SBC Park covered in WiFi

San Francisco Giants’ SBC Park will become the first stadium with wireless Internet access, according to a press release yesterday. Fans receive free access for the 2004 season, but SBC plans to begin charging its standard $7.95 daily fee or $19.95 monthly fee starting in 2005, according to the San Jose Business Journal.

The Giants, along with partners SBC and Nortel Networks have installed 121 802.11b Wi-Fi access points to provide continuous universal coverage to all concourses and seating areas.

[A]ll ballpark suites will be equipped with HP computers, flat-panel displays and wireless accessories that provide internet access coupled with more exclusive content from the Giants Digital Dugout, including archived video footage and in-suite food ordering”

Macromedia Flex

Macromedia officially introduced Flex today. Rich UI through Flash, similar to Laszlo. Later this year Macromedia plans to release a new Flex development tool code-named Brady with visual layout, code editing, debugging, and data connectivity tools for creating Flex applications in Dreamweaver. IBM already has a Flex WebSphere Studio plugin. Runs on Java app servers and you can download a free developer version on the Flex site.

Reset your MSN watch to factory settings

I was not able to find any documentation for resetting my MSN Direct watch to its factory settings, so I will post my findings here just in case another user would like to reset his or her watch in the future.

I have a Fossil FX3001. Two buttons on the left and three on the right. Press down all three buttons on the right side. Wait for the watch manufacturer’s logo to appear. Keep doing this until the time resets to 12:00. The watch is configured to reset to factory settings if you reboot the watch ten times within five minutes. Cycle through the channels once you see the time reset. You should have time, register, messages, and calendar channels.

You can login to the MSN Direct site, click on “My Account”, and remove the watch from your account. Note that you do not remove the subscription, just the watch associated with your subscription. If you buy a new watch with support for MSN Direct services you can associate the new watch with your existing yearly subscription.

Freddy Adu : Just Going Out To Play

Last night’s 60 Minutes featured a segment on DC United player Freddy Adu. Ben Olsen was interviewed as the veteran of the team. Why was Peter Nowak, his coach, and who also started his pro soccer career at a young age, not interviewed?

“Freddy’s $500,000 salary from D.C. United dwarfs even the game’s veterans. It has become a cliche that every rookie with a big contract buys his mama a house. Freddy may be the first one ever to do it…and then go home and live with her.”

Remotely driven rover

At Wednesday’s dinner we discussed controlling a rover or submarine over the Internet. It does exist. “RemoteDriver is a home made robot made out of a tablet-pc a webcam and an old rc car chassis. When online it can be driven by anyone from anywhere in the world. All you need is a good ammount bandwith and a flash player to interact with it. Login at the indicated time above for some hot rod realtime action.”

News.com : Interpreting Search

Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. “There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task.”

Tonight’s blogger dinner

Tonight was the Corporate Blogger’s Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right:

Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big steps in software?

NY Times: Phishing

Saul Hansell writes about phishing scams in today’s New York Times.

Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September.

Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish, or phish, for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else’s expense. After AOL switched to a flat monthly rate, the same phishing methods were used to steal credit card information.

I have used eBay’s toolbar, but there is no explanation why your toolbar turned green to indicate you are on an eBay or a PayPal site. The toolbar also sniffs logon pages just in case you are using your eBay username and/or password on any non-eBay site and warns you this is a non-eBay site and, if this site is legitimate, you really should choose separate user names and passwords for each site.