Month: December 2006

What if everything be just fake?

Sometimes it happens that reality baffles my expectations and my ego pretends that electronics, physics, computer science or whatever it is not responding the way I expect, work just for chance. No matter what you do, the result will always be random.Consider a wifi USB dongle. It behaves pretty badly indoor. Let’s face it, all manufacturers claim a 100m range, but, in practice, in real apartment environments it works fine within 10m, it becomes unreliable at 15m, stone dead at 20m. If you want to do real time communication, in my experience, you’d better halve the ranges above.
Ok. It may seems stupid trying to reduce the range, but it is handy when you want to test what happens at the range limit, without wearing out your shoes.
Now well over a century of science tells you about Faraday cages, roughly put – a metal sheet shields radio waves. So if I enclose my wifi dongle in a pretty solid metal box I would expect either no radio communication or a dramatic cut of the range. Right?
Well, time to rethink.
I experienced the very same range of the unboxed dongle.
With the same reliability.
It is like Laws of the Universe consider themselves superior to my request and diregards my experiment, saving themselves for more worthy causes.
BTW, in the meantime, I have read Stefano Benni’s “La compagnia dei Celestini”, Roberto Ierusalimschy’s Programming in Lua, Eoin Colfer’s “The Secret safe”, Alfredo Castelli’s “Rama’s Left Eye”… I suppose it’ll take quite a time to write review for each one of them :-).