Changing Jobs

Next week is going to be my final week serving my current employer. I am leaving because I received a much better offer (and prospect) for employment with an American company. From the security field, I am crossing back to UNIX servers, with a twist – I am going to work on Oracle as well.

The hardest part of leaving any job for me is friends and colleagues. Well, not that they will be lost forever but you leave a part of your life behind. Because of work, and other commitments you’ll have less chance to meet them. It’s even harder for me since I am leaving in very good term even with my direct managers!

There are other things that needs to be taken care about, such as HR matters, tax, etc. And you’ll never be certain what’s the new place will be like. My experience in the workplace started in small Malaysian companies, then to a medium Malaysian company, then to a medium European company, and to a huge European company. I’ve never worked in a huge American company before.

To be honest, it’s a bit scary even for someone who have worked for many years. But life must go on and a man has to decide which path he needs to take…

How’s your experience in changing jobs?

Hi Metallica, I am Megadeth

Listening to Hitz.fm this morning on my way to work, heard a news that a couple in Sweden wants to name their daughter Metallica (and the authority does not allow them to).

Searched the Net and found some news:

Apparently they are trying to combine their 2 first names and came out with Metallica.

If they have a boy later they may name him Sandman? 😉

Although I am a fan of Metallica I really don’t think that the name is suitable for a girl. Just as weird as my name is, I still remember a teacher laughed and said when I am a old grandpa people will think that I have lost my mind if I tell them my real name.

Right, granny Metallica?

McDonald’s Taman Equine

Last night (Sunday morning) at 2.50am my stomach started to rumble as I was staying up late to finish up some work. So I went to McDonald’s to get some food at the 24-hour drive thru. I arrived there exactly at 3.00am, and there were 3 cars ahead of me in the queue.

I didn’t expect anything weird until the first car in front still have not moved after 10 minutes. And 2 more cars arrived behind me. Not that I can reverse the car and get away or anything (although the thought did enter my mind). I turns out that I had to wait until 3.25am in the queue before it was my turn. Yes, 25 minutes in queue at McDonald’s drive thru.

After ordering (with very limited choice) I saw the supervisor was manning the drive thru counter while all of the other staff was playing around, taking drinks from the dispenser and do nothing. And the manager had to record orders on a paper. At first I thought they were on break or something until I decided to ask the supervisor why the hell did he write records on paper and does he have to do it every night? He said, “yes, we have to wait until the system turns back on in the morning to key in everything”.

Hmm… can’t the staff go around and pickup the food while the manager takes orders and record them? Beats me. I don’t know fast food business that well. I just eat them.

That’s a new lesson for me. If you’re starving in the middle of the night don’t go to McDonald’s. And I thought they had a perfect “system”. Quoting my entrepreneurship teacher in college:

Why McDonald’s can succeed in their business? They have a perfect system.

Yeah right 😉

Migration Complete

This site has once again moved. Now nobody can say to me that I have not tried to support the Malaysian hosting industry. I tried, and I don’t like it.

All of the other sites hosted on the previous server has also been migrated here. Hopefully this would be a better home. It would be slower for Malaysia visitors to visit, but at least it’s because of distant and not because of overloaded server resources! Monitoring for this server showed 100% uptime. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Bye, Exabytes

It has become worst since these last few days. Mails are missing, and site is not accessible many times. I’ve set up server monitoring at host-tracker.com and I receive on average 6 downtime alerts per day, with monitoring triggered every 30 minutes.

I’ve seen people writing about my plugin said “if you can’t access the site, try again later“. And my AdSense stats reveals that very little impression made meaning that many people are having problems to access this site, and 4 others I have set up in this server.

Accessing this site is slow, very slow. I have to do something about it now.

As I have SSH access to the server, I can see so many cron jobs that have been running for a few days, not finishing its job. One thing about Exabytes’ servers is that they have a lot of features and allow people to do things that many overseas hosting company does not allow you to do. That’s a good thing except that when a user do something stupid, there’s nobody to look over the problem.

Well, the Engineers are fast when you report something, and they are doing a good job in reactive work. But I don’t see any proactive work being done. Once I reported that the MySQL server is taking a lot of load and freezing and asked them to check which user is doing this (even if it is myself), so that it can be prevented in the future. All they can say is that the MySQL server is now running fine.

Even though it is not downtime, it is certainly close to one. The server load sometimes goes as high as 34 (this is not percentage, this is a 1 minute average load on a UNIX machine – number of process fighting over CPU resources).

pangkorload.jpg

And I don’t think they are going to do anything about it. I am not sure how many domains are hosted on this particluar server but I am guessing there are a lot. I checked PHP’s max_execution time using CLI and it is set to 30 seconds. So why does the ones running from cron did not die?

Continue reading Bye, Exabytes

WiMAX In Malaysia

Ok ok I know this is old news for most of you. I just can find this time to write a bit about it.

Technically speaking WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It is a common misconception to consider WiMAX and Wi-Fi as similar technologies. The fact that they both start with same letter and governed by IEEE standard 802x. makes them easier to be confused.

Wi-Fi, which most of us are familiar with and use everyday is targeted for short range access (10m) and is suitable for Intranet or hotspot coverage for a small area. It was never meant for ISPs to distribute Internet access. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed radio spectrum, otherwise you’ll need to apply for a license from MCMC each time you buy a wireless access point 😉

In the other hand, WiMAX can go up to 70km and is suitable for last mile/km distribution of Internet access from ISPs. The issue with licensing that we saw in the news is because WiMAX utilizes a licensed radio spectrum so not just anyone can operate a WiMAX access point.

Do take note, however all of the maximum ranges are still effected by the line-of-sight limitation so even if you live very near to a WiMAX access point but you live behind a hill you might not get the maximum 70Mbps speed that WiMAX can handle. That’s a nice pair of numbers – 70km/70Mbps.

Continue reading WiMAX In Malaysia

Rest In Peace

It is a sad moment indeed. Prayers and Al-Fatihah to our dear friend Rafizul Elmy, or better known as Ali. He passed away on Monday evening around 10.00pm after suffering for a month plus in chemotherapy. May he rest in peace. Ali leaves behind a wife and a little daughter. May they be blessed, always.

From Him we come, and to Him we return.

AdSense Referrals Beta

I received my email subscription to Inside AdSense just about 20 minutes ago. There’s good news – AdSense is launching a referral program where you can refer products from advertisers now, not only Google products. When a visitor clicks on your referral link, if he/she completes an action defined by the advertiser, you get paid!

AdSense referrals beta

This program however is in Beta and not everyone can use it for now. You can try applying here: http://www.google.com/ads/adsense/referrals/

(No no this is not a referral link. I am merely spreading the good news here).

JavaScripts getElementsByName – IE Vs Firefox

A little coding story. I spent quite some time to figure out what’s wrong with my code. Consider the following code:

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<html>
	<head>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	function getElements()
	{
		var x=document.getElementsByName("myInput");
		alert("First Element value is: " + x[0].value);
	}
	</script>
	</head>
 
	<body>
		<div id="myInput"></div>
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="1" /><br />
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="2" /><br />
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="3" /><br />
 
		<input type="button" onclick="getElements()" value="How many elements named 'myInput'?" />
	</body>
</html>


Firefox will correctly alert you with “First Element value is: 1”
IE in the other hand will alert you with “First Element value is: undefined”

Why is that so? Because there exists a div with the same id myInput. In this case the JavaScript clearly uses getElementsByName. Can’t IE differentiate between Id and name?

FeedBurner Feed Replacement

If any one of you just updated to the newer version of WordPress, make sure that you also update to the latest version of the plugin.

A fellow blogger encountered this error on WordPress 2.1.x yesterday, as he still had the version 2.1 of the plugin.

This is caused by the removal of generate_page_rewrite_rules function in WordPress 2.1

I checked the 2.1 version of the plugin and indeed it is calling to the function at line 43. Version 2.2 of the plugin had this removed.

Time and Space Continuum

I watched a few episodes of Heroes last night until episode 10. I was thinking that when Hiro went back to the past to save Charlie (after she has been murdered by Sylar), didn’t he risk causing a rift in the time and space continuum?

Just think of it this way, when Hiro and Ando first arrived at the diner in Odessa that was the first time Charlie ever met them. And Charlie mentioned that someone got her a Learning Japanese book as a gift. Why didn’t she recognize Hiro at that time, the person who gave her the book? Shouldn’t she at least be happy to see Hiro again?

Well, it’s just for entertainment anyway but time travel has always interest me and I always think of the continuum when watching something related to time travel 😉

I am a freak.

Damn Crackers!

To anyone who have downloaded and used WordPress 2.1.1, you must immediately download 2.1.2. Now!

An evil cracker managed to get into one of WordPress’ server and edited some file, resulting in the ability to remotely execute PHP codes. This is a very serious issue.

News at WordPress.org

Even the F-Secure Weblog posted on this information here.