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HighWLAN
Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"
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"It was hard to tell but I think Emacs came out as the better utility vehicle."
Absolutelty hilarious. I'll go and read the rest of it now...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
So they had ot use talkd! AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
It's also amusing that they still bothered to use ssh between each other's machines. I say -- any cracker dude who figures out how to snoop on my 802.11b traffic at 85m/h deserves my respect and my passwords!
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
using a cell phone would be too expensive... .. and we used a cell phone to get online!!!
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Pity they didn't setup Voice over IP.
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
If they ever make this into a movie (goddam there should have been a video camera operator in each car too) the final scene would have been a closeup on the driver's smiling face at the Perl conference, with a voice over...
"Some called me lame, some called me cool, but they all called me geek."
Final theme music, roll credits.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Dave did his PhD thesis on the idea of routing packets between a bunch of wavelan cards moving all over the place. If you play up the military side of it (imagine every soldier/tank with wavelan, routing packets between them!) DARPA likes to fund this kind of stuff.
Anyways, the most fun was had when Dave and his colleagues rented a fleet of cars, put a wavelan equipped laptop in each one (since this was a while ago, they were using the original 2Mb wavelan, not this 802.11b stuff), and were driving all over Pittsburgh trying to see how well packets would get through between cars....