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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.) - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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