Quick Response Code Platipus

Quick Response Code Platipus, originally uploaded by Platipus – Software Inside.

(What’s a Quick Response Code?)

Fujitsu recommends Windows … ?

Make Up Your Mind!

Originally uploaded by Theo Lagendijk

This commercial is about ….
A) a laptop with “Windows 7 Home Premium”
B) a laptop with “Windows Vista Home Premium”

T-Mobile web n walk stick under Linux

Today I tried using my T-Mobile Netherlands Web N Walk USB stick with Kubuntu 8.10. I had been dreading this moment, since installing T-Mobile’s web n walk manager for Windows has been a terrible experience for me. After a firmware update T-Mobile’s drivers became completely uninstallable. (A nightmare of several weeks with little to none support from T-Mobile Netherlands.) I figured, that since T-Mobile was offering driver downloads for Windows operating systems but not for Linux I was in for deep trouble. But this time I was pleasantly surprised. There are very well written tutorials on the Internet that explain how to use your web n walk stick with Linux within minutes.

I compiled the driver for my kernel with the instructions on this page: http://www.pharscape.org/hso.html

And then run the HSOconnect connection manager to connect to T-Mobile’s HSDPA network. It works!

HSOconnect connection manager for Linux

I’ve been using the connection for several hours now with proper down- and upload speeds.

I guess the big difference between my Windows vs Linux experience is that Option NV (the chip-maker for T-Mobile’s web n walk stick) does not offer windows driver downloads directly (they forward you to T-Mobile), but Option does seem to work together with the Linux community to build good Linux drivers. I’m very happy with the Linux drivers and I recommend Option and T-Mobile to use a similar construction for the Windows support!

T-Mobile Netherlands Web N Walk Manager Update For Web N Walk Stick

I hope that this post gets found by people encountering the same problem that I did. So I’m deliberately using the keywords that I searched on. In this post I describe how I solved the problem of installing a T-Mobile software update (which turned out to be in a conflict with Kaspersky’s Internet Security software) and how I fixed the terrible slow upload performance after that.

For a few weeks now I have been bothered by a very annoying problem. T-Mobile Netherlands offered a free firmware update and driver update for their web’n'walk stick. (Contained in a zip found here: web n walk manager upgrade) I was delighted because the description of the update appeared very promising and I was getting tired of the bad performance of the mobile broadband connection under Windows Vista (performance is way better on my girlfriends Windows XP laptop). The zip contained (along with some pdf documentation) a self extracting executable named Superfire.exe. By following the on screen instructions I succesfully upgraded the web n walk USB sticks firmware but after a reboot trying to update the software drivers failed with this error;

“An incompatible standalone version of the speedmanager plus/ByteMobile Client is present on the system. This version must be uninstalled and OS restarted!”

Strange. I never explicitly installed a speedmanager or ByteMobile Client. If it was part of previous T-Mobile software I would have expected it to be easily uninstalled or updated. I started in Windows Vista’s Control Panel’s “Programs and Features” to uninstall everything possible related to mobile internet. With no success.

Inspired by Jürgen Pabel’s succes story I went to regedit to remove every registry key possible related to a ByteMobile client or Speedmanager.  (Indeed I found some keys, I removed every key containing ”ByteMobile”, “Novatel”, “Option NV”, “GlobeTrotter”  or “T-Mobile”.) No success.

At this point I was getting really annoyed. I started looking for a download of the old firmware or drivers. I found a working driver on t-mobile.at (austria) that at least made be able to use the web n walk stick again. Terrible network performance but good enough for web browsing. 

Still wishing to solve this problem, I looked for ways to get more information about the microsoft installer failure. I found a way to get verbose logging from the microsoft installer. 

I used: 

msiexec /i webnwalkManager_en.msi /l*v c:\wnw.log

And this produced a 510 lines logfile. With this curious lines 277 and 278.

MSI (c) (04:1C) [12:05:38:939]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying MINSTALLCHECKMSIRETURN.102FE328_B77C_41FB_847C_166244959AAB property. Its current value is ‘0′. Its new value: ‘BM_ERROR_CONFLICT_SOFTWARE’.

MSI (c) (04:1C) [12:05:38:939]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying BMCONFLICTSOFTWARENAME.102FE328_B77C_41FB_847C_166244959AAB property. Its current value is ‘0′. Its new value: ‘Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0′.

It appears that Kaspersky Internet Security is the ByteMobile Client issue that the installer error speaks of. Weird, since I never explicitly installed that but this must be a part of my Kaspersky Antivirus. And indeed uninstalling Kaspersky allowed me to install the new web n walk software! (And reinstalling Kaspersky Antivirus made both work at the same time as well…)

New Web N Walk Manager interface

It was quiet dissappointing to discover that network performance (in particular uploading) was still terrible. Large file uploads (like uploading 5MB photos to Flickr) where even completly impossible, for a few seconds I would have 300-400kbps but then upload speed would drop to somewhere near 0 bps.

Looking for solutions to this problem I found the following possible cause. The T-Mobile driver documentation hints about a possible problem with Vista’s TCP window size autotuning algorithm. (In other versions of Microsoft’s OS it possible to explicitly configure a tcpwindowsize parameter in the registry. Vista ignores that parameter because it uses it’s own auto tuning algorithm that attempts to find the best tcp window size for you. But apparantly it fails to do so.) I found this post that explains how you can modify the default behavior of the tuning algorithm. I used;

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted

(In this article on speedguide.net you info find more tcp settings that can increase your network speeds. But I believe these settings bring only marginal results.)

For a short time it looked like the highlyrestricted autotuninglevel improved matters. But I guess that was only wishfull thinking. What made the big difference for me was disabling “Internet Protocol  Version 6 (TCP/IPv6)” and “Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS 6 Filter” in the connections properties.

Web n Walk mobile broadband connection properties

I’m happily continuing uploading to my Flickr stream! 

Win!!!

w00t!!

We (me, Sylvia and Daan) have won an Silver W3 Award for Studio Roosegaarde!

In our humble opinions this is a well deserved result of our fanatic affords (in good and bad times) to build the best we could. And we’re determined to make it a gold one next time.

Daphne Farquharson

Today we were notified of a terribly sad thing. 

Our friend Daphne Farquharson was found dead in her parent’s house in Badhoevedorp.

Words can’t express what a loss this is. 

Daphne, you will be missed and remembered.

Thanks for the fun times, the wonderful diners, the good book recommendations and the introduction to poker that we had with you!

We will not forget the fun we had!

Your buddies,

Sylvia and Theo.

Running the numbers

Did you know that;

• 2.5 million plastic bottles are used in the US every hour
• 65,000 American teenagers under age eighteen become addicted to cigarettes every month
• 11,000 commercial flights are made in the US every eight hours
• 426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day
• 213,000 emergency room visits are yearly made in the US related to misuse or abuse of prescription pain killers
• 29,569 gun-related deaths occurred in the US in 2004
• 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour
• 60,000 plastic bags are used in the US every five seconds

Pretty impressive numbers, huh? Chris Jordan made an American consumption portrait. Check out his website if you want a visualization of these consumption numbers.

Crispy edges

If you’re like me a fan of the crispy edges of your brownie/cake. Get this bakersedge.com’s labyrinth to bake them in.

Isn’t this sheer genius?!

The Great Global Warming Swindle

It’s a magical world

Sylvia and me made some changes to our interior, to give our books a better and more prominent place in the house. We used to have two big bookcases packed to gather in a little cabinet of our living room. This looked like this:

That arrangement was allright, but we could do better. Check this out! Using the space in the living room to place our bookcases next to each other really makes a much more powerfull impression. I had to put some pressure on Sylvia to get this done, but I really think it’s much better.

And at the same time we bettered the cabinet to. Monday Daan Roosegaarde came and delivered us a custom made variant, or a ‘drunken bookcase‘ as one of my friends calls it. I love the variant. [Disclosure: I work for Daan and might say nice thing to flatter him, but really I love this variant.] I spend the entire first day staring agape with wonder at it every half hour. You do not yet see it on this picture, but we now filled the variant with the kind of books that you can easily read when you have a little time. Some comics and some short story books. All this cabinet now needs is a Fat Boy to relax in it, a better lamp and something on the walls.

Okay about that something on the wall. I was thinking about this; I want to paint a giant copy of this Calvin and Hobbes cover;

And this is really ambitious because I never really painted anything. But I like this picture so much. In my giant replica of it (2m x 1m) I would make the most of the picture plain white, I would place a few small bare trees in upper left and Calvin and Hobbes happily moving through the snow in lower right. (I might put in the words “It’s a magical world” as well, but I’m not sure yet.) A magical image if you ask me.

So where do I start? What materials should I use? I will start by asking Sylvia, she’s the creative type, she has experiences with this sort of stuff, but at least she knows who to ask. I will keep you update on this project. Share your thoughts with me, if you have suggestions on how to tackle this.