DP | @ekhoophotography

While Malaysian broadband is lacking in more ways than one can count, there is yet hope. A certain monopolistic company and their terrible service is all most of us have but if you can actually afford it, SDSL is much better considering the guaranteed transfer speeds compared to best-effort. Best effort in boleh-land is probably equivalent of try-lah. You'll probably encounter download speeds as fast as 100kb/second to about 1kb/second. Yes, it's that variable. Come to think of it, Malaysian traffic is similar. I can take anywhere from 15 to 100 minutes to get to work!

There's yet another option - Metro Ethernet. Yes, many cities in Korean and Japan have high speed Ethernet broadband connections while our fancy broadband is still stuck at the mostly same speeds it launched with seven years ago! Paneagle has it's Metro-E in select buildings and areas and if you can afford it, a certain monopoly's broadband becomes dial-up! This is a 5Mbps Metro-E link.

Check-out my simultaneous download of Windows 7 from the MSDN site and yes, I'm still in Malaysia! Here's the info on my IP address:
IP address: 202.169.29.70
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns01.paneagle.com.my.]
ASN Name: PANEAGLE-MY-AP (Paneagle Communications Sdn Bhd, Metro-Ethernet & Internet Access Provider, Malaysia)
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): APNIC

Seven deadly sins or is Seven the perfect Windows yet? Installed it on a gray Monday morning on a Quad-core box. With just a measly 4Gb RAM, it was actually very fast and responsive. The disk is a short-stroked 1TB. Probably go with Vista Ultimate this weekend first and wait for Win 7 SP1 next year which will probably go into a new box with the aptly named Core i7

In case you didn't notice... I've updated the Blog theme slightly. Yes, it's a bit more blue-gray now. Slightly duller perhaps but it's just a start for now. I'll end up tweaking it over the next couple of days. Of course probably the blog will be harder to view with smaller monitors and iPhones. I'm trying to get a plugin for browser detection and adjust accordingly but it doesn't work right yet.

Anyways, I've had my 5D Mark II for two weeks now and loving it! The 21-megapixel results taking some getting used too but they're so buttery smooth and silky in terms of tonality and depth that I can tell instantly the difference between the 5D and my 40D. The bokeh is also so amazing. Anyways, looks like I need another pair of Terabyte disks... looking at 2008, I've shot over 250Gb and that's with 10 and 8 megapixel cameras. 2009, with 21-megapixels and 1080p video...

And of course, the next thing comes the horsepower to push all those pixels. Although I've had a quad-core CPU for a while now, I think RAM is probably the next thing to upgrade which then comes the question : Vista 64-bit or wait for Windows 7. Windows 7 is not too far away but probably too long a wait for me. Shucks. Have to think about the upgrade to CS4 as well since it's 64-bit on the PC now and look at all the RAM...

Well, yesterday I headed down to LY Plaza to my favorite IT retailer for a bunch of parts. I was aiming to wait till end September to get this upgrade but an unexpected disaster happened. Anyways, so, here goes upgrade phase one. Phase two is smaller and is not so obvious. If you noticed I have two Intel Core 2 CPU boxes in the photo. The one below is a Quad-core CPU which will be going into my main workstation but not exactly so soon. Why wait? I've two weddings to process so that takes priority and I need to stabilize the other workstation first. Choice of parts is nothing extraordinary. Just reliable parts to get the job done. After all, tech refresh is every 18 months anyway

Bunch of new parts ready to be assembled!

New architectural marvel or just a simple heat sink?

64-bit Vista install...

Normally, I'd never ever buy a fully built PC for myself (or wife) from anybody - HP, Acer, Apple, Dell, you know. This is probably the second PC I can consider getting other than this HP TouchSmart model that looks quite snazzy. The XPS One doesn't count because it's not available in Malaysia yet. What's not to like? Price is one thing but why can't Dell Malaysia remove all the useless stuff (monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse) because I've got better and sell just the unit? Secondly, it maxes out at 4Gb RAM. Come on, this is 2008, we need 6Gb and 8Gb! Anyways, pricewise, it gets pretty high (I spec'ed mine up to RM4,968 with a 2.5Ghz CPU) so again, I have to pass on it. However, it looks like Dell's waking up a bit and PC manufacturers are begin to make snazzier boxes. The new Latitude E-Series looks good

Lots of flash and demos. Nothing really new though and the real launch is still weeks away...

Interestingly, I found a landscape wallpaper that looks oriental... Click on it to see the larger image!

Vista is proving to be pretty decent on the desktop, at least with build 5472... at least it's much better to look at than Windows XP. I think it's growing on me a bit. Click to see more Vista screenies.


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