An Afternoon of Trains

March 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and I took a fun little trip last night. Originally we were going to go get an assignment for my transportation class out of the way. That involved riding a rapid west on Wilshire, the Red Line to Hollywood, the Gold Line to Pasadena, and two stops on the Blue Line down toward USC. Well, that wasn't what we ended up doing. We still ended up with a good little public transit journey, though. — Continue Reading...

Staking Out Cookie Territory

March 11, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So yesterday I'm walking across campus to get on my bike and head home, and I pass a girl, probably seven or so years old, selling girl scout cookies in the center of campus. Now, that's nothing unusual. But this girl had a whole setup going. She had a table, a chair, and next to them she had probably a dozen boxes of cookies. Not the little for-sale boxes, but the boxes those boxes get shipped in. Either this girl is the ultimate in little girl scout businesswomen, or she had some help.

Still Infatuated With Connectivity

March 10, 2005 by Eric Richardson

It's quite possible that the coolest thing about being able to have this anywhere Internet access via my phone is that suddenly I have connectivity on the roof of my apartment building. I have some laundry in the dryer, so while I'm waiting I grabbed my laptop and headed up here to hang out for a half hour or so. It's so nice just to be outside after all the crappy weather we've had lately.

Speed wise, my connectivity is testing at about 120 - 140kbps. That's not as fast as EDGE is advertised as being capable of, but it's good enough for me. The one thing I do need to lessen for this is my dependence on ssh. The latency times (600 - 900ms) are just high enough to make interactive typing less than appealing. It's workable, just not fun for email.

Woo hoo! Truely Mobile Internet

March 10, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Success came quicker than I might have thought... I'm now posting this via a GPRS/EDGE connection through my cell phone. I'm using my phone as a Bluetooth modem to give connectivity to my laptop.

Enough technical terms for you?

In layman's terms: My cell phone -- a Sony Ericsson s710 with service through Cingular -- offers internet access, in the form of Cingular's MEdia Net functionality. The phone offers the functionality to act as a modem, and in fact can connect wirelessly to the laptop as a Bluetooth modem. My laptop doesn't have Bluetooth built in, but I have a little bluetooth adaptor that plugs into the back of the computer (USB). So, to get internet access on my laptop the computer sees the phone as a modem and "dials" the internet (really it just tells the phone to use a certain profile). The phone connects to the internet and returns the connection information to the laptop. Voila, I'm on the internet.

Breaking Things, Getting Ready, and Getting Access

March 10, 2005 by Eric Richardson

It turns out I broke authentication on Tuesday afternoon while putting some code changes in place. Oddly, I was still able to post Tuesday evening after the DLANC meeting, but the code was broken so I'm not sure how that worked. Something still looks to be a little wacky, but it should just affect authenticated access, so none of you should see it.

That doesn't have anything to do with me not posting yesterday, though. I didn't notice until this morning. Yesterday I was just busy studying for my last midterm before spring break. Now I have classes today, work tomorrow, and then Monday Kathy and I fly to South Carolina for six days.

I'm working on getting internet access working through my phone. If I can get that going I'll use that while I'm in SC. I have my laptop able to make the phone connect to network and from the console it looks like the ppp connection starts up correctly, but something still isn't working right through kppp. I think I'm close, though.