HTNet

Holy fsckin’ shit… Nine bloody years in jail! That’s what you get for using spam to peddle your wares (v14gra anyone?)… at least according to laws in Virginia.

Jeremy Jaynes, 30, of North Carolina, was convicted in November of violating the state’s anti-spam statute by sending tens of thousands of bulk e-mail ads to America Online. However, Jaynes remains free on a US$1 million bond.

I hate spam as much as the next guy (probably more, I used to be a support engineer, and spam/email distributed viruses are some of the shittier problems I faced… even worse than a busted SCSI HD array), but getting NINE years for spam?

Now why the hell didn’t I see this petition earlier! But better late than never… thanks to Chan Siau Liang for pointing it out in his blog.

Basically, all IT-aware Malaysians know that the reason why we got shitty broadband coverage in Malaysia is primarily because of TMNet’s virtual monopoly of the market. Yeah, yeah… there are other pseudo-ISPs such as Jaring, TIMENet and Maxis… but none of them really offers nationwide broadband coverage.

So basically, they’re screwed… because in more than 90% of cases, only TMNet’s Streamyx ADSL service is the only choice that Malaysians can pick when choosing a broadband plan.

Why is this so bad? Well, some people have service related issues with them. As for me, I rarely have service issues with Streamyx… probably one slow night every 4-6 months or so. But I do have a huge problem with their service coverage in “new” commercial/residential areas in Johor Bahru.

God damn it TMNet, fibre optics are not a god damn excuse to deprive residents of decent ADSL service. For shit’s sake, DSLAM units are not really expensive… especially for GLCs like you!

Another issue that I have with regards to Streamyx is that, TMNet seems to employ thieving, lying bastards as sales-reps for the service in Johor Bahru. I had one of these bastards coming in my office offering Streamyx when I know for a god damn fact that it’s not available in my unit. The bastard even convinced me that the reason my self tests failed is because of the Centrex service I subscribed from Telekom (TMNet’s parent company, the monopoly telephone fixed line provider in Malaysia) cocking up the test.

I can’t believe with the number of years of experience I had in IT and technology in general, I fell for that bloody con! Till this day, I curse the day I met that bastard. Anyway, for those who didn’t get the gist of the story: Streamyx availability does not depend on your usage of Centrex or other PABX-like services.

I cancelled the Centrex service for the lines (not one but TWO, one in the HQ and another in our Pulai Utama branch) which I wanted to use for Streamyx. The bastard told me that their techie will come to our premises within a week to deliver the modem (technically it really is a router, but I guess none of you gives a flying shit) and do the installation. After a week, nobody came, so I called the bastard and he assured me the application is “being processed” (another tell-tale sign when you’re about to be conned by a sales drone).

Because I have lots of other important things requiring my attention, I just let this thing sit… probably because it already dawned on me by then that I got conned by the bastard. And sure enough, the typical “sorry, no Streamyx for you… but you’re now on our fsckin’ waiting list” letter arrived.

Bloody bastard… but anyway, the moral of the story is: TMNet will work harder if it wasn’t a god damn fscking monopoly with no taxpayer money tit to suck on. So, help your fellow Malaysians: sign the damn petition! The future of Malaysian broadband penetration depends on you!

I just noticed this, it seems that Gmail has doubled the storage size for its email accounts. It is now at a whopping 2GBs!

Heck, I don’t even use 1MB of my current gmail account, and I wonder how anyone would even use up the original 1GB offering by Gmail, and now they have doubled the size.

Anyway, I got lots of Gmail invites to spare, so if you want one (I’d be suprise if there are folks out there who still don’t have a Gmail accout, or two), just drop a comment here and I’ll send you one.

BitTorrent, the protocol which allegedly accounts for more than one-third of all Internet traffic, has now hit version 4.0.0.

Another interesting point to note about this release is that the license has changed from the MIT license to BitTorrent Open Source License, which basically is a derivative of the Jabber Open Source License. Somehow after writing this, I felt that 99% of you don’t really give a flying hoot about this… but what the hell, I already typed the damned thing :).

HTNet has always been a non-default look site, regardless of whatever CMS I used in the past. Although I’m not really an aesthetically gifted person, I can, and have been producing 100% XHTML valid sites which look good (to me at least :-p).

It now seems that I have to do this again with WP… But for the time being, I’m quite happy to use this WP theme called Steam by Samir M. Nassar. It is the only dynamic width WP theme that I can find in roughly 15 minutes. Even if I don’t use it permanently, it is an excellent base theme to start hacking on :-).

So far, WP has been just about what I needed at present without wasting time developing my own site engine.