Everything In Between

There’s a new book out today. It’s called Wireless Networking in the Developing World, and it’s available for free downloads online. I’ve already snatched my copy.

Even though it was written with the intention of making wireless telecommunications infrastructure more readily accessible to developing nations by means of educating implementors, I’ve already found it to be a useful reference and excellent learning tool to get a strong grounding on the considerations of setting up any wireless network. It starts you off with a grounding in radio physics, and then quickly goes through the stages of network design: the physical network infrastructure and the logical collision domains. It even has good advice on how to secure the network you create.

This book will be useful for everyone who wants to build their own wireless network that is more complicated than a simple home router. I can also see this guide being extremely handy for those managing and planning community wireless “hotspots” since its focus is on low-cost, yet effective, infrastructure. With the U.S. severely lagging behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband internet access, community wireless projects can breathe new life into local economies just as effectively in America as they can overseas.

Books like this that make it easy for individuals and other organizations to inexpensively maintain wireless telecommunications infrastructure is a welcome addition to the fight for better Internet access across the globe.

I recently discovered (and devoured) this excellent essay on Internet Explorer’s hasLayout property, which every web designer who struggles to understand IE needs to read. It’s probably the clearest an most complete article out there on why certain bugs affect IE the way they do. A definite must read that should cut down on your bug-hunting time and make you a better cross-browser web designer.

Here’s an early holiday gift to everyone who’s asked me about how to sync their Safari bookmarks, Address Book contacts, iCal calendars, and Mail accounts without purchasing the $99 per year .Mac account from Apple: use MySync. From the web site:

MySync provides the Mac-to-Mac syncing capabilities of .mac, without .mac

Instead of syncing your data via Apple’s servers, MySync runs in a Master-Slave configuration on your local network.

MySync uses the Apple Sync Engine built into Tiger, just like .mac and Apple’s iSync.

Tiger supports syncing for the following data types: Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Keychains¹, Mail Accounts, and Mail Rules,
Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes.

As more applications utilise Apple’s Sync Engine, MySync will automatically support them.

Since I have a .Mac account (and yes, of course I use it for more than just syncing), I haven’t bothered to try this program out. If you do, I’d like to hear how well it works for you. Happy holidays.