F1 2010 broadcast in Malaysia

Despite having our own 1Malaysia Lotus F1 team on the grid this year and having Petronas keep throwing money on F1 sponsorship, NTV7 has failed again on bringing live telecast for most of the races.

Last year, it only managed to broadcast 5 races live. This year, it will broadcast only 7 races live out of 19 races in total.

Ntv7 was announced yesterday as the official host broadcaster of the Petronas Malaysian F1 Grand Prix at the Sepang Circuit from April 2-4.

It will air seven races ‘live’ this year – the GPs in Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, China, Canada, Japan and South Korea.

Twelve other races – in Bahrain, Singapore, Spain, Monaco, Turkey, Europe, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy and Abu Dhabi – will be delayed telecasts.

Link: Berita Harian News

When the broadcast rights is given to 8TV in2006, all the races are aired live.

With so much of involvement in F1 over these years, with millions of ringgit wasted on F1, we will be catching the first qualifying for the 2010 season in Abu Dhabi tonight at 11pm on NTV7 with a delay 4 hours of original schedule time of 7pm.

Way to go Malaysia! Go go 1Malaysia!

Alternatives

What you can do to stay ‘live’?

You may use the F1’s live timing application online to view the official live timing sheet.

Visually, you may try to use online streaming services like TVUPlayer, PPStream, or other direct streaming links. (This requires a bit of digging in search engine though)

If you are hooked on satellite service like Astro, you may tune in to Star Sports if you don’t mind the very bad commentary.

Join the discussion of the F1 2010 season in Lowyat.net forum

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Job vacancy at Motorola: Senior System Engineer

Responsibilities:

* Maintain and administer NPI CIM Applications
* Develop and coordinate with local and global team on system enhancement project
* Able to provide off-office hour support and attend night conference call

Requirements:

* Degree in Information Technology, Software Engineering or Computer Science
* Minimum 2 years working with hands-on experience on ASP and .NET web application development.
* Good knowledge in MS SQL and Oracle PL/SQL development
* Knowledge on Shop Floor Control & Oracle ERP modules (OM, WIP and BOM) will be added advantage.
* Applicants must be willing to work in Bayan Lepas, Penang.

Jobstreet’s link

I’m helping on behalf of the company to scout for new blood. If you are interested with the position above, you may email me or leave your contact here, I will provide you with more details. Cheers~

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Belkin N Wireless Router F5D8236-4 review

Belkin Wirelss N Router (F5D8236-4)

I bought this wireless router back on January 2010 when I went down to Kuala Lumpur for sightseeing. It was priced competitively and moreover, it is priced very attractively at Sri Computer Low Yat Plaza (about 40 ringgit off market price).

Belkin Wireless-G Router (F5D7230-4)

I did not do much study on it before buying. It’s just pure cheap deal that made me buying it.

Previously, I’m a very happy and content Belkin wireless G router (F5D7230-4). It has been serving me very well for more than 2 years without any much problems. That’s the major reason I trusted Belkin and buying their product without looking at reviews first this time round.

Additionally, I bought one Belkin N+ wireless USB adapter too so that to match up with the router’s rated speed at 300mbps. The reason I’m buying N+ adapter and not N is simply because the vendor do not have it in stock and would not mind giving some discount on the N+ model.

It does not talk ‘Torrent’

Things are good at first.

At start, I removed my faithful Belkin Wireless G router and hook up with the new one. I removed the wirelss G adapter on one of my PCs and plugged in the N+ adapter. The PC mainly runs torrent client.

Things look good in the first 2 days. (My equipments run 24×7) Torrents run fine with no noticeable drop in speed compared to when using the older wireless G router. The PC managed to obtain about 104mbps with good signal quality with being about 20 feet away from the router pushing the transfer rate of 6MB/sec or about 50Mb/s.

At the end of second day, the Internet light on the router turned off, the modem light turns amber. The router hangs. At times, I can’t even access its router configuration page through LAN connected PC. Surprisingly I can access it through Wifi-connected PC but there isn’t much that one can possibly do to solve the hang issue.

The router will only hangs when one runs torrent client with it even with all care taken (port forwarding and such). One will see there are a lot of UDP flood attack warning in the router’s firewall log. The UDP traffic are from the torrent client.

Finding solution

After extensive time spending on finding the solution in the Internet, from trying to reset the whole router to upgrading to latest official firmware and getting a beta firmware from the official distributor in Malaysia, I gave up.

Read more

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Road trip to Hat Yai, Thailand

Driving on the street of Hat Yai

It has been slightly more than 10 years since I last visited Thailand.

It was really an eye opening experience being able to tag along Wendy and her friends to Hat Yai last month. And of course many thanks to Ah Sea for being our driver! Without her we would be literally blinded in the alien land up north.

It took us about 5 hours ride from Penang as we decided to go through the not-so-hectic Padang Besar (Perlis) check point rather than the usual Bukit Kayu Hitam (Kedah) entry point. Arriving there, we first checked in to the drive-in hotel and later on went out for lunch.

The name of the hotel is Leelawadee Resort (thanks to Wendy for remembering!) I can’t really recall what is the name of this hotel but and it’s reasonable cheap! It only costs us about 350 baths per night!

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PTPTN Interest Rate Reduction: Have you started paying?

Have you started paying back your loan? As a matter of fact I have paid all of mine but…. that’s certainly almost not the main point of this post.

The main point is to provide a quick chronicled run through on PTPTN’s interest rate (aka Kos pentadbiran).

On the interest rates

Quoted from PTPTN FAQ

Kos pentadbiran 4% setahun dikenakan bagi tarikh bayaran balik pembiayaan sehingga 31 Disember 2003. Mulai 1 Januari 2004 kos pentadbiran diturunkan kepada 3% setahun atas baki berkurangan.

From 1st January 2004 onwards, the rate has been then revised to 3%. It was 4%.

The Star 14 August 2008 - PTPTN rate 1% (Click to view entire article)

On 14 August 2008, the government announced the reduction of interest rate from the current 3% to just 1% (see news article above). And the effective date was backdated to June 1 2008. But, the loan holders would need to sign a new contract to enjoy the new rate. Also to note that, all interest charged would not be revised.

On Feb 2009. I called to PTPTN to clear the air a bit on why we are still not getting the new agreement.

We are supposed to receive a new agreement on the rate reduction on Jan 2009 (which has already passed few months). And, failing to return the agreement in it’s specified time frame given would result in keeping the 3% rate on the loan instead of the new 1%. No one receives any agreement so far as far as I concern.

However, the lady told me that the delivery of agreement has been postponed to March 2009 and agreements will be sent out in batches.

Here’s a article from Malaysiakini.com (Dated 13 August 2008) saying that we must sign the new contract to enjoy the new rate.

“Peminjam perlu menjawab surat tawaran itu sama ada setuju atau tidak, ini perlu kerana ia melibatkan perjanjian, mereka (peminjam) tidak boleh anggap bila kita umum ia akan berubah kerana ini ada perjanjian.

Source: Malaysia Kini

It’s very confusing but let me try to get it explained in plain English.

The effective date is back dated on 1st June 2008 would sound real good to all the loan holders but here’s the catch. It is only good for the new comers who sign up after 1 June 2008. For the existing loan holders? You gotta wait to sign the new agreement on agreeing to the new rate.

Please tell me that you would possibly not like to get your interest rate reduced from 3% to 1%? You simply won’t. How on earth you like to pay more interest? Can’t they just send out a notification or such? Due to the inefficiency of their department, our new agreements have not been sent out on time.

Until today (It’s Feb 2010 already), I have NOT receive any letter from PTPTN regarding the new rate or whatsoever. I gave up calling them. For this, I may conclude that.

My loan on PTPTN did NOT enjoy the immediate 1% interest rate effective on 1st June 2008 though. I’m continuing being charged at 3%  for god-don’t-know-how long.

I’m not sure if you are enjoying the new rate, cause, apparently, I’m not.

It’s not as straight forward as you think on how to calculate the interest rate. Read this article and you will know how.

And, just in case you are curious about how my statement look like, here are they. You may help me to calculate and tell me if I’m actually getting 1% rate.

I shall conclude this blog post with “Make sure you keep track of your loan well!”

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