Contributions to work

With every work at any company, there's always joy and satisfactions. There are even certain achievements or contributions you take pride in. Do you call it passion?

I was attached to Unified Communications in my previous job. Malaysia's leading telecommunications solutions provider, not only Malaysia, but Asia as well. I was hired as a Systems Specialist, specializing in the Missed Call Notification product. It's a value added service that captures missed calls and sends the subscriber a short message. I'm sure most of us have received such short messages ;-).

I'm not trained in telecommunications. I'm a IT fella passionate about Linux and the open source movement. I was excited to have been given the chance. This system's core technology is built on Linux with Oracle as it's main database engine with presence of Windows Server as well as mysql and Veritas backup solution. In short, it is one heck of a huge system. With SS7 and GSM totally new to me, I was in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a float.

Would I allow myself to drown? No way. I buckled up and started working.. very hard.. Soon I was a team lead. My team and I supported MCN throughout Asia. We setup the rack, we pulled the cables, we installed the machines, we installed the operating systems, we made sure the modules were properly implemented and finally, we supported the system.

The months I spent in Vietnam are now memories buried deep down in me. I was sent there as Project Coordinator and Systems Specialist. Having to manage the tight schedule as well as implementing the system posed the greatest challenge I've faced till this date. Communicating with the Vietnamese was the greatest skill I learned. I was there, I closed the project, successfully.

Exposures in other regions had opened my eyes, is had taught me so much in all expects. Communication, Business process, Project management, Customer relations.. etc..

I faced many difficulties on the field. What I learned, I documented and shared(however I can't share these Howtos and Tutorials as it's copyrighted). Where I saw room for improvements, I improved. Let's not sit back and complain, let's pick up that heavy arse of mine and do something about it!

When it came to troubleshooting, we lack the tools. There forth I squeezed every free time I had, in and out of the office. In 2 weeks, I came up with this. I had a vision to continue developing this for the whole Customer Engineering team. I wanted to provide all our guys a "on the field tool" that will speed up troubleshooting by many folds. This vision ended when I left the company. I was about to lead the operations in Indonesia. Was my move to Shell IT a wise one? Soon we will know :-).

Written in Python with the wxPython GUI toolkit.

Decoding the Quintum protocol the simple way.


Who likes to decode / read hex? But that's what the industry uses. Decode hex to ascii (vice versa). Something so valuable even the developers used it.


Now, we are so comfortable sending short messages from our mobiles that we don't even bother about the technology that drives it. Short message peer to peer protocol (SMPP) is one of the protocols available for this. The most widely used even. This is a SMPP decoder, not one you can google. Heck I had one hell of a tough time decoding this, having to study the SMPP protocol in and out.