T-Mobile Network Quality

As you’ve noticed, I bought an iPhone. When you’re living in the Netherlands, you’ve got two options to get an iPhone. The first one is walk to an Apple reseller, buy an iPhone and sell your soul to T-Mobile. The second option is to drive to Belgium, convince a reseller to sell you a simlock-free iPhone, and get a Vodafone iPhone “Super Sim Only” contract. I went for the first option, and to be honest I kind of regret it. The iPhone is brilliant, but the T-Mobile network in the Netherlands sucks. Bigtime.

If your life depends on somebodies availabilty, please make sure to check they’re not using the T-Mobile or Orange network (the companies merged). Don’t let T-Mobile fool you with the “iPhone has bad reception hype”. I can make screenshots like you see here each day. I have “No service” but I can see the Vodafone and KPN networks just fine.

Design by Management

A lot of great ideas start in the heads of creative minds. Unbound by budgets, planning, and customers, these ideas are passed around, and some of them turn into projects.

As soon as companies and managers get involved in realizing great ideas which are not really theirs, things can go very wrong. The least that can happen is that something isn’t built. Tomtom on an iPhone? A brilliant idea and technically possible, but non-technical people get in the way.

You are a pirate!

A briliant post on xkcd.com today explains in one single cartoon why DRM is bad:

Steal This Comic

I couldn’t have made it simpler (although I tried).

Take their money, then take the pain

Just to get this out of my system, I’ll tell you what I think of the current crisis in the monetary system. It starts off with a fictional story, and explains why we need to get rid of the monetary system, and why you should have physical gold in your safe.

Getting a high Google Quality Score.

The past week, I’ve heard some collegues talking about tweaking websites so that they will show up in Google search results. A lot of people actually try to figure out how to “fool” the Google search engine, and actually make a living writing books about it. The strange thing is, that a lot of people want to be the “I feel lucky” link in Google even when the search query hasn’t got anything to do with the content they’re providing.

It’s actually a funny discussion, because this behaviour which “makes use” of the system, actually breaks it. Suppose a lot of people figure out how to get this done. Now, whenever you use Google, your first page of search results will actually contain stuff you’re not looking for. After a few tries, you’ll get tired of this and start using a different search engine.