Archive for October, 2008

One Week of IM2 Broom Use: A Quick Impressions

28/10/2008 at 06:16 · Filed under internet ·Tagged , , ,

For a week I have been connected to Internet from home, full time, thanks to IM2 Broom service from IndosatM2. Some quick comments:

  1. Operating system support: IndosatM2 site said the service support Windows (2000/XP/Vista), MacOS X and Linux. However, the ease of use for each operating systems varies. For example, I found that in Fedora 9 it is easy to add new 3G connection via the NetworkManager. Right-click the NetworkManager icon in the notification area, click Edit connections, and add a new mobile broadband connection. However, the settings are forgotten after hibernation. It seems this can be worked around by logging out then logging in again. Another workaround is to delete the connection setting and recreate it. It seems to be a bug in NetworkManager.

    For Mac OS X I use the ZTE MF622 modem supplied by Indosat. There is a CD bundled which contains Mobile broadband manager and software driver. The software installed without problems. To configure the connection you have to add new settings (username, password, telephone number). It runs and connects successfully. So far so good. Then it turned out that you cannot save the settings and have to add it again and again for new connections. Gah.

    I don’t have a Windows machine so I cannot find out how it goes.

  2. Speed: It is fine in the morning and in the day. It sucks at the evening. It seems most users connect to the Internet at night (and online at work at other times). It is certainly not quick enough for audio streaming, not to mention video. For browsing and e-mailing it is just fine though.
  3. Usage: I can monitor the how much data I am gobbling up by logging to the IndosatM2 site. So far I have used up 928 MB, nearly half of the quota for one week. It seems 2GB will not be enough for my usage pattern. It must be noted that I am synchronised my mail data via IMAP (total 265 MB) for this week. But it is still too much.

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No Bahasa Indonesia dictionary for the new OpenOffice.org 3.0

27/10/2008 at 11:36 · Filed under software ·Tagged ,

Several days ago a colleague popped out of Google Talk window.

“The new OpenOffice.org doesn’t have Indonesian language dictionary, does it?”
“It doesn’t?” I answered, rather smugly. I have installed a copy of OpenOffice.org 3.0 at the office, but hadn’t touched it very much yet. But I was sure the free office suite still had it. Indonesian dictionary was one of the rare things that more popular and much pirated Microsoft Office lacks, but OpenOffice.org has.
“I am at home. I have not access to a machine with the new OpenOffice.org right now. Let me see it tomorrow,” I said.

To my dismay, my colleague was right. The old New Dictionary Wizard is gone. After some fiddling I gave up, the turned to Google to find some information. I found the OpenOffice.org wiki, and began to browse.

It turned out that dictionaries as we know it before in 2.x versions are now integrated into extensions mechanism in the new 3.0 series. Lots of extensions available at OpenOffice.org extensions page, some of them are dictionaries. But there isn’t Indonesian dictionary extension. Bummer.

It seems we have to wait some brave souls to repackage the old Indonesian dictionary into the new extension format. Meanwhile, if you need OpenOffice.org spellchecking capability for Bahasa Indonesia badly, you should stick to the 2.4 version.

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Indonesia Blogday celebration

25/10/2008 at 08:15 · Filed under Uncategorized

I didn’t really eager to go, but I went there anyway. Met some old faces like Enda and Hasan. I also found a lot of Macbooks. Most of them were the new models, too. It was curious. I wonder how prevalent Macs among the Indonesian bloggers are.

Other than that, it was just the usual feast. Eating, laughing, singing …

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Cheap, unlimited Internet connection

20/10/2008 at 20:00 · Filed under Uncategorized

It sounds to be good to be true. Perhaps it is. But yesterday I found that one of Indonesian cellular carrier, Indosat (through one of its subsidiary, IndosatM2), now offer unlimited, prepaid data plan. For only Rp 150,000 (less than US$ 15) a month, you can connect to the Internet as long as you want.

The caveat? The speed is capped at 256 kbps, which is much lower than theoretical maximum speed of HSDPA network. And if you have consumed more than 2 GB data, you are throttled down to 64 kbps max. Sounds a waste of a good 3G modem, but it is much, much better than the old dial-up connection.

It happens that one of my superior has unused ZTE 3G modem with IndosatM2 plan. I also have a spare 3G Huawei modem. He has already proposed to exchange the modems. The ZTE modem is not detected by his Asus EeePC, but the Huawei modem is well supported. I was reluctant, but now after I learned of the Indosat data plan I was intrigued. I found that the ZTE modem supported Macs (yay). But Fedora support is not very good (boo). Anyway, it turns out that my computers are much better supported by the ZTE modem than the Huawei one. So I am bringing the ZTE modem and the Indosat SIM card home, to be exchanged with my own modem later.

So I am now happily browsing the web, downloading e-mails, twittering, and chatting. No video or music streaming (it is too slow for that…), but I am not that demanding Internet user. This is very fine for me.

A good birthday present, I guess. Have I told you I turned 31 yesterday?

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