Its nice for us who live and work in urban areas and have 4Mb ADSL in the office and 2Mb at home complete with wireless access to make browing the web a breeze. But some poor sods are still stuck in areas where BT hasn´t upgraded the exchanges yet and are stuck on dial-up still. Well there is an answer! A service from Onspeed uses a proxy and compression techniques to increase the speed of your dial-up connection. Some content can be compressed by 50% effectively doubling your connection speed.
 
The compression techniques work best on text therefore the largest benefits come from standard web pages and email. There are other compression techniques that are used depending on the content being accessed but since jpegs and mpegs are already compressed as part of the file format, you don´t benefit that much. Its therefore best for those users whoo browse the web and use email a lot but if you want to access streaming media and other online multimedia content then its best to wait for adsl.
 
Check it out and see what you think. It only costs a couple of quid a month so whats the harm.

I work for a number of computers doing various things, one of which is Premier Computers which provides various computing and networking services. Because of this it gets around that I "do computers", which is pretty much true but not my main job. Anyway, a friend of mine asked if I could set up a wireless network so they could share his ADSL connection around their house.

 
I know he lives in an old stone farm house so i decided to go round and check it out along with the PCs to check if they would take the wireless cards. There didn´t seem to be any problems, all the PCs had a spare PCI slot and were running XP. Plus the computers were on the same floor in adjoining rooms so the walls wouldn´t pose much of a problem.
 
I got the stuff and went round to set it up. I replaced the USB ADSL modem with a new router and set that up. The first PC was online! Then went and set up the access point, linked it to the router and checked it all with my laptop. So far, so good. All that was left to do was shove a couple of wireless cards in the other two PCs and job done.
 
Thats when the problems started. Thecard installed without a problem but I couldn´t find the access point. I got my laptop and loaded up NetStumbler to check the signal. I wandered around for a bit and the signal was ok until I went near the PC.
 

"erm, whats behind there" I asked pointing at a wall in between the PC and the access point.
"oh, a wardrobe with mirrored doors"
"great…"
 
So time to move the furniture around. Still couldn´t get a signal in the room anywhere. Ok, time to shift it to the main room and see if its actually working at all. And that would be: No.
 
Right, next PC. It turned out it had 98 on it (I couldn´t be bothered to check). Hmm, this should be interesting. After 20 mins of messing about with it I decided to give up trying to get it to recognise the card and go home to sulk.
 

Turns out that when I tried the cards in a test machine at work today, the 98 one is actually broke, but the other works fine. Time to try some other cards and see if they work!

So I?ve been trying to figure out how to send texts out cheaper for our SMS reminder project thing and thought I?d put it on here in case anyone else is trying to find out info on how to send texts from their websites.   There are basically a couple of easy ways to send out sms messages:

• Hook up a GSM modem to your server and use it to forward the messages through one of our mobile networks (3, o2, orange etc) using a SIM card


• Use a service provider to route your messages for you

The advantage of using a paid for service is that all the development work is done - you just use their APIs to connect to their servers somehow.  The prices you pay per message depend on how many messages you buy from them so if you want to send a large number of texts on a regular basis without much hassle then this could be the best option for you.
 
The alternative of using a GSM modem (either by bying one or using a mobile and hooking it up with a serial cable) has the disadvantages of it being a more difficult to set up and once it is done then there´s the burden that you have to manage another peice of equiptment that might go down at any time.  This is a good option for any webmasters that may want to send a limited number of texts per month.  You could get a pay monthly account and use the free texts or even use pay as you go vouchers to keep the costs down.

 
I´ll let you decide which one is more suitable for you.

I´ve been working on one of our ongoing projects today - a text messaging and email reminder system.

 
I was looking into ways of reducing the costs of sending the text messages.  Turns out that there are three main ways of doing this so I thought I´d post the results here in case anyone else needs to do it.
 
1) Use a mobile.  You can hook a mobile up to a web server and let it send the messages for you.  Problem is it can only send a few per minute and costs the same as you would pay if it was a normal mobile
 
2)  Use an SMS Gateway.  These are ace! Hook it up and start sending cheap texts by the bucket load.  Problem is they cost thousands!

 
3)  Use an online service.  If you get a reliable service then they are fast, cheap and fairly easy to implement.
 
Looks like I´m sticking with option 3 for the moment. I´ll keep you posted as the project progresses