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Saw a presentation of the new Aruba 3 OS last week, and also got a demo of the AirWave used in the Aruba headquarter. This is a very good solution if you want to have full control and it's an event that you want to have control over and maybe have them on a regular basis. Could be that it's an overkill for this kind of event, but take a look here http://www.airwave.com/resources/demos/ to get a some new thoughts. It can also give you a heatmap of the coverage of all your AP's around in the event area.

So you install a wireless IDS like this one and monitor the airwaves and the wired data path to see if a MAC address shows up in both places...

and then my company makes all the money. whee! :)
soon to be part of a hosted service offering as well.

So you install a wireless IDS like this one and monitor the airwaves and the wired data path to see if a MAC address shows up in both places...

and then my company makes all the money. whee! :)
soon to be part of a hosted service offering as well.

Also, the AirWave Management Platform is in Perl (with C/XS/etc as appropriate in certain places). It sells for thousands-of to millions-of dollars, depending on your licensing and support needs. It's basically the only wireless network NMS out there which supports multiple brands of access point (Aruba, Cisco, HP/Colubris, Meru, Proxim, Symbol/Motorola, Foundry...) and its main competitor is basically Cisco WCS, which only manages/monitors Cisco devices.

Perl's take on object-oriented programming seems a little "fake" to some people: "what? you just bless hash references into a package named with a string? that's crazy!" But it works, and it works fairly well, and it is in fact very well-suited to development in this wildly heterogeneous environment.

and I do development on some software that will use RF data from your existing wireless access points to triangulate and display the physical location of every user and device on your network!

So you can call me, uh, Jerry Siegel, I guess? :| that's not as impressive...

Ron Jeffries wrote a good review of this book last month; his review avoids most of the flaws the comments here find in this review.

I've only read one chapter, the one up on the web, but it's quite silly. The author repeatedly describes how one team or another did some dumb stuff and it didn't work; many of these anecdotes are parodic fiction, and obviously so, but some of them are presumably real. Then he explains that that dumb stuff didn't work. The trouble is that a reader with no XP experience might be fooled into thinking that XP advocates doing that dumb stuff.

The trouble with liberals listening to Rush Limbaugh, as one poster suggested, is that Rush makes up a lot of lies and passes them off as truth. (See Al Franken's earlier book for details.) If you don't spend ten minutes investigating facts for every minute you spend listening to Rush, you're likely to come away believing a lot of nonsense. The same problem applies to this book: it's largely fiction, and the line between fiction and reality is unclear.

I've been working on an XP team for a year, and I really like it, but it certainly has its disadvantages. I'm very impressed with the people I'm working with, and I'm really happy with our product. The process we use has almost nothing in common with the processes the book criticizes. Still, sometimes it has its drawbacks, and I think you should definitely be aware of them before you jump into XP. But this book is a good source for information on the drawbacks of doing things XP prohibits, not on the drawbacks of XP. See Questioning Extreme Programming for that. (Briefly, XP requires a small team, significant buy-in and resource commitments from the customer, easy deployment, testing support, and flexible underlying technology.) And, you know, myself, I'd be a lot happier with an ATC system developed with Cleanroom than with XP.

I think it's unfortunate that XP has become so fashionable, because now we have programming fashionistas embracing and pushing it, and any technique or technology they embrace gets badly abused. Just look at Java, XML, and C++!

Airwave uses unencrypted traffic, not WEP. As a previous poster noted, WEP requires a shared secret among users. There would not be much point to sharing a secret with your fellow coffee drinkers if your purpose is to keep them from reading your Business Plan.

As you point in in #1, it's not secure once it leaves the cafe anyway. If you are concened, use ssh or https or encryption in email for your business plan anyway.

And get a pair of those glasses with mirrors on the front so you can make sure nobody is looking at your laptop screen either!

And to bring everything but the CueCat into this, I got mail from Airwave saying that their DSL in the local cafe here used NorthPoint.