There Are Still Uncivilized People Using The Internet

Sad to admit, but it’s true.

I am helping a friend to get rid of a very old HP laptop but instead of throwing it in the trash I decided to try and sell it off at Mudah.my so that he can get a netbook.

I am not surprised to receive quick responses from the site, but this is evidence of Malaysian (Streamyx IP) being a moron and a pain in the butt. I am unsure of the real purpose of the coward to send a message like that. Perhaps he has no life, and send messages to every item in Mudah.my he dislike. Of course, that’s not even a real name and email.

mudah-nx9010

Here’s a link to the original spec – what is the official name again?

Get a life!

Italiannies Sunway Pyramid

This is an overdue post that I wanted to write right after I came back from there on Tuesday, but I couldn’t.

That day, I went back home earlier than usual as my other half was craving for pasta. Pizza Hut and Kenny Rogers pasta were also candidates but we like the Carbonara at Italiannies best because of the full flavor. It was our second time at Italiannies Sunway Pyramid, as the first was on Father’s day where I enjoyed a free Grilled Salmon Oreganata (that is a RM44++ meal gratis). I like the branch in Sunway Pyramid better than the one in The Curve as the restaurant is bigger, the air conditioning is a lot cooler, and the environment is much calmer. Plus, the service in Sunway Pyramid is superb.

If you have been following my posts, you will know that I am easily annoyed with bad service. I was annoyed at first with the weird, hard to understand accent but it faded away when they gave their best service. The first time I went there they helped me carry the stroller up the stairs (we used the wrong entrance by the pub to the smoking level). This time, they brought a pillow for my kid’s back support when they saw that I had to use one of my hand to support the kid’s back on the considerably large high chair. They paid good attention and gave help without the need to be asked. I felt so grateful I almost shed some tears but fortunately I didn’t.

If tipping is practiced in Malaysia those two servers would get a fat tip from me. Well I would still tip them if I feel like I have money to spare but not right now. Maybe some day, hopefully soon.

Italiannies in Sunway Pyramid consists of two levels – the lower level is the smoking level and there is an entrance near the pub (I can’t remember the name). If you’re coming from inside the mall, the entrance is at the back of TGI Friday’s. Yes, you have to enter TGI Friday’s, go left and straight to the back where there is a door waiting for you. I personally prefer this entrance.

I will go there again, to try the Sicilian Pizza. I ended up having the salmon again since they were out of ingredients for the pizza (it was quite late in the evening).

So what about you, do you like Italiannies and what can you recommend to have there?

Do I need to reboot the machine after increasing the maximum number of open files at /etc/security/limits.conf?

No, you don’t need to. This morning I struggled to convince someone that the server does not need a reboot. It was because of this: Increasing the number of file handles on Linux workstations.

ulimit – Provides control over the resources available to the shell and to processes started by it, on systems that allow such control.

limits.conf is configuration file for the pam_limits module

It takes effects immediately upon re-login. It’s hard to explain things that only you understand internally. I wish I have a formal Red Hat training so that I can explain better.

In the end I just rebooted the system so that other person who thinks (he/she) knows everything will be satisfied. Now (he/she) is.

Those struggling to get some proof you can probably forward this url which should have better reputation than this blog.

Allianz Auto Assist

My car refused to start on Sunday, and as a car dummy I didn’t expect it was the battery. I thought the maintenance-free dry cell would last longer than acid lead batteries. That incident caused me to miss a friend’s wedding, but I am happy to see the pictures posted in many other blogs as well as in Facebook. I wish them a lifetime of happiness.

Back to the car problem, I tried to contact some of the workshops nearby home but to no avail. So since I have just installed the new car road tax and the Allianz Auto Assist sticker on my wind screen I decided to try calling them. 1-800-889-233

A female picked up the phone and asked me whether I have tried jump starting. Of course not because I didn’t expect it was the battery. Plus, it was Sunday and nobody was around. In 10 minutes Allianz called me back and told me that they are sending people. In another 10 minutes I received a call from the person responding to the case. And for every 10 to 15 minutes after that Allianz called me to ask for progress. It was a nice gesture. Although I had to wait for the auto assist van to arrive for 1 hour (nearby agents had other cases so they had to come from PJ), it was overall a nice experience with Allianz.

The battery was changed, and I went out with my family not to the wedding as it has ended by then but just to get out.

Kudos to them for providing a great service. I will stay with Allianz as long as I can. Anyone else have good experience with their car general insurance provider? Share them!

Zee Avi

A friend posted a link in Facebook to Zee’s video on YouTube, and I started to look for her songs. I really love her music and voice, as there is a certain old feeling to it, not quite the same but I can relate her to Norah Jones. And I commented on that Facebook link: “I like her music so much I’m gonna buy her album“. The reply I received was that I shouldn’t buy but simply download the music. Since I am very particular about music quality and I am happy to see a Malaysian artist making a name Internationally, I said I want to support Malaysian artists. That’s also a reason why I am broke almost all the time.

When I went to The Curve on Sunday with my family, we went to Rock Corner to look for some Mozart CDs. Lazy to look, I asked the guy there whether Zee’s album has arrived in Malaysia (who knows it might arrive late since it was released in US in May). And there it was, at the front counter along with all the new arrivals. To my surprise it was cheap… I was prepared to pay ~RM50 for an imported CD. I like Rock Corner because the guy over there is knowledgeable and helpful.

zeeavi

As usual, I made a backup copy of the CD for the car and ripped it to FLAC for my computer. To my friends, go buy one yourself if you want to listen. I don’t support piracy.

The best music is the music you buy. I kept my promise by actually buying the album.

Here’s Kantoi with the full English translations:

Delayed Yahoo! Messenger Custom Message Updates

Borrowing Google’s term – I have lately been using a flaky connection when connecting to the Internet. What I noticed is that my Yahoo! Messenger list becomes static and no custom messages are being updated. When I looked at my friend’s list, the custom message I set wasn’t showing. I was also not able to see when people get online or offline. I’m using Yahoo! Messenger 9.0.0.2161 for Windows.

I’ve tried all that I can think of – changing connection preferences, clearing message archives because I thought they grew too big, and up to the extent of reinstalling the whole application. I even blamed Symantec Endpoint Protection for it.

I found a simple remedy today – disable the “Always sign in to my mobile phone when I sign out of Messenger“. I have always thought that this option is convenient, especially when someone wants to convey a message for me when I’m not online. Well, okay I admit being lazy as this can easily be done by clicking on “Sign in to <cellphone number>” in the menu.

It turns out that the server is confused when you are online/offline so frequently – flaky connection. It’s a bug, yes.

Why am I not using Pidgin? Because I still want to separate my identities with the “send-as” functionality. With Pidgin I always revealed my identities to different group of people, and I don’t like it. I’ll reuse it once this feature is added.

So if you’re facing the same issue and have the option turned on, try to disable it.

Battery Powered Server

For real?

googleservermedium

The black box with two terminals is a 12V battery, and it looks like a lead-acid battery. Is it a DELL? Is it an IBM? Is it an HP? No, it is a Google. That’s right people, it’s a unit of many Google’s server inside its data center containers. It’s a 2U thick server, with a Gigabyte mainboard holding 2 CPUs, 2 hard disks, and 8 pieces of RAM.

It’s not really battery powered, but the battery kicks in once the main power is lost. This effectively eliminates the need for more expensive and space consuming giant UPS’s (uninterruptible power supplies) which are batteries anyway. Is this a better solution? You be the judge.

If you ask me, I’d like to have one of those Magnetek power supply unit to install on my PC. The battery can nicely fit in a tower casing, much better than having separate UPS units. However I think the mainboard itself must be custom because the 12V to 5V conversion takes place there. The power supply unit only outputs 12V (approximately 13.65V).

However I can’t find any info on how long can the battery can actually supply power.

Story found on CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Maxis to bring iPhone 3G to Malaysia on March 20

Really? That short notice? I was casually browsing my Google Reader when I stumbled upon this exciting news. Exciting? Not anymore. I don’t know why but the frustration of waiting has made me less interested in iPhones. The time stamp on the news was like 4 hours before I started this entry. Fresh!

maxis-iphone-3g

Going to into Maxis site there is now a big banner “Be among the first to own an iPhone 3G“. No, Maxis did not do anything wrong and it’s still a great news except that right now there may be hundreds of people in Malaysia using cracked iPhones. Among the first? I don’t think so. It should say “Be among the first to own an official and uncracked iPhone 3G“. Yes that’s me trying to be funny. Ha ha.

If you’re interested you may go here at Maxis’ spanking new iPhone section. Enjoy it. I don’t think I will be getting one anytime soon.

RegisterFly Resurrected as RegFly

I received an email yesterday:

regfly

It’s from RegFly, a resurrection of RegisterFly the lousiest domain registrar ever. I had very bad experience with them – slow system, buggy, unresponsive customer support. And now, they are no longer an ICANN accredited registrar so I guess they are reselling. Even the main domain regfly.com is registered under Tucows.

ICANN announcements:

Stay away. Look for an ICANN accredited registrar.

Image Hotlink Protection

Have people been stealing images from your websites? Well, there are not so many interesting images in this site so I don’t really have that problem. You can add a watermark to your image, but I guess everyone knows that.

Another form of image theft also involves bandwidth theft. It’s has many names – hotlink, inline linking, leeching, and many others. As many of us uses shared hosting and we have limited bandwidth, it will eventually reach the barrier if bandwidth is being stolen from other sites.

I have 1.5TB monthly bandwidth limitation, but I still don’t agree to people stealing my bandwidth by hotlinking images especially since I host quite a number of sites in this account. On Apache hosting it’s easy to prevent hotlinking by utilizing .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yourdomain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /nohotlink.pne [L]

WordPress users can add the above lines before the WordPress rewrite rule:

# BEGIN WordPress

What the configuration does is check whether HTTP_REFERER to match the specified domain, or if it’s empty (direct calls, for example). If not empty and unmatched it sends the content of file /nohotlink.pne to the browser. Why? Because when images are loaded with the <img tags the referrer is the page calling the image. You can also define a nonexistent image so that a broken icon is displayed on the hotlinker’s site, or better still replace the last line with:

RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

My implementation will cause the image to be replaced with:

Hotlink protection

By the way the hotlink protection image is named with the .pne extension to prevent an infinite rewrite to occur. You can also use other image formats, and any other extensions. Some fussy browser might not display it correctly but who cares, the point is to prevent people from hotlinking, isn’t it?

Try it out yourself. Good luck!

Queue Jumpers Beware

If I were to make a separate website dedicated to share pictures of queue jumpers, would anyone be interested in joining in? It can be worldwide as queue jumper is not a rare breed.

Queue jumpers deserve to be shot, and if I have the power like Sylar I would have thrown the truck upside down or to the road side while making sure the driver (and passengers) escape unhurt. That should be a good lesson. They are the most inconsiderate people on the road.

Here’s one driving the green truck:

asshole-driver

Too bad my K750 camera was too slow to capture this image and I can’t see the registration numbers. Maybe next time I will always have my DLSR and a fast lense by my side. The other day there were two queue jumpers at the same location so I had the idea to get ready with my camera phone but it looks like I need a new plan.

Get Your Pipes Fixed

The overflow pipe at my home has been running since the end of January but I was too busy to either call a plumber or look at it myself. I was surprised with a RM50 water bill this month when the usual bill is around RM3. So I decided to climb up the “attic” to take a look at the water tank. It was difficult since my arms are now too weak for the heavy body. Painful, but I got there. A sign that I need to exercise. The buoy was immersed more than 1 feet under the surface because water won’t stop flowing in from the main intake pipe.

water-tank

The pin was rusty and causes the arm to stop pushing upward. So I decided to clean the pin and loosen the arm to make sure it will do what it is supposed to do. It’s still working well now, and I hope it stays that way until I can move into the new house!