Oblomovka

2002-02-23»

Subject: Rob Flickenger hospitalized. :-(
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:03:53 -0800
From: Schuyler Erle <schuyler@oreilly.com>

At about 8pm PST on Wed. Feb 20, our very own Rob Flickenger accidentally fell
from the roof of a two-story building, while attempting to set up a
point-to-point 802.11b link here in Sebastopol. He was immediately taken to the
hospital, where he was underwent surgery for severe internal injuries. He has
since been taken out of intensive care, and is in stable condition.  Rob is
safe in the company of family and friends, and is expected to be released from
the hospital in a week or so.

First, *please* be careful when doing this sort of field work. Our community
almost lost a brilliant contributor and advocate (and a great friend, to boot),
due to a simple accident. I really don't want to see this happen to anyone
else. I'll say it again: Please be careful when setting up antennas, et cetera.
No amount of bandwidth is worth your physical harm, so don't you be a martyr to
the cause! :-)

Second, if you'd like to send cards or whatever, I'm sure Rob would be grateful
to hear from a community he's given so much to. He can be reached c/o O'Reilly
& Associates, 1005 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA 95472.  Feel free to be
creative, but please don't send antennas -- we don't want to encourage him any
further. ;-)

Of course, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or
Nate or Adam F., especially since Rob won't be answering his e-mail for a
little while. Please feel free to forward this news wherever you think it
appropriate. Thanks.

SDE
--

2002-02-18»

Scott Lemon talks about Indoor Location Systems using 802.11b, and mentions The Nibble Location System. This uses multiple base stations to triangulate your position. Seems a lot like what Microsoft's trying to do with RADAR. Of course, my paranoid head immediately asks: is this something that an unknown (passive) man-in-the-middle-of-the-next-street could use to discover your position? And if so, how can we jam these trackers? After that, I'll relax a little and wonder what the cool applications are, and is this anything to do with Woz's new venture? Would indoor location be cheaper or more expensive if it wasn't 802.11 but a simpler wireless system?

2002-02-13»

How much do people hate winners? And how much do winners hate losers? A lot, it seems. I'll stick my neck out here, though, and say this shows how much undergraduate test subjects hate each other.

2002-02-04»

Gzip can detect whether a piece of writing is written by a particular author, with 90% accuracy. Yes, gzip. - via Honeyguide

2002-01-28»

Edwin Armstrong, and how patent battles drove the inventor of regeneration, superhets and frequency modulation to suicide. - from Doomed Engineers, via Bruce Sterling's blog

2002-01-27»

I think this is a very accurate description of how being a participant on a TV show feels.- Plasticbag.org

A tally of my spam inbox shows that I get about 677KB of it a day. That would take about 4 minutes to download if I was on a 2.8 modem - which I'm not, admittedly. It's still 100 or so messages to ignore. Thank goodness for Spamassassin.