YES 4G launched, experiences downtime and says sorry.

Yes 4G, the anticipated new telco/internet company was officially launched last Friday. Everyone (or at least everyone not satisfied with all current existing companies) hoped that YTL will bring better services and better price to the masses. Finally, affordable broadband?

Yes? Actually, NO! During the launch day, YTL announced that their service will cost 9 cents for every 3mb, 1 minute talk time or per sms. Yes also offers up to 30% rebate to power users who consume high amounts of data. This effectively reduces the rates to as low as 2 cents per MB or RM20 per GB.

This means, if you usually use 10GB monthly (like I do), you’d be spending around RM 200 monthly! To me, that’s more robbery then a good way to attract new customers in a country with more then 4 major ISPs already.

YTL better come out with new packages soon to cater for home users who need unlimited downloads.

Okay, so just 1 day after the launch of their services, their website went down for a whole day and there’s no way to access their website. They claimed that it was hacked. I’d expected as much but being an experienced company, one should already expected such a thing should happen.

So finally, YTL offered 10GB for free for their new users and pre-ordered users as a apology for their downtime.

All these events isn’t good news for YTL. I was hoping they’d kicked the other ISP’s butts but looks like there wasn’t much to hope for.

Nothing to do here

I find myself just coming into my own blog, write nothing new and cleaning up at least 20 spam posts daily.

I need to get a life… Do something rather then to blog about my blog… LOL.

No Right Turn at 3 traffic junctures in Bayan Lepas

To all Penang residents and those working in Penang, especially working around the Bayan Lepas/Bayan Baru area. MPPP will be implementing “No Right Turns” at the 3 traffic junctions along the coastal road from 5.30pm till 7.00pm. This practice will continue if found to be able to improve traffic flow along that road.

I’m especially hopeful that this will work as it usually takes around half hour to one hour just to get from the 3rd junction till the first every weekday around that time.

It’ll also be good if the factories around the area can practice alternate working hours to further improve the situation by distributing the traffic load.

More information about the initiative can be found at this link:

http://www.mppp.gov.my/298

Dishonorable attitude in the industry…

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a Buka Puasa Event organized by National Instruments. It was an annual event where they will host a product and innovation sharing session and then Buka Puasa when it’s time to Break Fast.

The problem is not the event. Although the agenda (Green Engineering) is boring, there is the most obvious bad attitude that Malaysians show during that day. The event was supposed to start Sharp at 3pm with some welcome and introduction speech followed by breaks and demo sessions until 7pm. At 3.30pm, the amount of people who showed up could be counted using our 10 fingers. A pathetic amount given that NI is a major Engineering support company and this event should attract and generate lots of ideas, questions and discussions among potential education organizations, potential business partners and engineers.

However, the event just went on without the full audience anyway and around 6.30pm, when it’s about time for the free buffet, the Hall suddenly become 90% full.

Shame on the Malaysian Culture!

A toilet that checks your health

Would you like a toilet that tells you if you’re healthy or not every time you take a dump? Japan’s leading toilet maker, Toto did just that. The “intelligent toilet” has a built in scale on the floor, and armband to check your blood pressure and a receptacle to collect and analyze your urine sample.

The information will be sent to your computer, which you can then email the data to your doctor.

Japan is already a country with the most advanced toilet technology ranging from sound and smell management and automatic cleaning systems. This toilet will sure add to their profile. I wonder if they might create a toilet with a built in fridge so we can eat some ice-cream while doing our “business”.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iiFjXssh46TJTgbIidhTOoq8TFoQ

Malaysian Politicians

Right now, It doesn’t matter if you talk about the opposition coalition party or the ruling coalition party in Malaysia. Both these groups have something in common which I really think it’s a waste and I really think both parties are not really suited to govern Malaysia long term.

The issue is their arguments. Have you ever read the newspapers for the past 5 years? Anything related to politics will always have some statement either directly or indirectly insulting the opposite party. Everything they try to do in order to gain popularity, fame and trust is to make the citizen distrust the opposite party.

While in other countries, political arguments are not about blaming each other parties and finding their faults. Instead, they challenge each other party’s ideas and policies to see which is more efficient and practical. Then voters get to choose how they want the country they live in to move ahead. They don’t need to vote because the other party is a snake or traitor or just racists, they just vote because the other have better ideas.

When will we have such a good democratic practice in Malaysia?

Frustrating thought

So in the programming world, sometimes a project might be too big or too long term to work or support the system alone. Therefore, we need to work with several people who “knows” programming as well.

There’s where problems arise. A lot of them thinks their system is way superior then others and their skills are really good enough to brag about. Sure, if you can understand a messy coding in the first place and make it more messy and still make it work correctly, then you might think the same. Any suggestion that me and my friend to rebuild the system in order to standardize it into a systematic, modular and easy to understand program was all laughed at with the excuse that it’s actually making it more complicated and not piratical at all.

Now that they have actually seen a real systematic program and are forced to work on it (The system was programmed by someone else), they praised it so much that they have forgotten all their laughters at our suggestions before…

Even now, any other further suggestions by us were met with the same ignorance and laughters.

Random stuff about my working environment

There’s a few things I want to note about my current working environment. Some you may find funny.

1. Water leaks through the ceiling.

2. Flooded puddles at the car park

3. Pictures of products we don’t sell or support anymore everywhere!

4. Cables everywhere. Very messy, very dangerous, and they call themselves 5s complient.

5. There were some rats running around and died in one of the ceiling panels. It stinks.

6. They rather rent and maintain other people’s building then to develop the empty plot of land they have.

7. I have 2 access badges. Everyone else has only 1. Because they have 2 different types of door scanners and don’t have money to replace all the old ones to the new badge system.

8. 2GB of RAM and Windows XP still considered engineering spec laptop.

9. My cubicle is smaller then others. If that’s not bad enough, the cubicle only have half the surface area for me to put things on it.

10. Can’t find a proper toilet to shit. All toilet seats here bites!