Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 342)

When putting a new sim card in my USB dongle/USB stick/vodem I always need the APN. Detected a new trick today: the vodafone connection manager displays the APN if you create a new profile and it can somehow retrieve the settings. Doesn't work on all networks though it seems.

I needed this today, as I was in Singapore. According to M1 advertising you could buy a mobile broadband SIM for $18, which would be unlimited internet for 3 days, anywhere. But no. I started with an M1 SIM card bought at Mustafa, and despite I had requested it for the computer, it appeared to be a voice only. The 3G light went on, but I couldn't do anything. The card didn't come with an APN in the box, just like the Cellcom one, so what I had to do was find the APN. So go to internet cafe, find APN. Got an APN (surfnet), but that didn't work. But when I created a new profile in the Vodafone mobile connection manager it popped up with choices for M1 subscription or prepaid! Very nice. So that told me it was surfnetmcard. But it didn't work. No data, despite it appeared to be connected to the 3G network.

So back to another internet cafe (just 1 SGD per hour!), and find the nearest location of an M1 shop to get the proper sim card. After 1.9km of walking I arrived at the shop and bought the proper mobile broadband SIM. However, it was extremely slow as I detected in a cafe nearby. Thanks to Google I found a suggestion to try SingTel (I was in Bugis junction as well). The top hits for "M1 mobile broadband" are already an indication to the problems M1 has. So to a SingTel shop, luckily just opposite the M1 shop. And SingTel is perfect, at least for me. Downloaded a video at 170KB/s, browsing/email all work.

Did a speed test as well. Download was 2.76MB/s, upload was 0.35MB/s so that's quite usable.

A while ago I bought a Vodafone USB stick/dongle/modem while in England (a Huawei K3565). Has served me perfectly over there. I chose the Vodafone modem, because it came with drivers that work for Linux, which I happen to use.

Vodafone had a perfect plan as well: top up only, so no huge bills. Roaming charges are horrendous though, really making it unusable. So while in Israel I bought a Cellcom sim. Unfortunately it didn't appear to work. The salesperson suggested a SIM lock, and this is indeed the case. I requested a SIM unlock code, but after three days hadn't received anything. Called Vodafone again, and they said it they handn't even processed the request, and it would take 10 working days!!!

After some research I found a reputable company that produced an unlock program that worked! The only problem with this program is that it is Windows only. I own a copy of VMware workstation, so I used that to unlock the stick.

PS: when connecting to Cellcom using the NetworkManager, don't use any username/password, and use "internetg" for the APN.

Free software, necessary more than ever to remain free: Amazon remotely deleting books you bought.

Very interesting economics paper on why some economists got it right, but most didn't. Your economics model does matter after all.

Another day, another crash.

Just back after my linux's screen saver got stuck. compiz.real at 100%. Could ssh in, but could not kill, nor reboot the machine. I think my average uptime has been about 5 days for the last 6 months.

OS News has quite an interesting comparison between dominant processors in 1997 versus 2009.

Comunications of the ACM highlight the student enrolment crisis. But isn't it so hard to understand why the perception is negative?

What's the experience most people have with computers? They're promising machines, but often cease to work without apparent reason. No one seem to able to fix the problem, restart the program, kill it, or reboot are the only remedies. Mysterious behaviour coupled with having to press the reboot button doesn't inspire confidence that these computer programmers know what they're doing.

And it's not just my windows XP subnotebook that loses its wireless network all the time. Sometimes you can disconnect and reconnect, often you have to reboot. Or its get a blue screen. Reboot again.

It's not just Microsoft. The kids notice that FireFox keeps eating its memory and needs to be restarted now and then. A friend installs Ubuntu, and now his laptop locks up regularly, requiring a hard reboot. I lose my wireless on Ubuntu after a few sleeps and/or Microsoft VPN connects, and need to rmmod/insmod the relevant kernel modules.

Computing is just an unstable mess. And programmers must take the blame for that. But until the time programmers stop using pointer based languages and manual memory management, forget about progress in this area. It's time for the humble programmers that admit they can't be trusted with certain technologies.

I'm trying to close my Boingo account. That's a company that really makes it hard to close your account. They just love billing you every month.

I love the emacs nxml mode. It turns Emacs into one of the best XML editors I know. Especially its support for Relax NG is wonderful. But sometimes this mode just stops working with "Cannot complete in this context". I have no clue what it means, nor how to solve it. Anyone?