Captain's Quarters Backup Site

Wireless City, USA

Every Captain has a home port, and this Captain's hometown has decided to be the first wireless city in the nation:

CERRITOS, Calif. - Browsing the Web from this Southern California city may soon become an outdoor sport.

The first phase of a project to establish citywide wireless Internet access is slated to begin next month. Ultimately, anyone with a laptop or wireless device will be able to surf the Web from virtually anywhere in the city's 8.6-square-mile area.

When my family moved to Cerritos in 1970, it was a small town on the fringe of LA that consisted in large part of dairies ... with lots of cows ... that you could smell from everywhere, it seemed. During the real-estate boom in the 70s, the dairies all sold out for development and Cerritos is now a thriving, upscale neighborhood where I couldn't afford to live if I cloned myself three times over. Across from my old high school (go Dons!), where a pasture used to be is now a megaplex of retail shopping, theater, and hotels.

Cerritos has long pursued a policy of early adoption of technology. The library, also across from my old high school, was one of the first nationwide to use RFID to manage its inventory and automate the check-out process. Well before any other community, Cerritos installed fiber-optic cable for an experimental cable TV/telephone system from GTE, which was supposed to deliver movies on demand and digital telephony. In fact, this system may have been the reason Cerritos was not able to adopt any other high-speed Internet access technology:

The 51,000 residents of Cerritos, located 26 miles southeast of Los Angeles, have not had DSL broadband access to the Internet because the city is too far from the telephone company's central office. Cable Internet access has not been an option, either, Hylton said.

City-wide WiFi is just another way in which the Captain's hometown keeps innovating, and I wish them the best of luck in its implementation.

Breaking the Microsoft Jones

Yesterday I decided to take a radical step: I downloaded Mozilla and installed its browser and e-mail client.

I've used Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook for years now, and I've been pretty happy with both overall. Lately, though, I've been frustrated with the security holes in Outlook and its mail interface, and pop-up ads in IE have been driving me nuts. I'd heard that Mozilla addressed both of these problems, so I'm giving it a try.

So far, I'm impressed. The mail client isn't as feature rich as full-blown Outlook, but it matches up well with Outlook Express. I wish it managed signatures; right now you have an option to assign just one to an account, rather than being able to insert from a selection of signatures. It alerts you when new e-mail is on the server but it doesn't automatically download it for you. That may be an option, but I haven't played with it enough to know yet.

The browser isn't too bad either, and has a couple of nice features. First and foremost, it allows you to block pop-up windows. No more lock-ups from badly programmed ads (take that, Orbitz! mwa-hahahahaha!). Instead of opening multiple sessions of the browser, you have the option of opening tabs in one session instead. This is nice when you want to go clean out of your browser when you alt-tab on your desktop. Java scripts seem to run a bit better, too.

On the other hand, the browser doesn't always display sites as well as IE. For instance, your comrade and mine at the Politburo Diktat has done a great job designing his site as a two-column blog. For some reason, Mozilla displays the right column below the left column. I'm assuming that the problem is one of resizing columns that are hard-coded to a certain width. IE must be able to override the hard coding, where Mozilla doesn't, or at least that's my guess. Also, I still have the normal upgrade issues of remembering all my passwords that I've allowed IE to manage for me, but that's hardly Mozilla's fault.

If anyone has any insight into these issues -- or any others I may come across -- drop me a comment. I'll report back as I find more out about Mozilla.

Denial-of-Service attack at Hosting Matters

Ever see what a denial-of-service attack looks like from the server side? Check out this graph of server traffic at Hosting Matters last night. (via Instapundit)

Breaker, breaker ... any takers?

USC's Online Journalism Review has an interview with NY Times technology reporter John Markoff, written by Adam Clayton Powell. Markoff has been covering technology since the year after two guys named Steve came up with a computer named Apple, and he gives an interesting but somewhat bleak picture of the future:

I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that's certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now -- it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that's what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.

And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It's possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time.

When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. ... I also like to tell them, when they (ask) when I'm going to start a blog, and then, 'Oh, I already have a blog, it's www.nytimes.com, don't you read it?'

Not sure what he means, not the most useful thing to do with my time ... [sniff]. Markoff may be a bit pessimistic, but his vision of the possibilities is intriguing and certainly sounds believable. (via Romanesko)

Judge: Minnesota Internet phone company not bound by telecom regulations

This seems intriguing, although until the written decision is released, it will be difficult to determine how far-reaching the effects will be. If the states are not allowed to regulate voice-over-IP, start putting some money into these companies, and divest from any long-distance carriers you may have money in.

The utilities commission wants Vonage -- which charges $34.99 a month for unlimited calling in the United States and Canada -- to be certified as a local phone company. Among other things, Haar said, that would require it to file a complete listing of its various offerings to consumers, a description of its plans for offering emergency 911 service and a plan for participating in a state program than subsidizes phone service for poor people in Minnesota.

Vonage believes that the judge, Davis, agreed with its argument that the state lacked regulatory authority in this case because the Constitution prohibits states from interfering with interstate commerce. Vonage, a privately held company based in Edison, N.J., said that it cannot tell where its calls originate from because the phone number may be linked to a portable computer.

"We can't tell where you are making the call," said Jeffrey Citron, Vonage's chairman and chief executive. "Our business is interstate by its very nature."