Losing his cables

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:13

Jon Honeyball changes allegiance by cashing in the beloved PC for a Mac! No, he hasn't lost his mind - only his cable. He also attempts to get some order out of Windows 2000

AirPort is very effective. Its absolute range is ultimately governed by the type of building structure in which you're located, in particular the types of walls between you and the base unit. It would certainly have no problems running around a typical house, for example. Given that you can put multiple AirPort bases onto your network, you could even switch between them as you moved around a larger office environment, and given that each base can host multiple computers, this becomes an attractive proposition. The network speed is claimed to be 11Mbits/sec, which should offer approximately standard slow Ethernet speed. I'm not so sure I get that speed in operation, but it's certainly fast enough for Web browsing, loading and saving files, and general printing tasks.

In all, it's a jolly spiffing system, and being able to wander around with a cable-free laptop connected to the Internet is a grand leap forward. I'll confess that I often fire up a Citrix MetaFrame client on the iBook; it allows me to remote an NT 4 Desktop directly that can be run full-screen if I like, and which works very well indeed. The great thing about this technology is that it's not proprietary to Apple, but is to the IEEE 802.11 specification, which is a complex digital networking system running at 2.4GHz.

Since this is an open defined standard, other vendors can play in the same space, and in fact Apple partnered with Lucent (www.wavelan.com/) to get the technology onto the Apple platform. Lucent makes a range of cards, adaptors and base stations too, and you can mix and match them with no problems - there's even a PCI-mounted card adaptor, so you can use it on desktop PCs.

Given the stylishness and low price of the Apple kit, I have no hesitation recommending it, but it does require you to have an Apple computer to hand to program the Apple AirPort BaseStation. Help is to hand though - if you go to www.msrl.com/airport-gold/ and look in the Links You Need section, you'll find the KarlBridge configurator for Windows, which allows you to configure the Apple base unit from a PC-hosted card. If you want to save a little money you could go for the 2Mbits/sec version of the cards (ZoomAir being one example) and though you don't get the full 11Mbits/sec throughput, the speed is still perfectly adequate for most browsing tasks. Being able to carry around a small Sony or Toshiba Libretto laptop that's connected via radio waves to your network connection would make for a very compelling system, and being able to mix and match cards, adaptors and computers to one specification is a blessing. I'm beginning to see all sorts of uses for the technology, as I often find places where a wired network station would be awkward, such as the 'roaming around the office' scenario. The prices are pretty reasonable, making it worth consideration for the home as well - if you want to wire up a desktop computer in a bedroom, it has a lot to offer.

Order! Order!

I'm now quite convinced that there's a focus bug in Windows 2000. I've tried it on several machines with different graphics adaptors and cards, and I've tried changing screen drivers too, and just occasionally this problem rears its ugly head. It's the sort of bug that causes annoyance out of all proportion to the damage done, a little thing that makes me want to tear my hair out. The essence of it is this: open a number of windows on your Desktop and play around with their Z order (that is, the order in which the windows were last used - imagine a stack of layers going into the screen from foreground to background and that's the Z order). Now click on window A, then B, then C, then D. At this point, D has the focus and is at the front of the pile and the Z order is D, C, B and then A, because Z order is set according to a simple 'last used' rule. Therefore, if you close Window D you'd expect C to gain the focus; close C and it should go to B, and then ditto for A. But this doesn't appear to be the case, and I've seen many examples where closing D brought B or A to the foreground, completely missing out C.

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