are capable of functioning “quite well” in standalone mode, but which sync up whenever there’s connectivity, refreshing information from the network while at the same time updating our own information on the net. Remember in 2013 to remind me of this and see if I was right.

A big “thank you” to my international readers

12 January, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

I don’t have a huge readership (although I’m happy with what I’m getting), but if you look at my ClustrMap you’ll see that this blog is broadly read around the world. And so this is just a short post to say “thank you” to those outside of the US and Europe who are my readers. (ClustrMaps provides a little map showing where our readers are (based on the IP addresses of their ISPs), and it’s a pretty neat service.)

I’ve been tracking readership this way for about a year now, and it’s really gratifying to see that international readership has broadened out. It used to be primarily the US, with a little bit in Europe and some in India. Now we’ve spread to South America and more broadly in Asia.

Thank you to everyone.

Now, I’d better get busy and write more blog entries…