Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

I have somebody in my current study group that is working in a company doing medical devices. They are delivering when the customer needs it and I mean that literaly. It happens, though rarely, that a physician calls from the operating room and says that they need some little item in a specific size and then somebody will jump in a car or even use a helicopter to deliver that. Cool

I just wrote a long article for infoSync about the current war between Microsoft and Nokia. It will be interesting.

http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=1509

I gave up. I wanted to get a Cable modem (2mbit up and down!) but they are still a long way from making it available at my place so with the help of a friend who works at my telephone provider I will have DSL on the 15th of next month (instead of the 14 weeks waiting period).

The only problem I saw was that my Wireless LAN Gateway can’t really do DSL so I thought I’d need to use my laptop, which has a broken screen anyway, as a server.

When I got the DSL Modem from Net-Cologne (the telephone company) today it included a special user guide done by Net-Cologne themselves. The ADSL modem itself didn’t include any documentation. How weird. Then I wondered. They only want you to connect one PC to the modem, everything else would be against their rules. But hey, who cares for rules. I started looking and found the documentation.

A wonderful device. I can access it via telnet and a browser, set up the DSL config, username and password, if it should stay connected or cut the connection after a given time, DNS forwarding, DHCP if I want and even a simple firewall based on IP addresses that are allowed to connect. Who would have thought that they give me such wonderful hardware for free
All my worries are settled now and everything will work just fine. When I told my friend he was more than a bit surprised what the device can do. He’s not that technical but wouldn’t have thought that Net-Cologne does something like that anyway.

The only problem I still see is if the device is possibly configured to not give access to the management console. But I will see about that later.

(Originally published on infoSync) First of all, we need to take a look at how all this IP mumbo jumbo really works - or the basics of it, at least. IP stands for Internet Protocol, and the interesting part for us is the general routing of data packets it’s responsible for. When I send you a direct instant message (e.g. ICQ) from my computer, this message is instantly split up into several data packets which are numbered, and sent via my network card (or modem) into the network I’m connected to. Just for argument’s sake, we’ll now presume you are sitting far far away in another country.
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(Originally published on infoSync) I recently read a very good article on .NET at OS News, which attempts to filter out most of the hype and focus on what .NET can really do and is about in the long term, even mentioning that Microsoft is doing research on computer architecture where the device you are holding will borrow everything from the server, from RAM, hard disk space to CPU power. This got me thinking about the war currently going on between Microsoft and Nokia - which, if you take a closer look, will see is a real battle.

So what is going on?
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