Singtel's 512K mobile broadband is faster than Starhub's 2MB cable!

This really puts Starhub's Maxonline to shame. I have been hitting 40k-55k consistently when downloading, as compared to the 20k-30k that Starhub is giving me. That's 2 or 3 times faster than Maxonline, even though Maxonline is supposed to have 4 times the bandwidth... I'm so not getting my money's worth out of Starhub!

Ok I signed up for Singnet's mobile broadband on Monday and it was activated on Wednesday morning before 9AM. The connection is stable and fast enough that I can surf on the bus, watch videos on veoh, play ikarium, even download BitTorrent.

Let's compare the prices:
Singnet's 512K mobile broadband is $11.21 a month (12 month free for a 24 month contract) and gives reliable speed of 50k. There is a 50GB quota per month, but I'm not sure if it is for download only or download + upload.
Starhub's 2MB cable broadband is $26.96 (10% off for 24 month contract) and sucks at only 25k. It will be difficult to hit 50GB a month even if I leave my comp running 24/7, so what if there is no 50GB cap.

Yup, Starhub's 2MB plan is disgustingly slow. So slow that their staff expressed surprise when I asked them some question about adding a router. The response is why-on-earth-will-anyone-want-to-share-a-connection-when- it-is-already-so-slow which really surprised me given that I have used a 1MB link from Singnet and found it to be good enough for me. Now I know. It is way below what is advertised.

When my Starhub contract expires, I'm just going to take 2 mobile broadband plans for Sunshine and me, and give up our fixed line broadband. Singtel is not the friendliest ISP around, but they do give the speed that you are contracted to get.

The day I paid $55 for a spare charger

It is said that generic adapters and adapters meant for portable dvd players can work for the EEE PC. But when you dare not use a 3rd party accessory, you have to pay a premium for ORIGINAL parts, right? As much as double the price that you would have to pay for alternatives.

So I bought a spare adapter from the Asus service centre at 4th floor of The Adelphi, opposite Funan. At least I know that this is guaranteed to work without frying my laptop, considering how careful they were not to sell me the wrong charger. I had to produce my SERIAL number, not just my MODEL number, so that they can be sure the charger is suitable for use with my battery. Mine is one of the earlier pieces with battery capacity of 5200mA. It has since shrunk to 4800 and 4400, which probably means they have to cater for 3 different adapters even though this is still the 701 model.

At least I have the reassurance that the adapter will not die within 3 months (the laptop is a year!) and that it will not fry my motherboard. But it is worrying in that if I were to buy a newer model next year, it probably is not supposed to use this spare charger that I'm buying today. This reminds me of how Palm intentionally changed their sync cables such that you will not be able to use the cable from your older model. So no thanks for faithfully supporting them and sticking to them.

Now that I have a spare charger in the office, I can travel a bit lighter when I go to work and not ever have to worry about the battery running flat. I also found a spare mouse. I'm still considering whether to buy a 4GB SD card (or 8GB? *drools*) and I can leave my portable hard disk at home. Pay a bit more to be a bit more mobile. Pay a lot and I can be very mobile indeed.

Million Blog List

Are you listed? I'm #497.

Nokia wifizone

I finally got the chance to take one of the buses that Nokia has equipped with a free wifi network. I failed to join the network on the first day, but could surf the net on the second day.

First try
Using my eee pc, I was able to detect more than 10 wifi networks coming from the HDB blocks around me, but just could not find the Nokia WifiZone despite refreshing several times. I carried on with my ebook reading.

Second try (10 min later)
I finally saw the Nokia WifiZone but failed to get a DHCP lease. Hence, not connected.

Third try (10 min later)
Reconnected and joined, but could not go anywhere, not even google. If you can't even reach google or delicious, or connect to msn or google talk, you are pretty much screwed right? The address given to me starts with 192.168. and the DNS server is 202.65.247.152. I couldn't reach it. Was it too far away?

Fourth try (4 days later on the same bus)
I could log on to google talk, msn messenger, replace my twitter badge on my blog with the latest version that works, twittered via instant message, played Ikarium for a while and didn't have enough time to post this while on the go.

Fifth try (anoter 4 days later)
Good enough that I can post this on the bus. How useful is this free service really? Is it like oh since I'm in luck and on a wifi bus, I might as well try to surf the net and waste some time on this long bus journey? So yeah it works but don't depend on this if you're a net junkie since free wifi services are notoriously unreliable. In the worst
case, it could just be a waste of time and battery charge trying to connect! I'm better off writing or reading something on my eee. It's as bad as wireless@sg in that you can't do anything about it if it is not working, short of changing another bus or going to another fast food outlet. Changing to another bus hardly seem feasible. Download speeds are comparable with wireless@sg, and it's as free.

One difference from wireless@sg: I don't need to sign up for a free account with my IC and don't have to log in with my password everytime I'm using the free wifi (having to log in again is an inconvenience when moving around and changing base stations). I just need to click 2 buttons to indicate that I accept the terms and conditions (which nobody reads).

Evolution of T-shirt design

I like to people watch when I'm out of the house. Sometimes it can be fun reading what is printed on their T-shirts.

I started noticing T-shirts with the message "Explain to me again why I need a boyfriend" a few months back and was thinking that this must be a girl who couldn't get a boyfriend, or who has "alternatives" and didn't need a boyfriend for whatever purpose a boyfriend was supposed to provide for. I will not speculate on those alternatives here...

Then there are T-shirts with the message "I <3>copycat viral T-shirt designs.

Huat Ah!

This is probably the first time that I had won something useful in a lucky draw.

I signed up for a 24 month broadband contract with Starhub at the IT Show 2008 (ended on 9 Mar 08) and was entitled to a lucky dip. I was commenting to Sunshine just minutes before that we will probably win some crap that has no value, such as the fridge magnet or lanyard, those that did not even have their value printed in yellow and bold fonts on the promotional brochure. Imagine my surprise when I opened the folded piece of paper and saw "HP" and "printer" staring back at me!

I had to record down my initials on a sheet of paper (with less than 20 names on it) and one of the starhub guys was supposed to give us an instant photo of us holding up the prize and smiling. But he could not get the instant camera to work. So I told him to forget it and just let us go back since we had queued for over an hour to sign up, collect my modem and do my lucky dip. And I'm expecting a long queue at the taxi stand since the walk to either the bus stop or MRT station will be very very long with this heavy box to lug along.

The prize was a HP C5180 Photosmart printer with scan and print capabilities. And I suppose it can print photos nicely on 4R paper. The brochure says that it is worth $476. I had never been so happy paying for a taxi ride home, even with the $3 surcharge for boarding the cab in the city area.

I had never been a gambler and never been lucky in lucky draws either. The only time I ever bought Toto, I donated the money to Singapore Pools and hope the money made its way to paying for the staff at Singapore Community Chest. To win something at the IT Show when the lucky draw is not even the thing that draws me, is totally unexpected. Not that I'm complaining.

Upgrading my portable storage

Was at the IT Show 2008 at Suntec City. 8GB thumbdrive from SanDisk Cruzer cost $55 from 1 stall. A 160GB portable harddisk (2.5" from Western Digital) cost $109.99. Which should I get?

I already have a 4GB thumbdrive, I can pay $55 to double it.
I already have a 40GB harddisk, I can pay $110 to quadruple it.

The Cruzer comes with U3, which I will probably format away since I don't like the extra drive it emulates and I don't need its pre-installed programs. After all, portable apps is free...

Decisions, decisions... Cheap storage is a good problem. :-)

Leap year baby

If you are born on the 29th Feb, you get to celebrate your birthday only once every 4 years. Not a very common event! Waiting for the next celebration can be like waiting for the next Olympics or World Cup! Perhaps it can be an excuse for you to demand that your friends throw a party for you and make it special for you? Can you claim to be only 18 years old when you are already 76?

There are Chinese parents who consult feng shui experts to determine which is an auspicious date and time to deliver their baby. Medical advances now allow these parents to induce delivery or take out the baby via a surgical procedure. I had a colleague who made an appointment with her gynae to do a c-section at a certain date and time after consulting the experts. The ancient Chinese had believed that your fate is tied to your hour of birth and thus pay a lot of attention to the date and hour of a person's birth. Certain people are not favoured or even considered as jinxes due to their hour of birth. It is also believed that burial grounds influence the lives of a person's descendents but with real estate costs so high, this probably only applies to descendents who can afford to choose the burial grounds of his ancestors to benefit him. I suppose that it is much less expensive to choose the date and hour of birth. However, some people told me that selecting the delivery date artificially in this manner is "not accurate". Whatever.

I wonder if anybody chooses to be born on 29th Feb?

Where to find wireless@sg hotspots?

http://wireless.infocomm123.sg/ has a list of wireless@sg hotspots where you can get free wfi. Click on the "where to find wireless@sg" button.

Lovely, but how do you go online while you're out to find out where the nearest hotspot is? To avoid this stupidity, Thus there is also a program that you can download and bring with you on your PDA or smart phone. Click on the "Download offline wifi finder" and pick from the version that match your PDA or phone. For my Asus N311 PDA, I installed the version for Windows Mobile 5.0 PPC. No graphics, just text, but that should be enough for me.

It is said that some service providers may not work as well for you, maybe due to conflicts between your laptop/pda and their router. You will be able to see the operator from the list and maybe see which area to avoid. The site works with IE but not Firefox. No firefox?! It suddenly looks incredibly outdated. Fortunately the downloaded version saves me from ever having to open IE to come back to the site again.

Note, the data bundled with the software looks like it was last updated more than 6 months ago. So you should update the data after installation. You can do so from the menu, but you obviously need wifi or a phone with GPRS/3G. Library@Orchard(closed since Dec 07) is still in the downloaded list, but it vanished after the update.

migrated to wordpress.com

It is interesting how free hosting companies are now fighting for bloggers' attention the way website hosts fought during the dot com. I hope many of them survive and incorporate best features from each other. Healthy competition should cause most of them to improve.

There are now many credible hosts to choose from, depending on your needs. Do you need categories? Do you need adSense? How about protection from spam comment? Or an idiot-proof UI? Privacy settings?

I have migratedI'm back with blogger for now. They now have labels/categories, customising the sidebar is easy and their post-by-email feature is useful when I'm posting from the office ^-^

Shit-management

The nature of a System Analyst's job is that it is closely tied to operations. We not only analyse the system, we take care of the system and provide bug fixes and data patches as and when necessary. In fact, we spend more time patching the systems than analysing them at my side.

Raising forms to get permission to update database records when users make a mistake. Procedures to be followed only so that management has visibility of what we are doing. Routine tasks can be streamlined and automated as much as possible to reduce human intervention and hence the amount of mind-numbing repetitive work I have to do. For the rest of it, the nature is so ad-hoc that there is no way to cater for all and automate all such work. You still need an experienced human being to make decisions and judgments. Many such small investigations that take up a lot of time and sap much energy. Much as I dislike the drudgery of such work, this is the nature of the job that I am being paid for.

To think that I had doing mostly maintenance for more than 3 years when I hate the nature of such jobs. No wonder I feel numb, no wonder the future looks bleak. Too highly paid to make a switch to the kind of job I want to do without a significant paycut. I should do my sums and see how much of a paycut I can live with, once all this mad rush is settled down. Life sucks when you are chained down by finances.

I console myself with the fact that work is frequently "shit-management". You are hired only because there is work that the person who hires you do not wish to do it himself. And unless you are highly skilled (in which case it will be value-creation that your bosses are not able to do themselves), you are destined to do shit-management. Shoveling the shit that people in power do not wish to do themselves. Such is the fate of those who want to stay out of the power struggle. This description excludes those in power who relish the power they wield, who can control the kind of work they do. They are not shoveling shit. This also excludes those who create value.

When you create value, you will not be just another count in the statistics, but will be someone they depend on. You will then have some leverage and be able to negotiate your terms. Management likes to tell the story of 3 brick-layers, one who sees himself as laying bricks, one who sees himself as building a wall, and one who sees himself as building a cathedral. This is a good story to tell those you have hired to lay bricks. But more often than not, the brick-layer finds himself building a small divider wall on a crumbling building, or shoring up the poorly-built foundation that he did not design.

People shovel shit willingly because they get paid, because there is something they look forward to after work, because the consolation that they get from that something is worth the shit that they have to shovel. For some people, that something is their family that they love and provide for. For some people, it is their hobby or lifestyle that their "day job" is paying for. For some people, it is simply something that they do, because going to work is part and parcel of life.

What motivates you at work?

It is a blessing to be able to find such a job that can provide for your needs, and which you can work at willingly. In any case, shit-management is a useful skill that will come in handy all through life, because life is full of shit. Shit should be managed and controlled, rather than just endured, if the gems in life are to be unearthed.

Dengue-free zone

Dengue fever is on the rise, our standard measures to control the population of the Aedes mosquitoes are not working very effectively. Hence let me introduce a way to avoid being infected with the Dengue virus.

Stay near the ends of bridges of popular shopping centres in Singapore, such as Suntec City and HarbourFront Centre. There will be smokers puffing away just outside the exits during the opening hours, putting up a smoke screen that mosquities dare not penetrate. Where the mosquitoes cannot venture, they cannot bite you there and you cannot be infected. Let's not waste the efforts of the voluntary foggers who pump out smoke by sheer lung power.

My Science teacher taught us that insects get drowsy in smoke, as the oxygen content is lower. Unlike humans, they do not cough when they inhale smoke. They just slow down and lose interest. Yes, I may cough when surrounded by second-hand smoke from smokers whenever I am forced to walk through their smoke screen, but it may just save my life. Dying from tobacco fumes will probably be later than dying from dengue fever.

I may get desperate enough that I may want to join in. That is, if I find people around me dropping dead like flies. It may justify such desperate measures.

The Myth

Watched the Jackie Chan movie last night after work. Must be getting old, or overworked. Found the 9pm show to be pretty late.

It was different from his usual city-based action flicks in that all the action took place in ancient tombs, temples or out on the battlefield. He's still wowing fans with his monkey-like climbing abilities, but there is a lot less of the super-fast fighting scenes now. And Jackie Chan had 2 female co-stars instead of 1. So greedy. Or just practical? One's from Korea, the other from India. Everybody is going towards India now, even Jackie Chan's movies. Citybank Visa's latest advertisement shows Richard Gere in India, probably to win over the growing Indian market. But Jackie Chan raiding an Indian temple, dueling with Indian pugilists and helped by a Bollywood starlet? He returns to China eventually and fights a Taichi master who did not give him the chance to use his usual props in street battles. So the India trip was just an arc from the main story.

Not everyone can create a legend successfully. Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke were highly acclaimed but just did not strike a cord with me. Not the way LOTR and the Matrix did. Or maybe those films just raised the barrier so high that all films will always pale against them.

This reminds me of something my secondary school Chinese teacher said, "Shen Hua (Myth) is Shen jing ping ren jiang de Hua. (The nonsense spouted by mad people.)"

Oh, nice barge though. I also want to live in a house with a rooftop that can scroll back at the flick of a button.

Smokers' toilet

There is a toilet with a window view which is frequented by smokers. I get pissed off when I see the window open with the warm wind blowing in. I think the smokers like to open the window and let the smoke escape so that they don't choke in their own fumes.

Now I have nothing against smokers, as long as they don't force me to breathe in their waste product. Some are very fine people in all other aspects, but like to adopt open air corners as their own smoking point. This is fine as long as they choose some ulu spot where non-smokers keep away from. I mean, if you are in the toilet, you have to put up with the stench of my bodily waste, but if you're out of the toilet, you shouldn't have to smell it. So why should I smell cigarette fumes when I did not choose to go near a designated smoker's corner? Why should I have to endure smokers who gather along bridges, at bus stops, who walk in front of me, who smoke in toilets?

Those who do not want to breathe in their own waste will open the window and start smoking, and neglect to close it back. Sure, the higher air-con bills are not your problem because your company pays the rental, so it is something cannot care less about. That's very nice of you. I don't like to pee in a warm toilet and come out sticky with perspiration, but I guess you cannot care less also.

Have the decency to go congregate on roof tops or multi-storey carparks to smoke please.

Quidam

This is the 3rd time that the circus is touring Singapore, the show that they are putting up this time is called Quidam. Deciding not to be a country bumpkin anymore, I tried taking my family to watch the circus. Not everyone was willing to go, but no matter, I bring whoever is willing.

The acrobatics were breathtaking, the feats of strength and balance stunning, and the clowns were hilarious. They even pressed a brave local girl into joining in the mime on stage (sound effects provided by their live band) and she gamely played along. Another girl and three guys were later pressed into another mime. I think the participation made the evening very much unforgetable for them. Especially the first girl whose hair was totally messed up at the end of the show. What a sweet temper. I think those clowns were experts at judging from a look whether the person could play along well with them.

World Of Warcraft

I had an hour or so to spare, so I wandered around Sim Lim Square. There, I came across a shop selling WoW at WCG price! Just what I had been looking for! The fellow selling me the game wanted to give me a poster of the Orc, but since he also had the Night Elf poster, guess which I chose?

Installing the 4CD game took 45min, so pathetically slow. Blizzard tends to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator so that those with lower-end game machines can still enjoy their games. And what good games they make too! Even when designed for lower-end machines, they still rock. It takes a lot more than flashy graphics to make a good game, and Blizzard has got most of it right. Their games can be very very addictive. But installing the patch (1.7.1) was an obstacle to overcome. 230+ MB to be downloaded took me 3 hours over my maxonline connection. Blizzard says that a 56K modem is all you need to play this online-only game, but how are you going to download 230MB over a 56K link? I'm glad I'm a little above the minimum requirement.

And now let the much anticipated gaming begin once again.

webhosting - again

Frustrated at my company's Internet applications failing yet again, I sent an email to my boss on how professional webhosting companies can provide more reliable service for a fraction of what our own guys will cost. The response from him? Interesting, any guarantees?

Oh yes, their SLA is high enough to satisfy ours. Their data centre is just as secure as ours, with disaster recovery, which we are still struggling with. For the price of half a man-day a month, we can get a dedicated server to host our lighter weight applications, whereas our own guys will charge in multiple man-days. With a dedicated server, we can install the necessary software packages to run our applications. I can already think of ways to test out the feasibility of this idea, migrating the less critical systems over first. There are ways to overcome our backend linkages with our internal systems. Data centres are a commodity these days, it is frustrating to be bound by our own inefficiencies and incompetencies.

While compiling a summary for the boss, I kept an eye out for a cheapo plan to host my own site. After all I do not expect to be making money from this, and so I should keep the cost low. The minimum requirement to fulfill my needs.

http://www.vdomainhost.com.sg/valuehost/vlite.php
$70 a year for my own domain name, 50MB of disk space and 5GB monthly traffic limit, multiple email accounts and subdomains should be more than enough for personal use. Only with gmail's 2.6GB (and growing) email space downloadable via POP3, the tiny email space available on this kind of hosting seems pathetic. Well you do get your own email address at your own domain name for people to send to. You can set it up to forward to gmail for storage, and send out from your domain name.

Mambo looked good as a portal tool, until I found drupal, with all the necessary features already bundled in without needing to go for extensions. But I suppose it is a question of whether to take the bare minimum and add extensions as you need, or take a tool with more built-in features so you need not spend time looking for extensions.

Overkill?

Night cycling

It was such a relief to be cycling again after a few months of busyness.

I never feel more alive than when I'm on my bike, feeling the strain in my body and pedaling towards my destination on my own power. I found myself laughing while coasting down a gentle slope, my cares left far behind. I passed an old army camp that I thought was disused, but the roads remain free of fallen leaves and the lights of the top level bunks were on. I finally cycled on the new road that connects Queensway to North Buona Vista Road. I made it to my new flat and found a bunch of young men training with a punching bag at the communal area. My new apartment remains mostly empty and very peaceful.

I'm easy to please, just give me a few hours to ride by myself on quiet roads where traffic is light. It releases stress and loosens my muscles. No need for therapy or massage to recover from the demands of work. No need for cars, gym or club memberships, or condos. My material needs are simple, but my need for personal space is huge considering I live in a city. Perhaps I will be easier to please if I migrate to a more laid-back country with more roads and shorter working hours.

I must make it a point to go ride around more often in future. I will probably live longer and life will feel like it is more worth living.

Mustafa

We went hunting for home appliances at Jalan Besar and ended up at Mustafa, where we heard the prices are cheap. Call us suah-koo, but we have never been here before and did not realise how much merchandise they can pack into so little space and still get them sold.

Several interlinked buildings where you can walk from the basement of one building and find yourself across the street, then take the escalator to the top floor and walk over another road to a third building before realising that we were on a bridge. Ok, the space is not so little. They must have started from one building and bought over others near it when they expanded. It was like a colony of mushrooms expanding from a core and occupying the spaces beside them. They sell all things from toiletries to gold to cars to airplane tickets. I have never seen toiletries and jewellery being sold so close to each other, and I have never seen a supermarket above a store selling clothes.

They have more variety of kachiam-puteh than I have ever seen in other supermarkets. Hardly surprising considering they are run by Indians. There is a Sony digicam booth just outside one of the buildings, curiously staffed entirely by Chinese guys. No Indians as far as I can see, no girls either. There is no food court or eatery inside the buildings, but no lack of prata shops along the streets outside. Not a place to hang out, but a place to get bargains. And they are open 24 hours a day. Maybe I will make another trip if I have a sudden craving for kachiam-puteh in the middle of the night.

Testing frameworks

There is a new Java testing framework, TestNG, that is slowly replacing JUnit. I'm appalled at how out of touch I am with development work these days. I barely have the time to pick up JUnit as it is, and now developers are talking about how this new framework does not have the weaknesses of JUnit that I did not even think about? I have not used it often enough to notice the weaknesses much. I don't even know what JDK1.5 is all about, when we are still using JDK1.4 officially and really using just the feature of JDK1.2. Pathetic.

I seldom have the chance to get my hands dirty doing development work right now. My work consist of managing a few programmers and gathering the requirements, managing the versions, testing, answering emails, doing migrations. Unit testing is something I am not intimately acquainted with, though I need to know enough to guide my programmers. Therein lies the problem - how do you lead if you don't know? When I first joined the company, I was miffed by how little our managers really knew about Java, though that is the language we use, how unwilling they were to learn new things and try promising new tools and techniques that can potentially ease our burden. I find myself becoming more like them with the passing of time.

It takes something uncommon to go against the path of least resistance and to do a better job than is common. The uncommon had always been more interesting, and holds the possibility for improving on what we have. To be common had never appealed much to me, except those times when being accepted was more important to me than pursuing my dreams.

To be able to spend time doing hands-on development work and be paid for it will be wonderful therapy for me and will ease some of the troubles on my mind. To be paid the same rate as what I am now will be like a dream job to me.

Anyway, I really need to read up on what TestNG is all about and the weaknesses of JUnit that I did not really have the time to find out. I won't understand everything, but it is a jumpstart.
TestNG: Catch the Testing Fever
Test Framework Comparison
New features of JDK5
Under the Hood of J2EE Clustering