BolehVPN News/Status/Fun

TM via their Twitter feed has posted today that they still expect repairs to be completed on the SMW4 undersea cable by 2 May 2010.

FTP connections still appear to be deprioritized heavily.

Malaysian customers: Connections to US, UK and Europe will suffer degraded speeds due to a cable fault in SMW2. Expected time of recovery is 2 May 2010.

Announcement from TM:

INTERNET SERVICES DISRUPTION DUE TO CABLE WORKS ON SMW4

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) wishes to announce that its consortium members have detected a cable fault on the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SMW4) submarine cable network between Alexandria in Egypt and Palermo in Italy linking Malaysia to Europe and the United States (US). The consortium will be carrying out repair works on site on Saturday, 24 April 2010 and it is expected to be completed on Sunday, 2 May 2010.During the restoration process, there will be some interruption to the traffic to Europe and the US carried through that cable. TM is taking active steps to minimize disruptions; we have added additional links on other routes and coordinated with other international carriers in order to provide additional bandwidth for our customers. Despite these initiatives, customers using Internet services nationwide may experience some degree of service degradation such as slow browsing while accessing international websites. Customers using Virtual Private Network (VPN) and other critical business applications linked to Europe and the US will be assured minimal degradation of service, if any. TM will provide necessary updates on the progress of the restoration works, and would like to elicit feedback from our customers on the quality of service experienced. We apologize for any inconveniences caused by this disruption, whilst at the same time, would like to assure customers that we are undertaking all necessary measures to ensure that customers experience uninterrupted service.

TM wishes to thank its customers for their understanding and patience during the affected period. Meanwhile, customers can call TM at 100 and select “Technical Assistance” or e-mail us at help@tm.com.my for any Internet related problems.

Sigh…my upgrade woes never seem to cease. Not being able to get 4 mbit through my month long battle with TM, I decided to give 2 mbit a try. Guess what….shit happens AGAIN and AGAIN. My complaint to TM summarizes the story.

Dear TM,

Please note that I wish to file an official complaint against one of your subcontractors EB Solutions and in particular their installer by the name of Austin Yap.

My username is xxxx@streamyx and I had recently applied for an upgrade from 1.0 mbit to 2.0 mbit.

First of all, I was told that they would be arranging installation on Tuesday evening  20 April 2010. They didn’t come and rescheduled to 10.30 on Wednesday 21 April 2010. They did not come and only came in the afternoon.

The upgrade was done by their installer Austin Yap (016-8892200). I was not at home at the time but my housekeeper signed off on the acknowledgment slip. I tested the connection and found no improvement in speed although the line sync was done properly.

I called Austin and was told that he had tested it himself and that he could get good speeds and that he had tested it repeatedly. I told him that I wasn’t able to replicate such speeds. He blamed it on congestion even though I was testing using the Streamyx speedometer. He also told me to lodge a complaint 2 weeks later as TM would not believe that I had a problem if I had just done an upgrade. I found this strange and proceeded to call TM 100 helpline to enquire as to the problem. They confirmed that I was now on the 2 mbit package but they would try to reset my port. After the reset, no change was observed.

I communicated with Austin again and he said he would check the following morning as to what he can do. Meanwhile I checked the acknowledgment slip and saw that their service warranty period is for 2 weeks! It was no wonder then that he asked me to only complain after 2 weeks as he was trying to not take responsibility for his work!

I find this extremely unprofessional especially the way he tried to trick me. I smsed Austin on this, he didn’t deny it buttold me that his boss confirmed that my upgrade was not done yet as my ID had not been upgraded yet. He told me to check back on Monday. I fear this may be a time delaying tactic and it is hard to trust his words especially since TM had already confirmed that my upgrade had been done.

At the moment, Madam Itty has been very helpful and is dealing with my matter and is making sure that my upgrade is done properly. I however wish to put on note that your subcontractor EB Solutions may not be conducting business ethically and needs to be seriously warned or taken off your panel of contractors since

a) Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing when upgrading or testing my connection
b) He tried to trick the customer into not complaining within the warranty period.

Many thanks and looking forward to your reply and action.

Kind Regards,
Reuben Yap

Not that you can do much about it…but please be aware!

And the damn document that shows the warranty period of 2 weeks. Read the fine print people!

We are looking for beta testers for the new payment /user admin system which will allow BolehVPN to have instant key delivery and a more integrated approach to support.

Please let us know should you be interested to participate in this beta where we will provide you some instructions  on what to test / look out for. We need your feedback as it is after all you guys who will be using this system

Please post in this thread with your BolehVPN username should you wish to participate. Serious participators only please

TM has posted an announcement stating that restoration has been completed, however we want to hear from you guys.

Has your internet recovered? How is surfing and gaming? How are downloads?

Streamyx seems to be down nationwide. Using my Blackberry to type this.

Update: Whole of Malaysia seem to have been down for half an hour. As at 6:17 PM connections are being restored by TM.

Update: TM’s twitter account has confirmed the problem (gotta love the thanks for reprimand bit):

CONFIRMED:major routing (DNS) b/down 2 domestic & intl since 5.30pm. Restoration ongoing in stages.TQ 4 ur alerts & reprimands

You might want to try using a different DNS using our previous guide.

Blackberries have been plagued with an antiquated browser that chokes on Javascript and most modern pages. It’s slow, it doesn’t fit text properly and has possibly the weakest browser of the major smartphones. RIM has realized this and are developing a webkit based browser but there’s been no estimated date of release.

Now if you can’t wait, there’s a really great alternative available now which comes in the form of Opera Mini 5.

The test device used was a Bold 9700 running on OS5.0.0.593 but should be more or less the same on other Blackberries.

The start screen is great for mobile devices and it  condenses all your favorite pages in an eye-catching format allowing quick access.

Now Opera can open most links throughout the Blackberry through a link in the menu but I haven’t found a way to make Opera your default browser.

Pressing the Menu button on your Blackberry doesn’t open your familiar text menus but opens a toolbar which gives you access to Bookmarks, History, Saved Pages, Downloads (woohoo!) and settings. Sleek, a bit of a departure from your familiar UI but still easy to use.

Most importantly, unlike the Bolt Browser’s font which is ugly and the inability to zoom (split screen is pretty lame to be honest), pages display in its entirety as how you would expect them to appear on your desktop and then zooming is very simple (and accurate in fitting the text to your zoom!). You can also do tabbed browsing via the + button on the top end. You can also cut and paste by holding the select button over text and it will allow to cut and paste text (a feature that I had to find!). The numbers 2, 4, 6 and 8 can be also used as a directional pad to zoom about quickly through the page without the need to scroll.

If I had to gripe, there are some really small issues. One of it is that it takes a short while to start up so you must keep Opera open all the time should you wish to have a speedy browsing experience. There also seems to be a bug where sometimes Opera uses your TCP connection despite BIS being available. This can be very annoying since using a TCP connection kills your BIS connection and you have to close the browser to re-establish BIS access. However I found this was a problem only with certain phones (I’m using Celcom) where the APN settings were set inside the TCP/IP section under Advanced Configuration. Once I disabled my APN configuration, Opera used BIS once again and everything was smooth and I could keep Opera open. Re-entering my APN settings also kept Opera using BIS so it was only a one-time fix. Remember if you’re using BIS, you most likely have to change your settings in opera to use HTTP mode instead of socket mode.

Boleh: Fast browser, displays pages accurately, tabbed browsing, zooming works great, solid browsing experience.

Tak Boleh: Takes a while to get used to the UI, May default to TCP mode without you knowing it, no direct Blackberry integration beyond the Open in Opera Mini, no integrated video viewing (Bolt does this!)

Verdict: It’s free, it works great and it’s the best browser available for the Blackberry right now. No reason not to get it while waiting for RIM’s webkit browser. Grab it at http://mini.opera.com

There is an announcement posted on the 5 April 2010 that I just noticed:

Dear Valued Customers,

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) wishes to inform its customers that the Company will be upgrading its existing Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) platform to a Next Generation Network (NGN) platform in order to facilitate the ongoing improvements to our network performance and service quality. The upgrading will enable the network to support more advanced products and services in the future. Kindly also take note that there will be no changes in the service terms and pricing policy under this network upgrading exercise.

The first upgrading exercise will take place at TM’s Wangsa Maju exchange area on 10 April 2010.

The schedule for the upgrading exercise is depicted below:

Upgrading	Service affected	Service numbers	Upgrading Date & Time
Phase 1	Homeline and Businessline	03-41490000 – 03-41490999	10 April 2010 12:01am to 02:00am
Phase 2	Homeline and Businessline ISDN Basic Rate Interface Direct Dial In	03-41420000 – 03-41429999 03-41430000 – 03-41439999 03-41481000 – 03-41481999 03-41491000 – 03-41499999 03-41411000 – 03-41412999 03-41402xxx	24 April 2010 12:01am to 02:00am
Phase 3	ISDN Primary Rate Interface	03-41450000 – 03-41459999	01 May 2010 12:01am to 02:00am
Broadband	Streamyx		10 –21 May 2010 Residential (7:00am – 7:00pm) Business (7:00pm – 7:00am)

During this upgrading exercise, customers residing in the respective areas may experience minor service interruptions for a maximum of 15 minutes. We would like to assure our customers that the services would resume to normal after the stipulated period.

TM would like to thank you for your patience during this period and we would like to assure you that we are upgrading our network to enable us to provide you with the best in Next Generation Network (NGN) services.

For more information, please contact us at 100.

I am unsure if this schedule is just for Wangsa Maju or the whole of Malaysia. In general, NGN services should improve broadband connectivity in the country. For more information, you can view the Wikipedia entry here.

Need a casual game to pass the time yet not have the stress of failing? Enjoy city building? Then this game might be worth a look at.

Premise is that you’re a giant (of the friendly sort) that helps Keflings (clueless, single-minded people who like to wave at you when there’s nothing to do) build their kingdom. The main goal of the game is to progress through the tree building things until you get a castle.

You assign Keflings to gather resources, transport materials, man buildings, and all this by placing some sort of hat (almost like a mind control device of sorts when you think of it) on the Keflings head. What’s this with hats and jobs anyway (remember Fat Princess for PS3?)? Resources gathered are placed in buildings where they are turned into components. These components are then used to build structures and buildings which then unlock more buildings to be built.

Now Kingdom for Keflings (KfK) wouldn’t satisfy the hardcore gamer. Several key elements:

1. This isn’t your traditional sim game where you try to manage limited resources. Resources are UNLIMITED. The resources near you can be cleared to make space for buildings but the ones at the edges of the map are unlimited.
2. Where resources are unlimited…you can’t fail. There isn’t any disaster or basically anything bad that can happen to your kingdom or your Keflings. You can’t lose the game…now this may be a bad or good thing.
3. The game mechanic is simple and repetitive. KfK is about the simple joys of managing and building things. You can’t play KfK at long hours at a stretch without getting bored fast.
4. The rewards aren’t like OMFGWTFBBQ EPIC WEAPONN…in fact…when you finish building a building, most of the time all you get is….a new blueprint to build more buildings! KfK’s satisfaction comes from the act of creating your teeming little city of worker ants…I mean Keflings.

Now with all this is KfK a bad game? Hardly. It fits what it sets out to do admirably, a stress-less game meant to be played in short intervals to relax and soothe. Exactly what a guy like me coming home from a hard day at work needs. Its graphics are fun, runs on almost any system and harkens back to an older era of games where things were simple. Perhaps the only complaint is that unlike the XBox system, the PC version for KfK does not have any achievements system or the ability to customize your giant. These small things would have helped made the game that little bit more rewarding.

There’s also an multiplayer option where you can play with your friends. I haven’t tried this myself but I’m not quite sure how much value this adds (perhaps to play with your significant other?)…I am unaware of any change in game mechanic or special abilities that comes with co-op mode.

Kingdom for Keflings is slightly pricey at 19.95 USD though there is a free trial available. You can grab both at their official website.

KfK isn’t for everyone, but the execution of its simple play mechanic is well done and is a great way to end your day .

System Requirements:

PS: It works on Eyefinity too!

While attending to some support queries for seedbox, we found that some of you have intentionally adjusted your torrent upload cap speed beyond your package subscription. We have disabled these accounts. This is especially prevalent for non-GUI users.

We will continue to check seedbox accounts over the coming days and we will treat these violations very seriously, with the possibility of a permanent ban with no refund.

Please adjust your upload cap accordingly to your subscribed package should you wish to avoid termination.