Pos Malaysia, Free money and a lot of hot air

If you think this is gonna be a rant, you're right. Partially. Last weekend wifey, baby and me went off to the Jalan Besar Seri Kembangan Post Office to see if we could collect out RM625 (about USD191) that the Government was giving out as a rebate to deal with the rise of fuel prices. We've been hearing a lot of stories of how to actually get the RM625. Turns out, it was pretty painless. You go in and ask for a form to claim the rebate, which turns out to be a money-order ish kinda form with spaces for your name, MyKad number (Identification Card) and your vehicle number rubber stamped on it. Fill that out, take a number, wait till yer turn and hand that over to the person behind the counter. He/she will then take your thumb print (huh? yeah, we still do thumb prints here) put that on the form, hand you a scrap of tissue paper to clean yer thumb and hand you the money. Since dad's car is under my name, I ended up with RM1250. Dad refused to take it when I gave it to him so its mine. Wah..thats what in Malay we call 'Durian Runtuh' (windfall). Until I got into my car and switched on the air conditioning.

Hot air. Tweaked every imaginable setting and all I got was hot air. Called up some buddies to find out why and I got a variety of answers. The figures I was getting in terms of replacing cooling coils and compressors were really frightening. At last, the ever reliable Mr Kee sent me an sms with the contact details of a very reliable Air Con guy:

HENG WA AIR-COND SERVICE CENTRE
3003, Jalan Tun Razak,
50400 KL
Tel : 019 2136170 / 03 26980254

Turns out, the problem was a busted cooling coil and damaged compressor.Oh, the Air con relay was bust too. Pics below. The damage? RM645! So much for the extra cash. Well at least he finished the car in one day. I pity the Mercedes Benz Elegance owner that had his car over there. To change one damaged cooling coil, the entire dash got removed. Back seat littered with the steering wheel, buttons and all kinds of stuff. Sucks to be you dood. :P

Oh yeah, sucky Camera phone pics warning.

The dead Coil



Compressor from Hell. Replacement was a second hand one. New would have cost upwards RM1K. yikes!

Zipidee doo dah

Ever been in a situation where you've got a zip file and you can't open it cos the idiot admin didn't grant you access to install anything on the lousy outdated machine you're using in the office? Or maybe its a situation where you got a rar or a tar file and have no blinking idea what to do with it. Also, zip files have them nasty viruses in them so you're afraid of opening them at the first place. Well, the fretting is over. Wobzip hath arrived!



I found this while going through some del.icio.us links and was wondering why someone had not thought about this idea earlier.(Maybe there are others but I haven't looked) So on to brass tacks. Simply put, wobzip asks for an upload of any zip, tar, rar file ( up to 15 formats supported: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZHCHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS), un-zips (tars, rars etc) and displays the content for you to download:



1. Is where you upload files from yer hard disk.
2. Is what you press after you choose the zip file..duh

Results look like whats in the box. Be reminded that the limit for files that you upload is 100MB. There is also the option to download what you unzipped back as a zip and an option to delete what you just unzipped. Ok so far? Good. It gets better. Because not only can you password protect your files but you also have the option to input a download link into wobzip and wobzip will unzip it for you. Boom! Here's how it looks like (kinda):



Now, the obvious benefit of using something like this is that its cross platform, there's no need to install anything, no need for registrations and its safe. How do you ask its safe? Well, there's the fact that every file uploaded gets scanned for viruses. The technology powering the anti virus comes from Bitdefender. Speaking of what powers wobzip, the Uncompression Software is made possible by p7zip.

However its not all that complete actually. wobzip is in testing and development and only uncompression is available. The site lists a couple of known bugs:

1. Uploader may cause corrupted files.
2. There are reports that .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 file extension do not work

So yer mileage may vary. Got a better solution or have an opinion about this? Leave me a comment and I'll be more than happy to discuss (or Disqus) it with you.

Sir-Plurk-a-lot

#3 top Plurker in Malaysia. Woot!



I need to work on my Karma..sigh.

Changes, Changes

Yeah, its been a while hasn't it? I've been putting in some little hacks into the blog to make your 'experience' better. Obviously, I had to sort out the comments disappearing issue. I want to post a huge big shout out to the guys at Disqus, Daniel and Jason, Thank you so much for fixing my template! erm...ok. I've also put in show/hide thing into the sidebar and I've to thank Annie from Blog U for showing me how to go about doing a fix like that.

Also, I've created a Label Cloud and I have phydeaux3 to thank for the very helpful instructions that eventually helped me do a nice Tag cloud. I must admit I kinda screwed up the RGB color codes while doing the cloud so I had to go back to fix it. Which is not bad since I'm not a Template-Code-Monkey. I've also listed my blog at the BlogMalaysia Blogger directory (easier for the Government to come a calling if I ever post anything seditious!) If you're Malaysian and have a blog, please get yer tushes over there and get yer blog listed there now! Also, I have made a few new acquitances in the BlogMalaysia Forum.

So, with work crushing me in all directions, hopefully I can get to write more often. Currently I'm playing around with Plurk. If you wanna get on it, click here to sign up.

Laters.