Wireless

[jc at TRILLIAN.MIT.EDU (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

	As soon as Jerry gets his DSL lines installed, I will report the details. As I 
	mentioned, he is dropping his phone in favor of 100% wireless, which 
	makes sense in his case. 

It'd be interesting to hear the war  stories  about  wireless  links.
I've  been  interested  in  this  for  some time.  I even worked on a
wireless project some years back (for  a  Motorola  subsidiary),  but
then it didn't seem at all ready for prime time.

I've long thought that wireless  (radio  and/or  IR)  had  a  lot  of
potential  advantages.   It  occurred to me again this weekend, while
listening to the frantic media coverage of  the  JFK-Jr  story.   Why
didn't  they have a precise location for the plane?  GPS equipment is
cheap these days, and most planes have it.   You  can  interface  GPS
equipment  to  computers.   The only missing part is the IP link to a
computer not on the plane, so that the records  aren't  lost  if  the
plane is damaged. You have a little program that asks the GPS for the
current coordinates every N seconds, and appends the data  to  a  log
file  on  the remote system.  Then if the plane is lost, you just run
tail on the logfile, and you know where it was when the computer lost
power.   Is  there anything here that's not doable with off-the-shelf
hardware and a small program?  The critical part seems to be  whether
you can make the wireless IP work.

(A quick check with man shows that the linux syslogd reads  from  the
standard  syslog=514/udp  port,  implying  that  it is indeed able to
accept messages from remote clients.  But the man  pages  for  things
like openlog don't contain any clues about how a client program sends
a message to a remote syslogd. So it looks like this would have to be
discovered  and  documented for the above scheme to be usable.  Or we
could just write a special-purpose "GPSd" server; it'd only be a  few
lines in perl.)

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