Metcalfe in Full Effect

AirPortA colleague and I, while on a long day trip to Washington, D.C. via train today, found ourselves in need of connectivity en route. We had work to do and files to exchange, but with the Eastern seaboard still unwired for the tens of thousands of commuters crawling between D.C. and Boston daily, we were stuck.

Then I remembered the long-standing but frequently ignored feature of the 802.11x wireless standard that allows the creation of ad hoc networks. Mac OS X makes this feature exceedingly easy to enable: just select “Create Network…” from the AirPort status menu, enter a name for the network and you’re done. We were instantly able to exchange files via iChat’s Bonjour messaging protocol, and my colleague was able to use his browser to effortlessly view PHP-enabled work on my hard drive, thanks to Personal Web Sharing (I never thought I’d get so much use out of Mac OS X’s built in Apache Web server, but it’s fast becoming my favorite feature ever, especially in conjunction with Marc Liyanage’s dead simple PHP installers.) On the way back this evening, we were even sharing music libraries across the aisle via iTunes’ built-in music sharing feature. The twenty-first century is here.

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Free Form for All

Good FormAll of the blood, sweat and tears that I put into designing that form in XHTML and CSS last week is coming to some good. After much continued fussing, I finally got it to render reliably and consistently across several major Web browsers, so at the very least, my labor satisfied the challenge at hand. But, having heard with near unanimity the general frustration that people feel about forms, I thought I’d do the civic thing and release a genericized version of my work — and let others freely borrow, steal and/or adapt it for their own needs.

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