Technology Funland

bonszai brought some unexpected benefits into my computing life. When you know meanlix is 5 years old, you realise that I'm really at the bottom of the hardware technology curve.

Not so with bonszai. It has technologies that I've never played with: Wi-fi (802.11g), bluetooth, and Firewire (IEEE1394).

With campus Wi-fi access, I'm really not tied down anymore, and can roam with ease, atleast within most departments. Furthermore, in Ad-Hoc mode, my friends and I can form a private Wi-Fi network (MANET) that leads to interesting possibilities.

Bluetooth (and especially it's Linux implementation) also has opened up some fun possibilities. I'm looking forward to receiving a pair of bluetooth headphones (courtesy HP, hopefully they'll be sent) and am trying to increase the number of bluetooth devices I'll use, especially a planner. BTW, the Linux implementation rocks and I've never seen it so user-friendly. Want to send a file to somebody in the neighbourhood? Just right-click the file, click Send-To, and select Via Bluetooth. Voila, a list of devices in the neighbourhood is presented for your sending pleasure! I think only Mac OS X has a better implementation.

This is, of course, nothing to say of the ethernet-over-bluetooth implementation (modprobe bnep) which is ultimately cool. It means my teensy laptop can connect via four different mediums (eth, fw, bluetooth, wifi), which is the most I've seen a device ever do! It often suffices when wi-fi doesn't (due to buggy drivers). Not very great speeds though.

Firewire is another story, for "sustained" speeds and rated 400Mbps, it's an excellent industry standard for data transfer. It's only now begin showing up in desktops and laptops, and I must say it rocks too! Firewire is built for point-to-point communications and unlike USB2.0, has no problems connecting computers to each other. RFC 2734 details a IPv4-over-Firewire implementation, and the Linux module eth1394 implements it. Not very great speeds (I've got about 17MBps sustained), but again, fantastic to be trying out such technology. Windows too has this, but Microsoft has announced that "due to lack of demand", they'll be removing it in Vista.

All of this has meant that I now carry the following along with me wherever I take the laptop:

1. One straight CAT-5 cable
2. One cross CAT-5 cable
3. One Firewire 4--6 pin cable
4. One Firewire 4--4 pin cable
   

The shopkeeper was out of S-video to S-video cables.