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February 2007

Viewing posts from February , 2007

zombified

only slept for 4 hours last night. was up trying to setup some kind of proxy on andy’s server. and i think i was almost there, but not before his sysadmins blocked my connection. guess not all types of cgi scripts are allowed. 😛 wonder if it’s specifically written anywhere in their ToS.

the lack of sleep and the huge amount of food we had last night (Beef lasagne and ribena lychee!) didn’t help me wake up this morning. but i did wake up. 😛 one my resolutions this year: reduce EL usage.

hmn

lessee.. work is fine. went to nirwana for dinner. wii’ed at merv’s. saw a python on the road on the way home. and here i am at home.

paid my hsbc bills, reconstructed my colleague’s ancient P2 cuz her hubby wants it back for god knows what. packed merv’s geforce 2 mx and posted a blog entry.

nothing much happening. really.

on the other hand, got my VPN routing sorted out. now we have an australian proxy. 🙂 haven’t tried it with WoW yet though, since it’s maintenance night.

hm.. i owe you guys pictures, right? and i think i owe someone House episodes…

Lady Sylvanas sings

found this WoW easter egg on friday. didn’t finish watching it cuz Fish had already arrived to pick me up for dinner.

i actually have the quest item for this (from questing at Windrunner Spire), but i didn’t turn it in because i started following a levelling guide.

but i won’t turn it in so soon.. not till i workaround this lag.

translation:-

Our enemies are breaking through
Children of the blood
By the light
Failing children of the blood
They are breaking through
O children of the blood
By the light of the sun
Failing children of the blood
They are breaking through
O children of the blood
By the light of the sun
The sun

ps: it might not’ve been herself singing, but who cares. 😛

i fecking hate tmnet

yes. i do. i really do.

first, they throttle p2p. fine. no big deal. i can wait for downloads to finish. even if they take days, or months.

then even after that, quality of service still sucks. i can’t get a decent ping on wow. the lag spikes are frequent and makes the whole experience unbearable. and it’s not just me, many other people are experiencing the same goddamn problem.

so i try explaining this to tmnet’s tech support. Rimal was his name. told him how my wow connections are unstable, and altho it’s not just me, there are still many players who do not have the same problem, of whom many are also streamyx subscribers.

sez he can’t do anything and can’t tell me anything. as far as he is concerned, i have a connection. i tell him it’s not just wow, it’s also other things like downloads and whatnot. we argue for a bit and lastly he tells me to do the speedometer test.

so i did the test a few times and only got 450kbits, average. called them again and told another person this and they were more than willing to open a report ticket.

moral of the story: them support people can’t think out of the box. that’s why they’re forced to work sundays. just get evidence that they’re familiar with and be done with it. leave the technicalities to the tech people who’ll be assigned to your problem.

well, i may have to change that conclusion depending on how this issue develops. 2 working days for them to get back to me.

it’s things like this that make me want to go back to the US.

freaky friday

yes! today was hella spooky!

a colleague got possessed right before our very eyes. it was horrifying. he was just sitting there, before slowly falling into fits of pain. he tried to resist, chanting Quranic verses and prayers, but it only delayed whatever it was.

at first i thought it was medical, and honestly, i thought he was dying. but fortunately things didn’t turn for the worst. the screams of agony, the unearthly laughter. the siamese speech. it felt surreal. took a while for someone powerful to arrive and get whatever it was out. 4 hours of torture…

well, he’s ok now. took the entire next week off. hope he gets better, and gets cured for good. find out who’s doing this to him, and return the favor.

terrible thursday

been posting day-related items lately, but they usually cover the later part of the previous day. like how i’ll start this post by talking about the problems i faced wednesday night.

actually it didn’t really start with problems. it just got problematic when i got home to WoW. 🙁

anyways, the evening started with me thinking i could WoW before picking up my bro from class. but mom had to get some work done at the office, so i had to teman her there. there wasn’t much chance of WoWing after either, cuz we had a yum char session in Bangsar at Starbucks in Bangsar ViIIage. t’was the usual crowd: me, fish, zoe, henry, nd, aly, merv, viv and az.

so we had a good look at henry’s new toy, his sony k800i, and then merv’s new toy, his nokia 6300. then we talked abt all sorts of other things, including a discussion with regards to this. i’ll leave it to az to decide whether he wants to divulge the explicit details, such as the “wow exchange”. 😛

then it was back home at 11.30. tried to WoW, but experienced bad packet drops with streamyx’s 219.* ip range, and couldn’t secure a stable 218.111.* address with constant dsl reconnections. couldn’t even hold a decent guild conversation.

so today i dedicated a lot of my time looking for solutions to get me back on Tichondrius. already in a bad mood carried over from the day before, it didn’t help that i had to encounter the usual malaysian drivers, and get calls from lame users and vendors who can’t remember what they agreed upon last year.

first of, i looked at Tor, an anonymous network of routes of sorts. basically any traffic you connect via Tor goes through a series of random jumps on the internet (called a circuit) and ends up at some other end of it to connect to your target destination. doesn’t really help my problem, so it’s a no go. but i have the daemon up and running, so if anyone who can access my VPN can try it out on port 9100. it acts like a socks server btw.

then i just looked at one portion of the Tor package, which is the socks part. maybe i can find myself some open proxy using 218.111.*, or maybe a proxy in a neighboring country. couple it together with a transparent proxy like FreeCap, i can then connect to WoW via that proxy. problem with this is i need an open proxy somewhere. and it’s very insecure. but it’s still viable, assuming streamyx’s routing problem is only international.

another interesting solution, which some LYN-forumers have done, is to route traffic via VPN to a location not affected by traffic shaping. there are existing VPN services that do this, such as Sweden’s Relakks, some local people have taken it a step further by setting up their own servers in Europe or wherever and charging for VPN services.

their main goal for doing this however, is to circumvent streamyx’s bittorrent throttling (with applaudable success). so far their setups aren’t really geared to doing anything else. one interesting thing to note is, they’re using OpenVPN, which is what i’m using for our Hamachi-gaming alternative. i think i can easily create such a service on my own, and possibly add a lot more function to it.

maybe if the guys are interested, we can just share a private server for everything. have it hosted locally on tmnet’s non-throttled routes for fast vpn-gaming, and at the same time use the bandwidth for p2p. so guys, let me know if interested. otherwise, i might make it into some chump change business plan.

OR, if the problem continues long enough, i’ll ship a small server to my sister in Sydney and route all my WoW traffic through there. 😛

OR, i could just wait. maybe TMnet isn’t as hopeless as most people think. fortunately i still haven’t watched yesterday’s episodes. and now i also have House and My Name Is Earl to watch.

wow wednesday?

i wish.

last night i spent a lot of time… sleeping! went straight to bed after maghrib, close to 8pm. wouldn’t say i slept very well, but at least it cured my sleep deprivation somewhat. gotta be thankful for WoW maintenance night.

i did try to put in some time into it, but the lag was just horrible. didn’t seem to be a streamyx issue this time. but hopefully i’ll be getting back into it tonight. but that’ll have to be balanced with new episodes of Heroes and Prison Break. there’s still so much ground to cover, but i’m levelling up pretty efficiently. it also helps that i’m a priest; get lots of invites to instances. 🙂 it’s not easy to follow this hunter levelling guide that Faz gave me, so i need to break from it once in a while for other things.

can’t beat this one guildmate though (i’m now in Wad De Kao :D). he was 24 on sunday and now he’s 36. :O and i’m still 27. man, some people have all the time in the world.

undisciplined tuesday

went to bed really late this morning. no thanks to a book, Darren Shan’s Demon Thief. so those close to me knows what happened. 😛 it sucks though. i’ve succumbed. but sometimes a good book is just too hard to put down. at least it’s not because of WoW. but mainly that’s because i had lag spikes last night.

tried again this morning and still had spikes. decided to try what some people do and try and get myself reassigned to another dynamic IP. true enough, now my WoWing is fine. i don’t really know how this works, but TMnet must be really screwy to have splotches of bad IPs here and there. think i’ll start keeping a log.

mad monday

damned malaysian drivers.

no signals. main rempuh masuk. bloody mofos like cicak only.

couldn’t get much work done at the office today. still trying to normalize back to the weekday schedule after a long 4-day weekend. yes, i took leave on Friday, mainly to play WoW all weekend long.

i’m level 27 now. another 43 levels to go. 😛

still, one cannot work too hard too much. read this example. i find myself work in a month-length biorhythm, working super hard for weeks, then slowing down for a breather for the next few. works for me so far. and definitely still much better than the certain select individuals in the office.

ps: fear my multitasking skillz. read a few pages of Darren Shan’s Lord Loss on the way home. 😛