Finally submitted my income tax via eFiling, got into some trouble but thanks to the guy answering my call at LHDN toll free i finally get it done.

Before we begin I would like to tell you that the FASTEST way to do this is -- fill up your paper form and goto a LHDN office and they will do everything for you. *very good service, deserve a praise here*

If you want to try yourself, checkout my build order and strategy below:

the eFiling build order for newbie

1. visit your nearest LHDN office and get your slip pendaftaran. Just bring IC (no need No. Rujukan Cukai) and ask the staff there for a slip pendaftaran, done in 1 minute.

2. go home. download the latest Acrobat Reader (min 7.05 needed. 7.07 available now, 20MB)

3. use Internet Explorer, visit https://e.hasil.org.my and click the "Daftar" image in step 3 to get your digicert done.

4. click "Muat Turun" to install (select Run) the e-form.

just click the Run

5. After installing, find the shortcut at Start Menu and launch it.

6. Fill up your form all the way to Page 6, then you will see the Tandatangan Dan Hantar button. You can save the form and edit until you are happy with it before submitting, so take your time.

the magic button. to submit your e-form, click on it and WAIT

7. A new IE window opened and bring you to the Akuan page. Click the "Setuju", select your name, and enter your Digicert password you assigned just now.

i got this "dcSignX Run time error 5" when submitting, SZSC! so i called the hotline and got it fixed -- say this is common problem people faced. If you have this error, goto Control Panel -> Regional & Language and make sure you selected English (United States) in both Regional Options and Advance page. They really need an FAQ page with all the common problems. 

8. If you do not have the setting issue, you should come to this page by now. Which means, you are done!! You can print it out , or save it, or ignore it =)

ok, make sure the status says "Berjaya"!!

That's all. I am very happy this year with eFilling because all the amounts in the form are calculated automatically, no need a calculator no more. Well done LHDN.

Have fun doing eFiling! You have till end of the month to do it. Remember to adjust adjust your redemption until the payable amount is chun chun zero or negative before you submit  ;)

ARGH!! My torrent downloading speed still suffer at not more than 10kbps... and here's what i dug out.

Those who having problem downloading your favourite HK Drama series, JAV, Anime, 24 S5 epsd 13.. etc, lets hold our hand together and pray that by tomorrow the suffer will be over.

Those who are surfing happily, ... pray with me too.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

ANNOUNCEMENT

TMNET TEMPORARY SERVICE DISRUPTION DUE TO INTERNATIONAL LINK OUTAGE

TM Net Sdn Bhd would like to inform its customers that its Internet service is currently experiencing a slight drop in performance caused by several outages due to service degradation at some of its international links to China, Taiwan and the United States. This is due to the APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) submarine cable fault between Shantou, China and the South China Sea, near Philippines that occurred at 11.30 p.m. on 12th March 2006.

The international providers are carrying out rectification works in stages and the restoration exercise is expected to be completed by Friday, 17 March 2006. Meanwhile, the company would like to inform its customers that this had caused major downtimes on several TM Net international transit and peering links, mainly to the said countries.

As a result, TM Net is currently running slightly short on international capacity due to the problem. Therefore, some Internet users in Malaysia and other parts of Asia may be experiencing some delay when assessing content and websites hosted in Taiwan and China.

TM Net has taken immediate action to divert some traffic through other back-up links in Taiwan and China to reduce the traffic congestion and is currently working closely with the cable restoration team for the cable failure that has occurred.

We will be making an announcement as soon as services have resumed.

TM Net Sdn Bhd apologizes for any inconvenience caused but at the same time we would like to assure you that what we are doing is necessary in order to restore the service as soon as possible.

Customers can call the 24-hour TM Net Customer Interaction Centre at 1-300-88-9515 or 1-300-88-1515 from 8:00 a.m. till midnight or email at custcare@tm.net.my for further enquiries about the service.

Found a few very good site on CSS, Check out MaxDesign.com.au at http://www.maxdesign.com.au

See how to create a nice page without TABLE, step by step at

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/wentworth/index.htm

Articles at A-List-Apart

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ 

so many things to read, so little time... :) 

A major drawback to switching mobile service providers is that, at present, customers need to change their mobile telephone numbers if they change service providers. Each of the mobile service providers in Malaysia is assigned a designated network code - 013/019 for Celcom, 016 for Digi and 012/017 for Maxis. Mobile subscribers are uniquely identified by the first 3 digits of the network code (01X-zzzzzzz) of their mobile phone
number.

The recent introduction of the common prefix 014 for mobile operators requires use of the 4th digit to identify the current service provider therefore this prefix has less significance than prefix mobile prefixes. These numbers will also be portable.

Any mobile subscriber who wishes to migrate to another service provider network will have no choice but to change their mobile phone number. MNP ensures that mobile phone customers can keep their current mobile number, when switching from one mobile service provider to another.

Be kiasu !! Keep an eye on Newspaper for the announcement, and faster go and register your lucky numbers :))

Pay attention to your GMAIL (www.gmail.com), or Start.com (www.start.com), notice the different between these sites and other conventional websites you are running? Notice how the page got updated dynamically without refreshing or reloading? You probably think that is normal, but let me tell you -- they are not normal -- they are using a special technique called AJAX.

AJAX -- short for "Advanced Javascripting and XML" or "Asynchronous JavaScripting and XML" -- not really new stuff, but it is something new to chimou; and if it is new to chimou, it is new to most people out there too (noob).

Read on if you want to learn more. otherwise checkout www.sex.com for less boring stuff.

AJAX is a technique gotten very HOT recently, being widely used in web applications. They make your website looks more like an application rather than web pages. For example, when you click on a link in a webpage, normally another page loads up. If the site is using AJAX technique, it does not need to reload, and new contents are updated "live" into the page. Make sure try out www.live.com, it is fantastic!

What happen in the background is, when you clicked the action link, your Firefox or IE silently send back some information (mostly encoded in XML format) to the webserver, and the webserver process it, and return with informations (in whichever formats you desired), and you web browser will update the displaying page accordingly using scripts (vb or javascript).

Here's a page i found to help me get started with AJAX.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/09/xml-http-request.html

----------

The hidden iframe

Before i heard about AJAX, there was another method which is similar to AJAX but "older" way of doing things. If you are experienced with form submission, HTML allows submitting form to another window by setting the form target. By creating a hidden iframe you can submit the form into this hidden frame, do the processing, and use javascript in the return page to update your calling page, and achieve the same result.

The technique was called "Remote Scripting" (see this).

----------

Sample sites

Checkout the following sites, and see how they utilize AJAX to create very smooth dynamic pages.

A dynamic help/documentation page
http://www.backbase.com/demos/explorer/

Javascript for Rich applications (demo)
http://www.openrico.org/rico/demos.page

Dynamic RSS reader
http://www.backbase.com/demos/RSS/

Microsoft whishes every internet users to start here
http://www.start.com

Google Suggest - dynamically suggest words as you type
http://labs.google.com/suggest/

AJAX is the direction of future web applications. If you want to cari makan in this industry, learn it before you become obsolete. ;)

Awhile ago I saw in someone put up a a very cool photo album at his site. He have all this little markers on the map of places he took the pic, and you clicking on them bring you to his photo album. Take a look at more applications of Google Map API.

The map is actually run by Google, all you need is some Javascript knowledge and you can put a map like this in your website too.

To add a map to your site, first you need to visit Google Maps to get an API Key for your site. The Key is site-dependent, www.abc.com is one key, www.abcd.com should use another key.

http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

Once you gotten the API Key, google gives you a sample code. Quickly save this into a file, lets call it gmap.html, and upload it to your website. Then, just launch it (for example, http://www.abc.com/gmap.html)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <script src=http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=YOUR_KEY type="text/javascript"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="map" style="width: 500px; height: 400px"></div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    //<![CDATA[
   
    var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
    map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
    map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-122.1419, 37.4419), 4);
   
    //]]>
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Google has an official blog about their Map API at http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/

Here's my version of the code, auto-centered to Malaysia ;)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml">
  <head>
 <style type="text/css">
 v:* {
   behavior:url(#default#VML);
 }
 </style>
    <script src=http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=YOUR_KEY type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    //<![CDATA[
 function init()
 {
  var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
  map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
  map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
  map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(102,4), 10);

  GEvent.addListener(map, 'moveend', function() {
    var center = map.getCenterLatLng();
    var latLngStr = '(' + center.y + ', ' + center.x + ')';
    document.getElementById("message").innerHTML = latLngStr;
  });

  GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, position) {
   map.openInfoWindow(position,
     document.createTextNode('This is your dad at '+position.x+','+position.y));

  });
 }
    //]]>
    </script>
  </head>
  <body onload="init()">
    <div id="map" style="width: 800px; height: 600px"></div>
    <div id="message"></div>

  </body>
</html>

Have a look-see at the statistics of textmalaysia.com, and heh i baru realize there is a MSIE 7.0 out there already :D Found a few sites about IE7 and found out its still under BETA. The new IE7 is currently in beta2 and it can be downloaded from here (11.2MB).

 

The toolbar has been simplified to only back and forward buttons are visible by default. A search is included into the toolbar too. IE7 also added support for tabbed browsing (Avant can go to hell soon!), built in RSS reader, etc. It also included some security features for noob non-IT-savvy-surfers, such as Phishing detection.

 

Noticed the abnormal placement for menubar... menu is no longer at top of window but now placed under each browsing tab. some new Usability findings?? You will also get IE7 in Windows Vista (the next generation of Windows OS).

Google Picasa is a wonderful program to manage photos in your harddisk. It will crawl your whole drive and generate thumnail view of every single images found in your HDD... some even long forgotten.

There are some neat tools included too. You can create slideshow, video, and fine tune your images (simple image filters and color corrections), resize and email pictures, and also burning them into CD/DVD (it will mark which files are being backed-up and wont repeat next time).

Get PICASA2 from http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html