T-Mobile Please Get Your Act Together!

I'll start by saying yes, this is a moderately whiny complaint blog. But if it helps one other person, then it's worth it.

T-Mobile has a great $30 pre-pay plan - unlimited text, unlimited data, 100 minutes talk. For our usage, this plan is perfect and pretty darn cheap. Sure, the "unlimited" data means that overage happens at a lower speed, but we've never come close to that limit.

Because this plan is such a good fit for people who don't use their phones as phones much, this is a great plan. However as far as I can figure out, T-Mobile doesn't want anyone to actually use this plan. It's easy, when you know the tricks, but forget trying to get T-Mobile to help you get this plan. Their customer support can't get you this plan (and will even go so far as to not tell the truth, insisting that you have to buy a new phone at Walmart). With the information in this post, you'll learn how to activate this plan and save a ton of money.

I've been a generally happy T-Mobile customer for a 8 years now, and I've had up to 4 lines on the account, though for the last 2 years we've had 2 pre-pay and 1 post-pay. The sole post-pay has been my Android phone, with the 2 pre-pay being feature phones used by other members of the family. You'd think that being a good customer in good standing for a long time would matter, but alas, in today's business world, it doesn't - they really just don't care.

In the last 9 months or so I've gone through a spree of updating my Android phone from a Samsung Galaxy 1, then a Samsung Galaxy 2, and now a Nexus 4. I've had a 2 year contract (which just expired), but swapped the phones around under the contract without even notifying T-Mobile. I bought the Galaxy 2 off a coworker, and the Nexus 4 straight from Google, so T-Mobile wasn't involved in the purchase of any device aside from the Galaxy 1 that I used when I started my 2 year contract.

I had to do some hacking to cut the regular SIM card down to microSIM for the Nexus 4, but that turned out to be really easy with some guidance from a coworker who had already done the same thing. Seriously, it's really easy to make a microSIM. Don't pay T-Mobile $50 for a replacement SIM, just grab some scissors and do it for free. You've got nothing to lose, and if you screw it up (but you won't, it's easy), then you can still pay T-Mobile for a replacement SIM. Don't buy a SIM cutter, don't buy a cutting pattern, just find someone with another microSIM so you get the outline right, cut it a bit big, and trim to size. If I can do it, you can do it.

When I bought the Galaxy 2, I sold my Galaxy 1 to a friend of mine. But when I bought the Nexus 4, I gave my wife the Galaxy 2 as an upgrade to her feature phone. The $30 pre-pay plan was appealing, so I bought a SIM card for $1 from the T-Mobile online store. It came a few days later, I activated it under a new number, with no problem, then called T-Mobile's horrible offshore pre-pay customer service to cancel her old number and transfer this number to the new number. This is really important: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to activate the plan or SIM via T-Mobile customer service. They cannot and will not help you. You need to buy a SIM online and activate it online, then only call customer service to port your number afterwards.

Fast forward a few weeks until my 2-year post-pay contract is up. I wanted to switch my phone to the same $30 pre-pay plan. I know the plan works, because my wife has been using it for a few weeks, but unlike her plan where we were converting pre-pay to pre-pay, I was converting post-pay to pre-pay. Cancelling post-pay requires a conversation with customer service, but I thought it would be easy - and it is, now that I know the secret, but boy did I go about it the wrong way (by trying to go about it the right way)!

My initial plan was to call up post-pay and cancel. Then I would buy a pre-pay SIM for $1 from the online store, activate it, and just like with the Galaxy 2, be set and done with this. Sounds simple, right?

So I called up post-pay customer service and told them I wanted to cancel. I get an amazingly awesome CSR (customer service rep), who first tells me he can get my current $79 plan for $55. This is a decent discount, but $55 is obviously more than $30, so I told him what I planned to do - that I was going to cancel, and just reactivate with a pre-pay SIM. He agreed with me that requiring customers to cancel just to activate pre-pay was silly, and he said he could override pre-pay and give me the $30 plan I wanted. Pretty awesome, right?! So, the guy sets me up and says I'll get an SMS within 24 hours, and that I'll need to then go activate with that code to switch to pre-pay.

I can't say enough good things about this post-pay CSR who helped me. Unlike every pre-pay CSR, and most other post-pay CSRs, he really wanted to help me - and understood that ultimately the end state would be the plan I wanted, so T-Mobile might as well make it easy on everyone involved and just do it.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way - pre-pay denied the account conversion. Of course they couldn't be bothered to actually call me, or notify me - instead they just blocked the conversion silently. Two days later I called, as I hadn't received the SMS to activate the new plan. This is where things got ugly. Post-pay wouldn't help me, and transferred me to pre-pay. Pre-pay told me that I couldn't get this plan and that it was only available if you bought a new phone from Walmart (This is obviously untrue, and a total lie on T-Mobile's part, as I had activated this exact same plan previously with the Galaxy 2!). I got really angry with the pre-pay CSR, who just started to give me a bunch of run-around. Asking me for account and SIM card numbers (which I never needed before), and finally just refusing to help me, even when provided with this information as well as the confirmation reference from my call two days previous. I asked, several times, to just transfer me to someone who could help me, but she basically refused. I was really surprised, customer service isn't the way it used to be, that's for sure. Sure, I was getting pretty angry at this point, but only because she wouldn't listen to me when I knew that I was right.

It was at this point that I remembered I had ordered a second SIM card when I bought the $1 SIM for activating the Galaxy 2 for my wife! I totally forgot about this - since they are only $1, I bought two just in case I needed another pre-pay SIM for some reason in the future.

Thirty minutes later, it was all done - I did the conversion from post-pay to a pre-pay plan that T-Mobile says there's no way you can get. And here's how you do it:

1. Wait until you contract is nearly up. Don't blame me if you screw this part up and have contract cancellation fees!
2. Go to the T-Mobile online store and order a new pre-pay SIM card for your phone for $1 plus shipping.
3. Wait a few days for the SIM card to arrive.
4. Activate the SIM card online, and choose the $30 plan with unlimited text, unlimited data, 100 minutes talk. And do not, under any circumstance, call T-Mobile customer support as part of the activation! Don't forget to port your old number over at the appropriate place in the process (and if you can't do it at the time of activation, you can always do that bit later, as we did for my wife's phone).
5. Cancel your old plan.

That's all there is to it - that's how you do the impossible, to get the plan that T-Mobile says you cannot have.

Atari Inc. Business Is Fun

If you are interested in the history of Atari, I would encourage you to grab a copy of "Atari Inc. Business Is Fun" by Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg. This is a big book - 800 pages of narrative, pictures, and internal documents that tell the unabridged history of this pioneer video game company. What Atari was doing in the 70s and early 80s shaped not only the video game industry, but the entire computer industry.

As an added bonus, there's even a picture of me in this book! My father was an engineer for Atari from the beginning until the fall of Atari in 1984.

Go grab yourself a copy by clicking below - you won't be disappointed!

 

The fun of working in a large bureaucratic company

The following is a real email from a decade ago, with only the names removed, from a mid-sized software development company that was very bureaucratic. As you can probably imagine after reading this, the company had a very old-school, throw it over the wall, development lifecycle - long release cycles, little interaction between developers and QA, and no coding until the design is "perfect". They even had a "no prototyping" policy - one of the engineering upper-ups said that a professional engineer should be experienced enough to know what they need to build the first time and it's not OK to throw away code. I'm not kidding! You can imagine how productive this environment was, and the resulting quality of the code.

If there's one reason to move to an agile lifecycle with a flexible work environment, just avoiding condescending, morale destroying emails like this is enough!

Enjoy.

===========================================

To: Development
Subject: Miscellaneous Items

There is standards that we need to follow for safety, cost and equity purposes. Unfortunately, I'm finding that I need to step in here and remind everyone of these standards and policys. These are not new standards. They have been in place for quite some time. So let me be the one to remind you of the following:

1) Chairs - Each associate is issued one task chair. These are the ones you are sitting in. A manager is issued one task chair and one side chair. A Director is issued one task chair and two side chairs. The conference rooms have been furnished with the appropriate amount of chairs depending on the size of the room. Teams areas have been issued appropriate chairs. That's it. Therefore, there will be no side chairs issued to an 8X8 cubicle. I know some of you have modified cubicles that would accommodate an additional chair, but this is not going to happen. Those that currently have an additional chair, will return them to me. Those that are requesting an additional chair can stop asking. Now then, if someone wants to write me a check for $26,950 from their own personal account, I would be more than happy to provide an additional chair for all cubicles. And no...you can not bring a chair from home either.

2) Coffepots, toasters, microwaves, refrigerators, etc are not to be used in the cubicles. Period, end of story.

3) Cubicle modifications - all modifications need to be approved by facilities. This is not your personal property and therefore is not yours to modify using nails, molley bolts, screws, saws, paint, etc.

4) Any of that old furniture that you became attached to (lamps, tables, bookcase, etc) is not approved for placement here. However, I'm told that you may be able to take it home (contact [name withheld] if interested).

If you have further questions or objections, please feel free to see me personally and I will help to explain.

[name withheld]
Vice President Software Development

VOIP solution round THREE

For 19 months I'd been pretty happy with Callcentric for our home VOIP, but that all changed last month. For two weeks, Callcentric was under a DDOS attack resulting in flaky service. Then superstorm Sandy hit the East coast. Amazingly, Callcentric has no redundancy or disaster preparedness in their system - everything is served out of a single datacenter in NYC with no backup in VOIP infrastructure. During Sandy, they didn't even bother to point their DNS to a temporary location so people could at least get a webpage with status. They just went off the wire - completely.

To add insult to that injury, Callcentric made no attempt to proactively notify customers about the DDOS events - they only way I found out about it was because I found our phone wasn't working, so logged into my dashboard to see what was up, and only then got presented with a message. Not an acceptable amount of communication.

I can accept one of these failures, but all these together is a show-stopper for me. Not having reliable (or any) phone service for 3-4 weeks is just not a workable solution, nor is lack of notifying customers. I say this not only as a customer, but as a developer of SAAS apps - I know that building a system capable of absorbing these types of failures is possible, if not simple, and really a requirement in today's wired world.

So a couple of weeks ago I signed up with Flowroute and switched the ATA over. So far, so good! Flowroute is not only cheaper than Callcentric, but DIDs (inbound phone numbers) are allocated instantly on demand, rather than having to wait a couple of days for an assignment. As an added bonus, Flowroute supports CNAM - which means you can add your name in outbound ANI (CallerID).

So far, the Flowroute experience has been excellent. I actually looked at them early last year before choosing Callcentric, but was put off by the $35 minimum payment. I was afraid that if I didn't like it, or wasn't happy, that it would be a hassle to get a refund. So far, I don't anticipate getting a refund, as the service has been great. $35 goes a long way for BYOD VOIP. Our DID is $1.39, as is E911 service. And per-minute rates are about a penny (half of Callcentric).

All the features I need are there - so feature parity, lower prices, and hopefully better service makes this a win.

Configuring the Linksys PAP2TNA ATA was no problem even though Flowroute doesn't document a specific configuration for this device. They support the G729a codec. Call forwarding from Google Voice seems slightly faster than with Callcentric.

Having a dual port ATA is handy when switching service, as the new service can be configured with no disruption to the old.

We'll see if in a few months, or a year, there's a round FOUR to this post. I don't really know if Flowroute can provide an effective level of redundancy - only time will tell, as anyone who's been through a disaster can tell you, disaster preparedness drills never cover everything.

You can read part one of this saga here and part two is here.

Why you shouldn't buy a Kindle or Nook eReader

I'm really surprised that Amazon and Barnes and Noble continue to push out eReader devices, and even more surprised that people are still buying them. Two or three years ago, it made a lot of sense, but it's 2012 now and if you want a new eReader, simply go buy one of these for $199:

I say this as the owner of two Nook products - an original first generation e-ink based reader, and a Nook Tablet.

The reality is that a real Android tablet, like the Google Nexus 7 can do everything that the Kindle and Nook can - you can read all existing books from either device by installing the Kindle or Nook apps. And unlike the limited eReader tablets, a real Android tablet is... well... a real Android tablet so you have access to all the apps in Google Play, and full hardware features - such as a GPS and Bluetooth. For just an incremental additional cost you get a full blown tablet-based computing platform.

The Kindle and Nook are very limited, as they only allow you to install applications from their very, very limited app stores. There are ways of hacking these devices to install regular Android apps (I did this on my Nook Tablet), but it's still a hack - and many applications are still not supported on the hardware - such as anything requiring a GPS.

There's only one reason I can think of to buy a Kindle or Nook - if you really want an e-ink display for better viewing in direct sunlight, in which case it might make sense to buy one of the e-ink based models, but note that due to technical limitations of e-ink displays, these units don't have anywhere near the capabilities of models with LCD or OLED displays.

And finally, yes - Apple is coming out with 7" tablet of their own, but it will come as no surprise that I wouldn't recommend it. It just doesn't make sense to pay twice as much for Apple's proprietary hardware and locked down ecosystem. It makes me laugh everytime someone tries to plug an Apple product into anything else, with all the ridiculous dongles required to convert from industry standard connectors to Apple's proprietary ones. Enough said about that - do yourself a favor and buy an Android based product. You'll thank me later!

Converting Raymarine FSH files to GPX

I've always been a bit annoyed by not being able to convert data from my Raymarine C-Series chartplotter into an open and accessible format, such as GPX. Although there are some tools available that support the FSH files written by these chartplotters, they are either not-free or very limited - such as not supporting all data (such as tracks), or by only running on Windows.

I want to be able to back up the data (waypoints, routes, and tracks) on my chartplotter and load it into OpenCPN, so I started to write a python script to do so, available on github. In it's current form it's very rough but exports waypoints and routes to GPX which I can then import into OpenCPN.

The script doesn't yet support tracks, nor is it very resilient or stable in decoding values, but it's a start. Since no other freely available, cross-platform solution exists for converting FSH files, this is a free, open-source project licensed under the GPL.

Long term, once the FSH format is fully decoded, the plan is to turn this into a GPS Babel module. Until then, give this Python script a try.

"It's not clear that we really need patents in most industries"

The title for this post is a quote from a well reading interview with Richard Posner, the judge who presided over the Apple vs Motorola suit, and ultimately threw out the lawsuit:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/us-apple-google-judge-idUSBRE8640IQ20120705

It won't be a surprise to anyone reading this that I agree with Mr. Posner. The current US patent system is broken, especially when it comes to software and our modern selection of computers, tablets, phones, and other software-driven devices.

It's time for companies to win because it's what people want and are buying, not because of lawsuits. Competition is good for the industry, and the differences between competitors are pretty small these days. We are past the point of "invention" - at this point it's all refinement and innovation, and let's let that battle happen in the marketplace, not the court room.

Think Costa Concordia was an isolated event?

Mad about Costa Concordia? You should be! But read this if you think it's an isolated incident that these cruise ships care one bit about people's lives: http://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/lectronicday.lasso?date=2012-04-20#Story4

I think the answer is pretty clear: everyone should boycott the entire cruise ship industry. This is really sad, but it's been proven recently that these cruise ship companies are not honorable and do not deserve to be in business as they are not honoring international law.

Neat Chart Plotter App for Android - MX Mariner

Recently I stumbled across MX Mariner, a nifty chart plotter app for Android phones and tablets. This is well worth checking out, and it's only $7 in the Android app store.

While pretty new and still under active development, MX Mariner is better than nearly every other marine charting app in the Android store - and certainly nothing can beat it at this price. Many charting apps are impractical for real use as they require a live and fast data connection, they require saving charts one-by-one in advance, or they don't support chart quilting at all. With MX Mariner, you download a region when you have a good wifi connection - these are big files, 150-250MB, but once you have the file for a region, MX Mariner will automatically quilt charts for that reason as you navigate - and no data connection is required! Note that switching to Google Earth view does require an active data connection, but since the primary point of this is for marine charts, that's reasonable.

Some features, like GPX import/export are still under development, expect to see new features soon! Like OpenCPN, MX Mariner embraces iterative development, and you can even contribute if you so desire. If you notice some similarities between OpenCPN and MX Mariner, that's no accident - as the primary developer of MX Mariner is also a contributor of OpenCPN.

Currently, MX Mariner has somewhat limited world coverage, take a look at the website for more details.

So, if you are looking for an Android based chart plotter app, give this one a try! It works great on our Samsung Galaxy-S phone, and HTC Flyer 7" tablet. Looking forward to see what features come next!

Why Apple iBooks for textbooks is a bad idea

Apple recently announced an initiative and authoring tools to get school textbooks into their new iBook platform. This is a really bad thing for a couple of reasons.

First of all, this is an enforced vendor lock in. In other words, Apple iPad will be supported, and nothing else. This is not unexpected by Apple, but it begs the question about Apple's real motives.

Second, if you are thinking about authoring a textbook for this platform, read the fine text of the agreement. You are agreeing to give Apple exclusive rights to your book. Yes, exclusive means exactly what it sounds like - You are explicitly denied from publishing your work in any other way or medium!
If Apple really cared about education, they would be embracing open standards with an equal footing for anyone, and respecting author's rights. They could do this in a way that still makes them money, but instead have chosen to make sure that they are the only player. I'm really disappointed in how the media is touting how "great" this is without considering the downside.

Yep, Apple is proving themselves to be the new Microsoft, time and time again. I will continue to support open platforms and open standards, and encourage everyone reading this to do likewise. Say no to vendor lock in and exclusive publishing agreements!