TechWave 2008 Call for Papers Extended!
Due to popular demand we are extending the TechWave Call for Papers one extra week to Monday, March 31.
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Mi Vida Móvil
Working in the mobile industry, one would think that achieving a wireless life would be quite easy; however, the reality is that the mobile life (or wireless life, if you prefer) is not the easiest to achieve for many Americans. Over the past few years, I have managed to become relatively free of wires for a variety of communications functions.
Let’s take a quick inventory of how I’ve managed to achieve “the Wireless Life:”
1) My mobile device – my HTC Touch – a tri-band GSM device (GSM 900, GSM 1800, and GSM 1900 MHz) with GPRS / EDGE support. This is a great Windows Mobile 6.0 touch screen handset (and a nice iPhone alternative). I now use it for wireless access to my corporate email via Sybase Onebridge (a very capable alternative to Blackberry) as well as for Internet browsing via both Internet Explorer and Opera Mini. Opera Mini provides for a great mobile browsing experience as an entire web page is rendered and then by selecting a portion of the page that one wishes to view, the content is zoomed to readable (and scrollable up/down, left/right fashion). Opera Mini has done an incredible job of optimizing the downloading and rendering of web pages on a mobile device, which greatly enhances the mobile browsing experience. If you haven’t downloaded and installed the latest version, I highly recommend that you do so.
Of course for voice communications, most of the time I use a Bluetooth 2.0 headset and I do use SMS for both alerts and for quick P2P communications. I will also use MMS for P2P based rich media from time to time as well.
2) My home Internet Connection – also Wireless – satellite, to be exact – I use a company called Wildblue -- WildBlue uses Ka-band (transmit: 29.5 – 30.0 GHz, receive: 19.7 – 20.2 GHz) "spot beam” satellites to allow multiple re-use of the same frequency, providing higher capacity at lower cost compared to other available satellite systems. WildBlue launched service in 2004 and now operates 2 satellites. Virtually all of the continental United States is reachable via WildBlue. As I live in a very rural area, it is difficult for me to obtain broadband Internet service any other way. While there are a number of local wireless Internet providers (WISPs as their called), none of their services are usable at my location. I do look forward to some possibly newer technologies in the coming years such as WiMAX and possibly newer 700 MHz based services. Satellite Internet with 1Mbps downlink / 512Kbps uplink with the latency involved does not compare well to DSL/Cable/fiber services, given the alternative that I have, it does quite well. VPN connectivity is not screaming, but usable.
3) My home network is completely wireless – 802.11g – including connectivity to my main computer, audio/video components (DISH Network, DVR, TiVo, and DVD Player are all on my 802.11a/g network), and of course, my company laptop also uses it. My mobile handset also supports 802.11g, so it too can connect to my home network (and does, frequently).
4) My television content uses DISH Network –both standard and High Definition channels, although it is wired from the two satellite dishes to the receiver.
5) Even my weather station uses 900 Mhz links between the actual station sensors and the main console and computer interface (I am somewhat of a weather geek, but you can see my station data here.)
As you can see, there are very few wires. When I travel, I use my mobile device very heavily – either via GPRS/EDGE or 802.11; I am almost always connected, including both in Europe and Asia. When possible, I use my laptop to access the Internet wirelessly, which I am finding that I do more and more and use my Ethernet connectivity less, with one exception – when I am my Sybase 365 office, I do use a wired connection.
So what about you?
Have you achieved “La Vida Móvil” yet?
Or is the only wireless in your life your cordless phone and maybe mobile phone?
Sybase at EclipseCon this week
Sybase is one of the silver sponsors for EclipseCon2008. Some of us will be at the sybase booth. Note that the exhibit hall pass is free
and you can sign up online. DTP and Sybase are going to be represented in various talks and tutorials. Please stop by if you've any
DTP/Sybase questions. You may also want to stay for one of the evenings as most of the evenings there is a party
sponsored by one of the companies. Stop by at the booth if you just want to find out which is the cool party ..)
Tutorials
- Implement Schema Editing Based on Delta DDL (Dafan Yang, Sybase)
- Data Applications in Eclipse: The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (Sheila Sholars, Loic Jullien, IBM; John Graham, Sybase)
- Enabling support for a new database or data source in Eclipse (Philippe Ombredanne, EasyEclipse/nexB)
Long Talks
- Introducing DTP Open Data Access Framework (Linda Chan, Actuate)
- Introducing the DTP SQL Query Builder (Brian Payton, IBM)
Short talks
- Creating Windows Mobile Database Applications with Eclipse (Jose Ramos, Sybase)
- Push for Usability of Data Tools Wizards (Brian Fitzpatrick, Sybase)
- DTP Help-Helper Plug-in (John Graham, Sybase)
So, the iPhone... Part 1
Regular readers of, my colleague, Bill Dudley's blog will know of his near obsession with the iPhone. And of course I take great pleasure from gently teasing him about this.
So me posting an entry on the iPhone is of course going to enable him to get his revenge. But, for you, I'll take that risk!
So, is the iPhone the end of 'mobile' banking?
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