For the past few weeks I've been trying to work out which "mobile broadband" provider to go with for my daily commute. It's a train journey from the north coast of Northern Ireland to Belfast and goes through some sparsely populated areas, so I wasn't expecting to get anything that would provide 3G all the way. However I do want a provider that can do their best to keep a session up for the journey, handing over between 2G + 3G as necessary. Coverage maps/checkers aren't too bad if you just want to check a static point, but really even then it's better to actually try the provider in the location yourself. So, armed with a bluetooth GPS (BlueNEXT BN-909GR), an Option GT 3G Quad PCMCIA card and my laptop I set about measuring signal strength along my train journey for each of the 5 providers available. I also made sure to actually try a session with them for at least one journey, because signal strength is not everything.

I wrote some Perl using Net::GPSD and Device::Gsm to query my current location, signal strength, 2G/3G status and network every 10 seconds. I did this for 3 train journeys (except for O2) and then also produced an "optimistic" file of all the data points combined for that provider.

A second piece of Perl took this data and drew the maps you see below. The graph on the right for each provider is all data points. Red means 2G, blue means 3G, green means "Limited Service" (i.e. it could see a signal, but not one it was allowed to connect to). White means that we had a GPS location and no signal at all. Click on the maps for bigger versions. You can see the route on OpenStreetMap - my graphs are a little squished horizontally, but the journey is from Castlerock (top left on the coast near Coleraine) to Belfast (bottom right).

At first glance 3 look to be the best bet. Lots of blue, a reasonably priced data plan. Except they can't hold up a session to save themselves. Not only does a 2G/3G handover almost always seem to result in a drop, but I had periods of failing to get a 2G session up at all and had some random drops while in 3G coverage as well. So strike them off.

O2 and T-Mobile don't manage any 3G outside Belfast (that's the bottom right corner btw). I found that a few periods of 3G along the journey helped a lot; it meant I could do a quick mail sync rather than the long drawn out affair it was on a 2G connection. They can both handle handover between 2G/3G and keep a session up for most of the journey, but the lack of speed counts them out.

Vodafone managed the worst reception, which is disappointing. I found them quite good when I lived in England (my datacard is from a Vodafone Pay as You Use data contract). I did find sessions being dropped during the no signal regions, so they just don't seem to be a good bet.

Which leaves Orange. I've had issues with Orange and data in the past (pre 2004 IIRC) but in testing they were able to keep a session up between Belfast and Castlerock, handling 2G/3G handover fine. Coverage was reasonably good and they manage 3G at several points along the journey (the blue points roughly correspond to Coleraine, Ballymena, Antrim and Belfast). I understand Orange have some EDGE capability, but my card doesn't do EDGE so I've no idea if that'll be an extra gain or not. I had a few issues with getting dud DNS servers but this happened with the other providers too so I was beginning to suspect the datacard of playing up. Manually setting known good servers in resolv.conf worked fine.

So, before I go and sign up to an 18 month Orange contract, what have I forgotten?

I think I want a netbook. Although I'm still happy with my R200 (especially since I replaced the battery) something smaller would be handy for the train and general carting about. With the R200 being 12" I'm more drawn to the 8.9" variants; 10" isn't a lot smaller and at the cheaper end doesn't appear to result in any higher a resolution than 8.9"

Really I'd like something with built in 3G/HSDPA, but only the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 seems to have this, and the Linux model isn't even on sale yet in the UK, let alone the 3G version.

If I can't get 3G then I'm drawn to the EEE 901. It seems to have the best battery life, has bluetooth and isn't too expensive (though at the higher end of what I'd want to pay for a 2nd machine). Plus it has the appeal that I should be able to walk into a shop and pick one up. Main drawback is that I've read the Ralink RT2860 wifi ain't great (and the driver isn't in mainline yet, though there is one kicking around). Any truth in this? Any other gotchas?

Thoughts, people? I've seen an MSI Wind in the flesh and it was a bit big. The Acer Aspire One looks nice enough, but not great battery life and no bluetooth. Any others I should be looking at instead of the 901? Must be easily available in the UK. I will, of course, be running Debian on it.

I've been quite pleased with my evil Perl script that logs into my OpenID account and then uses the credentials to pull authorised LiveJournal feeds to local files, ready for Liferea to read. Except I keep breaking my OpenID stuff (because I haven't got round to putting the openid.server/delegate headers in the Movable Type index template) and not noticing. And the OpenID login works fine, but then LJ just doesn't auth me rather than erroring, so I see some posts but not friends locked stuff. Tonight I noticed. And discovered posts all the way back to before June.

So if I've missed some major event in your life in the past 3 months, sorry. And if you get comments from me on old posts in the next few days, this is why.

Our Belfast office has finally got large enough to have to partake in the NI Equality Commission monitoring. This covers religion and gender. The options for religion are:

• I consider myself a member of the Catholic community
• I consider myself a member of the Protestant community
• I consider myself a member of neither community

Which all seems fine, except for the bit below that says "If you do not complete this questionaire, we are encouraged to use the "residuary" method, which means that we can make a determination on the basis of personal infomation on file/application form". It turns out that also applies to the neither option. So I clarified with the poor guy who's having to deal with this what he'd do if I ticked neither. And he rang the Equality Commission for some advice. And it turns out that although the wording in the step-by-step guide for employers is "we strongly advise" essentially if you end up with more than a certain number of neithers then you put yourself at risk of an investigation.

FFS. How the hell is this country supposed to get any better if even the Equality Commission is forcing us all to be one side or the other?

(I ticked the neither box and told the guy handling it that if he had to apply the residual method then I'd provide him some suitable information to support whichever side was most convenient. It's not his fault some silly buggers want to make me a Protestant or Catholic atheist, or imply I only hang round with one side or the other.)

pleia2 wants a new smartphone. Me too.The current options seem to be a Nokia E90 or an HTC Touch Pro. Both have disadvantages, but nothing else appears to offer a keyboard and decent screen. I'd quite like to have a play with a Touch Pro to see what it's like and if the interface is fast enough to not be annoying for normal phone use. I've also seen various snippets about the forthcoming HTC Dream Google Android based device suggesting it might be out in October. I'd been expecting it not to happen until next year, but October is tantalisingly close...