Grasshoppermind

Back in November 2005 Manx Telecom announced their plans to rollout one of the first HSDPA networks in the world. Those of you who read this blog will be aware of my interest in all things geo and map based. So naturally I was interested in being able to be online at broadband speeds anywhere I went. I went to a demonstration of the technology last week and although it doesn’t work too well within steel framed buildings (faraday cage effect?) the performance outdoors is superb.

BUT

according to one of the slides I saw at the presentation, the coverage and speeds available away from urban areas fade away to nothing. So the idea of being on-line at the top of a mountain, broadcasting geolocated live video feed straight to the net is a little way off yet.

However the target market for this type of technology is largely urban based, so I can forsee developers making use of the extra bandwidth to get very creative with their video/map based mashups.

I just heard about the latest release of the Wordpress 2.0.1 blogging platform.
I moved to Wordpress a while back because it is so simple to maintain and I love the way the plug-ins just drop in. I’m especially fond of Spam Karma2 which I use to deal with the Comment SPAM I started getting soon after I was up and running. There’s also a new release of Spam Karma2 available so I’ll have to spend an evening some time soon getting this up and running. From what I’ve heard so far it’s a pain free experience.