Day: June 10, 2004

Gizmodo mentions Bluetooth EDR, or Enhanced Data Rate.  It is supposed to be faster than but backward compatible with plain old Bluetooth (or is it Bluetooth Classic now?).

I’m glad that it’s going to be backwards compatible with oldskool Bluetooth, though honestly I’ve never had an issue with the speed of it.  Sure, I’ll have to wait if I’m transfering a multi-meg file to or from my phone.  For most things Bluetooth seems to be fast enough.  I’m sure that for more advanced uses more bandwidth would be great, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.

I would use a slower Bluetooth device if it connected more reliably and didn’t do the random weird things that Bluetooth devices seem to do at one time or another.

Bluetooth EDR Roundup:

• EDN
• Daily Wireless
• Design Technica
• The Wireless Weblog

• NewLC links to The Symbian GCC Improvement Project, which aims to update the Symbian-compatible GCC toolchain.
• Linux Today points to a Linux.com article that discusses using jabber and jann as a log monitor.
• Sci Fi Hi Fi has an amazing shot of Point Reyes.
• Simon Willison discusses backporting Python 2.3 code to 2.2.
• GonzoMoFo recaps some bugfixing for JXTA 2.3rc.
• OSNews on moving from Debian to SUSE and back again.
• Reuters: Clear Channel is getting ready to pay out on some of its indecency cases.
• Scott Hanselman has some notes on how to make .NET code happy in Mono.
• Jenny finds a killer use for SMS.
• Via Erik, Neil takes a tour of Firefox 0.9.
• Reuters: Roy Disney Wants Details on Eisner’s Pay
• Dejan Bosnac at ONJava discusses SMS-powered Java apps.
• OSNews has some interesting tidbits about what Apple may or may not be working on.
• Speaking of Apple, how about the new G5’s now up to 2.5GHz for the elite creative class.  I’m still looking for a cheap blue and white or grey and white G3/G4.  My G4’d 8500 runs 9.1 great, but I can’t quite coax OSX on to it.
• Blue Sky on Mars points to rome, an RSS/Atom library for Java.

Things are finally starting to settle down after a few hectic days.  We’re almost done with leftovers and are finally starting to get back to our regular schedules.  Thanks again to the guys, Martin, Eric and his parents for mobilizing the champagne.

In other news, we ramped up the wireless infrastructure with a Linksys WRT54G on sale for $69 before rebates and $59 after.  That’s about $40 off what I’d expect to pay normally, $30 off the normal “sale” price, and below my “buy it” threshold.  I know that Linksys is pushing the SpeedBooster versions of their hardware, but 802.11g/b is faster than my internet pipes, and if I need to transfer anything faster, I’ll plug the thing in.  You know, with wires.  (Grandpa, tell us about when computers had wires!)

I picked the WRT54G because of an array of flashable Linux distros that I can put on it.  I’m going to run the stock firmware for a bit until I get things sorted out, but I’ll be shopping around for the best firmware for it.

I’m still way behind on my aggregating.  I should have a linkdump ready in the morning.