EcoblogIT

Patent spot

You may or may not know that this week is WiFi week in the UK. You may also have wondered how commercial WiFi hot spot operators force you to their login page. Well Nomadix have patented their implementation, which is licensed by many operators.

New Years Resolution

Go green and clean up your information pollution (from Jakob Nielsen).

Improve your handwriting

The traditional way of improving poor handwriting is to use a fountain pen as this slows down the rate at which one writes. The ability to create a font in your own hand is a pretty good way too.

Smartcards

We had a meeting of all our technology team recently and one item which came up was that of Smartcards. In particular, Oystercard, which is the card being used to handle payments on London Underground and London Buses. A few things came up. First that this was a similar technology to the Octopus card that has been in use in Hong King for a number of years and whose use has been extended to non-transport areas (a good summary is here). Secondly that Smartcard didn't seem particlularly appropriate for what we thought was not a very smart technology. On this latter point, Smartcard is, in fact an ISO standard that describes physical parameters and how data on the card is encrypted. Also, it is pretty smart. With the Oystercard system, journey details are relayed back to a central database - when this happens depends on the reader/writer. At fixed ticket gates (on the London Underground, for example), this happens immediately. With mobile reader/writers (on buses, for example), this happens when a data transfer occurs. Additionally, the pre-pay part of Oyster is pretty smart. If, for example, you load your Oystercard with some cash (in addition to your normal annual travelcard, say) the cost of journeys outside your normal validity will be deducted when you exit the system. And because data is stored centrally if you lose your travelcard you won't lose your money.