But I hate my cellphone provider, Rogers Canada. I hope that’s clear. Rogers CANADA.

Being a community, people-oriented person, free software activist and open source enthusiast, and on top of that a full time technical trainer and support analyst, last summer when I heard that Rogers Canada would be the first company to sell & support the mighty HTC Dream (known as G1 to T-Mobile customers), I decided I would trust them. In fact I got my HTC Dream the day it came out, on June 2nd. If Google trusted Rogers with their first Android deployment in Canada, I would be OK. Big mistake!

I’ve posted before that Rogers Canada sucks. I’ve thought about documenting my own problems, but it’s getting easier to just gather other similar experiences Android customers have at Rogers:

• Rogers Mandatory Update Debacle
• How Rogers Ruined My HTC Dream
• Rogers and the Squashing of Personal Freedom
• I want my one point six – a blog dedicated to the HTC problems
• …

That’s right, there is a whole blog dedicated to document and share all the mistakes Rogers Canada has made and all the problems they have caused.

When I saw that I started my own Identi.ca group: RogersSucks (or !rs)

As I write this I am waiting for a replacement HTC Magic which was promised once, order “lost”, promotion postponed, then secretly available again, then finally ordered on Sunday. I know, it’s Wednesday and we’re only a province away, but the phone hasn’t even shipped. Nevermind it’s only a slightly less outdated phone, I am waiting again to get the Rogers Canada Android Revolution.

Rogers Canada thinks it’s good business practice to suspend data service in order to force customers into upgrading to a firmware that basically locks down my phone. Why is it important it’s unlocked and rootable ? Because otherwise it’s very much useless, or should I say even less useful than a regular cell phone. At least regular cell phones behave well with BT headsets, don’t crash or reboot spontaneously, and don’t lag for >30 seconds when going from one application to the other. Among other things. It used to be possible to use Cyanogen Mod and other custom firmwares to make these phones somewhat usable. Not anymore.

How did Google let this happen ? I have no clue.

A lot of similar mistakes can be made by any company selling devices based on free, open-source software (and yes I know Android devices don’t come with 100% free software). I secretly hope some anonymous person inside such companies learns something from Rogers Canada mistakes. This is truly an example on how NOT to launch and service such a product.

Meanwhile I am gathering details on my own problems and getting all my services with Rogers cancelled without penalty for breach of contract. If that doesn’t happen, small claims court in Quebec should help, and I’ll document this in true free, open fashion so I can help as many people as I can do the same: vote with their money. I am angry such a great platform got such a bad start in Canada.

I guess the Revolution is not going to be available in Canada for some time.

Lunch & Ubuntu

Well, this is only a friendly reminder and invitation to come and join us at Café Suprême, (4190 Boulevard St-Laurent, Montreal – Plateau Mont-Royal) tomorrow Thursday at noon. We’ll have lunch and who knows, perhaps meet some new people. Or just have lunch.

Télévision de Radio-Canada is a Canadian French language television network. It is owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, known in French as Société Radio-Canada, or just “Radio-Canada”, for the rest of us. – from Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago they launched a new web site, tou.tv, making “available” all their TV shows (or most of them)… in Flash

Never mind it’s 2010 and HTML5, Ogg Theora and in general open standards and formats are the talk of the day on most web development sites… Flash 10 is a bad enough choice as it is, but apparently tou.tv’s team just forgot that Linux existed.

Within hours of the launch Ubuntu Québec team members started complaining on the mailing list and on tou.tv’s Facebook group. We wrote to their admins, provided details, wrote to the ombudsman, got canned replies for all communications. We then put together a Facebook group, and started inviting people to join and we shared our findings (now all on a public wiki). 451 people joined the group which is an amazing number for Quebec province, given the context. I never ever thought I’d use Facebook for open formats and Linux support advocacy in such a way!

Only one programmer from the tou.tv’s team first acknowledged the problem, then asked for testers. That’s it, total silence from the tax-payers-funded TV network and website.

Within hours of the initial launch people on the mailing list had analyzed the streaming protocol, the Javascript code, etc. and ruled out problems there. To our amazement, a single commented line was preventing any shows to be displayed. Someone put together a GreaseMonkey script, someone else tested it… we went online on IRC to coordinate testing + blogging. Bottom line is we came up with a workaround. A week later tou.tv finally applied minimal fixes to unblock the Flash display on Linux systems.

The site is not perfect and now other minor issues subsist, and yes, I wish open formats were an option. For now I just wanted to thank Ubuntu for providing not only an incredible operating system but also an amazing community that made all this possible I also wanted to thank the Free Software Foundation as we used several resources from them such as the Defective by Design web site to explain the problems associated to using DRM-like implementations of web TV sites, and the problems of not using open formats, such as Flash.

I also wanted to send a big FAIL to Radio-Canada and tou.tv’s team. To this day they don’t even mention Linux on their FAQ.

You can also find more details about this little victory of ours in my original blog post in French.

Your taxes at work!

Rogers Canada really sucks. It’s really a pitty they were the first to introduce Android devices in Canada. Fortunately now other companies also offer them. I hope Rogers never sells Android devices anymore to anyone.

I just found out 85% of online users agree with me. Now I feel like I am part of a big dysfunctional family.

I am doing my best so 100% of possible Rogers customers (and others too) all know their rates, customer service and technical service suck to no end.

I am so fed up with them I won’t bother explaining why they suck. The above links should provide ample accurate, complete historical data.

Of course there’s a dedicated Rogers Sucks Facebook group.

[If you live] in Québec, we get 35% of the first 200$ of donation to registered charity back in taxes credit, and 53% of amounts above 200$.
Yes, 53%. That basically means that the government already matches your donation by crediting you half of it. So I am going to make my donation to the Canadian Red Cross, double the amount I can afford to give, and get half of it back in taxes credit next year.

Merci pour l’explication Étienne!

Yesterday my pre-UDS day kicked off at the Festival del Tamal that was happening right across our hotel. From Wikipedia,

“The terms Chicano and Chicana (also spelled Xicana) were originally used by, and in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement mainly amongst Mexican Americans, especially in the movement’s peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The self-identify term Chicano is still of popular usage today. [1]“

I initially thought “mhh Latinos… there must be food”. I knew tamales where a key component of Latin American food but I’ve never ever seen so many people lined up to get their piece of it! There must have been a few thousand people and I truly felt I was in Mejico, not in the U.S. as I typically imagine them and see them in the news. But as we cruised the venue I also noticed a lot of stands and kiosks offering help & services for landing immigrants, and NGOs of all types and origins. We felt the strange contrast of a huge happy family reunion and people struggling to just make it- while keeping a huge smile.

Going into my third year at Canonical in a few days, I still feel the same excitement and anticipation about spending a whole week (and then a bit more) having 100% one-to-one bandwidth with many of the essential individuals that are the driving force behind our favorite operating system – and freedom culture evangelization tool. After a few tamales and being immersed in this huge latino crowd I couldn’t help but see some parallels between the Chicano social liberation struggle and the Free Software movement.

I even got a TShirt from this nice gentleman who kindly explained to me why there was a Chicano Activist Convention a few months ago right here in Tejaztlán. They have these student groups called Mechas who meet regularly and discuss and further issues they face daily (and have for a few decades now). “Wow,” I thought to myself..”this is kinda like our LoCo teams and Bug#1!”. Except on a very different social (and technical) scale, of course. Here, meet the Mecha of Tejaztlán group.

Aztlán, by the way, “is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica. “Aztec” is the Nahuatl word for “people from Aztlan.”[2].  So you can see a bit of where the Tejaztlán word came from.

He looked at me with a “where the hell have you been” face, but was nice anyways, as my Latino looks couldn’t get him through the notion I was completely ignorant of the Chicano movement to the extent I still thought yesterday it meant “any Mexican in the US” when in fact it means a lot more. I remembered how patient and welcoming we must be to every person that is new to Ubuntu and I felt welcome to further my knowledge and fix their Bug #1.

Going back to the hotel I thought I’d wear the Tshirt on my first day at UDS, if only to honor this land that welcomes us, and in a way, knows what we are up to this week. I am hoping to meet members of the Ubuntu Texas Team and perhaps they’ll help me better understand their very own ecosystem, and if I was wrong in any of my first impressions at my pre-UDS kickoff day, it wouldn’t be my first time. I love being in that position, and having the ensuing discussions, specially when they revolve about Freedom.

Oh, and if you have any Apple hardware, please know I will be nice to you anyways, I don’t hate Apple or you – buy me a beer and we can have that discussion too

Open this post on my blog to see image captions.

Imagine a few hundred people gathered in a big conference were presentations go from Android on Ubuntu to Making Ubuntu family-friendly to Ubuntu One development to Mastering Unicode to project updates … well you get the point. Oh, and everyone of them is a colleague. The challenge here was to go beyond shaking as many hands as possible and trying to find out what we all had in common to best push Ubuntu forward, while looking at our best shots without losing sight on things to improve and innovate on.

Pfew! If that sounded like an intense few days, it was. I am glad I planned on sleeping very little.

I hope this gives a small insight into how great this big Canonical-family meeting was.

Now UDS follows, although I won’t be attending I trust my many mates will drive this one home too.

Cheers to all and see you soon, somewhere

See the announcement here – great to see the Ubuntu Colombian LoCo team rocking! Thanks to the Mathematics department at Universidad Nacional in Colombia and for all involved in making this possible.

If you want to setup an official Ubuntu mirror, check:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/mirror

Si j’écris à ce sujet aujourd’hui, c’est que j’ai survécu En vrac:

• Un pantalon de pluie par dessus des pantalons ordinaires, accompagné de combines et des bottes d’hiver, c’est bon jusqu’à -20C (ou -35 avec facteur vent)
• Sans les combines d’hiver (donc pantalon de pluie, bottes, pantalon ordinaire), je suis confortable jusqu’à -10C
• Les voitures roulent effectivement les vitres montées et seul un klaxon très puissant peut attirer leur attention
• Les piétons avec un Ipod ou autre MP3 player sont aussi dangeureux que les voitures. Par contre ceux que j’ai failli frapper sur la piste cyclable sur Maisonneuve vont se rappeler de mon klaxon toute leur vie, j’en suis certain.
• Je n’ai pas nettoyé ni graissé mon vélo depuis 3 semaines – mea culpa. Par contre j’enlève l’excès de neige avec une petite brosse douce chez moi.
• J’ai du acheter un tapis qui me permet de me rendre la porte jusqu’à une chambre de jeux qui est devenue mon garage de bicyclette
• Je ne laisse jamais le vélo dehors
• La neige n’a jamais touché (ou presque) le système BionX, même chose pour la pluie. Quand on roule, la force centrifuge évacue tout vers l’extérieur. Ou presque.
• Sans BionX, je ne me rendrais pas loin sur la côte de l’Avenu du Parc. No way
• Sans BionX, j’aurais pas été loin sur la route la fois qu’il venait de tomber 20cm de neige
• Je roule souvent en plein milieu de la rue, les bosses de glace rendant certains pistes cyclables et la neige envahissant toutes les petites rues de mon trajet habituel
• J’ai baissé mon siège pour que mes deux pieds touchent rapidment à terre en cas de dérapage. Ça m’a servi une seule fois – et ça valait la peine! Oui, j’ai seulement glissé sur une plaque de glace une fois en 3 semaines
• Je ne roule jamais à plus de 20km/h malgré la tentation en BionX. Cependant plusieurs cyclistes visiblement plus expérimentés, ou moins peureux (ou les deux) vont plus vite que moi!
• Été comme hiver, je fais mon trajet de ~6km sans boire une goutte d’eau. Même chose avant quand c’était 15km, j’ai découvert que je ne transpirais pratiquement pas et je me suis habitué avec le temps.
• Je ne bois plus 2L d’eau ou Gatorade en arrivant comme il m’arrivait de le faire
• Comme je ne transpire pratiquement pas, je ne me change pas souvent en arrivant… mmhh sauf pour la tête! Je dois me sécher. Heureusement le code vestimentaire au bureau est relax
• En dessous de zéro, ça prends 2 paires de gants: gants d’hiver ordinaires, et petits gants en polypropylène ou en laine. J’ai aussi des gants en néoprène pour les journées de pluie (oui, il pleut en hiver des fois)
• En dessous de -10, ça prends 2 paires de gants: gants d’hiver ordinaires, et gants extra-large “coupe-vent”, ce sont des gants assez minces mais qui empêchent le vent de passer et donc gardent au chaud.
• Les deux derniers points sont invalides après 20 minutes Pas encore cherché de solution à ça mais j’ai gelé mes doigts deux fois, dont une qui a fait très mal. En dégelant ça pique en t**!
• Pour le haut, les pelures d’oignon font l’affaire: un t-shirt, un chandail manche longue et un impermeable (!) suffisent jusqu’à 0. J’ajoute un petit manteau de printemps ou un chandail en laine et je peux aller jusqu’à -20 confortablement. La seule raison: je pédale constamment dont l’effort compense pour l’habillement. J’ai marché 5 minutes une fois étant habillé comme ça et j’ai gelé
• Les passe-montagne et des lunettes de ski à 35$ dont l’affaire. Ça mérite un billet entier ces deux accessoires-là! En bas de -10C je mets 2 passe-montagne! Très confortable, jamais eu froid ou même de la buée.
• À chaque fois que j’arrête dans la rue ou à l’intérieur (ascenseur, corridors..) on m’encourage! On me félicite, on me pose des questions, on me regarde bizarrement…c’est une sorte d’activisme silencieux. Mes collègues font presque des paris à savoir si la journée où il pleut copeiusement ou bien la journée où fait -35C avec le vent je vais venir

Voilà, je manque un peu de style aujourd’hui … mais je crois que l’essentiel y est.

L’autobus, le métro, l’auto, rien de tout ça me manque et j’ai toujours hâte de prendre le vélo, matin (à 6h30) et soir (vers 16h30). Le plus gros problème que j’ai rencontré à date sont les vibrations vraiment importantes qui pourraient endommager le vélo ou le disque dur de mon laptop. J’ai un bon éclairage, je roule lentement et j’essaie de rester civilisé avec les piétons et les voitures – ça semble fonctionner car je n’ai pas eu d’incidents à ce jour! On touche du bois.

Je ne crois pas avoir beaucoup de mérite car mon trajet est vraiment minuscule comparé à d’autres, et Montréal est une ville idéale pour le vélo d’hiver. J’ai vu les équipes de déneigement passer 2 fois par jour et les pistes sont pratiquables la plupart du temps – encore faut-il que des vélos y circulent sinon la neige finit quand même par s’y accumuler. Donc j’ai des conditions idéales pour continuer! Le plus important comme j’ai lu qq part est de ne jamais lâcher, personellement je crois que c’est vrai et après seulement 3 semaines je crois que ma routine est établie.

162.5KM c’est bien peu, si on calcule pour le reste de l’hiver qui devrait durer jusqu’en Mars/Avril, à 200km/mois je devrais parcourir 1000KM cet hiver. J’ai hâte!

]]> http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2008/12/17/mes-premiers-1625-km-en-velo-lhiver-klaxon-tempetes-pas-de-bobo/feed/ 2 http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2008/12/04/whats-on-your-ubuntu-laptop/ http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2008/12/04/whats-on-your-ubuntu-laptop/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:54:03 +0000 MagicFab http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/?p=630 I’ve been meaning to post a picture of my laptop’s “decoration” for a while, perhaps start another chain reaction…

I think what you put in your laptop tells a bit about who you are or what you do

So here’s my current laptop:


One more thing, I got a zebra-themed vinyl skin applied on the laptop, which protects the machine – the stickers are on that vinyl layer.

Clicking on the image will bring you to Flickr where I added some notes.

What’s on your Ubuntu laptop ?

]]> http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2008/12/04/whats-on-your-ubuntu-laptop/feed/ 8