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Can you suggest places in London with a free WiFi access?

Or maybe a wiki with a list of such “geek friendly” locations? Recommendations for cafes where you can buy coffee and get some time of network access would work too.

We will spend this weekend in London (arriving Friday evening) and one thing that surprised me last time when we were there was that it was hard to find a place with wireless internet access, not even talking about free access. Was expecting something more like SF Bay area (I wonder why) where free wifi is in every other cafe.

There were some places like a cafe in Chapters where you can buy coffee and get wifi access, but even then it was not working properly. We ended up going to one of the “internet farms” as you could call places where many people are crammed in small space full of computers w. internet access. It got the job done that time, but a relaxing cafe would be so much better.

Hopefully you can recommend something. The main area of interest is between Marble Arch and Covent Garden, but any such information can be useful.

Writing this to remind all that the workshop deadline (July 25) is approaching fast.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW 2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

It can be a good opportunity to write about connections between the Social Web and the Semantic Web, about FOAF, SIOC and other cool things. The organizers (I am among them) are looking forward to interesting submissions and to providing a discussion place for people from different areas of interest.

Detailed information can be found at the SDoW 2008 website.

“You abuse the throttle, you should expect a ticket” [SiliconValley.com]

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s recommending that the commission punish Comcast for secretly interfering with BitTorrent file-sharing traffic.

Comcast has defended the throttling of users’ uploads as reasonable network traffic management, meant to benefit the majority of customers. But Martin’s investigation found Comcast was using the surreptitious technique more broadly and more arbitrarily than it claimed. “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” Martin said. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said he won’t seek any financial penalties, but he does want Comcast to stop the blocking, fill the commission in on how it was used, and clearly disclose to customer its network traffic management plans and policies.

BitTorrent is like other Internet data transfer technologies in that the technology itself does not dictate what it is used for. It has plenty of legitimate uses and internet providers can do better than knowingly lowering the quality of service provided, based on false assumptions.

In other news:

Many users in Europe and the U.S. are used to theyr internet providers limiting downloads at 10-40 Gigabytes per month and might consider themselves lucky if their download cap is more than 50 Gb ("that sure must be enough for everyone"). Compare that to Japan where NTT Communications has imposed an upload limit of ~300 Gb per month. Downloads are unlimited.

I recently upgraded my notebook to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

It is quite late compared to many first adopters, but there was no reason to rush. Even so there still are some rough edges to Leopard (e.g., a bug with desktop screen size after the external monitor gets unplugged) that need to be ironed out.

What are your experiences with Leopard, do you enjoy the new look & feel and what is the “must-have” software that you would recommend using with it?

P.S. One reason for waiting with an upgrade was because I did not have a good backup / HDD imaging solution in place (solved using SuperDuper!). The other was too much travel and not wanting to risk upgrading shortly before traveling.

Post-Upgrade Notes:

HP Printer Driver 1.1 was released by Apple on July 15, 2008. Printing stopped working for me after installing this update. This support discussion post suggests how to fix the problem by replacing the following directories with older versions (backup from before printer drive upgrade):

• MacintoshHD/library/printers/hp/filter/hpPostProcessing.bundle
• MacintoshHD/library/printers/hp/PDEs/hpPostScriptPDE.plugin