DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Having a PowerBook running OS X has made me a Mac fanatic again. Last week I had a long list of software updates to purchase, and a long list of questions to find answers to, so I went to the best place in the Macintosh universe to satisfy both needs: MacWorld Expo.

Many exhibitors offer “show specials” — they sell their products at discounted rates at the expo. It’s not like I generally need an excuse to buy software… this is equivalent to giving free needles to addicts. But I saved enough in discounts to cover my admission fee.

I also got some important questions answered. This is a key feature of the Expo: many of the best software engineers in the community are working their employers’ booths. So are the company founders. Often, this is the same guy.

At one point I was in a conversation with one of the three-letter-title guys for a particular company, and I asked a technical question he couldn’t answer. He said he’d go get an engineer to answer the question. I didn’t want to put him to the trouble, so I said, “Hey, that’s OK; I can call your tech support folks tomorrow.” He paused for a second, and said with the air of a man admitting something that’s commonly known but not commonly admitted, “Er, you don’t want to do that.”

The best part of the Expo this year is that I did not contract any apparent disease.

The hygenic low point of the day came when I was introduced to a senior engineer from a particular company. I planned to pepper him with obscure and difficult questions (the type that the phone-support guys can’t even spell, much less answer). The engineer turned away to cough — a suspiciously wet Expo-style cough, indicating the incubation of foreign microscopic nasties deep inside his respiratory tract — and then he reached out to shake my hand, offering the hand he’d just coughed into. Insofar as I needed his help, I felt it would have been rude to refuse the shake. But I quarantined my hand until I could get to the restroom for emergency disinfection procedures. Ech.

Mark Morford’s SUV column is over the top and worth an immediate read: Are Hummer Owners Idiots? - More delightful proof positive that most SUVs are, in fact, morally repugnant. Go, America!

Just in time to crush a few thousand smaller cars and kill a bunch of pedestrians and poison the environment and still be able to traverse six feet of standing floodwater in order to make it in time for Timmy’s soccer game, it’s the rollout of the new Hummer H2, the biggest joke of the entire SUV world, representing, well, just exactly everything that’s wrong with America’s view of the world.

Beyond the comic value of his indignation, some of the statistics are downright frightening: “the Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord kills only 21 per 1 million such vehicle.” In simpler terms, this SUV is 5 times more dangerous than a given passenger car. Perhaps not to the driver — just to everyone else.

Also worth an immediate read is the source article Morford quotes, Bumper Mentality by Stephanie Mencimer of the Washington Monthly.

One step further back into the ancestry of this diatribe is Keith Bradsher’s new book, High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, which just went onto my reading list.

Don’t know 802.11b from 802.11a from 802.11g? See Linksys’ handy Wireless Technology Comparison Chart

Before you rush out to upgrade to ‘g’, though, remember that most home DSL installations are only good for 1.5 Mb/sec throughput — or 13% of 802.11b’s best-case max. In other words, for home users, the bandwidth bottleneck is not the wireless connection, but the broadband connection itself. Even a high-end DSL or cable-modem installation will max out at 6 Mb/sec, just over half of 802.11b’s capacity.

No, thanks; I won’t eat food additives that show up free and unsolicited with my newspaper.

802.11b, aka WiFi, aka Airport, aka wireless networking, delivers the promise of mobile computing. If you are only online a few minutes a day, to check your email and debris.com (thank you very much), you may not be interested in this. But if you’re online around the clock, whether to work or play, the ability to do this from anywhere in the house, or the coffee shop downtown, expand’s one’s environment in a way that cannot be fully appreciated by anyone not chained to a workstation 8-12 hours per day.

Wireless networking is a hardware geek’s nirvana. Like audio gear, it’s all about the numbers: milliwatts of amplifier power, decibel gain of antenna, distance from access point.

Most consumers needn’t worry about any of this. Macintosh users, especially, have an easy time because Apple’s Airport is a tightly-integrated, minimal-configuration WiFi system.

But 802.11b has other uses, such as providing wireless broadband access in remote areas, where DSL and cable-broadband are not available. The local wireless-networking group has created a handful of public access points, providing inexpensive DSL-equivalent bandwidth to anyone with line-of-sight (that is, to anyone who can “see” one of the group’s antennas). The basic methodology for determining whether one can see the network is to walk around one’s property with a laptop configured to sniff out available networks.

In performing such a survey, maximizing sensitivity to any present radio signals is crucial. To maximize sensitivity, the group uses high-power 802.11b radio cards and high-gain antennas. At the moment, the highest-power radio cards are the 200 mW Senao EnGenius NL-2511CD Plus EXT2, which have connectors for external antennas. The best antennas for surveying are directional; the most common one used here is the 24 dBi parabolic grid.

I am attempting to create a Mac-based (OS X) survey kit. I’ve purchased a Senao EnGenius card and matching pigtail. I’ve built a low-cost cantenna. But I’ve hit a wall: although the free, GPL’d WirelessDriver supports basic 802.11b connectivity using the Senao card under MacOS X, network scanning is not supported.

The WirelessDriver for OS X will no doubt support network scanning at some point. But the dates in the CVS archive seem to indicate that the project has stalled; the most recent code check-in was four months ago.

At MacWorld Expo I discovered another possibility: the folks at macwireless.com have created a driver for Prism-based 802.11b cards, such as the Senao EnGenius line. The driver supports network scanning. But it’s not commercially available yet. If you would be a customer for this product, please contact macwireless.com to encourage them to focus their efforts on this.

Either of these would provide my hardware with the ability to scan for networks. I’d still need scanning software. There are two NetStumbler-like scanners for OS X: iStumbler and MacStumbler. At the moment, neither supports 3rd-party radio cards. But I believe both authors would quickly incorporate support for scanning, once the underlying driver offered the capability.

A third scanner, KisMAC, appears to include its own Prism-compatible driver software, but in my experiments it was too unstable for real-world use.

Die-hards who want to scan their neighborhoods right away could instead attach an external antenna to the Airport card built into their laptops. This is too much work for too little payoff in my case, but I mention it here for the people more desperate than me.