I’m at the conference, and the hotel has wireless everywhere, both rooms and conference rooms. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to connect to it with my D-Link card. It shows up when I do a site survey, but it won’t connect. When I borrowed an SMC card from the front desk and installed it, it connects, but I don’t get name resolution. I can ping known IPs on the internet, but it doesn’t know what (for example) “yahoo.com” is.

I’m typing this on a machine in the hotel business center, hoping that someone might have an idea what the problem might be.

As far as the conference goes, it’s largely the usual suspects so far, and nothing new, at least not in the presentations. More tomorrow, perhaps.

[Friday morning update]

I’m blogging live from the conference now. Michael Mealing figured out that the hotel’s DNS service is confused in such a way that XP, which is more forgiving of such things, didn’t mind, but various flavors of Unix and W2K do. He managed to find the right numbers via a DNS query, I hardwired them into my network connection, and all is right with the world again. Posts will appear as events warrant.