Jan’s blogs about life

Apparently there was a damaged to TMnet submarine cable network linking Malaysia and Europe. And service degradation was expected for connection to North America because they will reroute some of the connection. No wonder the internet service was so, so bad, especially those linking to overseas. Since this web site is hosted in the US, it was similarly affected. And it was expected the undersea cable to be fixed and the online services restored by 31/Dec/2008.

Sheesh… Even posting a page takes like forever. A page will load real slowly. Especially if a site using PHP like Wordpress, Joomla, phpBB or any other server side enabled web sites. Simpler web sites were still not so bad. If a page was just created using simple HTML/CSS and a bit of SSI/PHP, the page loads quite fast. And not all sites were affected. Some sites and most Google services still run fairly well. Read more »

Home improvement is getting more tedious. This was supposed to be a simple job. Plaster ceiling to cover the cable that runs from fuse box in the living room go pass my PC room then end up in the kitchen. But lo, no! My wife wants to paint the PC room saying the wall is ugly, I said no, she insisted, and now my PC room is in a big mess too!

PC and computers devices do not run on wireless signals and power. Maybe in the future if the scientist figured out to transmit electricity sufficiently and efficiently via microwave power from source to components and devices without using any wires then perhaps we will have a less crazy complicated network of cables sticking out from behind the computer and peripherals. Read more »

I’m sure many have jumped into the bandwagon signing up for all the social web sites (Facebook anyone?). And if you make your own web site, you definitely want to latch on to this phenomenon. But are all these social web sites crack out to be? What are they good for anyway? Read more »

So Malaysia wants to join the rank of a develop country with everything at the tap of the keyboard and do everything online? Dream on man. With the current slow motion of Streamyx, I shouldn’t even call it broadband; it is more like a dial up pretending to be broadband. I’m sure many of my fellow Malaysian netizens would whole heartedly agree with me. Read more »

The giant electric oven which Lena bought has been lying idle for almost a year now. We couldn’t use it to bake anything because the existing wiring could not take on the higher power requirement. The initial testing melted the plug. Besides there is no way the existing wiring could take on the power load as it was strung up in such a way that the refrigerator, the microwave oven, the water boiler, the washing machine, etc all uses the same serial line. Read more »

Make over your own web site page by page is tough. That’s how it is for my travel destinations related web site. It started out that way so I just left it as that. And since this is my most successful web site, I’m somewhat content to leave it at its current hosting location. Though I wish could do more like install scripts and such. Previously I couldn’t do so until my recent discovery of the use of CNAME function was I able to merge Sitesell Site Build It together with BlueHost to make a potent marriage. Read more »

Windows dynamic disk volume can be useful, but it has its pitfalls too. However I believed the disadvantage far outweigh the advantage, of course it all depends on your needs. However my recent experience with dynamic disk volume has not been good. Read more »

Having switched over to using digital SLR photography, the amount of storage space required for storing and backing up RAW files jumped up tremendously! I had considered various options for data backup, but in the end settled on using the bulkier Western Digital My Book external hard drive instead. Read more »

During my last upgrade, I crashed my Wordpress websites and after I made the web site to work, it broke the Fantastico DeLuxe automatic upgrade feature. Manual upgrading was a little tedious and I had to go through several steps to make any update to the Wordpress installation. I did find another way to make use of automatic update and it worked by using the Simple Script feature provided by Blue Host web hosting company. Read more »

I’ve been looking around for a widget that will display for example the top ten most popular posts in a Wordpress websites blog. The only widget I found was the “Popularity Contest” widget in the Wordpress.org website. Unfortunately many users complained about it being buggy, not working with fatal error or not reporting posts that are actually popularly visited by visitors. Read more »