11 Mar 10 Starhub Tweeting & M1 Messing
It’s nice to have Starhub respond to a Twit when you post an issue related to its broadband connectivity. Although the problem is likely to have been resolved by the time I got the direct message (DM), it’s nice to know that they are listening.
Compare this experience with what I had with M1. Just a couple of days ago, I received my phone bill from M1 with over a hundred dollars charge to mostly my data charges. This is the second time I’ve got such an amount from M1 when previously my bills were around $30. You see, just two months ago, I activated a 1GB BlackBerry plan with M1.
The first month I got the bill, I figured, “Hey, it could be that the first month I choke up extraordinary charges becase I had more to transfer.” But when the second bill came, I guessed something was wrong. So I called the helpline. The first person I got through told me that I was using the wrong APN so that’s why the data charges were not counted as part of the BlackBerry data package. Fine, so I was then transferred to the technical helpdesk who then told me that third party applications cannot and will not count towards the BlackBerry data. I was flabbergasted! When I got the plan, no M1 personnel told me that third party applications on a bloody BlackBerry cannot use the BlackBerry data plan. Furthermore, information given by the customer service officer and the helpdesk person were completely different!
Right. So I switched from the BlackBerry plan to a normal data plan. I figured that since I don’t have much use for push mail and BlackBerry Maps (I use Google Maps), might as well change. To their credit, M1 did not charge me for the early termination of my BlackBerry plan which was meant to run for at least three months.
After the plan has been switched, my BlackBerry became bricked. Why? According to their helpdesk, it seems that the service books that were installed in the BlackBerry causes it not to be able to communicate with the normal APN to transfer data. Now, I know this is no fault of M1, but shouldn’t the customer support officer advise me on this? The only reason I can think of is that the person didn’t even know this. I only got to know this when I got through to their technical helpdesk.
The only recourse that I had, aside from throwing down another few hundred bucks for another smartphone, is to restore the BlackBerry to the factory settings. I was hoping this will clear the service books and let my phone use the normal data plan again.
Fortunately, it worked. For now. I’ll wait until the next bill comes and see what happens. This has been a bad experience for me with M1 and BlackBerry phones. I don’t think I’ll ever get another BlackBerry again. EVER.
11 Mar 10 CSS Best Practices
As mentioned before in earlier posts, I’m involved in a Web application development project. Recently I had to do some testing on the Web application (although it’s barely beta ready, but that’s a different story). During the testing process, I’ve got to see for myself the implications of not incorporating scalability designs early on into the code.
This post will take a simplistic approach to look at why load times can be improved by consolidating CSS files. At the same time, I will also take a look at naming CSS selectors as the approach to consolidating CSS. By taking a consistent approach to naming CSS selectors and organising the selectors in a structured manner in CSS files, we can minimise the number of CSS files.
Tags: css
28 Feb 10 Alpha, Beta, … What’s Next?
This question has always been on my mind. The best answer I’ve found so far and is reasonably credible can be found at http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080912142314AAZdlh9
Basically it follows the Greek alphabet:
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
Zeta
Eta
Theta
Iota
Kappa
Lambda
Mu
Nu
Xi
Omicron
Pi
Rho
Sigma
Tau
Upsilon
Phi
Chi
Psi
Omega
16 Dec 09 Why I don’t join Facebook
Reading this post (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/121409-bank-antifraud-measures.html) confirms my decision not to join Facebook a correct one. Hell, if some corporate entity knows about your daughter-in-law, you should be scared!
01 Dec 09 Ever Heard of the Crunchpad?
It was supposed to be a headline-worthy cooperation between the world’s arguably most popular tech blog and a Singapore startup. Now it’s all going downhill. Why and how it came to this stage nobody will know for sure, as Arrington puts it, “Ultimately there are two sides to every story…”
But, if it were the case as Arrington described, the “shareholders” deserve this ending. Why squander away a chance to launch a product in a larger market by leveraging on a famed tech blog’s name and instead choose to have the whole of a much smaller pie? If greed was really the cause, I hope Arrington wins the suits against Fusion Garage.
But Fusion Garage deserves a chance to voice their side of the story. Maybe we’ll get to see something on Straits Times to hear from them what exactly transpired. I hope it’s not because they are unable to produce the software – I really look forward to a successful Singapore tech startup make good internationally.
30 Nov 09 Animal Swapping Pain
The Facebook game Animal Swapping has caused me much anguish in my bid to best everyone. Now, I’m only third place. It took me a long time to get there and recently I’m reminded why I don’t want to play it anymore.
Image Overlay Error
Some time into the game, I always encounter this error where two animals will overlap and that makes it difficult to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it’s due to me using Linux, but it’s a good excuse to say why I can’t be first =P
Tags: facebook
28 Nov 09 Weird Problem with WordPress
When I was writing my post “Setting a Static IP Address in Ubuntu“, I encountered a strange problem.
In the post I was describing the location of of a directory and it contained the following:
/ etc/network
Notice that there is a space between the word “etc” and the preceding forward slash? If I were remove the space between these two characters, I will get the following error message when I preview or publish the post:
Method Not Implemented
POST to /wordpress/wp-admin/post.php not supported.
I don’t know if this is an isolated incident or a Wordpress vulnerability. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this problem.
26 Nov 09 Setting a Static IP in Ubuntu
Just recently I had to set up a few workstations for developer work. I installed them with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I had originally installed them with 9.10 (Karmic Koala) but for some bloody reason, Eclipse, both Ganymede and Gallileo, don’t work on Koala. Anyway, that’s another story for another time.
So the workstations are used for Web development, each has to have a static IP address. Being a small outfit, we don’t have a DNS server. Therefore we need to set each machine’s IP address as static. I thought that it could easily be done with the Network Manager tool in the menu bar, but I was wrong.
23 Nov 09 Why I sometimes hate to be in the IT line
The server holding the project files for the e-learning application that I’m developing just died on me today. The cause of the server dying is the insertion of a faulty RAM chip. What flabbergasted me was that the chip was idenfitied as faulty before. Why my colleague knowingly placed the RAM into the server I don’t know. I haven’t gotten a chance to ask.
The result of that action was that the server could not boot up. In fact, the problem was so different from what I’ve encountered before that it didn’t even occur to me that RAM could be the problem. The CPU was supposed to be a headless node that our developers access over the network to the repository and the wiki. What tipped me off was that the CPU was not reachable even after turning on. Network cable seems fine, and are connected at both ends properly. The system was working fine the Friday last week. Then I connected a monitor to the server to try to resolve the issue. Strangely, what came up on the monitor is an image that is akin to static noise you see on TV (during the analog days).
19 Nov 09 Google’s Strange Way to Demand Strong Password
A few days ago, I had to set up a mail client to retrieve mail from a hosted Google mail account. Setting the mail client should be a very simple affair that can be done in a few minutes. I never imagined it would take me more than 10 minutes to get it working.
Tags: gmail
