All work and no pay makes Jack
Haiwan - 'Animals' in Bahasa Malaysia
Haiwan is a copy of the Animals flashcards with Bahasa Malaysia sound clips and flashcard captions. It has been a very long time since I touched wossis.com, and I can’t help thinking that it shows! I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Spinneret Java web server, including API changes – so the next update to wossis.com will be hard work.
Watch this space! And be very, very patient…
I was in the shower, covered in soap! It wasn’t so bad without the heater, but the lack of a pump meant that there was only a dribble coming out of the upstairs shower head. It was pitch black in the small wash room so that I struggled to find the door!
I’d been fiddling about with some inverters recently with the idea of selling them online. That was lucky, because there was a car battery and small inverter on the office worktop. I could at least plug in a desklamp. The streetlights have gone off outside, so it really is ‘darkest PD’ at the moment.
The thing that bothers me most about the services failing here is that they all seem to depend on each other. The phone is also dead. I can’t help thinking there must be people having a bad time somewhere in the pitch black and needing to call an ambulance or something. They can’t!
Oh well, I’d better tidy up and go to bed before that battery runs flat – it’s not fully charged. I’m not looking forward to joining the rest of the family in the bedroom, without ceiling fan and aircon, that’s going to be sweaty! I hope you have light, power, fan and aircon wherever you are. My Dell Mini9 was charged, and DiGi’s network is still up, so at least I got my message in a bottle off!
… that’ll teach me to keep the battery charged, just got beeped by the inverter. No light until the morning then. Night!
Update 13th July – power came back just before 2am, according to one of my computers that was set to automatically boot when power is restored. I’m a heavy sleeper, so I was dimly aware of the aircon, ceiling fan, kids’ night-light coming back on, and the street-lights streaming through the open windows and curtains – in a “Wassat? Oh power’s ba…zzzzz” kind of way.
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!
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’:
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / total votes
Shown as a percentage:
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / vote percent
And the voting rate as votes per minute – calculated as the difference between one minute’s total and its predecessor.
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / votes per minute
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:
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / total votes 8pm 14th
Percent:
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / percent votes 8pm 14th
Rate:
Ministry of Tourism "Keep the Arches" poll / votes per minute 8pm
17:05 – Poll is about to close at 5:30pm, according to MoTour website – I’ll post final graphs after that.
Poll closed – Totals:
Poll closed - total votes since Jun13
Percent:
Polls closed - votes percent since Jun13
Votes per minute:
Polls closed - votes per minute last 2 days
The raw data:
screenruler - two of them, one rotated to vertical
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!