Lesswire: wireless e altro

Would you like an expert opinion on your PowerPoint presentation?

After a successful month of free presentation checkups for Italian visitors, with good feedback from participants, I am happy to announce that the initiative will continue until  July 15th for English visitors and their English presentations.

Send your business presentation in PowerPoint or PDF format to info@lesswire.it with the subject “Checkup” and you will receive a Presentation Checkup report with 5 suggestions to improve your presentation. Only one checkup per week will be performed, first come first served, with a maximum of one checkup per person/company. Make sure to state how the presentation is used: self-running or with a presenter.

photo credit: Maldita la hora

Presentation Checkups and other services are described on my other website: www.slidecoaching.com

I have recently been commissioned by USRobotics to develop a new podcast in English that showcases the 10 unique features of the Courier Business Modem. Yes, it’s an analog modem, but there are situations where it fits perfectly in a business environment, even in the age of ADSL and Fiber. Listen to find out why!

A breve sarà disponibile anche la versione in lingua italiana di questo podcast.

Without any visible announcements or posts in wireless blogs, two very recent amendments to the IEEE 802.11 standard have gone unnoticed: I am referring to 802.11k and 802.11r.

802.11k – ratified on the 12th of June 2008

Amendment k is tied to Radio Radio Resource Management, RRM. RRM includes strategies and algorithms so that certain parameters can be controlled, such as transmission power, channel allocation, handover critera, modulation schemes, etc. Continua »

I have also developed an English version of the presentation for my new “Effective Presentations” training course.

If you’d like to contact me for traning opportunities, send me an e-mail.

Update: starting September 2009, all activities related to presentations have moved to: www.slidecoaching.com : go there for services, training, blog, and free resources.

Many access points on the market have a default setting of “DHCP client” for IP address assignment. This is very useful when the access point is configured directly on the network where it will be deployed, and this network has an active DHCP server. It can also happen though that one needs to pre-configure an access point without having this possibility. Sometimes acccess points, when they realize there is no DHCP Server on the network, start with a default IP address, something like 192.168.1.64. In this case, you need to configure a pc on the same IP network as that one assigning an address manually, such as 192.168.1.65. At the end of the process, you must remember to set the pc back to your usual IP settings.

There is another way, thanks to the hidden DHCP server function in Windows XP. I say hidden because it is automatically activated only when the pc is confured for Internet sharing, using the feature called ICS (Internet Connection Sharing). The DHCP server in this case is used to give an IP address to the second computer that will be connecting to the Internet via the first.

How does one use the DCHP server in Windows XP to assign an IP address to an access point?

Download this pdf (registered users only) to read step-by-step instructions:

... (è necessaria la registrazione (Register) e il Login per leggere il resto del contenuto)

Yesterday was Technology Day at the CiscoExpo 2008 event in Milano. Among the morning’s speakers I particularly enjoyed listening to Professor Maurizio Decina; his knowledge of the Internet and Telecom worlds is impressive and always one step ahead of everyone, and his speeches are stimulating and provocative. Continua »

Do not underestimate the importance of a good password to protect your professional or personal resources and data.

photo credit: Max (Tj)

In choosing a password to protect your wireless network, but also for your personal computer and on-line accounts, there are some valid suggestions in an easy to read document on the Microsoft site.

To summarize, the main suggestions are:

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With great pleasure I post the content of a recent conversation with Joe Bardell, Chief Scientist of Connect802 Corporation, regarding the subject of antenna reciprocity as it relates to a wi-fi network. I find his explanation very useful.

The “Law of Reciprocity” is a law of physics. In applying this law it must be assumed that two transmitters are operating at the same output power (that is, the power being applied to the radiating antenna element). In this case, if you increase the gain of only one of the antennas it has the effectof increasing both the transmit effectiveness and the receive effectiveness
equally. For example, imagine that your notebook computer (with a simple 2dB antenna built-in to the internal Wi-Fi adapter) is one mile away from an access point. Lets further assume that your notebook computer is transmitting with 30 mW of output power. This yields a 32 dBmW Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP; the sum of transmit power and antenna gain.)

Continua »