Colin Charles Agenda

The one telco that I have never had the pleasure of dealing with yet, is DiGi. I’ve heard good things about them, and was slowly tiring of my Maxis subscription (a SIM card that I’ve held for over eight years, running mostly idle when I wasn’t living in the country).

So on Saturday, at about 8pm, I walked into the DiGi store in Pavilion and made the switch. I listed what was important to me:

• My credit limit – I have a pretty high one, because I travel a lot
• A reliable network, for both voice and data
• Automatic international roaming turned on immediately
• Guaranteed free calls to supplementary lines (and vice versa)
• Never cutting my line off, if the credit limit is reached — I am after all a direct debit customer

DiGi confirmed this was all possible. I handed them my IC, and credit card (for direct debit purposes), and spent less than ten minutes at the store. The customer service rep, and the sales person were all very professional. There was a minor scare about needing a passport for international roaming, but the customer rep waived that requirement. I was told this process can take anywhere up to five days. They handed over my SIM card for safe-keeping.

Hardly thinking about it, I had an enjoyable Sunday, till I got the SMS that told me my switch is complete! What, that was about 24-hours turnaround, amazing, no?

Maxis said:

We acknowledge your request to move. Thank you for being with Maxis and we hope to serve you again in the future. For further queries, please call 1800 821 123

DiGi said:

Your line is about to be activated on the DiGi network. Please replace your SIM card with your new DiGi SIM card as soon as your current line stops working.

Being naturally impatient, I just switched SIM cards even before my current line stopped working. Upon powering up my phone, it said “DiGi” gloriously – no more “MY MAXIS”.

I made a quick call to ensure I had everything setup accurately. I did. My credit limit too was reasonable. After a flurry of service settings, everything on my phone just worked. I was on their EDGE network “diginet”, and I could make calls with no issue. I had no service interruption.

So, what do I get over at DiGi that I didn’t at Maxis?

• For the same commitment of RM250/month, I get unlimited amounts of calls to any network, or local calls in Malaysia, including SMS messages, till it reaches RM600, and after that, I will pay 10 sen/minute or 10 sen/SMS.
• RM66/month, unlimited EDGE. I was paying RM99/month for “unlimited” Mobile Broadband, at usually HSDPA speeds (3.5G). Note that there are caps, in theory, it was just never imposed on me.
• RM30/month supplementary lines get unlimited calls and SMS to the principal line. With Maxis, this was capped at 15 hours (about half an hour per day!), with 1,500 SMS messages.
• Great customer service – be it in store, or via the phone. I wish Maxis had an ounce of the customer service DiGi has.

With my limited testing, I can report that from Klang – Cheras, on the Kesas, I had one call drop; the situation was similar from Cheras – Klang on the Federal Highway – the call dropped around Glenmarie. EDGE is nowhere near as fast as 3G or 3.5G – YouTube’s mobile client ended up buffering ever 20 seconds or so, something that was completely smooth on Maxis. At events, sometimes I use Qik to live stream the event – this fails on EDGE. Uploads of between 5-15KB/s is just not enough to sustain video going up into the cloud. Coverage wise, I’m seeing it at all places I’ve been to so far – Klang, PJ, Cheras, Bangsar – so I can only assume they’re doing well in the Klang Valley (where I spend most of my time, no?). Also, video calls don’t work on the network, as its not 3G enabled, yet.

So EDGE on DiGi might be slow… but EDGE on DiGi seems darned reliable. No connection drop outs, just enjoyable working, (albeit slow) Internet. DiGi is rolling out 3G in some areas, and I don’t believe customers who have a mobile plan automatically roam to 3G there, but when time permits, I’ll check it out.

Oh, and I mentioned Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in the title, and never talked about it at all, even. That’s because it just worked. My 012-prefixed number, just works on the DiGi network. No problems, no questions, no service interruptions. So if your current telco provider is giving you the shits, consider moving! The comments I’ve received so far indicate lots of people wanting to move from Maxis to DiGi — a win, as long as they can take on new customers and keep capacity.

Watch out for my next post, probably when I get my bill, to tell you how DiGi performs, overall. Are you a recent switcher? Tell me about it.

Disclosure: I have no interests in either Maxis or DiGi. Though I am contemplating purchasing shares in the company (DiGi) in the near future, because I truly believe that the more modern and demanding Malaysian, will want greater customer service and cheaper prices, and DiGi seems to fill that niche quite well. They seem to be industry shakers in Malaysia (despite the government trying to retard them by not issuing them a 3G license when the other telcos were), while Celcom and Maxis tend to play catch-up.

You know what’s disgusting? I knew that I couldn’t purchase music at the iTunes Store (see A plea to Apple), but yesterday I found out I couldn’t even look at the podcast directory. In fact, no Malaysian using the Malaysian store can. Podcasts are free Apple.

The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the Malaysian Store

And here I was wondering why there aren’t more Malaysian podcasts. Do you listen to a Malaysian podcast? Tell me what it is.

In fact, can anyone tell me if they have access to the AppStore but not the music/podcast store? That means… do Singaporeans get access to podcasts? Music? Thanks.

I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple enough to implement in timeframe
• Pet projects
• Extending tools, creating new tools that support MySQL
• Wider ecosystem that is MySQL – this means I’m looking at you, Drizzle, even

Again, if you have any queries, drop me a line via email, as I’m the Program Administrator again :)

The xkcd comic I’m an idiot has some context to this (no, I wasn’t locked out or anything).

It seems like one can do wonders within the command line in Mac OS X. For example, to mute the volume, you do: osascript -e "set Volume 0". Similarly, to make the volume the loudest, you can do: osascript -e "set Volume 10".

Then you know, in OS X there is also a magic say(1) command. It converts text to audible speech, and you can even specify the voice. Something as simple as say "Hello World" will use the system voice to execute.

One can imagine this being useful. Now, I know there’s another variation (from a little searching) to changing the volume: doing osascript -e "set volume output volume 100" makes the volume as loud as possible. Note that if you do it this way, it ranges from 0-100. The method two paragraphs ago, is 0-10. Weird?

Today I was listening to what is becoming my new favourite radio station, BFM 89.9, and I heard the Marketing Manager for Guinness (well, GAB Sdn Bhd) talking about a range of topics, from the sin tax on alcohol (2nd highest in the world, following Norway!) to what a big deal St. Patrick’s Day in Malaysia is (must be — GAB disgustingly pays bloggers to write about it). If you care to listen, BFM is all modern with the relevant blog/podcast. Two things come to mind.

St. Patrick’s Day Drunk Dial
Check out the St. Patrick’s Day Drunk Dial. Call the number anywhere between March 13 and 23, to win a prize even, for the best entry ;)

Why do I even mention the site? Because my colleague Dups, is one of the guys behind this. Check out his journal entries on this.

Guinness has a stupid website

I won’t link to what I consider silly, but Guinness Malaysia needs to think twice about their website.

One should think its sufficient to enter based on clicking “Yes, I am a non-Muslim aged 21 years and above”, but asking for the I.C. number? The I.C. being the Malaysian Identity Card is not something one should give away lightly. How do you know if the number isn’t cached? Isn’t stolen and used for other devious purposes?

I wonder how many people check out the site and freely give away their I.C. numbers. Probably far too many, that don’t know much about identity theft.

After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking on the feature you most want (and its do-able within 12 weeks or so). As usual, mentors, we have an ideas page up. Mentors, go forth and fill it up.

Students, should also feel free to discuss their ideas, either on the wiki, or via the mailing list. You don’t need to apply yet (in fact, you can’t till we get accepted into the program to begin with!).

Remember, this is the year to Make MySQL Contributor Friendly (MMCF). Check the interview with Masood Mortazavi for more. So much potential for server contributions abound.

If you have any other queries, please don’t hesitate to drop me a comment, or an email at colin@mysql.com. Now, on toward happy hacking!