DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

I wrote about HomeData Corp recently — they’re the folks responsible for the flood of junk-mail (especially catalogs) you receive after purchasing a home.

I have established contact with someone there who can remove victims from the HomeData mailing list. I won’t publish her email address; I have more respect for her privacy than her employer has for mine. If you want the address, email me — or just call HomeData at 800-628-9456 and ask to opt out.

Realtors, take note: you could provide your clients with a service they’ll truly appreciate, if you give them this piece of information at close of escrow.

The SUV/terrorism debate continues. The Chronicle reports on reactions to the ad campaign: Gas-hogging SUVs aid terrorism, new TV ads say / Columnist Huffington starts campaign

Still more news from the front lines in Huffington’s recent column, How Corporate Greed And Political Corruption Paved The Way For The SUV Explosion (thanks to Bim for the link)