Telemarketing. Ugh.

I just got a phone call. It went something like this:

*Dring dring*
Me: “Hello?”
Some guy: “Hi. Mr. Sin. Please?”
Me: “Who are you after?”
The guy, heavy Indian accent: “Mr. Sin.”
Me: “Would that be Mr. Sin Fat maybe?”
The guy, sounding as if he’s reading from a script: “Yes. I. Would. Like. To. Tell. You. About. The. Fantastic. Offers. For. Cell. Phones. That. Cellplus. Has. In. Your. Region?”
Me, thinking that I could not have heard right. Cellplus? I’m in Perth, Australia. “From whom?”
The guy: “Cellplus. Are. You. Satisfied. With. Your. Current. Mobile. Phone. Plan?”
Me: “Where are you from?”
The guy: “Call. Center. In. India.”
Me: “No thanks, I’m not interested.”
The guy: “Okay.”
*Click*

What the hell? I can’t have heard right. Cellplus? I’m in Perth, Australia. With all the hype about call centers in Mauritius, maybe someday I’ll get a spam-call from our beloved island. That’d be the day! I pity the poor sods who work in the call centers, having to do telemarketing and getting abused by irate people at the other end of the line.

A Good Friday

Today I got my ADSL working. At last! My ISP didn't even email me to let me know that it was set up and ready to go. I was just playing with my router and decided to test whether I could connect to the service. And it worked! That was good timing, since I'd just come back from the computer shop with a new network card for my FreeBSD box.

Unfortunately I had to leave for work, so I had to wait until now to play with my increased bandwidth. I'm now redoing the FreeBSD box. I just did a minimal install and initial configuration (15 minutes or so) and I'm now in the process of pulling down all the updated sources with cvsup. This is going MUCH faster than it used to on a dialup connection. Next step is to compile a custom kernel and rebuild the world (userspace). At the end of it I'll have an up to date, optimized, lean and mean minimal install.

I've decided to redo the FreeBSD box because I get nervous when it accumulates cruft. I've been installing so much stuff on it that I eventually used it as a desktop too. I've decided that from now on it will stick to its duties as a server and no more. I'll dual boot with Windows XP on my workstation if I want to play with FreeBSD as a desktop system.

I've also received a letter from my university today. I get nervous when I receive mail from them. A letter from uni usually means that something has gone amok or they want more money out of me. It turns out that it was a letter from the Vice-Chancellor (yeah, right, as if he would personally write to lowly me. It's probably a mass mail). I'm being invited to join the Golden Key Society (yeah, I know, it sounds pompous and all). Aparently I'm in the top 15% in my year, and am considered to be leet enough to grace the society. I wasn't sure about joining - it costs AU$93.50 to join, and I'm graduating at the end of the year anyway. But it may look good in my resumé (I get a certificate when I join). And the careers people have been chanting away to us "Networking, networking, networking" (nothing to do with TCP/IP).

I sound a tad cynical. But I realize that it's a fact that doors can open if you know the right people. So yeah, I'll probably sign up. I'll want to get a job (well, a "proper" one) as soon as I can when I graduate. Anything that helps is a plus.

Brown Nose

Here's a picture of my doggie. Her name is Pepper and she thinks she's the boss in our house.

Home Network

I’m supposed to get ADSL today (512kbps). I’m still waiting for my ISP to email me with the good news. But ISPs being ISPs, I’m not holding my breath. I don’t trust the ADSL router that I have. So I’m going to set up my network like this:



The bastion host will be my FreeBSD box running the ipfw firewall for now, and pf eventually. The bastion host also runs my web server. I plan to run squid proxy on it as a transparent proxy, as well as an Intrusion Detection System.

Design and Coding

I'm sitting in the multimedia lab in uni, cursing Macromedia Flash MX 2004. I just had to force quit it. I was copying over some frames of animation when it locked up, giving me the twirling rainbow of death (I'm on an OS X box). I've just totally lost taste for animation work. I'll get back to it at home.

I've decided that it's sometimes a curse, being in the multimedia field. It's extremely hard to be good at something. It takes dedication and practice. In multimedia, one is exposed to both design (as in how things look) and coding (programming). How does one become a top designer and a top programmer as well? Can one become a better designer than someone who only does design for a living, while at the same time become a better coder than someone who only codes for a living? And we're not even talking about film and animation.

Most people tend to specialise. Most of my peers are probably better at design than at coding. Some even regard coding as a painful exercise. For example, a web designer is not really expected to know how to code. That's the web developer's job. I tend to prefer coding to design. However, I know enough about design that it prevents me from being satisfied with a so-so design. I want my code to be beautiful, and I also want my designs to be beautiful. There aren't enough hours in the day to achieve perfection. I think I should learn to be less anal and enjoy life more.

Virtual Community Site Project

This is the latest mock up of the virtual community web site that I am currently developing. The design has not been finalized yet. But from the 22 different ideas that I produced so far, this is the one that I prefer.



I'm doing the project for Dr. Leisa Armstrong at uni. Initially she was thinking of using existing ColdFusion code from another project that uni did, an eco portal. However, I had a look at the code and I believe that it would be more productive for me to start over in PHP. I have some code from previous projects that I could use. I already have a basic content management system and a bulletin board that I coded in PHP. These could be adapted to the virtual community site.

I am also looking for a hosting solution for the site. I plan to do most of the development work on my development server at home. However, the project will need a permanent home eventually. My upload speed at home will be limited to 128kbps (512 ADSL). The best solution would be to obtain permission from uni to run our own server off the uni's network. We plan to run a chat server for the virtual community. So we need our own server where we have admin access. There's no way the school of communications or the school of computing would give me access to their projects servers to run a chat server! If we do get the permission to run our own server, I am willing to set it up and demonstrate that it is secure. I'll probably use FreeBSD, because that's what I know best.

Temporary Home

After much procrastination, I decided to make my first meaningful post here. I’ve been thinking about setting up my own blog for a while now. I’d rather code it myself - I actually have a lot of php code from previous projects that I can (re)use for what I have in mind. But I don’t really have time to take on a pet project right now, and I’ll be busy for the next few months at least. So I’ll use to blogspot for now.

So what can you expect to see on this blog?

• My rants (I’m sometimes very opinionated. And stubborn.)
• Stuff about technology, computing, coding, design and photography (My interests).
• Images from my projects, past and current.
• Screen grabs from whatever operating system I happen to use (FreeBSD and Windows XP right now).
• Snippets of interesting reading that I encounter.

Stay tuned :)