Jan Leow's Blog Page

Goodbye Madam Calico Cat

Dealing with loss (Goodbye Madam Calico Cat)

It did not matter whether your dearest was a person or a pet friend, their passing always strikes a blow in your heart. Loosing them creates a hole in your life and it takes some time before you let it go and get your life moving again. Such grieving is normal I suppose. You poured out your heart but only to be wrenched out like a dentist pulling out your teeth!



Still, a remembrance is good for the healing process.

Malaysian GST has come

Malaysia GST has come! The build up to this great government custom taxation is now implemented and there is no way the man in the street will now escape from paying more tax. The flat GST tax rate of 6% will affect all population in Malaysia, but more so to the lower and middle income earners.

No doubt 90% of the world countries has adopted GST (government sales tax) or VAT (value added tax) in order to improved their confers. The way Malaysia has gone about it was more like a force throat approach. From discussion with friends abroad, I get to know that the initial amount collected was something like 2-3% and then gradually increased. So the effect of GST was not too sudden and the people could get used to the consumption tax. But it was said by the men in the street, Malaysia government don’t have enough money, thus the 6% jump, and using the neighbouring countries as an excuse, “we are still lower”, but only by 1%. Terrible way of explaining to the public acceptance.

Search Privacy is Making it Difficult to Judge What Web Visitors Want

Of late, there were many privacy requirement from companies. That means, information about what people want or searching is now hidden from web masters. I thought such information would not infringe on users browsing, after all no personal information were divulge. The search keyword terms is useful as it shows what the web visitors interest, and yet Google is now hiding this. Without this information, there is now no way to know to what extend how people found your website.

Celcom XPAX Prepaid SIM card must be upgraded to get 3G

I decided to pop in to a Celcom centre to try to find out why my XPAX 24 could only get 2G/EDGE internet data. A quick check with my phone number and it showed up in their terminal that my SIM card was only meant to be used as 2G.

I found it odd that the Celcom shop was selling 2G XPAX prepaid card when everyone else, Maxis, DiGi, etc were selling 3G enabled prepaid SIM cards. It seems like Celcom stock is slower moving compared with the other telcos. In order to have 3G/HSPA+ internet data connection, I need to change and upgrade my SIM card to a 3G version. And the shop that sold it to me didn't even informed me about it! And when I called up Celcom support sometime back, they were just as befuddle and didn't understand what was my problem. Why is it Celcom support so poor? Anyway,...

Celcom Axiata XPAX 24 prepaid cut into a micro SIM card size.

Celcom Xpax Data Connection is so poor!

Is Axiata Celcom Xpax data connection so poor? My Maxis line has not been able to get good signal strength in my home, and was wondering whether Celcom could be any better. The only way to know is to get a prepaid line and give it a test. Who knows? I might just get lucky!

Celcom was a pioneer for mobile phone technology and I heard they have one of the best coverage. Before I switched to Maxis some 20 years ago, I was using Celcom analogue mobile system. Nope, not the Motorola "brick" phone thankfully! It was the Microtac or something named like this from Motorola. Then came Maxis with their GSM system, and my friend persuaded me to change to Maxis and I have been with Maxis ever since.

I have never considered any other mobile telephone operator until now when I could not get any decent mobile signal strength from Maxis after moving to a new house. I recalled the previous owner was using Celcom line so I thought perhaps that telco should be getting good signal.

Mobile telco coverage and data connection speed compared

My Internet was blocked by bad DNS

My internet connection was working fine just the day before. And this morning when I powered up my PC, no connection could be established. I didn’t know I have a bad DNS problem and was wondering what could be wrong.

I checked my other PC in the LAN network including my mobile phone and they all could connect online. Looking at the error message, it said it was blocked by my browser. So the first thing that came to mind was my PC firewall. The quick way to test it was switching off the firewall. Unfortunately, no connection could be established.

The next step was to try disabling the anti-virus. Even that didn’t work.

Trying to pinpoint the error, I tried running other browsers. Perhaps my current Google Chrome browser was getting cranky. Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browser didn’t work either.

Finally, after giving the error message a second look, I realized the error message came from Open DNS. In my bid to overcome the blocking of certain sites by the Malaysian government, I have switched from TM net DNS primary/secondary servers to those of overseas.

A quick change on my Local Area Connection properties TCP/IPv4 Primary and Secondary DNS server address to another one, voila! My connection was established. This time I switched over to Google’s DNS server.

So most likely the Open DNS gateway servers were down, or they too started implement some kind of blocking procedure. Fortunately I still have some other alternate choices to try.

Well that solved my problem, though it took me about 2 hours to figure it out! What a time waster!

Nested Cloud Storage and NTFS Symbolic Link

Having a bunch of free cloud storage from the likes of Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box.com and many others, you could embark on a synchronization strategy to back up to your precious files up in the cloud and even give you a convenience or two.

Scrounging around the internet I found you could do some rather interesting sync and backup using the cloud storage on offer.

As of this writing, I have:

Google Drive = 15GB variable with email storage
SkyDrive = 7GB plus a free 1 year 20GB storage for being a Windows Phone user
DropBox = 2GB, can be bump up by doing various task, and recently a link from my mobile Samsung Note 2 gave me a bonus 48GB storage for two years!
Box.com = 10GB
Ubuntu One = 5GB
Amazon = 5GB
Apple iCloud = 5GB