802.11n blues

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As his fellow-Twitterers know, Rory Cellan-Jones has been grappling all week with getting 802.11n networking to work in his home. He’s now written an entertaining blog post on his experiences. Sample:

So then I got in touch with a real expert – a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem – I’d put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn’t work with ‘n’ routers – or rather it does but it throttles them back to ‘g’ speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.

So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they’d originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there’s the possibility that some bits of kit won’t work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.

He got it to work btw — eventually.

Jeff Jarvis on HuffPost’s Investigative Fund

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Writing in the HuffPost, he says:

The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as the one HuffPost is announcing.

Footnote: AP report of the HuffPost venture says:

The Huffington Post is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to set up a $1.75 million fund to pay staff journalists and freelancers.

The investigative fund will direct reporters to look first at stories about the nation’s economy.

Rachel Cooke: save our public libraries

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Feisty piece by Rachel Cooke

Make no mistake, this is a crucial time. If those of us who love books, and libraries, and believe they are a vital, beautiful and cherishable part of our cultural and social heritage, take our eye off the ball now, we will regret it. We must make a fuss, and we must name and shame those who are set on destruction. “We need to say that these cuts are entirely wrong,” says Shirley Burnham, who is leading the campaign to save the Old Town Library in Swindon. “I compare it to sub-prime mortgages: if someone had said something forcefully, at the time, we would not be in the mess we are in now. People need to realise that once something is gone, you never get it back. Libraries are like train stations in that respect.”

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

New Labour’s dream: the national surveillance state

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This morning’s Observer column.

There’s a delicious moment in Alastair Beaton’s satirical film, The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is finally arrested for war crimes on a warrant from the international criminal court. One scene shows the standard police procedure as Blair is inducted by the desk sergeant in a London station. Towards the end of the rigmarole, the policeman moves to take a saliva swab from him.

Blair is aghast, asks him what he is doing and – after the policeman has explained that he’s taking a DNA sample – asks who brought in such a stupid law. “You did, sir,” is the response…

The Quiet Coup

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Charles Arthur spotted this extraordinary piece in The Atlantic.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time…

James Cascio has also been reading this piece and has written a post putting it in a wider context.

On this day…

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… in 1979, America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred inside the Unit Two reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

The psychology of nerdism

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Lovely blog post by Andrew Brown.

You know that feeling when you are sitting on the floor by the dusty disassembled guts of a computer and nothing works at all? It won’t even give a healthy cheep on startup? And then, slowly, it all comes together, until everything works, except, perhaps, sound, and you change something to fix that, and then nothing works at all again: you’re back in the smell of dust and silence and you can’t undo?

You will swear, when you finally recover, never to upgrade anything again. Yet you will. And I don’t know why, or didn’t, until I stumbled on a lovely passage in Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding…

He’s right about Ullman IMHO. Go to the link and read on.