P1 Downtime

It looks like I will be off the net - well off the P1 for the time being. P1 was doing maintenance in my neck of the woods this weekend. Good thing that we were planning to balik kampong to Kuala Kangsar this weekend. Idlan has gone grumpy since he was not able to get on YouTube. Kids nowadays.

Puan Anita has started packing. We will leave tomorrow after work, taking our minivan for the first time. Not sure if I will be doing the drying since our driver will be coming along as well. Since I was currently teaching in Kelang, I had to come back for teaching on Monday. Otherwise it could've been an extended weekend as Tuesday will be a public holidays. We were planning what to do that day. We may go up Genting.

Slow connection

The Internet connection at the house has been suspect in the last week. According to P1, they were upgrading the services around Gombak and during this period, they will be outages. It was no fun when the connections were down. I guess they do most of the upgrading work outside office hours so not to interrupt their corporate clients. In the meantime, Dad was settling at home nicely. I took some blood off him this morning for tests and the levels looked OK. He got his energy and appetite back. He insisted on staying downstairs - our house’s entrance was on the top floor - and climb up the stairs for meals and TV. He seemed OK and maybe during the weekend, I may take him out for a drive. My Mum-in-law was planning to travel to Kelantan on SUnday to attend a wedding. Dad will be staying at home with us and the boys.

Earlier tonight, I was at the KL Hilton for an academic meeting. It was a small group affair, an Advisory Group kind of thing, discussing about a new treatment being made available for a blood condition called Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP for short). This was when your body mount up an immune reaction, an antibody against your own platelets, ending up with bleeding tendency. We have some standard treatment for it but it was never ideal. This new drug were being made available and the main hurdle was it cost a bomb and patient will likely need them long-term. Justifying the cost was really a challenge.

Following the discussion, we had a nice sit down dinner. The desert were superb and I only arrived home at 11pm. Irfan was already asleep by then. They had to sleep early as tomorrow will be their Sports Day.

P1 Day 1, and the new iMac news!

091021.1, originally uploaded by Haris Abdul Rahman.

It has clearly passed the test and even Anita was impressed. With my Mac, I can watch YouTube in HD without a hitch. Also heard today that Apple just announced the release of the new iMac line. The flagship model now support 27 inch display with resolution of 2560x1440 in 16:9 ratio! That is just insane. But that not just it. It ships with i7 Nahalem chip, but my personal favourite, wireless keyboard and mouse ... and the mouse has multitouch technology a la iPhone! M jaw just dropped!

When I bought my iMac back in 2005, the choices were between 15 and 17 inch models. How time have moved! They also released a new MacBook line and from the great vine, I heard that they might be replacing the MacBook Pro line in time for Christmas as well. Well, my MacBook Pro is only 2 years old, and my iMac 4. We know which one needs an upgrade!

Finally taking the plunge

Dinner at IKANOThe lack of broadband at our Taman Cemerlang house is really driving me nuts now that we are planning to spend more time there. I tried tethering my E71 but the speed is just too inconsistent and I just cannot get much done. This evening, we went out to IKANO for dinner and just a spot of fresh air if you can call it that. I then had a chat with one of the lady at the P1 Wimax booth, just chatting about how good the connection is and stuff like that. She was actually very informative and described all the comparisons and what to expect. There was also an offer going on that if you are a Streamyx user, you can get 3 months off the fees to try out the P1. I thought, why not. The modem costs RM100 complete with the wifi base station.

Arrived home. Set everything up. In 3 minutes, I'm online, at 150Kb/sec. Amazing. No connection issue using my Mac at all. No interruption in connection. It's been great so far. I'll let you know if it's otherwise.

Wireless Broadband for the Common People Like Me

The best is still surfing at wi-fi hotpost, Starbucks etc. Even kedai mamak and McDonald's one. No problem there even though there might not be much privacy. Nowadays, even hotel lounges charge for broadband use. So what's next?

Personally I use my E71, boot up a program called WalkingHotspot. It will turn my phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot and I can hook up to 5 devices onto it wirelessly. So if I go out on a holidays with my family, I can use my MacBook while my wife and Idlan can use the other laptop. I also use it at home because the stability of the connection and the fact that Streamyx can be really slow at times where I live. The main drawback is you need to have the phone charger with you since it drains the juice. There is also the problem with latency! So if you are into online gaming, it can cause slower reaction time.

When I used my Dopod, I turned the unit into a Bluetooth Local Network. It can only hook up to one device. The connection is a bit slower as it depends very much on how fast your Bluetooth ship is. On both cases, the connection speed depends on the GSM signal speed to your phone. Using my E71, using 3G netwook, the connection goes up to 45kB/s, which is pretty decent. No problem watching Youtube on that speed. EDGE goes at around 15kB/s. If you have a stable HSPDA signal, it can go up to 120kB/s. When I was on holidays in Kota Bharu, I was getting downloads at 350kB/s. That's screaming! I you want to test your connection speed, click here.

What seems like the in thing at the moment is WiMax. Certainly in Silicon Valley, the technology using microwave essentially - no you can't fry your egg with it - there are concerns about slow adaption of this technology. Other newer technology are catching up fast. The main drawback is the cost on it's basic infrastructure. Once the antennas are up, you're blazing. The technology is basically based on a base station spouting out microwave signals. Then you have a capture device, similar to an ADSL modem inside your home. This device will translate the signal and hook up into either a router or straight into your computer's dataport. Since the technology is directional, the receiver needs to be pointed towards the emitter  antenna.

There is also a mobile device that goes straight into your Laptop USB port that will capture the signal and feed it directly into your computer. This is the main selling point to this technology. The advantage, connection speed is faster than 3G mobile modem. Drawback, you have to be in an area where the service is available, re, mainly in Lembah Kelang.

In Malaysia, there are 4 companies that are licensed to provide this technology. The familiar one is Pocket One Networks or P1 W1MAX by Green Packet Berhad. Other players are YTL with Y-max. The other two are Asiaspace (AMAX) and REDtone-CNX, most likely going to be made available in Sabah and Sarawak. At the moment, I am very happy with my E71 connection and will probably stick to it.