autonomous_unit

That's the way it is done where I grew up, and it has all the benefits you mention. I was rather confused to find them fitted on the inside here. In fact, on close inspection of the aluminum window and door tracks, I suspect that the builders had to hand-modify the hardware to fit them this way because they were actually manufactured to US standards to go the opposite.

A related problem is that they put the sliding element of the door/window on the outside of the fixed part, in order to make the screen fit on the inside. This too should be reversed.

What is "a regular basis"? Uploading at a steady 512 KB/s would take about 54 hours to transfer 10GB. I have found that I can usually get close to this speed with my 1024/512 ADSL from BKK to the USA. Unless you can get a different kind of local connection, your upload is probably limited to 512 as well, so no intermediary will help get the data from your home. You would have to hand-carry the data to someplace with a real symmetric network link. I would assume that most "consumer" places w/ commercial network access would have similar asymmetric networks because they are catering to users who mostly download...

However, if you can leave a system on constantly, uploading large files isn't that difficult... I run regular transfers using the "rsync" utility on Linux, which can easily restart where it leaves off and can even be scripted to automatically keep retrying until it completes. You just need to figure whether the rate is feasible to sustain, e.g. that you generate less than 10 GB per week or so (allowing for some downtime).

If you really have large data, but the response-time isn't super critical, you might want to seriously consider just burning a set of DVDs, or writing tapes even, and sending them by FedEx or similar? That way, the cost is relatively low, even if a package gets damaged periodically.

BTW, if the filesets are not all completely new every week, you can get further benefits from something like "rsync" which can effectively transfer only the differences, if the previous set of data is still available on the destination server... I've done things before like carry a set of data on the plane and then use rsync just to "fix up" the differences that had occurred since my last trip. It works amazingly well if your data doesn't change dramatically every time. (It would not work well for things that are already compressed or encrypted, since a small change will lead to many changes all over the encoded version.)

What is funny is that many of these are perfectly meaningful to an American. I wonder how much of this "corporate jargon" is just imported colloquialisms from the US? Particularly blue-sky and getting ones ducks in a row (like a mother duck). To me, they are clearly metaphorical and I have a hard time believing that a native English speaker wouldn't figure out most of them the first time they were heard.

However: I believe brain dump was coined in the computer space, where "core dump" was the writing out of all the data in the "memory core" of a computer. Brain dump didn't necessarily reference other "dump" similes, but of course they are all related if you trace back how "core dump" gets its name in the first place. Imagine a dump truck opening its gate and all the content pouring out at once... I didn't realize it had escaped out of the computing community.

Pushing the envelope was popularized in the aeronautical space, where it meant to push (an airplane) past its design envelope, e.g. cause stresses which might lead to failure under normal engineering tolerances. Any American male is well aware of this phrase if he ever went through a phase idolizing fighter jockies or "test pilots", or ever talked to someone who did! It is really more general engineering geek talk though, just appropriated by pilots through their training.

Hey, it's Thailand related since it is about cross-cultural language understanding.

...

Same goes for Sydney. Could it be the canned curry paste and coconut cream as apposed to freshly made in Thailand that is the difference?

While freshly made pastes are great, I think you'd be surprised how often people are using the factory-made stuff from those little plastic envelopes in Thailand.

I think the real difference is the business reality: for every one of us who would like a "real" Thai dish, the restaurant has to serve dozens of locals who don't really know what Thai food tastes like, may not even like it, and must be pleased in order for the restaurant to turn a profit.

For example, take the level of chili heat; most restaurants will not make something hotter than "nit noy" in the west, because irate customers will send the food back for being "inedible". I've gotten in the habit of saying to the waitress (if she appears to actually be Thai): I would like this dish properly hot, like I was having it at home in Bangkok where I live. This usually confuses them for a bit and then they smile and go have a rapid conversation with the cook in Thai. My tablemates are left wondering why my food looks so different from theirs... for example, my pad kra pow comes minced instead of with big chunks of meat, all because I indicated that I knew the difference.

Of course, the availability of ingredients is a problem. I have seen some restaurants that do not have the right vegetables or variety of chilis, and the resulting dish just tastes different as a result. Not necessarily bad, but not authentic.

What kind of applications do you intend to run? With my athlons, I was able to buy a mid-range cpu a couple years ago and then upgrade to a much faster chip for another $100 recently as a simple chip swap. Unless I were running some high performance computing app or something where the app response time meant real money to me, I'd focus more on the mid-range value "sweet spot" than the high end. Even if the quad core prices are good, just imagine how cheap that will make a nice dual-core clock-rate upgrade!

Anway, I've just done some seat-of-the-pants benchmarking of a 2.4 GHz core 2 duo machine to compare it to some existing althon64 machines of the same clock speed.

For my mixture of java and a "compilation" task, it is modestly faster than the athlons. I have to do some handwaving to compensate for the second core, since my athlons are not dual-core. The speeds are roughly equal on non-parallelized stuff and almost double on parallelized.

I have one SSE/MMX/float math benchmark that the core 2 duo smashes the athlons on. But, based on the above results, I have to consider the fact that my benchmark may be RAM bandwidth limited rather than core instruction rate limited. The core 2 duo system has dual-channel DDR2 RAM, whereas the athlons have dual-channel DDR.

If I were shopping again right now, I'd probably assume dual core and about 2.4 GHz cpu rate. I'd focus more on getting a good DDR2 setup and also other I/O like a good onboard SATA, gigabit ethernet, etc., and hope that I could swap out for a faster chip once in the life of the system...

My wife spent a long time in the US and likes basically everything I can eat, plus a lot more (I don't care for seafood in general). However, once she got comfortable with my parents, she preferred to make a more Thai-style sauce to use with Dungenous Crab instead of the creamy sauce they used. One thing she doesn't really like is Lamb, but I have gotten her to eat some Lamb Vindaloo and say it isn't as bad as she expected... I knew I could marry her when she enjoyed wolfing down some plates of Flint's BBQ hot-links w/ hot sauce while shivering on a park bench in November (Berkeley, CA).

With me she has enjoyed various American BBQs, Mexican, Indian, Polish, German, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Iranian, Chinese, Japanese (but only cooked stuff), Korean, etc. I think it would be easier to find things I do not like than her. However, she would long for Thai food if we go without it for a week or two.

I am more worried about my mother-in-law, who lives with us part time. I have yet to try to cook any real roasted meals, but would like to try this "winter"... maybe a roasted turkey, or a good ham if I can find either and get up the motivation to do the whole spread. She has tried my pizza, meatloaf, some Indian-style curries, and a quarter of a BLT sandwich. It is hard to read whether she really liked it or just was being polite though. She definitely did not like when I made a psuedo Palak Paneer (spicy minced spinach), but we cannot figure whether this is mainly because of the spices or the texture.

The LCD came with a DVI-D cable. But the video card has ONLY a DMS59 connector, which is this bizarre little rectangular forest of pins that contains dual VGA and dual DVI signals, according to wikipedia! So, I need a pigtail to split out one of the DVI ports.

I received a Dell computer w/ a video card that has a "DMS59" connector, and a pigtail to convert this to dual VGA connectors, instead of the DVI-D I want for my LCD. Does anybody know if these adapters are easy to obtain locally in BKK, or am I going to have to order one from Dell to go with this silly computer?

(I cannot believe they shipped a computer w/ this connector, a pigtail adapting to VGA, and an LCD capable of DVI-D input. Who wants to use analog inputs with a brand new, high-res LCD?)

i do not agree with the statment of ' no such think like quality salt ! "

You are responding to a closet chemist or at least a pedant. Quality doesn't mean "tastes good" to him, it means "pure".

The same point he is making could (and has) been made about water: quality (read: pure) water is what you get from careful distillation. People who want a tasty mineral water are actually looking for "dirty" water.

What rate are your modems syncing at? If they have started locking that down to the "subscribed" rate, it would make sense that a call is required to raise it back up?

As I recall, my True line synced at something like 6-12/1-2 Mb/s up/down (cannot remember which, since it didn't matter much in practice) even when I was subscribed at 1024/512.

On the other hand, TOT has my current line set to the subscription rate, so the day we requested an upgrade from 512 to 1024 service, the modem started syncing at the higher rate too. The like quality appears to be very good (in terms of signal-to-noise and attenuation), so I think they must be using this as part of their QoS/limiting strategy.

I think I liked True's method better, because with TCP the higher link speed plus traffic shaping gives better performance than saturating a link. I remember getting single TCP streams to reach 1024 quite often on True, whereas with TOT it seems I need to get several going at once to approach the subscribed bandwidth limit.

I don't have a True line anymore (new residence) but used that true2m login on occasion in 2004-2005 and had the same experience as The Coder. In addition, it also gave me better QoS on international links, so I sometimes switched over in order to make VOIP calls when the regular 1024/512 service was destroying my call quality with all the evening/peak contention.

I also believe it is 2.5 Mb/s download, rather than 2048, based on speeds I got downloading some Linux distirbutions back around that time.

Small "unmanaged" switches are much cheaper than routers. For the price of a typical ADSL+wireless+4port router, you might even be able to find a 5-port gigabit switch! The 100 megabit ones are much cheaper, i.e. 1000-1500 THB. I think it would be hard to even find a "hub" anymore, unless someone is trying to sell you 10 year old surplus.

At places like Pantip, they are readily available.

Yes, where is the booth?

Also, does anybody have practical experience using this (and/or the one at Don Muang) to get a permit before a morning flight? When I fly to the US, my departure is often around 7am, so I am wondering how early I would need to get to the airport in order to safely get checked in, get my re-entry permit, and not miss my flight, without losing any more pre-flight sleep than I have to.

If it requires a lot of extra time, I guess it might be less disruptive to just take a trip to Suan Phlu a few days in advance. But, it would be nice to know for a worst-case situation...

Why are they saying the baht is the 'strongest' in 6 years? I thought it took a dump. In my experience I never saw it go under 38.

The baht is stronger at 37 than at 38 per dollar. Stronger means you can buy more dollars with the same baht. As someone pointed out above, if you look at the reciprocal value of dollars per baht, then the number goes "up" when the baht is stronger and "down" when the baht is weaker. (1/37 of a dollar is more than 1/38 of a dollar.)

GuestHouse-You studied and got pissed with the dead?? Was that a degree in Mortuary Science?

No, no, obviously he meant to spell "decadents." Though, I am struggling to figure out what a direct decadent is... is that like mainlining?

I think Heng's post gets at something interesting here. There is a cultural difference with many of us post-WWII westerners, in terms of thinking of separate "personal" and "business" lives. From another point of view, we probably artificially exaggerate this separation, and I said "post-WWII" because I suspect it has to do with some of the class mobility efforts of the Baby Boom and subsequent generations.

The idea that during my overseas trip, I should act as a freight carrier for someone seems absurd. I understand the logic in what Heng is describing, but I feel offended by the very idea that I would "sully" my trip with import/export duties. I go out of my way to reduce my luggage size to a single small roll-aboard for 2-6 week business trips overseas, and then someone assumes that it would be no real bother at all to add another bag full of junk. Nowhere in these calculations of freight cost is the valuation of my personal time or stress-level during travel... and believe me, my family doesn't want to pay my market value as a consultant even for a few hours of luggage lugging.

But getting back to the class-posturing---from conversations with fellow native Californians, I have found a common theme wherein we like to travel light as a sort of subconsious reaction to the way our parents traveled. We despise the feeling of turning any weekend or week-long vacation into a mad caravan. Maybe it is programmed into us, the way we laugh uncomfortably at the faded image of the "Okies" roaming across the western US with their clap-trap of a pickup-truck overladed with a life's belongings?

All I know is that I get a small, secret thrill from the idea that I can fly anywhere in the world with a toothbrush, a few changes of clothes, and a credit card. The fact that it is my guilty pleasure is what makes me think there are some inexplicably complex cultural or psychological issues at stake.

Yes, I suppose you are right. I suppose my 4-week stint back in the US reinstated my gullibility, along with destroying my heat tolerance.

I arrived last night and quickly found the "temporary" taxi stand mentioned above. I guess I was sleepy, but I forgot to check that the meter was on when we pulled away... The driver wanted to charge me a 600 THB flat rate to Nonthaburi, only 200 THB less than one of the limo touts had offered me.

My wife got involved in the debate when we arrived at my home, and she called the agency responsible for taxis. The drawn out discussion made it clear that the driver believed he was supposed to get a flat rate, based on some written guidelines he had received from the transportation administration. However, the guy they engaged over the phone was adamant that we at most owed about 300 THB of metered fare (estimated based on our route) plus the 50 THB fee. He apparently even suggested that we should refuse to pay anything, and report the taxi by number and with our ticket stub information from the airport taxi stand. He told my wife that they are trying to be very strict about protecting the experience passengers get from taxis at Suvarnabhumi.

Anyway, my wife usually is the cynic and first to cry, "scam!" when she thinks other Thais are trying to hook her or give us some sort of "tourist rate". However, even she felt that this poor driver was really honestly confused about the procedures at the new airport. We decided to tip him 50 THB over the 350. Unless he was a very good actor/scam artist, I think he was mostly just embarrassed at being wrong about how to charge for the ride.

All told, I guess I will miss the days of flying into Don Muang and having a quick 200 THB ride across the river, without any toll roads.

Here is a clumsy analogy to help you think about the size... people keep talking about quality and that is sort of like how rich and deep of a paint layer can you lay down. Bytes in the file are like some small volume of paint. When you take your big, high quality umpteen megapixel picture, you've used a lot of paint. When you crop out a small part in the middle, that part still has the same quality but it only contains a small amount of the total paint proportional to the area you kept.

Where this analogy falls down is in the way digital pictures are scale-free. A high quality picture takes the same number of bytes whether you "paint" it on a thumbtack or on the side of a barn. But, if you think of the number of pixels across like a length, then it makes sense. When you cropped out the part with your face, you cut both the height and width of the picture, and the area decreased as the multiple of these two changes. For example, if I had a 3 foot by 5 foot wall and I cut out a 1.5 foot by 2 foot piece in the middle, the area has gone from 15 square feet to only 3 square feet.

Rather than dual boot, a great way to get exposed these days would be to get one of the free virtualization packages like vmware virtual server and run one OS as a guest of the other. I suggest running windows as a guest but I am biased. I think it needs to be quarantined.

The driver issue is more complex. For hardware that is supported, it is often supported as well or better in Linux than in Windows, meaning it works out of the box and usually without trouble. What is not common is the idea that you get random hardware and get a driver from the hardware vendor. As a long time Linux user, I caution against ever using hardware where the only driver comes from the vendor. If it is not supported by the kernel, you don't really want the pain of using it. This means it is best to do some research of chipsets and what not before trying to buy new hardware, and possibly using a LiveCD as suggested above to test out existing hardware. The most difficult problem here is that some vendors are very undisciplined about changing hardware implementation without changing the visible markings on packaging, so it can sometimes be a nasty surprise to buy some "supported" hardware and find out it is no longer supported because it isn't the same Zipwell Industries Floobuzzle that someone else had great success using last quarter... the only out-of-kernel driver I use these days is a driver for the Atheros 802.11a/b/g card built into my laptop.

Games can be tricky. Some games have native Linux ports, and some can run under the windows emulation layers (or in a windows virtual machine). Things that are pushing the modern 3D graphics envelope will not run well under emulation in many cases. But I am not a gamer, so don't take my word for it. Ask google about the specific game and Linux.

I think the best way to experience Linux is as a purist: don't try to run commercial software on it. Try out the open source alternatives, and keep a windows machine (real or virtual) around to do those other things if and until you become a convert. Try out the new/different ways without betting the farm on it. It is hard to give it a fair shake when you are in a panic to recover some existing work method from your past, instead of having a relaxed experiment without dire consequences.

I've been using Linux since 1992, and one of the only recent times I felt the need to boot a windows virtual machine was to get an exact printout of a Thai Immigration Bureau document in MS Word format. The manual spacing they did just didn't come out right under OpenOffice. If they would have published PDF, I would have had no problem.

Wow, I've never seen 600ms ping time on any GPRS->internet path, not over AIS, DTAC, nor T-Mobile USA service. It has always been around 1800ms to any host I could think of, i.e. trying to use hosts "local" to wherever I and the provider were located.

Now that has me wondering if there is something wonky with the Linux pppd/USB acm/motorola phone stack I use...

I had very good luck using compressed ssh-forwarding to a remote privoxy proxy, to get some of the ad-filtering combined with gzip of the http sessions. But the latency still sucked.

Considering that the first step from your GPRS modem/phone to the rest of the IP world (including DTAC's servers) is 60 Kb/s and 2 seconds round-trip latency, I'll be surprised if a caching proxy does you much good... try some ping tests against the closest Thai server and the most far-flung US or European server, and notice the latency hardly varies... the real problem is not the speed of getting content from the remote server to DTAC's routers, but getting it through the wireless part of the path, which will also be between you and DTAC's/KSC's proxy.

You would need a filtering and compressing proxy. Some providers have ones that will decimate pictures in web traffic, so that the downloaded images are much smaller (but also horrible to look at). Having a proxy that also filters out advertisements and a lot of other redirection and "marketing bugs" will help because it is all of the excess round-trips implied in these web pages which slow the loading speed over GPRS. This filtering proxy needs to be "on the other side" of the GPRS link, i.e. a hosted server somewhere, and not running on your PC.

Unless you have multiple clients behind your GPRS link, I think trying to run a local caching proxy would be pointless. Just make sure your browser is caching enough of what it sees.

Most long-haul networks run full-duplex. This means that data is sent over separate paths/frequencies so "upload" and "download" will not impact one another. They each have a separate fixed capacity. This is true at the physical layer, e.g. with fiber optic links, and also at the typical logical management layer, where the available link and switching equipment capacity is managed as if it were a real physical circuit. There is nothing to say that these would have to start off with symmetric capacity, but it seems that it might in this case...

As for why they degrade asymmetrically then, it means Thailand on the whole consumes more internationally produced Internet content rather than exporting content that other countries wish to consume.

If you have a machine with an extra internal drive bay and controller port, you might want to get it in there to use the S.M.A.R.T. tools to verify why it crashed, but it does sound like it went into bad block mode. However, that should not have made your filesystem partition "unused" unless the partition table block failed or something! If you were running unusual software that misbehaved, or have other hardware problems, there is nothing to prevent a repeat with the new drive...

If you have space, make copies of the saved image so you can experiment on one and then revert to the original if it is a dead end. I am not sure how familiar you are with various Linux tasks, so here are several to try:

mount -o loop,ro saved.img /mnt/tmp

(now that you've copied the disk partition, you shouldn't get any long delays with the disk trying to recover bad blocks, so this will quickly tell you just how corrupt it is)

man debugfs

(this tool can give you some interactive access to a filesystem that is damaged and not able to mount successfully as above)

man e2fsck

(this can run in repair mode and fix certain metadata problems. however, on badly mangled filesystems it might just make matters worse, and your "grepping" of underlying file content may be the better recovery method if you are only aiming to recover a few more specific files.)

To answer your other question, no it is not an option during installation. The entire CD or DVD must be downloaded for the 64-bit build of the OS instead of the 32-bit build. All the kernel, programs, etc. will have different file contents.