Recently in Internet Category

Broadband in the Sky Is Thrilling

By dayhawk on August 1, 2010 6:35 PM | 0 Comments
DSC_0007_gogo-wifi.jpg
I am in an Alaska Airlines 737-800, 38,000 feet above sea level and traveling at over 500 miles per hour. And I am connected to the Internet at broadband speeds.

Gogo Inflight Internet, the brand under which Aircell markets its in-flight Internet services, made sign-up and sign-in a two-click process.

Within seconds, I was responding to my work e-mail, updating my Facebook status with a message from the sky, and reading disclaimers about VoIP.

Connection to Skype was tenuous at best. Messaging through Skype worked with noticeable delays, and a Skype call was nearly impossible. It is unclear why Gogo's ground-based cell towers are unable to handle Skype or VoIP. Row 44, Gogo's overshadowed competitor, on the other hand, has no problems with VoIP.

Row 44 offers VoIP options for certain mobile handsets. Row 44 has a fundamentally different infrastructure. Instead of ground-based cell towers, Row 44 relies on satellites. That allows Row 44 to cover most of our planet, whereas Gogo is limited to the continental United States and, according to Aircell, about 100 miles beyond.

In the end, being connected to the world while in flight has been thrilling. Gone are the days when use of electronic devices could land you in a holding cell. That does make me wonder whether mobile phone use was being curtailed for no good reason.

Google vs. Microsoft

By dayhawk on January 31, 2010 8:31 PM | 0 Comments
Microsoft creates a mannequin and forces me to learn how to dress it. Google generally allows its systems to adapt to how we work. And too many people and businesses fell under Microsoft's spell, being forced to make communication more complex and more expensive than it has to be.

In the end, we're all in the information business. Just because the bosses don't get the picture doesn't mean information has to be pretty. E-mail, for example, seldom requires pretty fonts and colors. I don't value the information in e-mail more because it has strange fonts and arrives in color and Microsoft RTF--which is not true RTF.

Google is universal. Gmail did relent and allowed some colors and fonts. It's a streamlined version of what Geocities used to be. Personalized expressions in information transmission. Add to that, voice, documents and project collaboration. But we were brainwashed on a platform whose future is clouded by complex licensing schemes and is inflexible.

While Microsoft is constantly band-aiding its creations, Boeing's defense systems are moving forward with a fine-tuned step-child of Linux. And I moved on from Windows Mobile Smartphones, which crashed and hung so often that it was worthless.

It is amazing that dozens of teams, many of them the brightest in their field, on Microsoft campus couldn't perfect an operating system. That speaks to the corporate culture, a top-down mindset that hampers development.

Can ornate Bing ever Google? All signs point to no. Not when you want businesses to fork up hundreds of thousands of dollars for incomplete products.

[Update: and someone's upset in general--about Google, Adobe and god knows what else. It's amazing that Jobs didn't take on Microsoft. He must be in the same business camp.]

Going Google...Completely

By dayhawk on October 13, 2009 9:38 PM | 0 Comments
Five different e-mail accounts that I know of. More than 450 RSS feeds. Over 2,000 calendar items and tasks. They now reside under a single Google account. I'm not brave enough just yet to consolidate all incoming calls to Google Voice.

Manually consolidating and uploading old e-mail to Gmail took about two days. Outlook 2007 was nice when it was a solid local-copy alternative to nebulous cloud computing. The days of a single UNIX e-mail account with several aliases are gone--especially when so much incoming data must be processed continuously and organized with a method that offers some continuity.

I am Dayhawk. And I'm free of Outlook.

But I cannot let go of FeedDemon, arguably the most versatile RSS aggregator out there. In its ad-supported version 3.0, NewsGator has switched the synchronization service to Google Reader. Another reason for this week-long consolidation process.

After about a week of relying solely on Google for data mining, aggregating and processing, I feel like a new person. No more bulky Outlook to enslave me. Just Google and me.

Finding Your IP Address

By dayhawk on August 4, 2008 7:14 AM | 0 Comments
Your IP Address is: 38.107.191.116

Being on the Internet sometimes requires knowing my IP address. There are many ways to track it down, but here is an easy way to pull just that information using PHP. This information and others are usually sent every time I visit a Web site. This is one way of retrieving a portion of that data.

The above script uses the following PHP code which works with version 4 and above.
<?php
print $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
?>

« Germany | Main Index | Archives | Life »