Author: sven

http://www.assodigitale.it/content/view/6342/31/

“Vodafone announces today that customers in Europe will be able to surf the internet, check e-mail and access their business network when roaming abroad for a flat rate fee of only €12 for every day of use…”

This is interesting. I use my phone to connect via 3G quite often – sometimes internationally – and am fed up with being charged something like £2.35/Mb for internet connectivity (never mind upwards of £10/Mb when abroad) when other companies (like T-Mobile) charge significantly less for fixed data packages. Orange, 3 and others have similar packages as far as I know.

The difference in price can be astronomical, and I’ve long considered transferring elsewhere because of it. When I happened to mention this to a Vodafone rep a little while ago they assured me that a new rate was in the works – at the time they suggested £7.50/Month for a gigabyte of data (amazing!) starting 1 March.

This has, of course passed and after another couple of calls they started mentioning some more complicated system whereby the first meg would be two quid, and each successive meg would be one pound, with various limits imposed – or something like that. All sorts of options and strings attached. By the end of the discussion both the rep and I ended up confused by the entire thing.

So it looks like the £7.50/Month deal is not nearby (in case you’re wondering the deals have been discussed elsewhere)- Vodafone have delayed any rollout it seems. The comments in that link also suggest the much more conservative limit of 100Mb a month for that cost – not as good but still great, and a huge improvement.

The International deal is interesting but worries me: my phone has this annoying “issue” whereby pressing the OK button more times than is necessary (it also has the slowest and most-unresponsive interface known to man) will launch Vodafone’s little Internet portal. Cancelling the action faces similar unresponsiveness, so it’s normally already starting to download by the time I get it to stop.

So I’m wondering – does that mean the moment this thing loads I get charged full whack for the first megabyte? That also turns out to be a rather large charge if you want to do something small and insignificant, such as check the train times (50Kb,if that).

Fingers crossed for more news on the Vodafone internet data strategy – the international offering is an okay start and definitely welcome, but I’d love to see something truly competitive in the domestic market.

Alex pointed me to this video of an optical illusion of a dragon. It’s very neat.

That lead me on to http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/ where you can print out and build your own dragon, as well as building and seeing plenty of other illusions.

I’ve been remarkably quiet lately, but with good reason. The
commuting to London has certainly taken a good chunk out of my day (roughly six
hours a day on the commute – fun!).

Still, I’m getting plenty of sleep on the train and a
surprising amount of  coding done on the
laptop.

In the absense of anything more exciting in my life right
now I’m finding it tough to find things to write about, but one piece that’s
been brewing in my head for quite ome time now is a little list of notes and
tips from the commute.

So, here goes, Sven’s top tips for travelling on the train
and tube…

1. The best seats on the train from Portsmouth Harbour to
Waterloo are in the second coach from the rear. Normally, the morning train
will stop at a few of the smaller stations, like Farncombe and Liss. These have
shorter platforms. People getting on looking for seats might head towards the
back, but will almost always go right to the back of the train at which point
they don’t bother returning even if the second from the rear was quieter. I
reckon there’s also a bit of psychology at play where people tend towards the
extremities of platforms.

2. When getting on the Waterloo and City line at Bank, get
on at either the front or back to favour a quick departure at Waterloo – the
only two exits at Waterloo are at either extremity.

3. If you get off at Havant and want to cross the
footbridge, go to the rear end of the tenth coach of a 12 coach train. The
doors open right next to the footbridge. It’s best to start walking just after
you leave Petersfield if you’re at the front. The forward end of the ninth coach
is best in 10 coach trains.

4. Portsmouth-bound trains from Waterloo are generally every
fifteen minutes in the evening. The ones on the hour and half past are normally
a lot faster.

5. To avoid the various newspaper people at the front of
Liverpool Street and to make a shortcut towards Folgate Street (northerly I
think?) take the side exit. It’s a tiny little path just to the right of Upper
Crust, follow the road along and you’ll come out just off Bishopsgate.

6. Weekly travelcards are phenomenally cheaper than
their 5/7 day equivalent day tickets. A ticket from Havant to Waterloo plus all
zones is about the same as two day returns plus Zone 1 – I never initially
realised quite how good the discount was (or quite how much of a ripoff the day
returns are).

I’m typing less and less these days, but I’m still up to things. Google Reader has a handy RSS feed of articles that I’d like to share with you and, as soon as I’ve figured out how, I’ll include them in the main blog feed. in the meantime you can see them here.

Off to another Sussex dinner tonight, review up soon (I’m debating whether to take a camera or not….)

A pretty big update in order. I know it’s been a while but I’ve been predictably snowed under yet again with work. This time it’s a daily commute from Gosport to London (some three hours each way, give or take signal failures and strong winds!).

The downside is that I’m getting almost no time at home that isn’t spend sleeping or trying to sleep. The plus-side is that it’s given me an opportunity to work through my much-neglected library of books that I’ve gathered over Christmases and birthdays and have yet to read.

Actually, I just end up on the laptop all the time, doing more work. Still, I’m getting paid for (most of) it, so can’t complain.

Last Wednesday I managed to get back down to Havant and along to Brighton in time for the Sussex Geek dinner. This is basically an opportunity for a bunch of like-minded people to socialise [yes, I realise that is an oxymoron with geeks], and learn a bit more about each others’ work.

The event is organised by Simon Harriyott, so my thanks go to him for organising yet another wonderful event.

I’ve felt a bit guilty over the last few months having missed at least two of these dinners due to being overseas, but it’s good to be back and I look forward to making a regular appearance.

Simon has recently begun inviting guest speakers to the dinners – a great idea in my view, and this event was well covered by Mikel Maron, a developer involved in OpenStreetMap. Mikel was very keen to talk about the technical and logistical aspects of such a project, which – given the audience – was very well received.
OpenStreetMap is a project aiming to map the planet using readily-available commercial GPS receivers and a lot of volunteer time. It’s quite an ambitious project, although some progress has already been made: the Isle of Wight is fully mapped, thanks to a series of workshops held on the island. Brighton is close to 100% coverage.

There are some interesting legal and copyright issues. For example, you can’t just trace Google Maps – that would violate copyright. In fact, it seems you can’t even refer to the maps for guidance or to double-check – it all has to be original work.
The various mappers track this by placing so-called Trap Streets, which are fictional roads placed in various locations designed specifically to spot copyright infringement. It’s a good idea, but I wonder how many SatNav systems have tried to guide people down these fictitious roads (although, I presume they’re normally cul-de-sacs).

OpenStreetMap’s coverage for the rest of the UK is less detailed. Gosport, for instance, has very little more than the main road, and that only goes to the outskirts of the town. It’s certainly not navigable!

But the point of this website is that it encourages the user to go out for themselves and map their area. I quite fancy mapping Gosport, if I had the time and a GPS device, for nothing other than the feel-good factor of the contribution. Heck knows I get about enough to accumulate some pretty widespread data!

I’m still not convinced about OpenStreetMap’s sustainability – a few good companies have backed it technically, and I understand that MultiMap sponsors one of its developers, but it’s surely a long way to go before the entire country is mapped (even the end of 2008 seems incredibly ambitious). Still, I like the idea of the workshops focusing on particular areas – if 100% of Sussex could be mapped, for instance, then it’s of immediate benefit to everybody who lives and operates in Sussex. A more general coverage of, say, 10% of the whole country is of almost no use to anybody.

Incidentally, I never recognised Mikel’s name at first, but when I came across his blog afterwords (http://brainoff.com/weblog/) I immediately recognised it; I’m sure I met and chatted to him at the BlogTalk conference in Austria in 2004. Is it sad that I recognise URLs before names? Almost certainly!

During the evening, I also got around to meeting a few other people, although my natural tendency to hover in the corner and eat sausage rolls limited that somewhat. I had a good conversation with Clive and Ian. Clive runs a website listing pubs in Horsham, which is an ideal research project for me. The latter two are working on a website that offers free video training. This is showmedo.com, and you should have a look at the site to see lots of diverse and interesting video tutorials from fixing cars, 3D rendering, to Python programming in German.

Unfortunately I had to head off fairly early to get to bed for work the next day (4:30 start), but it was good to see a nice crowd of people and I look forward to the next one.

At some point today I need to clear this. It’s an accumulation of a good few months’ worth of paperwork that has been growing while I spent some time in the Netherlands. Eek!

Aaah good, one of my pet hates in local.live.com (Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps) has now been fixed. The oblique ‘birds-eye‘ view now supports continuous scrolling — it used to require the user to manually select photos as they moved around for any great distance.

The Microsoft offering has some pretty up-to-date imagery, and beats Google for quality in some local areas (the map I was looking for was in Southampton)

Huzzah. It’s 2007. Now we begin the ritual annual task of making mistakes writing out cheques and dating letters.

Wikipedia has a list of things that have already happened in 2007, things that are scheduled to happen, and films & games set in 2007.

Did you know that on the first day of 2007, ISBN numbers increased from 10 to 13 digits? That Irish has become an official working language of the EU, and that Slovenia has begun using the Euro as its official currency?

Things to look forward to this year include the 41st Superbowl (Feb 4); Welsh smoking ban (Apr 1) followed by the England smoking ban (Jul 1); the release of Spiderman 3 (May 4); the Tour de France (Jul 7, starting in London – that well-known French city), and the expiration of the copyright* on Peter Pan (Dec 31)

I don’t have a New Year’s resolution this year, since I clearly suck at keeping them.

*Interestingly the owners of the copyright, Great Ormond Street Hospital are entitled to perpetual royalty payments beyond the expiry

After a little festive time (nice and quiet) I’m back at the computer. Busy as ever, but hopefully I’ll find some time shortly to post a bit more.

I hope you all had a good Christmas or, if that isn’t your thing, a nice time anyway. I did well in the DVD department, scoring six or seven DVDs 😀 Also got a few very nice shirts, the Planet Earth book and two green furry dinosaurs to sit on my desk. Edit: I also got a very creative model made for me!

For those who might want to contact me, I’m flying to the Netherlands this afternoon. Back Friday evening. No email (through choice) but I’ll have my mobile.