René Rebe

As child I already learned that the German Telekom is not the most friendly and providing company in the world and due to the past experienced I avoided it like the plague for many years. Recently, however, with an US iPhone used in conjunction O2 in Germany I desperately waited long for an unlock possibility to arrive, and eventually decided some 6 months (or so) ago that it’s time for the 3G/UMTS update and had to take the bitter pill T-Mobile Germany is.

I have to say I really regret it. So much that this Saturday morning is a good time to write about it. Not only is it the most annoying customer care company calling ever 1-2 month asking me what other stuff they can sell to me, no: not even their basic network functionality works solidly. Never before was I more often off-line than on-line. Very often non-German server are simply not reachable. Most notably my daily email check in the morning does just lead to “The connection to the server … failed.” and international sites like engadget.com are not reachable. Strangely this morning other Germany sites like heise.de did work, just not our comanpies website and mail server. And this is after a total cellular network
meltdown that made headlines even in all regular German newspapers when their network went off-line, national-wide, … And this morning I called to complain about my ongoing “network routing issues” and the person told me (after the automated voice system failed to understand my request) that:

.. they have a known network issue right now and are working on it, … Voice calls should work, but I’m lucky that some German internet sites work for me at all. …

Now this was a 7 AM when I got up and now at 10:30 PM it is still not fixed, …

I even went on asking him if, deduced form my ongoing intermitted problems, they have weekly network problems. But the guy did not wanted to comment. I take this as yes.

I’ll now try to get rid of this iPhone contract early, because, frankly, my first US (UMTS-less, G1) iPhone my girlfriend keeps using with an O2 SIM and network always works without a glitch.

The worst part is that I often get a near heart-attack in the morning because the first thing I get to see is a “failed connection to our companies e-mail server”, that always kicks in some “oh my god are some our servers down” emergency mode in my brain.

I really wonder how Germany’s largest phone and internet provider can have so many ongoing basic “routing” or similar problems. I mean routing some data packets from cellular towers properly should not be too much of a deal with a network also connecting some million of landlines for analog, digital ISDN and DSL. Or are those landlines messed up right now, likewise? Thanks god I cannot tell as my landlines are covered by other providers that apparently do care more about their customers.

Recently I started to notice some traffic storms from strange folks that run wget against our sites and on-the-way grabbing whole Subversion repositories, including tags and branches on the way. Needless to say that is a pure waste of our bandwidth and server CPU cycles. And as it even motivates me to drop a note in my blog, this is not a single occurrence and makes me wonder what the heck the people want to do with the randomly grabbed data and why they can not use proper clients (e.g. the svn client) to checkout open source bits, … If this trend continues I guess I really have to think adding some smarter traffic shaping and quality of service then just dropping offending IP addresses:

iptables -I firewall –src x.x.x.x -j DROP

For a year we wondered why our Konica Minolta 2430DL produced vertical stripes. As we mostly printed regular, every-day office letters it did not mattered too much, as it was mostly visible in more saturated areas. We mostly waved it off as: it’s probably just the empty color toner (which was at 0% for many months, but still printing in principle).

Today, however, we wanted to print some invitations, and as the Xerox Phaser 8500 had it’s (usual) hick-ups with the custom page size we decided to go with the laser printer and started to get rid of the stripes by installing a new magenta toner, but no change. As we also had a new drum in the storage we replaced this in the hope to finally clear ths stripes, but still no go.

After some more back and forth and excessive googling (which was not too helpful anyway) we further searched for replaceable consumables but did not found any. This pointed us to further disassemble the printer and we indeed found places one can self-service and clean: Most particularly the laser!

And cleaning the laser it was: After we wiped off the laser segment under the drum cartridge the stripes where finally gone! We now wonder why it is not more prominently noted more often (in magazines and the net, but also the manual) that one is supposed to wipe of some hidden laser under some “attention: don’t touch - hot!” warning signs, …

So the new drum cartridge and magenta toner could be put back into the storage, the old consumable still producing solid colors, even with the color toner cartridges indicated with 0% for about a year, now.

However, in the end we still convinced the Xerox Phaser 8500 to print our custom paper as the colors where way superior. At least we finally know where the stripes came from, and can print stripe-less on the laser printer as well.

So Microsoft finally got some TV advertisements out of the door that does not suck completely.

However, I like to add: you get what you pay for. Of course a Ferrari is no Mercedes is no Tata Nano (Indian) car. One usually get what one is paying for. And in case of this el-cheapo PC’s it’s a irregularly shaped plastic case, full of least cost hardware, with usually some design glitches (such as at least noisy audio output, up to a just-VGA external video output to the worst case: system bus noise or overheating problems causing medium to long term system stability issues). And you still pay the Microsoft Windows OS software tax, anyway.

On the other hand I even brought PowerPC based Apple computer back in the days, not even to run Mac OS - no, I just required reliable hardware, with superb battery life for my Linux needs. Back in the days the Mac OS (9 and early OS X) discs went into the trash immediately. But bug free, solidly built hardware with suspending to RAM capabilities and up to 5 hours battery life even under Linux was just outstanding back in the days.

And this technical matters aside, I really wonder if another price race to the bottom is in Microsoft’s (and the remaining “PC”/IT industries) interest after the NetB..k and NetTop inflation, …

So I eventually got myself one of those cheap sub-notebooks (yet those kind a NetB..ks) and had to look for something suitable to carry it along.

Turned out most of the gerneral purpose bags out there are pretty ugly - well, in my opinion at least anyway. So it took some time to actually find something I would want to be seen with out in the world at all. Yeah, yeah - I know the result of (too many?) years on Apple hardware kind of design obsesssion …

Anyway, the choice I ended up with is a black Bree Punch 52 - made out of trunk awning. A little like a messenger bag on diet.

Well, yesterday night I finally updated my 3G iPhone to the 2.2.1 firmware - mostly because I have bug reports pending over at Apple, where some are said to be fixed in the latest 2.2.1 FW update.

So after the usually too lengthy backup, update and restore cycle (why can’t they just send delta updates over-the-air as they do for regular, real Macs?) I was left with my iPhone not wanting to lock on a provider in Germany, and no - I’m not running it unlocked or jail-broken but with the regular T-Mobile contract here in Germany (sigh!).

Anyway, as the “reset network preferences” and googling was not of help I decided to restore without replaying the backup, and voila: it worked, locked to the all expensive T-Mobile cellular network again. Though this left me with all of my preferences and particularly my not yet downloaded photos missing. Thanks god others already created some nifty iPhone backup decoder!

Even years before the recent NetB..k ^W sub-sub-notebook storm - kind of initiated by unfortunate Asus EeePC - I already used and enjoyed one. No, not the initial, real Psion NetBook (although I had a Psion Revo at that time, …), but the MSI MegaBook S270.

It was about the size of the 10″ modern flavors and compared to the most ugly Asus EeePC even had a slick and slim design, including a quite thin metallic display cover.

It’s just now - comparing all the many variants today for family and friends asking for suggestions - for me to notice what I was already enjoying back in the days.

Just the other day on Susan’s birthday we had the pleasure to follow Obama’s inaugural speech live (via CNN) in a Irish Harp pub here in Berlin, Germany:

Enjoy!

Last year the news of the Festival of Lights (2007) did not really came thru to us, although we where even guiding a friend thru Berlin:

This year, however, I got a tripod for the digital SLR for my birthday and we thus we took a quite extra excessive two night tour thru Berlin and took quite some photos on the way. So enjoy Berlin at night:

Don’t wonder about the many re-occuring images, they are -/+ 2EV exposed images to eventually generate HDR images from. Also approximately the second half are RAW images that you browser will probably not show full screen (unless you are on Apple’s Safari anyway). I specifically further hacked up the gallery code to generate JPEG thumbnails on the fly for the .CR2 RAW images :-)

The was a time, some years ago, when osnews.com was a lovely site, reporting about alternative operating-system news. Of course you could find news about the major releases of Microsoft Windows, or Apple Mac OS on the site as well, however the audience was mostly people interested in more solid solutions and looking into OS/2, BeOS, Linux, etc, pp.

Long these days appear gone. These days the site appears to be run by a handful of people just popagating their own personal taste and feeling. Where the biggest fraction of the news are just Mac OS X developers seeds - nearly each of those - dynamic window managers and their weekly pointless ranting about what annoyed them most the last 7 days and come up with their own teaching series.

Seldome did I see a site degrading that much - guess it is time to watch out for a new operating systems news site, …