Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 345)

One of the most famous economists died last week:

Just before the fall of communism in the thirteenth edition (1989), Samuelson and Nordhaus declared, "the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." Six years later in the fifteenth edition (1995) they noted that Soviet Communism was a "failed model"). He did not have much to say about the free market success stories, from West Germany's post war recovery, or the success of countries Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. If it couldn't be traced to a government program, it wasn't that interesting.

And it's people like him who are advising the people in power, wherever you live.

Tried to upload a .mp4 file with gtkpod, but it wouldn't let me.

The solution appears to be:

apt-get install libmp4v2-0

Scary thing happened to me. I had my FreeBSD server lock up fairly randomly. Recently got a very consistent lockup: when doing a backup. Always one particular disk (only 1 partition) caused a lockup. On the console you could still switch console screens, but you couldn't type. Also was pingable, but you couldn't ssh in. fsck never helped.

Moved all data to a different disk, rebuild the file system, and it now appears to work fine. Not nice. Must be some very weird problem.

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.