swifter

there are plenty of options for 1 month of housing here, but your internet requirements are not going to be met at any of them, not for what you likely consider a reasonable amount of money.

options available to you:

- standard in-house wifi. i work remotely, 8 hours a day, on my month to month hotels wifi. its fairly awful compared to anything one would be used to in a more 'wired' country, but for ssh/email, its adequate, *usually*. ive had horrific routing, power outages, storm interference, so on, and im never facing less than about 1500-2000ms average lag. plus they have some bizarro border multihoming going on which also creates its own subtle tcp nightmares. 80% of the time its fine for ssh/email/light web browsing. 15% its really bad but no one notices. 5%, im glad i have a sympathetic boss. forget IP phones, online games, so on.

- usb modem / cdma type access. you pay by the meg and its not terribly cheap, plus all the instructions are in thai. and despite claims on the boxes that they are supported under osx, neither of the usb modems i ever bought for my powerbook ever worked right. with a windows laptop, i suspect i would have fared better, but seriously consider disabling flash/images on your browser, its that type of party. also for get IP phones, so on of course.

- buy a 3g iphone here and stack up on the data sim card option, then tether to laptop. did not do this. will be doing it next time i come out i think.

- satellite. set-up fees, equipment deposits make this an unlikely solution for you, plus you gotta deal with returning equipment and the like, which youre not going to want to deal with in the final hours youre in the country.

- cable modem, etc. year long commitment iirc.

bloody public execution on camera = internal house cleaning in the red camp.

"I suspect he was about to become an embarrassment." -Joubert

Not all networks are "switched", which is to say, on some networks you can also view the packets going over the wire to other computers on the local network. Hotels and other shared-wireless environments are notorious for this sort of thing.

That said, you would clearly see that the "conversation" taking place did not have your IP involved if that was the case.

Chances are its innocuous, eg cross-site scripting or hyperlinks on a normal webpage referencing content on third party websites, such as banners, ads, so on.

If you really want to make sure, there is an application called "lsof" aka "list open files", that will take a snapshot of the files in use on your computer and let you know what application is responsible for what network streams. Its a hugely educational tool and if you have even a passing interest in what goes on under the hood of your PC, running it will take you down some interesting roads.

Regarding the comment on how this is BKK not LA and the use of these applications might in some way transcend legal boundaries, although Im certainly not privy to the specifics of constitutional law in BKK, none of the above packages has any use with regards to obfuscating traffic or otherwise manipulating it; they are passive. I can say that using them to intercept data you were not meant to see would almost certainly be patently illegal, eg trying to snatch peoples passwords and so on, but the tools themselves are not illegal, otherwise the kingdom would have made the entire Information Security industry illegal at some point and Im reasonably sure I would have heard about it had that been the case (as would have Oracle/Sun up the road, shortly after they were raided ostensibly).

Can you paste some of the error messages? Or at least the last 3 or 4 that occur on the screen?

Red-shirt leaders demand PM to specify House dissolution date

The red-shirt leaders Tuesday demanded that the prime minister announce a specific day for House dissolution before they will join the government's roadmap for political resolution.

They announced that the prime minister had no authority to set the election date on November 14 as the power belongs to the Election Commission.

They demanded that the government must show its sincerity towards political reconciliation by halting all kinds of intimidation towards the red-shirt protesters.

-- The Nation 2010-05-04

I think we can close this thread until further notice. MYbe I am dumb, but why must there be a house dissolution before the the election.

BBC are reporting that the reds are unconcerned by the date of election, they want to know when the house will be dissolved

this is still in line with their previous demands, so nothings really changed

they want Abhisit to dissolve the house quickly, so that he cannot pass the 2011 budget, and more importantly so he cannot amend the constitution to keep Thaksin and his cronies out and so that he can oversee the military reshuffle to see Anapong retire, and install Thaksin hater General Prayuth who will be the hard man that will bring the Army back on track

the reds know that if Abhisit can achieve these items on his personal road map then the red cause will be all but over bar the shouting

he can dissolve parliament almost when he chooses to

Gordon Brown dissolved the UK parliament on April 6th 2010 and the elections are the day after tomorrow

so a month is feasable and would be good news for Abhisit

get everything passed, in the meantime get the red shirt leaders, their associates and the Phua Thai Mp's charged with terrorism, lesse majeste, treason and murder

get the Phua Thai party dissolved for treason,

Thaksin will be proven to be a murderous, traiterous conspirator

there will be more trials here than there were in Salem

Abhisit will romp home with Korn as deputy in the biggest landslide this country has ever seen

This is the post Ive been waiting for, thank you. Well met sir.

Ahhh yes, English news media. The same English news media who spent 3 straight weeks describing the only paths to stability in Thailand as "the bullet or the ballot", after spending the previous 3 weeks doing everything they could to weave the words "red shirt" and "democracy" into as many news cycles as possible. Whatever keeps viewers attention is fair game, I guess, who cares if it contributes to the collapse of the closest thing to a free government on the entire South East Asian peninsula?

Im starting to think that without an OS upgrade, this is a lost cause. The data you provided is absolutely top notch, and it *should* be enough to get me online, but at this point I dont think this laptop has any idea how to initiate a handshake with this device..

I think I'll head out tomorrow and pick up an installer, Ill post the results of course.

My sincere thanks for the info, of course.

Hello!

I purchased a Kakudos U268 USB wireless modem and SIM card, and got the SIM activated at the shop. Im on a 15" Macbook Pro running 10.4.11.

I was told this was plug & play, eg pop it in and it will phone home and establish a Edge internet connection. Problem is, its not phoning home, and its not self-configuring anything in TCP land.... I plug it in, a little blue LED blinks once every 10 seconds or so, and thats it.

Under Internet Connect, I see a panel for Reference Design Dragonfly Plat (sic) with four fields:

Configuration:

Telephone Number:

Account name:

Password:

However nothing is filled out in any of these and the status is "idle".

No documentation was included with the card, sadly, not even in Thai, and the SIM card documentation dealt exclusively with how to renew my minutes on it.

Im wondering if this would have worked in 10.5.x a bit better (not an option for me)..

Can anyone provide any guidance here?

Isnt the mac address hard coded and unique to the NIC/network card.

That is the theory, but in Windows the MAC address is also held in the SW (memory?)

and can be changed.

Useful if your ISP checks the MAC address and you want to use a different computer, or change the network card.

At the risk of over complicating the discussion, although you can change the MAC address on the OS layer, and present that MAC over the network, software running on your computer can query the card directly to retrieve the hard-coded MAC address. Online-poker software and other borderline-spyware employs this tactic, for example.

The MAC address is hard coded into a chip on the network card. In addition to being a unique identifier, the first series of numbers are manufacturer specific.

However...

MAC addresses can be "spoofed", and if your operating system is running a virtual bridge device or a virtual operating system (with virtual network devices), those MAC addresses are arbitrarily assigned by the operating system, not retrieved from any physical chipset.

Regarding NAS devices, the same rules apply. The storage units physical network interface provides the MAC address, at least with copper lines.. although Ive seen NAS solutions which had virtual NICs which had OS-generated MAC addresses.

I'm curious why you would want to import orchids to the U.S., when it's the state flower of Hawaii?

You can order them to be delivered to any part of the U.S.

the orchids i saw at chatuchak market were really lovely. 100 times out of 100 id rather select my plants first-hand, even if it costs a bit more. plus id rather support thai businesses where possible.

also, taking back an armful of orchids for my parents from thailand has a lot more sentimental power than ordering from the internet of course.

You can't bring orchid plants into the USA. The only exception is seedlings that are still in a sealed agar jar and even they might get confiscated by ag inspectors if they don't trust the sterility of the jar. Enjoy the flowers while you are here, then give them to a friend when you leave.

so sad! my thanks for the info, regardless

Hello! Can anyone provide any details regarding the process of taking orchids home from Thailand? Im flying into the US and Im wondering what the limits are, do I need to pay some sort of import/export tax, do I need receipts, so on...

Thanks!

I think a day trip to KL is exactly what the doctor ordered

Many thanks to both of you, these responses were exactly what I needed to know.

Hello, I am in Bangkok from the US on a 90 day visa, however it runs out at the end of April and I have some business here that requires I stay until the third week of May or so.

My question is; will I somehow be prevented from leaving if I show up at the airport in the end of May with a visa whose exit date expired 3 weeks ago? Will there be problems on the American side?

My schedule really doesnt allow a lot of time for a "visa run" so Im just trying to get a thorough understanding of what risks Im taking here; is it on the level of having to pay a small fine or am I toying with something far more substantial in terms of penalties/repercussions? If I avoid any situations which require me showing my passport to say, the police, will anyone really care?

Obviously Im not very world-wise when it comes to such matters and I hope no admins think Im advocating a criminal act by letting my visa expire, Im really just clueless in terms of how severe an over-site it is and what the worst cases scenarios are...

Any and all advise is greatly appreciated!