Sean’s blog

TM Streamyx and phone down Port Dickson area

June 24th, 2010

Sometime between 10:30 and 10:45am, still down at time of writing (10:55). I’m just going out for a short walk. Not like Captain Oates – I’m getting used to Malaysian Internet access now – just to see my friends at the local switchbox.

Update – 11:15 how disappointing, there’s not a single technician at the switchbox at all. All the usual faces were there the last few times. We go through the same charade each time – they see me, I do ‘palms to sky’, and they all laugh: “It’s lidat wan!”.

We just tried phoning the last few technicians who left us their handphone numbers but the two that have answered so far are no longer working for TM. Hey! One guy asks us to SMS him our landline number. That’s refreshingly sensible. We’ll do that and then join the long queue at 1300 88 9515.

Update – 11:25 Novel. 1300 88 9515 rings about 20 times before ‘answering’ with 3 short electronic-sounding chimes and then drops the line.

Update – 11:35 No announcements on Streamyx / TM websites. If the service wasn’t depressingly bad enough, their use of information technology is woeful. Last update for a while – the DiGi EDGE adapter is going out to work, and not with me. I have to be honest and mention that DiGi’s network was down for a few hours a couple of days ago, but it was scheduled maintenance that I knew about from an announcement on their website.

Update – 16:28 Phone and Streamyx back on. The time is accurate because I left the phone on my desk off the hook all day. A few seconds after they reconnect the line, the handset makes a loud warning noise!

Posted in Broadband, Broken | No Comments »

The Ministry of Tourism Poll: Penang Botanical Garden Arches

June 14th, 2010

There’s plenty of ‘information’ available in Malaysia, and just a few people publicly questioning its quality. The Ministry of Tourism is conducting a poll on its website to see whether people want to keep the arches being built at the Penang Botanical gardens (Warning: abysmal Flash site). Anil Netto (who isn’t keen on the arches) is worried that the poll may be being manipulated. Specifically, he is concerned that the poll was showing 91% against retaining the arches for some period of time and then suddenly did an ‘about face’ and showed over 50% for retaining the new arches.

Fortunately for busy-bodies, the Motour website uses AJAX to implement its poll, so it’s very simple to run a shell script using something like cURL to keep track of the poll without causing the web server or its admin any undue stress. In case you’re interested, here are some plots using GnuPlot. The time axis is ‘time of day’ where the integer part is the day part of the date (so 13 is 13th June, 14 is 14th June). The decimal part of the day is 2.4 hours per tenth, so 14.4 is the 14th of June, 4 times 2.4 (2 hours 24 minutes) hours = 9:36 in the morning.

Totals – the poll ‘result’:

Shown as a percentage:

And the voting rate as votes per minute – calculated as the difference between one minute’s total and its predecessor.

There isn’t really much that can be said about the data. There’s no way of telling – for example – exactly who is voting or even if there is anybody voting more than once. It would be nice to see the raw server logs, though there’s an obvious privacy issue involved in making the IP addresses available. Providing stats based on the network address range – such as that available from the Routing Assets Database – would probably go a long way to allay fears over who is voting – and may even allow stats to be generated based on geographical region.

If anybody is interested, I can provide the raw data from which these plots are made. The AJAX request isn’t always reliable, so there are missing data points – a sequence of 20 (minutes) is currently missing as I write this.

8pm on Monday 14th – a little update. Not sure how many times I’ll do this, perhaps I’ll wait until there’s some ‘remarkable’ change in the poll. The rate chart makes it obvious how ‘episodic’ this poll is! Total:

Percent:

Rate:

17:05 – Poll is about to close at 5:30pm, according to MoTour website – I’ll post final graphs after that.

Poll closed – Totals:

Percent:

Votes per minute:

The raw data:

Motour logging script raw output – motour.gz

Posted in Bolehtics, Breaktime, FOSS, Life, Philosophy | 2 Comments »

On-screen ruler for Ubuntu: screenruler

May 13th, 2010

Just a quick note to say I’ve found one of those surprisingly useful features of a graphical desktop that really does make sense. I was thinking about calculating the positions of some elements on a web page and providing some relative or absolute positions to prevent ‘resizing salad’. The first thought that struck me was “what are the positions of the elements now?”. I stopped myself from taking a screenshot and measuring them with the GIMP’s image ruler, thinking that by now, some bright spark must have done the decent thing and provided something that would work on the desktop, for all applications.

The first ‘on screen ruler’ in a scan of search results that looked convincing was screenruler, and it really is exactly what I want. If you’re using Ubuntu, you should be able to install it using this magic ‘apt:’ link:

Install screenruler using an apt: link

If you’re a command-line kind of person, ‘sudo apt-get install screenruler’ will do much the same thing.

My favourite features of screenruler: the ‘track mouse’ tooltip so I don’t have to count the marks to get precise measurements, and the fine-positioning afforded by the arrow keys on the keyboard.

Enjoy!

Posted in FOSS, software | No Comments »

Streamyx down 15th April 2010 17:30

April 15th, 2010

So… in the middle of editing a configuration file on one of my servers and Streamyx is down. Interesting differences this time are that my router still claims to have an IP address, there’s an ADSL carrier, phone has a dialtone, TM’s support line at 1300 88 9515 is permanently engaged.

Update 15th April 2010 19:00 – back sometime after 18:00

Posted in Broadband, Broken | No Comments »

TM Streamyx down Port Dickson 1st/2nd April

April 2nd, 2010

Just putting the finishing touches to my URL shortening service and *BOOM* everything dead: no Streamyx, no DiGi EDGE, can’t even browse from our handphones.

Just a quick note (thank you DiGi!) to keep track of it: Streamyx is dead from 11pm Thursday April 2nd 2010. I noticed soon after (when I tried to dial 1300 88 9515!) that the phone had no dial tone. Maybe something big is happening, because DiGi EDGE on my USB adapter was dead too, and so was DiGi GPRS from Jess’ phone! The handphones still worked for calls though, so I reported the fault to TM who always seem surprised that something is wrong. Maybe the network in their office is managed by DiGi.

Internet from the EDGE adapter and the handphone seemed to come and go for a while before midnight, but has been rock-solid since. Once I got online again, I sent an email to DiGi asking if there’s any opt-in scheme for receiving SMS alerts of network outages. Their Customer Helpline (the number is on the SIM card) doesn’t actually offer any help. It says it will at the first menu, but after choosing the obvious “speak to a representative” option, the next menu has no such option! There must be a way of communicating network disasters to us, rather than just leave us ‘in the dark’ mustn’t there? I’m not going to ask TM the same question – for what ought to be the obvious reason.

Update 2nd April – landline was still dead until about 11am this morning, when dialtone and ADSL both returned. Will we ever know why?

Update 7th April – TM called this morning to ‘check the line’ and ask if everything was OK now. The fault was due to ‘server broken’.

Posted in Broken | No Comments »