He wanted to use his new computer for Linux only, but the store (a supermarket) and the computer manufacturer would only accept a refund for the complete purchase, regardless of the Windows Vista license offer to get a refund for the bundled software.

The consumer agency ruled in favor of the consumer, citing his right for reimbursement as pr. the license agreement, and the Danish consumer law that interprets in favor of the consumer when doubts arise.

This is very good news for the rights of Danish consumers, after we were let down by Poul-Henning Kamp’s recent loss in court (GTrans) about a similar complaint.

Go get those Vista refunds!

But remember for Windows 7, the license reads “you must return the entire system on which the software is installed for a refund or credit”, effectively making any product distributed with Windows 7 a madatory subject to the Microsoft tax.

UPDATE 2011/01/18 20:40:

A followup article at ComputerWorld Denmark (GTrans) states that HP Denmark doesn’t think the ruling will have any “practical effect” on their business. They believe very few consumers are interested in alternative operating systems,  and haven’t seen any demand for it in the market. How a demand can be established without a product,  HP doesn’t have any insights into, as they have never had alternative offerings.

Even though we all know what the OEM license says, an OEM director from Microsoft Denmark cleverly enough states that; “we can not and should not interfere with the wording of return policies, including whether the software can be returned with the PC only“. In the last blow to any logic, the HP response is to; “await a statement from Microsoft, and then implement a solution“.

Apparently Google Streetview has started collecting data again here i Denmark, as they did in Norway, Sweden, Ireland and South Africa in July. Now with the Wi-Fi privacy issue resolved.

The following netfrenzy brought me to the official schedule at http://www.google.dk/help/maps/streetview/where-is-street-view.html which shows some mid to large sized cities in Denmark beeing up for an update, including Esbjerg. Strangely I haven’t noticed any lack of imagery in my local area. I know that most of Denmark was beeing photographed during July and August 2009, so something must be missing, or of inferior quality since they are coming back.

I also found a fun Street View Partner site; Legoland in California has allowed Street View to take a tour through the park. Fun for me, because the Lego Group HQ and original Legoland Billund is close to Esbjerg, and I have been going there regularly wiht the kids. Going to be fun to take them for a virtual walk in the park in California . The Billund park doesn’t seem to have been mapped internally, though.

Also a hilarious joke on Google Streetview from an interesting group of people; The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab. Will be digging these nutty people out for sure.

In the IP world of the internet, the swiss army knife for debugging interprocess communications in a totally protocol agnostic way is called ‘telnet’. Telnet opens up a communication channel between your local computer and a daemon/server on a specific port on a specific IP address. Then it gets out of the way for you to talk directly to the daemon in clear text.

Knowledge of how to interact using a specific protocol can be very useful to check server availability and functionality. All common protocols in use on the internet (like DNS, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, XMPP etc.) can be debugged like this, because all of them transfers data in clear text (or at least initiates other transfer types from a clear text session).

Below is a basic HTTP session to my web server www.mikini.dk using telnet command line on a Linux box. Full specifications for the HTTP protocol can be found in IETF RFC2616. I keep forgetting this, and end up digging around for it when needed, therefore this blog post.

Red text is local text input by me. Blue text is local text by telnet application. Green text is server response.

miki@khandro:~$ telnet www.mikini.dk 80
Trying 92.61.152.47…
Connected to 92-61-152-47.static.servage.net.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET /index.php/2010/06 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mikini.dk

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:19:13 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: http://www.mikini.dk/xmlrpc.php
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

2bd2
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd“>

<… remainder of HTML document dropped …>

We are asking the server at www.mikini.dk port 80 (default http port) for the document at path /index.php/2010/06 (“GET /index.php/2010/06″). Notice the two CRLF characters after the Host header field, this indicates to the server that the request header is done, and that it should begin parsing header and send its response. Also notice that even though you tell the telnet program on the commandline that you want to access www.mikini.dk, you have to tell it again to the server in th HTTP Host field. Thats because telnet is only concerned about the IP address of the server, it resolves www.mikini.dk to the IP 92.61.152.47 through DNS and forgets about it. From the servers point of view, it needs to know which of its virtual hosts you want to talk to, cause one server application on one port on one ip can potentially host thousands of separate websites (virtual hosts).

This particular modem came from the danish cable ISP YouSee, in an offering known as Mobilt Bredbånd (mobile broadband), targeting their existing cable internet customers. Pricing starts at lowest offering of 1 Mbit/384 kbit transmission speed with 1GiB/month data limit at DKK 99/month (~USD 16.5 ~EUR 13.3).

As many recent USB modems, this one is a mode switching type with multiple personalities (Option ZeroCD(TM)). At plugin it defaults to an emulated CD mass storage drive (USB ID 12d1:1446), with an onboard Windows driver and dialer (Mobile Partner). When detected by a driver knowing it’s schizophrenic nature, it can be manipulated, utilizing psychotherapeutic tricks, to switch it’s personality to the modem it actually is (USB ID 12d1:140c). Hence, on non-Windows systems some magic needs to be established to make the modem actually behave like a modem.

One incarnation (se discussion about other stuff here) of this magic is called usb_modeswitch. That is also the solution chosen by the Ubuntu distribution team, and it is present in the repositories and configured for the Huawei E1752 in Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’, so we just need to know that we need it. You do now…

Activating usb_modeswitch is a matter of installing the usb-modeswitch package. Find it in Synaptic or issue the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch

Now all you have to do is insert the modem and check (we like to be certain, right?) with lsusb that you have the 12d1:140c modem device instead of the 12d1:1446 mass storage device.

The Gnome Network Manager should now pick up on the new modem device, and offer you the possibility of adding a new mobile broadband connection. In my case, it defaulted to an Oister connection, but removing that and using the wizard to create a TDC connection (YouSee is a part of/close associate of TDC) did the trick, after reinserting the modem once more.

Now I wonder why my own E160G modem works without usb_modeswitch installed…

The new fellow was bought at danish netshop Proshop.dk (product page) for DKK 2551 (~342.75 EUR ~420.50 USD). Delivery was DKK 59 and took from order at thursday 17th until delivered monday 21st (danish mail is not to blame, I expected it to arrive friday, on stock and all but Proshop decided to wait until sunday 20th before processing the order).

Even though I’m a software junkie, I’m by no means a commercial hardware junkie (software is the enabler anyway, ya ‘now!). I don’t buy off-the-shelf  systems every other day, or have a job where I try out a horde of different netbooks/notebooks. Bear that in mind; these observations come from a newbie netbook user, with experience from larger more gfx capable laptops.

All of the below are under the overall judgement that says: I like this machine very much, it will indeed fellow me  in many a journey in the time to come.

List’o'Niceness

• battery time (just keeps on running, after 7.5 hour still 25% left)
• multitouch pad (pinch zoom, two-finger scroll (didn’t know I needed this!))
• light and easy to handle, battery acts as a kind of handle bar
• screen is crisp and clear
• soo silent (put ear to chassis to hear hdd, haven’t heard fan yet)
• very snappy feeling, in both Linux (Phoenix Hyperspace & Ubuntu 10.4 NE) and Windows 7 Starter (first encounter, but positively surprised)
• pgup/pgdn keys are just above cursor keys, nice!
• no heat

List’o'Annoyness

• no internal mobile broadband (slot present behind battery)
• all usb is in front = mobile broadband adapter is always annoying
• right shift key squeezed too much, keep hitting <> when shifting (might be DK keyboard specific)
• home/end keys with Fn qualifier requires getting used to (didn’t know I used these so much)
• alfa keys a bit offset to the left, keep writing 2 (argh…) 1 more than I need
• no space/mark between f4 & f5, f8 & f9
• caps lock indicator is hidden with other system leds (why isn’t it purple or something to stand out from power/wireless/hdd led?)
• num lock and scroll lock is indicated using osd from windows app, could be problematic in non standard environment
• no multitouch out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 10.4 (will be looking into this)

Oh, and of course, it needs a name! My N210 is named khandro, after a tibetian deity, meaning “cloud fairy” or “she who traverses the sky’.

Let the fairytales begin…

Of couse its open source/free software (EPL 1.0 licensed) and  development is community driven, or I wouldn’t mention it by many words.

Will be interesting to learn more about this, and see if it kicks in. Kind of reminds me about Carl Sassenrath’s little known environment REBOL, even though REBOL is a little more ‘itself’, where Closure draws on the large LISP heritage.

We do stuff! Like foobar, null pointer dereferences, DND and N/A. Oh, and also fluffy, squeaky things!