T-Mobile Travel & Surf: manchmal fühlt man sich…

…als zahlender Kunde schon ziemlich heftig auf den Arm genommen.

Im Urlaub (Kroatien war es dieses Jahr) habe ich ein Travel&Surf-Paket vom Magenta-Meister, das 7 Tage langen Auslands-Surf-Spass mit UMTS und Flatrate verspricht, gebucht, obwohl es in unserer Unterkunft und im näheren Umfeld keinerlei UMTS-Empfang gab. Immerhin hat Edge sehr gut funktioniert, um zum Lesen der Mails und für die täglichen Nachrichten, ein bisschen Navigieren und Ausflugstipps und Wettervorhersage stöbern reicht es ja auch aus.

Interessant wird es dann, wenn am 5. Tag (der Pass gilt für 7 Tage) eine SMS kommt, die mir mitteilt, dass mein UMTS-Volumen erschöpft sei, und ich ab sofort nur noch mit verringerter Geschwindigkeit surfen könne.

Nun ist das im Grunde nicht schlimm, denn es gab an meinem Standort sowieso keine schnellere Verbindung, und die Vertragsbedingungen sagen ganz klar, dass nach 100 MB gedrosselt wird. Für mich war der Service also vor und nach der SMS genau gleich.

Und doch: offenbar zählt die Telekom hier nicht mit, wieviel man per UMTS surft, sondern es gilt der komplette Datenverbrauch. Die ersten 100 MB dürfen per UMTS oder EDGE versurft werden, danach nur noch per EDGE. Selbst bei nochmaligem Studium der Bedingungen auf der T-Mobile-Seite ist mir nicht gelungen, das so herauszulesen:

Was passiert nach Verbrauch des Volumens oder Ablauf der Gültigkeit meines Travel & Surf Passes und welche Kosten entstehen maximal beim Daten-Eurotarif?<
Keine Sorge, es entstehen in keinem Fall zusätzlichen Kosten. Je nach Pass wird Ihre Datenverbindung automatisch getrennt oder Sie surfen mit dem WeekPass mit einer reduzierten Geschwindigkeit weiter (Bandbreitenbeschränkung). Hier entstehen Ihnen ebenfalls keine weiteren Kosten. Nach Verbrauch des Passes werden Sie automatisch wieder auf die kostenlose Internetseite geleitet, wo Sie bei Bedarf einen weiteren Pass kaufen können.

Also irgendwie lese ich das so, dass nach einem Verbrauch von 100 MB per UMTS die Bandbreite gedrosselt wird, und nicht, wenn 100 MB genutzt wurden, egal wie schnell. Aber wer hier Begriffe wie “Raubritterei”, “Beutelschneider” oder ähnliches im Hinterkopf hat, liegt sicher ganz falsch. Sicher war das ein Einzelfall, und ausserdem lag ein unglücklicher technischer Defekt in einem der Vermittlungsknoten beim Roamingpartner T-Mobile Hrvatska vor. Das Abbuchen der Option hat übrigens super funktioniert…

ESUG 2012: Registration is now open!

Johan Brichau just announced on the ESUG mailing list that you can now register to attend the European Smalltalk Users Groups’ yearly conference ESUG 2012 in Ghent, Belgium:

I am pleased to announce that registration for the 20th ESUG Conference in Ghent, Belgium is now open!

To register, please proceed to the website http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2012 or go directly to http://registration.esug.org

He also adds that people interested in joining the Smalltalk community for a week packed with news and noteworthy as well as network with fellow Smalltalkers, should book their hotel rooms as soon as possible: Ghent is a tourist place and besides ESUG, there will be other events at the same time.

Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM 2012

Stephan Eggermont is going to set up a Smalltalk Developer Room at the FOSDEM conference 2012, February 4-5 in Brussels, Belgium.

The Smalltalk Devroom is scheduled for Sunday, February 5th.

What exactly, you may ask, is a Developer Room? In essence, it is a full-day mini-conference that is part of the FOSDEM conference, organized by a small group of people. Stephan was kind and courageous enough to apply for such a Developer Room and got a slot. He now needs both input and help from other Smalltalk enthusiasts and open source users and committers.

FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. And it is free to attend, you don’t even have to register, just drop in and enjoy!

So if you want to learn about Smalltalk, get in touch with Smalltalkers and want to see what’s going on in the European open source community, from MySQL to JBOSS, FOSDEM is the place to be in early February.

ESUG 2011: Registration is open

Even though the Smalltalk world now has three major events worldwide (Smalltalk Solutions in the States, Smalltalks in Argentina and ESUG), I’d say the major and most traditional event is the annual Conference of the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), which will be held for the 19th consecutive year in 2011. This year it will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Niall Ross just announced that Registration for the event is now open. There is an early bird rate of 360 EUR for the whole week from August 22nd to August 26th, 2011, which includes the social event and lunch, as always. ESUG also made an arrangement for affordable rooms close to the Campus, which you can register for at the ESUG page.

So if you want to learn all about what’s going on in and around the Smalltalk Programming Language, wish to meet old friends or participate in the Camp Smalltalk which takes place the weekend before the conference, visit the ESUG site and register for the conference. I can tell you, it’s worth it!

Battery packs for vehicles will not be the answer

James Robertson points to a very interesting detail related to electro-mobility that I haven’t thought of before:

… it can take as long as 20 hours to charge up the car using a standard 120-volt circuit. If you hook up to a 240-volt Level 2 charging station — which can be installed in your home for the estimated cost of $2,200 — you can cut that time down to eight hours or so for a full charge.

So living in the states where the outlets have 120 Volts rather than 220-240 means charging you car takes double the time or you have to invest a siginifcant amount of money just for reducing charging times.

This will of course put high obstacles into the way of electric mobiliy in one of the biggest market for cars – one that I’ve never thought of before.

But, to be honest, I am quite convinced that the whole battery pack idea is wrong, both from a practical and ecological / economical standpoint. As long as the electricity for our cars comes from nuclear or coal plants, and as long as we have highly-toxic battery packs in our vehicles, there is not very much ecological sense in all this.

If it takes many hours to charge a car, it’s impractical or inconvenient for many people. That’s not the way to convince the masses of a new technology.

I also see issues with replaceable battery packs. Sounds expensive, time consuming and also incenvenient to me, not to speak of the problem of how many stations I will be able to find where they can replace my battery pack.

There is an interesting sounding alternative to battery packs: it is called flow batteries or Redox-Flow-Batteries. The idea is that there is an electrolyte that flows through a power genarator. The base principle is easy: you have two fuel tanks in your car: one for the loaded electrolyte and one for the used, “empty” electrolyte.

Why do I think that sounds better than battery packs?

First of all, recharging your car means removing the used electrolyte and refilling the tank for new electrolyte. So the charging of the electrolyte happens outside of the car, at any time or place. Even if tanking/untanking would take 3 or 5 minutes, it would be very similar to how we tank our cars today. And it still would be cheaper and faster than most battery pack replacement concepts around. Sounds very nice to me, I guess this could be adopted by the masses pretty easily.

So uncoupling the charging process from the car brings many advantages:

• No need for an outlet at my parking spot
• Unlimited mileage by tanking new electrolyte, just like fuel today
• Reuse of existing distribution channels, like gas stations
• No hassles with broken batteries. If the electrylote is “empty”, tank new
• Better chance for ecologically friendly power production

Let’s assume we want electric cars because we want to do something good for the environment (I know, that’s naive, we want them because electricity promises to be cheaper, but….). What could this technology do for us?

The electrolyte would be charged at the gas station or even better in big plants. Imagine somebody setting up a huge solar plant in some sunny region, like some desert and using existing infrastructure like ships and tank lorries to transport electrolyte instead of oil. Or water power plants, or whatever ecologically sensible way of producing electricity we might think of. We could ship the loaded electrolyte around, just like we do with oil today. And we could do it by using flow batteries in the lorries or tankers (not sure if that’s practical).

If we wanted, this could be good in many ways:

• We could help poor but sunny countries to make money by delivering our electricity
• The today rich oil producing and sunny countries could invest in such solar plants to earn lots of money even if they run out of oil
• The petrol companies could provide their infrastructure (tankers, lorries, gas stations, ports etc.) to distribute electrolyte instead of gas
• We would not have to build up extremely expensive power networks to transport the electricity
• We could use solar energy for our cars rather than conventionally produced electricity (which is just making the pollution invisible for the individual driver but solves no problems as long it is not produced in an ecologically friendly way)
• We could probably really do something to reduce CO2 emissions

So in all, I wonder why no big player tries to invest in this technology for electric vehicles rather than expensive and fragile battery packs.

There are, however, first attempts at using  redox-flow batteries for cars (article in German), but only financed very poorly.

Interestingly, the approach by the Fraunhofer institute seems to promise that you can reach up to 100 km with one tank – theoretically. I guess with a few million bucks in Research, there will be more progress.

Seems I am a Y2K10 victim

This week I am in Zurich and it seems I got caught by the Y2K10 bug. I cannot get cash at the ATMs here because “Transaction cancelled” without any additional error message. I travelled here with just 15 Swiss Francs in my pocket and my eurocheque card. In the EU, we are not used to think of getting foreign currencies any more since most countries around Germany share the Euro currency…
Fortunately, most credit card terminals either ignore the chip or my credit card is not affected. I could pay my Dinner yesterday. But it’s somewhat weird to not be able to simply step into a shop and buy yourself a bottle of water, because you never know if you urgently need those last 15 Francs for something more important like aspirin or a tram tickt back to the train station
Hat Tip to James Robertson for the link above. This way I now know that it’s some colleagues of mine to say “Thank You” to.

Going through te bugs listed in the linked article, it seems like Programmer’s abaility to learn from former errors is an illusion. So many Y2K10 problems, just a decade after the fear of the millenium harmageddon, just amazing.