Soliciting Fame

BarCampEdmonton1 is in 9.5 hours. I’ve stayed up later than usual quickly putting together a splash page for the WiFi network I’m setting up. This will let me track all the traffic it receives over the course of the day.

I reflashed and updated 5 of my Open-Mesh routers this evening. I’m hoping that’s enough but I have at least 10 I can break out if I have to.

I’m hoping to do a session at BCE1 on mesh networks and the current state of technology surrounding them. I seriously haven’t planned anything yet so I’m going to gather my thoughts a bit before I hit the hay.

My good friend Timo Ewalds was mentioned as one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People by Alberta Venture this week.

Timo Ewalds
Nexopia Creator
MySpace? My wha’? Facebook? So over it. If you have a teenager, chances are they’ve drifted from other social networking sites to Nexopia.com. Since its launch six years ago, more than 1.2 million 14- to 20-year-olds have made the switch. Oh, and did we mention founder Ewalds started developing Nexopia.com while he was still in an Edmonton high school? Early this year the site received a multimillion- dollar injection from Hubert Burda Media, one of Germany’s largest media companies, which was, like, so cool.

I’ve known Timo since late 2003, a few months after he started Nexopia. A big congrats to your success, Timo!

I just installed ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin that lets you blog directly from your browser. So far I am really impressed! I often find it hard to motivate myself to post an entry because it’s a process to go to my blog and open a new post. Then I have to remember to finish the entry and it probably gets lost in a tab somewhere. ScribeFire can split your browser window and you can post while you browse. This means no flipping through tabs!

One thing I just noticed, however, is that they don’t do a very good job of integrating with WordPress’s image uploading. It’s not easy to have thumbnails automatically created

ScribeFire.com has a list of additional features:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

I’m going to use this for a while and see how I like it. Let me know if you’ve had good or bad experiences with it.

This morning, Mack Male and I attended a city council meeting where the Next Gen committee was presenting the results of their wifi pilot project. The agenda called for the City-Wide Wireless Internet and Wi-Fi Service - Pilot Project Internal Evaluation to be the first item at 9:30 a.m. Unfortunately they got wrapped up in protocol announcements and they didn’t actually start talking about it until around 10:30.

The city’s IT Director, Steven Gordon did most of the talking. According to their surveys, people expect the service to be there. The public system is based upon the existing city employee network, the public section just builds on top of it. This means that for incremental costs a public access point can be placed anywhere the city has infrastructure. Steven thinks that piggy-backing on the city wifi is the best option to keep costs low.

They mentioned how some other cities have tried municipal wifi as well. Apparently Philadelphia ran their own city wifi project that ran around $3 million, however they have partnered with another company. I’m 100% sure on this though. Councilor Don Iveson mentioned that some transit corridors in Seattle allow wifi access, like in the back of busses. Calgary also had a city wifi project that ultimately failed.

There are some major problems with Edmonton’s current public wifi:

• E-mail is blocked
• Traffic is filtered
• Filtering drives a lot of the expenses
• It’s insanely expensive to set up a hotspot (like roughly $20,000 expensive)

Councilor Ben Henderson brought up the filtering problem and he strongly encourages the notion that we open it up. Based on his past experiences traveling and using our own wifi he’s had frustrating experiences when he couldn’t access his email.

Councilor Karen Leibovici doesn’t think this project is self sufficient and it won’t make any money. She posed the question of why we should spend this money on public wifi when the private sector is already competing. Even without my bias I agree (yes, quite the statement, I know :P). I’m of the opinion that the government shouldn’t try to compete with the private sector, unless it’s in an out of control industry that needs regulation.

Gordon feels that “we’ve struck the right balance,” but he did agree to create a business case outlining a cost benefit analysis as councilor Linda Sloan requested. This was seconded by Ron Hayter who would also like to see a numbers break down and the implications involved.

So the council moved to continue the exploration of free wifi. I believe that if they are able to bring the costs down to a reasonable level they might have a chance. Hopefully our taxes aren’t going to be wasted on super secure and expensive wifi hotspots. Many people see open free wifi as a utility and they believe it will give Edmonton some credibility as a world class place for travellers, business, and young people alike.

My friend Andrew linked me to this news article about the City of Edmonton and their free WiFi pilot project. So far they’ve done a pilot project in several large community areas that averaged about 250 users a day. I’m extremely skeptical about those numbers considering City Hall was one of the locations. The other locations were wide open spaces like Sir Winston Churchill Square and community centres like the Kinsmen Sports Centre.

According to the article in the Edmonton Journal it’s expected to cost $20,000 to set up a new hotspot and about $1000/year to operate each node. That’s simply ridiculous.

I’ll be at the council meeting on Wednesday, June 18th when they discuss this. The agenda is set to address WiFi at 9:30AM.

The City of Edmonton Wireless Edmonton website FAQ is sort of funny. It assumes people are idiots:

“Q: Will I be disconnected when moving to another location?

A: Minimizing your movement is recommended - typing while walking is not recommended for safety reasons.”

They also filter content, which I have a moral issue with.

Here’s a brochure about the WiFi pilot project.