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Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Larry Wall is conducting his Guru session in the Half Moon seminar room aboard the Holland America Veendam, speaking about developing PERL 6 while being unemployed. The Geek Cruises PERL Whirl seminar at sea is in the closing stages of the all day sessions at sea, as we cruise to the Bahamas after spending a day in St. Thomas and St. Johns. On Friday there will be a series of morning sessions before the conference is concluded. The Internet Cafe is on the deck above us, but with three CISCO Aironet 350 access points frequency hopping across the ship, we have 11 mbps connectivity in the main seminar rooms. Many attendees brought access points for us to test aboard this wireless Internet Beta. The 3COM access point works almost as well as the CISCO Aironet, with almost the same range. I have even rented out my extra 3COM 802.11 adapter cards, because the CISCO access points are configured to accept non-Aironet 802.11 and 802.11b adapter cards in repeater mode. We tested a Dynalink access point as the root AP in the Internet Cafe one night, because there is a price difference of almost $1000 with the CISCO APs. Unfortunately, the Dynalink did not have the same range as the CISCO equipment: three signal jumps with the Dynalink APs would not provide access to the seminar rooms on the deck below the Internet Cafe. In the Library and Card Room, the Dynalink would provide 11 mbps access, but the difficult part of working this metal environment is bouncing, reflecting, or jumping the signal from deck to deck. It is rewarding to see a dozen lap tops tuned on during a session as attendees multitask during the lectures. Even more enjoyable is the Geek Internet Cafe in the Library after the sessions, a true geek chat room, that often does not close down until 5 am. There is a wonderful Internet culture going on aboard this cruise, a relaxed low stress web ecology that is a pleasure to be absorbed in. The "conversations" are concurrent live verbal circles of dialog and Internet communications to sources off of the ship. We discovered the Bermuda Triangle of Internet access today, something Jay in the Internet Cafe says happens every cruise at this area of the sea: due to proximity to the Equator, the solar flare activity disrupts radio communications, and the Internet transmission fade in and out, often times for hours. The signal seems to have stabalized now, but I was warned that signal disruption can continue into the late evening. We are changing rooms for the next Guru session, but since roaming is turned on, the wireless connectionw will carry over into the next room. Neil Bauman said that the wireless LAN will absolutely be set up for the MAC cruise, and that I will start the site survey arrangements as soon as this cruise is concluded. The Titanium laptops work great with the CISCO access points (IEEE 802.11b WIFI), so all of the MAC users will have a simple configuration (join geekcruise). There are responses to this message:
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