Three years and millions of dollars later, however, the Milwaukee Wireless project is yet to achieve its city-scale coverage. The challenges it aimed to address remain as precient as they were three years ago.

I recently began to read about innovations in the mesh-networking space, and found that technologies such as Meraki, Fonera, and Open-Mesh are being successfully leveraged to deploy large-scale wireless networks.

I launched the WireFreeMKE project in July 2008 in order to organize a volunteer supported wireless network to serve the city of Milwaukee. The initiative is based on the principal that neighborhoods that recognize the value of freely accessible internet infrastructure should have the resources to deploy a network that serves their need.

WireFreeMKE is designed to assemble the technology and expertise to enable communities to setup a network hotspot in their own neighborhoods, and bridge each one with others around the city. The goal of the project is to seed pockets of connectivity around the city of Milwaukee, and then work to consolidate them until the city has achieved a broadly unified, free to access wireless network.

You can track the progress of this project at www.wirefreemke.com.

Many of you are probably familiar with Johnny Lee Cheung and his Wii-mote hacking projects. Like many, many others, I found his work stimulating and was immediately inspired to learn and experiment with this technology for myself.

The Wii-mote collaborative light-table is an application of Johnny Lee's multitouch whiteboard exploration. This project was a unique opportunity to experiment with both hardware and software to create a unique, interactive user-experience.

The end goal is to develop a packaged suite to deploy on a 6'x6' light-table and enable upto 4 users simulatenously interact with a canvas. The users would be able to collaborate, share and produce media and textual content.

At the moment, I am using a java based open-source package published by Uwe Schmidt which outputs the wii-mote's blob tracking data using the TUIO protocol. This has been an excellent excuse to begin learning Processing.

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed an excellent conversation with a couple of friends, and as a result started experimenting with a web-based cron variant. Over the course of that exploration, I became interested in live traffic data feeds (you know, for local highways and such).

While there are a lot of popular web-service APIs that provide high-level traffic incident reports, and even live traffic map overlays, I had a lot of difficulty identifying solid resources to provide reliable drive-time information.

I began researching available data-resources to provide this information even at a local or regional level in an effort to protoype an application that will provide me with a reasonable drive-time estimate between two locations.

My goal is to determine whether I have adequate traffic volume data for a particular highway segment and provide the user with an indication on how a typical commute time may be increased or decreased.

My first personal site in over 8 years! I've wanted a spot to highlight my technical skills and maintain a journal of sorts to document my explorations. In addition to the project updates, the site itself is a solid representation of my skills as a solutions designer.

The site is styled completely using custom cross-browser consistent CSS (ie no tables for display or layout). I use Blogger as my authoring tool, and a series of simple content handlers written in PHP and Python to restyle the content.

shaheeb.com has afforded a unique opportunity to apply my strengths in software design, as well as explore and learn new technologies ranging from reverse proxy caching using Squid to the various, wonderful curiosities surrounding cross-browser styling.