Month: March 2003

More on WiFi Worldmap

Duh.  Basic idea of what I described has not only been done, there is even a name: wardriving.  I remember reading about a guy who did that in NY sometime back, but didn't connect the dots.  Duh Again.  I also found several sites where WiFi maps can be found.  Here is a national one and here is site where more detailed maps can be found although its SF area map shows WiFi points offshore.  Are these warboats or errors?

While GPS-based solution is done, I have not yet located one that uses addresses entered by WiFi station operators.  I did find an address to GPS coordinate mapping servce.  Wow!  This means all I need is a bit of software and lots of publicity to get WiFi Worldmap project off the ground.  Cool!

WiFi World Map

Dave's request for ideas for blogging across America gave me an idea on how a WiFi World Map can be built and updated.  Someone else must have thought of this idea.  Its just too simple and obvious.

All you need is a WiFi receiver, possibly optional GPS receiver, and a bit of software that sends GPS coordinates to WiFi World Map servers once in a while, effectively saying "Hey, I can connect by WiFI from here."  All that remains is a bit of server code that draws the dots on a world map.  If an area gets too hot, servers can tell reporting WiFi receiver to slow things down in the returned message.

GPS device will not be needed if approximate location can be provided by WiFi stations using some readily available information (like address) entered by the WiFi station operators.  Is there an address to geo-coordinate conversion web service?  A funny hack version could use graphical results of an address to map service (like Yahoo Maps) and figure out the location.  Just start with an address of which you know the GPS location of and then count the pixels to the target location on the returned image.  Heh.  Cool hack of hacks.

Of course, there must be a tangible benefit for people to install and run WiFi World Map client on their machine.  One obvious benefit is nearby WiFi station locator service (1.5 miles south west) as well as a warning service (20 miles from next nearest WiFi station).  I would find such service useful.

If no one else is doing this already and enough people and companies are willing to donate some time, funds, or equipment, I think we can make this happen rather quickly.

Going nuts with Python

While I had a great time playing with Lua — its smaller, faster, as easy to hack in, and internally simpler than Python — what I like about Python is the large volume of available Python libraries and the community that built them.  So, I have been doing some crazy things with Python from within IE.  I just got back from a day long conference at Adobe that gave me some new ideas too.  First step is to embed Python inside Acrobat so I can start playing with Acrobat itself as well as writing some Acrobat plugins in Python.  Adobe should have used SWIG, Python, and wxWindows instead of wasting time with JavaScript and hard to use API.

Farewell to Red Herring

Red Herring was one of my regular reads.  Reading Red Herring was like what reading newspaper sports section must be like for sports fans — I avoid the sports section like the plague.  Now Red Herring is closing its doors.  I will miss it.  Farewell.

So long and thanks for all the Red Herrings.

Back from Python Jungle

Whew.  Last night, I finally nailed the bug that forced me to get lost inside Python.  Debugging Python inside Internet Explorer is not easy.  To debug native code inside Python, I had to rebuild all of Python, Pythonwin, and PyWin32 native code because you have to have debug builds of all the DLLs.  To debug Python scripts, I wrote some debugging helper code that lets me watch each line of Python code executing.  I am going to hook up a real Python debugger as an IE explorer bar (like the Favorites bar) so I can step through Python scripts and set debug points.  That would be so cool!

Finding out that win32ui module required hosting application to be written in MFC stumped me because I was hosting Python as a DLL written in ATL/WTL and IE doesn't seem to be written in MFC.  Come to think of it, its been ages since I last wrote an MFC application.  I think the last one was NetDynamics Studio.  NetDynamics was bought by Sun and NetDynamics products turned into iPlanet and I have no idea if they are still using the code I wrote.  I was going to replace it with a XUL-engine written Java, but that never happened.

Coercing Win32com module to use existing IE automation objects took some effort, mostly spent on trying to figure out how Win32com works.  I had to patch win32com.client.dynamic.py to do what I needed to.  Real bummer was finding out that most of Win32com is written in Python.  This means its much slower than native glue code.  For most COM automation use, this is no problem since tasks performed by each COM method takes much longer than the time it takes to invoke the method via Python-based Win32com code.  But for manipulating IE DOM, this is dog slow.  Sometimes, I can literally see changes being made to a web page.  Also, each COM dispatch object uses too much memory in Win32com.  Just touching all the nodes in a document will be prohibitive.

I'll have to write my own optimized COM glue for Python at some point.  For now, I am pushing forward with Win32com.

Yahoo URL Screwup

Have you noticed that Yahoo URLs have been screwed up in the past few days?  News seems to work, but maps and other Yahoo services end up with 404, thanks to some URL being prepended.  You can workaround it by removing the first part starting with "http:" to just before the second "http:".  I figured this bug would get fixed within an hour or a day at the latest, but the bug is still there as I write this.

Update: This problem turned out to be my fault.  For a while, I have blocked — by rerouting to echo back – most of the ad sites using the KazaaLite's hosts file which has a list of domain names known to be used to serve ad contents.  Yahoo has decided to reroute requests through a domain in the filter list, resulting in 404.  I removed rd.yahoo.com from the filter list and the problem went away.

XML Advanced Electronic Signatures

W3C released XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (XAdES) as a Note.  XAdES extends XML-Signature (XMLDSIG) to support signatures valid over long periods and to comply with the requirements of European Directive on electronic signatures.  Does this impact 3D-Secure?  No, because its the card issuer that signs in 3D-Secure, not the cardholder.  Future 3D-Secure architectures might support cardholder signatures as well as leveraging P2P infrastructures, but I'll be glad just to see current 3D-Secure become ubiquitous.  I think 3D-Secure adoption has slowed lately.

Power Network Predators

While everyone was studying properties and behaviors of complex networks, predators like Enron were preying on the weaknesses of the power grid network.  I still remember the damn PG&E bills.

"As chief of Enron's Western energy trading wing, Timothy N. Belden is the guy who turned out the lights in Silicon Valley during summer 2001's bogus energy crisis. He described his depredations as "experiments," and in some profound sense that was true: They were so far ahead of the curve that a lot of them probably weren't even illegal. Nonetheless, he recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, coughing up $2.1 million and promising to sing in federal court. His cadre of 100 or so energy traders, crammed onto a tight little floor together under his supervision, was just like Johnson's Skunk Works – an elite division of wonks who were quick, quiet, and right on time.

They were so quick they made a business of selling lightning. Electric power doesn't sit still long enough to be stored.

They were so quiet that, despite endless press coverage, nobody realized Enron was gaming California's power system. No one imagined that a Texas-sponsored cabal of traders hidden in deepest Oregon could accomplish such marvels. But every time Belden's crew pushed the F1 key, California magically "congested" and "decongested," and Enron made money – more than $800 million amid the crisis of 2001." [Wired 11.03]