Sun, 19 Feb 2006

VoIP server installed

The SeattleWireless VoIP server is installed and running. I am currently importing the required base config to make this system operational, as well as working on the account creation webpage.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

VoIP Server Install on Saturday

I have worked out all the particulars with SCCP and we should have some hardware in place this Saturday. This means the SeattleWireless VoIP server is only a couple weeks away from going live.

When stuff is up and running, expect an official announcement in the next couple of weeks.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Mon, 13 Feb 2006

SeattleWireless and Community Wireless VoIP

About ready for testing. Anyone who is interested in an IAX or SIP intertie with SeattleWireless, please contact me directly. Big or small, it's not important. Looking for asterisk experimenters.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Wed, 01 Feb 2006

Node A-Toys

Today was the first day I got to see the completed Node A-Toys install. The facilities were impressive, and I felt very special pulling up through the secure gate and parking inside! The gate also closes and locks, which is always good too. Last time I was at the site, there were some..well...strange people wondering about.

To see what we were competiting against, I threw a spectrum analyzer on the heliax. It was amazing how much noise and spurious emissions popped up on the display -- both WiFi from around Seattle and noise from other non-WiFi operations on the tower.

I found a couple holes in the noise, and passed them onto Rob. I suspect that things will be a little cleaner into the tower now. Pictures to follow.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Tue, 31 Jan 2006

Planet.seattlewireless.net

Check out planet.seattlewireless.net. This is a aggregation of all SWN blogs, and a great way to see what everybody is up to.

For some reason, I am stuck with this stereotypical blogger/mac user icon for all my blog entries on this site. Perhaps someday i'll figure out how to set this @#$@# icon. Okay, looks like i figured this one out.

In unrelated news, I went down to Phoenix for the weekend. It was great to get away from the insane amount of rain pounding the northwest. The papers in Phoenix were reporting inverse records -- 110+ days of no rain. There was simply too much sun -- oh darn. Highs were in the mid 60's.

I rented a convertible and discovered it was just a little too cold to drive on the freeway with the top down this time of year. But I did it anyway -- why rent a convertible if you are going to drive with the top up all the time?

My daughter did not like the roofless vehicle, but just put up with it. I made a point not to show her that it had a retractable roof that folded up in the back.

Eventually, she figured out that it, indeed, had a roof--or in her words--a "house". After she saw that, I was nagged nonstop to tell the car to "make a house". Instead, we bought a large winter coat on clearance for $10 and bundled her up. She liked that.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Fri, 27 Jan 2006

Tower Project Complete

As you may remember, SeattleWireless embarked on a tower node project in the start of december. I am happy to report that this project is now complete. The gear is on top of the UPN tower on Capitol Hill and is fully operational. The ESSID is "SWN-NodeAtoys", and is currently a 6dBi omni antenna. The UPN tower is the southwestern tower on top of madison.

NodeAtoys, on top of the UPN tower, runs DHCP, OLSR (a mesh routing protocol), and is available to anyone who wants to connect. I highly suggest a high gain directional antenna, as it will take a little bit more power than normal to light up this small omni. This was actually done on purpose to reduce the heavy amounts of interference in seattle area. 2.4GHz is a jungle, as you probably guessed.

Inital surveys using Kismet indicated that we are pulling in a couple of stray signals. One of the most interesting is a signal originating from an antenna located at a marina at the base of Magnolia. A non-directional antenna not really pointing at our tower that is several miles away (line of sight) is a very good sign that things are going to be great for people in the Seattle area who can see this tower.

I was not able to make it out today for the install, but check out Matt Westervelt's Blog for more details. Also, check out the NodeAtoys wiki page for official node-related information.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Wed, 14 Dec 2005

Fundraiser Complete!

I am happy to report the SeattleWireless fundraiser is complete. This is a significant milestone in SeattleWireless network deployment! While financing could potentially be our biggest hurdle for this project, there is a lot of other hard work ahead for some of the core SWN members on this project. I really believe in everybody on this project, and suspect that we will stay on target, meet deadlines, and finish this project as soon as possible.

According to the project plan, the expected completion date of the fundraiser was 12/15/2005. Most certainly, the financing round is an important milestone in any project--otherwise it just would not get off the ground. This puts us on target so far, but I won't get too much ahead of myself. There is still a long ways to go.

Expect the holiday season to put a damper on this project. While purchasing and provisioning of gear can work in parallel of aquiring a tower climber, expect no climbing until after the holiday season (aka, all the big stuff happens January).

There is actually a pretty well-defined completion date. This will be announced after we officially secure a tower climber, and after we can schedule a climb date with the tower owner (which A-Toys simply leases space from).

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Wed, 30 Nov 2005

Donation Link

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Tue, 29 Nov 2005

SeattleWireless Tower Fundraiser

SeattleWireless has been presented with the grand opportunity of collocating on top of a large radio tower on top of in the Seattle area at no cost! But we need your help to make this project a reality.

One of the most difficult engineering obstacles when building a community wireless network is access to high locations. WiFi signals require line-of-sight between two locations in order to function properly. Building a network within a juggle of large, concrete apartment buildings and steel high rises, even over a couple blocks is a monumental task. This is especially true when noting that SeattleWireless projects are solely financed on a need-by-need basis by members. Our nodes are built with inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware, and we even climb rooftops in the pouring Seattle rain.

However, a radio tower is not your typical roof top. There is no elevator to the top of this structure! Skilled and insured tower climbers need to be hired, weather hardened gear needs to be purchased, and care needs to be taken on hardware selection so that we only need to hire a climber once.

A tower location, such as this one located on Capitol Hill, not only helps expand our network in the Seattle area, but ultimately opens access from many other locations in the Puget Sound area. It will provide our community network with a high, central location to bring our network to a critical mass required to foster further growth.

We have budgeted $2500 to purchase the required hardware, contract a climber to install the gear, and cover any additional hardware costs and future site maintenance.

Due to the significant costs of this project, we need your help! We have been offered the unique opportunity of free tower space with no recurring costs. We have the technical skills, the facilities, all we need now is your generosity.

Please visit http://www.seattlewireless.net/fundraiser/ to help out -- even if you just want to donate a couple bucks.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link

Wed, 09 Nov 2005

MindCamp

MindCamp was COOL. I am working on a post mortem for the issues we had with WiFi. In short, our social experiment involving mesh networking in the client space failed. I will explain more later.

The backup plan was to use OLSR in the distribution layer, and use access points in the access layer. This allowed us to deploy a wifi network with *no* cable plant. AND NO WE DID NOT USE WDS FOR GOD'S SAKE. It was a success--although it could be greatly improved. Matt, Rob, and I will be putting some serious cycles into making this an even better solution.

I would have to say the notable experience was a few hours spent offline with Michael Laine after his Space Elevator presentation. Michael is working on something great, and it should bring countless other, more "down to earth" (he he), innovations.

An unlikely innovation in the DVD arena captured my imagination. Since I first set eyes on a DVD player (ultimately the menuing system, and the apparent extensive scripting capabilities), I thought it would be cool to have a movie that either had a different plot every time you watched it, or perhaps a plot that stopped at various decision points.

As someone who has experience in the whole video scene, its difficult enough to write one plot, let alone 2^n plot deviations with just two choices alone. I have never had the time or the ability to make such a complex story line.

Make My Day (DVD) does just this. Its a choose your own adventure DVD!! The viewer is given almost an endless amount of choices as the video progresses. The disc is a comedy, and naturally has a very indy film feel to it. I thought this DVD project was so amazing, that I am going to buy it for christmas.

Near the end of the camp, I figured id show up to this one talk about "Cell phone programming". I almost didn't go...it sounded like someone explaining how to bypass phone subsidy lock codes so they could be provisioned to operate on other carriers. Thankfully, this was not the case! UIEvolution has just launched something quite amazing called UJML.

UJML is a programming language done in XML. I have no idea why the hell anyone would want to use the XML framework in a programming language, but they pretty much just use them all as functions and ditched the brackets.

UJML is a VM that rides on top of BREW or J2ME, and all code is platform independent and automatically scalable. While it is not multithreaded, it has an extensive system for handling events (like a VBL, etc) which makes its perfect for games.

UJML has all the "meat" of J2ME in a very easy to understand format. Anybody can crank out some amazing software for mobile phones using this system. The best part: Everything is free. The IDE, the compiler, the emulator, even the system that does OTA installs of your software.

Since UJML makes apps that are truly platform independent (unlike the slight variations seen with J2ME and BREW VM's), you can use the same code, graphics, and sounds from a java-enabled plasma TV, to a Treo, to even a low end 120x120 color cellular phone.

UJML also has XML call systems, plugin library support, and even a method of retrieving UJML code on an external internet host and executing it after download. This allows the coder to create very large applications that work on even the smallest of memory restrictions.

Overhead is there, but minimal. The system will handle multiple sprites and events without any issues.

It sounds like I need to stop development on my WAP MMORPG and move this over to UJML. I might have one heck of a killer app on my hands.

[/seattlewireless] permanent link