A couple of weeks back Vodafone acknowledged that they are actively scanning blogs to find complaints from customers. So here is one.

A couple weeks back I bought a Nokia E65, it’s a great phone. Again: it’s a great phone. The only thing that I can not get to work is the build-in VoIP application. I’ve tried all settings I could think of, googled around the world and still no solutions. Some people suffer from the same problem, being that it registers fine to my phone provider, but I can not make outbound calls. It simply tells me it can not make a connection.

We’ve done a scan on the ip-packets send from the phone and it seems on outbound connection it does not try to authenticate to the server. A bug in the software.

Now the big question is: who is responsible for the bug. The software is adjusted by Vodafone (firmware version: 1.0633.58.02), they have plugged in some menu’s for Vodafone Live. That’s fine. Or rather: that’s the problem. Nokia tells me to go to Vodafone, as it’s their software. Vodafone does not understand my complaint, but when I get someone on the phone who actually understands me, the answer is that they have not changed that part. At least they say so. I can not change to the Nokia firmware as that is not published anywhere and probably not installable as I have a locked phone.

I told them to send me the software as I wanted to look at the source and see if I could spot the problem. They refused that (o surprise). I asked them if I could provide them my account data so they could test it. They refused that too. You know, when you do these things, you need to take responsibility for it and provide support.

I’m out of options now. There goes the key functionality why I bought the phone. Sigh. I don’t count on a new firmware by Vodafone. I hope this is fixed for my next phone.

Today a group of people advised our government to stop using the electronic voting system we used up to now.

They advised to use a different system of voting: let the people make a choice on a computer, print that choice on a piece of paper, put it in a box and count them at the end of voting period.

Until the system is ready we will probably vote with pen and paper. I’m very happy for this decision, not only because the voting computers we used up to now did not have a paper trail, but they contained closed source software.

The kde svn module kdenonbeta is closing. It has been replaced by the different playground areas. So if you are a application maintainer of one of the applications in kdenonbeta, please send me an email so we can discuss your options.

On Oct 28th, all remaining applications will be moved to the unmaintained-area.