Lannig

I like Hua Hin a lot. I won't repeat the pros mentioned in other posts (close to Bangkok, all the facilities for westerners etc.).

Really, you want to avoid downtown Hua Hin: the beach isn't nice (lots of rocks, harrasment from vendors etc.), but if you move out just a little bit, the beachfront around Kao Takiep (can't recall the right phonetical spelling) is nice and quiet.

There are many hotels, bungalows and condos in that part also, that are certainly a more enjoyable place to stay than downtown.

Still, you can get downtown very quickly for dining, shopping, whatever.

I've always felt very safe there. Can't comment on the crime either. Such things can happen anywhere in Thailand (and elsewhere BTW).

If you're concerned about the 'red light' aspects, it's really discreet in Hua Hin. If you just avoid the couple of blocks where all the hot nightlife takes place, you'll ignore them completely (that's unavoidable in Pattaya).

I work hard so I don't have much time to go around in Thailand, but I've always enjoyed my stays in Hua Hin.

I've been told that there are some very nice places to stay just a few km further south, like bungalow parks. Never tried them though.

Cha Am is the popular thai version of Hua Hin. Much noisier (I hate the loudspeakers all along the beach!), busier, lots of cheap food and logding. Choosing between the two really is a matter of your own preference. They're only 25km away so it's easy to go back and forth.

Just my two satangs,

--Lannig

Yesterday , my yahoo had a problem (at home)

- when i lunched yahoo radio it got d/c in 3 mins later

- people could see me when got online, I could send msg to my friends(they got all), but i could not get any replies

- when i used yahoo webcam ,it got d/c suddenly

What i did

- uninstall/reinsatll yahoo msg atleast 15 times (and tried to install other versions also)

-clear cookies,temp files

-run antivirus and anti spyware

What should i do ?

Thank you

I'd seriously consider Internet connectivity problems, the most likely cause IMHO.

See how big downloads/uploads go (is it as slow as usual? )

Call your ISP's hotline and ask whether they're having some specific trouble now.

--Lannig

It's been a while since I bought music CD's, and I see copy protection has become more pervasive. When I pop the CD in, all that is visible is the autorun player, not the tracks. The special autorun player lets me play the music or copy them in WMA format which I refuse to use since that has burned me before with the internal copy protection. I want to rip MP3's to the hard drive. Is there a way to do that with these kind of CD's, shareware or other?

CDEx (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/) is supposed to work well even with these. And it's free.

I haven't tried myself, though. It seems to depend on the exact protection scheme used.

Googling for "rip copy-protected audio cds" will give tons of hits.

Note: ripping copy-protected audio CDs is not illegal if it's for your personal use. Not in this country anyway. Not sure about the US (DMCA?).

--Lannig

Google use dynamic DNS to redirect clients to their nearest host. This is done regardless of the country/language variant opened, www.google.com, www.google.co.th or www.google.co.uk will resolve to the same IP address (or same set of).

AFAIK thai clients are sent to their Singapore nodes, and the connectivity to these does suffer from shortlived hiccups on occasion. I've seen this going on for months, it looks to me like a recurrent routing instability at the CAT exchange point, but who knows? (certainly not the CAT losers themselves). It usually goes away after several minutes.

Censorship has nothing to do with this. Maybe I'm up for a suprise, but I doubt the ICT min. would be stupid enough to ban Google.

--Lannig

Have you called their hotline? they may not be very useful in many cases, but generally when there's something wrong in their network (in most cases one of their uplinks goes dead, and almost all the times the brains-challenged CAT folks have messed up something...) they know.

I use CSLox but from a leased line connection, I haven't noticed any significant incident over the past few days.

Yes, they use transparent proxying, like all ISPs (at least for home users).

--Lannig

I'd choose nVidia as well. They have an excellent history of driver maintenance. Better than ATI's.

Just my two satangs.

--Lannig

I have somehow managed to mess up some of my basic Windows settings, mainly the XP desktop colors and taskbar and title bar sizes.

It’s no big deal as everything else seems to be working OK but I would like to get back to the default XP settings.

I have tried the Desktop/Appearance etc. but can only get “Windows Classic Style” Windows XP seems to have disappeared.

I tried to “Repair Windows” by running the original installation disc, as I seem to recall an option of “Repair” instead of “Install” but I guess because I have SP2 and all the upgrade patches installed I get the message something like “The version you have installed is later than this version if you continue ALL your data will be lost”

The question is if I continue past this warning will I be able to Repair Windows without losing any of my data or will it just go on doing a complete reinstall before I have a chance to stop it?

Thanks

Beachcomber.

These are per-user settings so if you were to create a new username in Windows and use that one, it should get the default settings. You should have no trouble copying your documents, desktop shortcuts etc. from one user to another if the new one (target) is an administrator account (or if you're not using NTFS).

However the fact that the "Windows Classic Style" has disappeared from the list suggests that there might be something else corrupted... in that case a "repair" installation could be the solution. You should better do it with an installation CD with SP2 already in (this is Thailand right? so getting a new CD isn't a big deal), you will save the SP2 reinstallation step and most likely avoid this warning. It's strange anyway. I've already done a "repair" install from a gold (SP0) CD to a computer with SP2 installed and never go such a message. Are you sure you're using the right CD (Pro. vs. Home)?

Greets,

--Lannig

Challenges grow to ICT Asian hub status

BANGKOK: -- Thailand's ambition to be Asia's regional hub of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is far-fetched given the country's place in both the regional and international context, a leading research house said.

As Thailand attempts to scale the mountain to gain the stated goal of regional ICT leadership, not even one in four persons uses a computer, and slightly more than one in 10 use the internet.

The mountain appears to be getting bigger instead of smaller, it indicated. Instead of rising, the kingdom's competitive status is falling.

You bet... at least this information goes uncensored now, that's nice.

As an IT professional who's been working in this country for 7 years, I have lost any hopes of finding competent and professional Thai staff here. I've trained dozens of Thai engineers, and apart from one case I can remember of (the guy's now working in Australia) I've found their unability/unwillingness to learn, structure their minds, acquire solid knowledge and professional behaviour quite discouraging.

Why that? well, I'm not suggesting that thais are inherently unable to be good IT people. I can see two main reasons for this:

1) the language barrier - can you believe that fresh IT graduates from Chula or Kaset Sart can't read (and understand) any english-langugage technical documentation and even much less write any? I've seen quite a few of them joining the place I used to work. All the same. How long will it take until learning English is taken seriously here? Recently I had to chat with a Mathayom 6 English teacher, and I soon found out that my Thai was better than her English, so we switched to that language. My Thai isn't good at all... and I don't teach Thai!

2) a cultural problem - IT being a technical matter has no value in the eyes of students in higher education. They all dream of becoming "managers" and real IT work is considered as (yuck!) "real, hands-on" work, somethings that their culture despises.

When they graduate in the IT field, they don't try to acquire any technical expertise at all. Their only aim is to get to a nontechnical position as soon as possible.

Oh... and I work in a higher education institution now, after having worked for a major ISP.

--Lannig

Sure you can, just use a command-line Bittorrent client like e.g. 'ctorrent' (http://ctorrent.sourceforge.net/)

There are many more, just Google for "Linux command-line Bittorrent client program".

I hope that you really mean SSH (Secure Shell) when you write 'telnet'. Accessing your server over telnet is very unsecure.

Unless it's an unusual installation, your Linux server should accept SSH connections as well. It's basically the same thing, but secure (communication is encrypted). On the client side, you will need a SSH client program.

One of the most widely used ones is PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

It's free.

You can also copy files back and forth over a SSH connections using another (free) program called WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/index.php). It's almost completely identical in its usage to the FTP client programs you're probably used to, except it's secure.

Oh... and I sympathize if you're using iPSTAR.

Hope this helps,

--Lannig

Even 4-5 years ago, it was possible to get 12 MB/s (96 Mb/s) throughput over SSH between two workstation-class Pentium III or Xeon PCs, e.g. enough to saturate a 100baseT network interface in full-duplex mode. My current Pentium-M laptop has a much faster processor than those did.

Ever since I left behind my multi-gigabit employers, I have never seen SSH be the bottleneck in a WAN transfer.

Well, don't know, but I certainly have seen a huge difference between native and ssh transport modes when doing daily backups of a Linux-based mail server (~150Gb of data) using rsnapshot which in turn uses rsync. My daily backup times were almost cut by half.

One box is a dual 2.0G Xeon, the other one a 2.6G P4. Ah well, they are on a gigabit Ethernet segment I must tell.

It probably won't make any difference on a WAN though, I do agree.

Other reasons why I like the native transport much better:

- you don't have to allow root logins through ssh

- you can sort out the rsync traffic from the ssh remote admin traffic, and filter them independantly on your f/w

edit: I have to add that my Linux manpage for rsync has --acls and --xattrs options to preserve ACLs and extended attributes. I don't know if these are available in a modern Windows port...

Interesting... I'll look into this.

--Lannig

Rsync normally works great even on slow WAN links, but in my experience the Windows port isn't as reliable as the

native Unix version. I (also) used it to sync two Windows servers as well, one is on a colocation facility. It works, but some syncs mysteriously fail, actually as soon as my Internet connection gets heavily loaded.

Also, being a Unix app, it has no knowledge of the Windows file system protections, and I have all kind of trouble with newly created files or folders. It doesn't carry the ACLs of course.

I eventually gave up and now use shared folders inside a VPN connection + a freeware folder sync program instead of rsync.

Last note: rsync over ssh is slow. Better use the native (unencrypted) client-server mode. The security exposure is very minimal if you configure it properly (filtering on IP of client etc.). Unless you object having the data going across in cleatext of course. I'm not sure rsync over ssh is possible at all on Windows anyway (maybe with Cygwin).

--Lannig

This short video (.swf) clearly demonstrates the superiority of Macs over PCs.

Seems to be gone comes up as a blank page, and forced download gives me a zero-length file.

Anyone kept a copy? I'd love to see it

--Lannig

Also, OS X is a version of Linux, so you can do a lot of Linux-type stuff on a Mac as well. There you go - three computers in one!

Not quite true. It's a modified FreeBSD, which is another variant of Unix, on a Mach microkernel.

Agreed, this doesn't make a whole lot of difference except to die-hard Unix fans like me.

Still, Linux programs won't run on MacOSX on Intel. They need to be recompiled from source.

--Lannig

Wild speculation IMO. The main reason is $$$, CAT selling international bandwidth at 10x the market prices (with 1/10 of the reliability) to Thai ISPs by the grace of the monopoly.

I agree that money is clearly one motivation (one of the key reasons the ISPs hate CAT), but I don't think it is the only one.

Another is the opportunity to impose sudden and draconian censorship (and I'm not talking about the current restrictions on porn). In the event of some ermm...'political instability'...how long do you reckon it would take the government to lock down the internet?

It may be futile, but they will try.

The current filtering is done by the ISPs themselves, based on the directions received from the MofICT.

Hence the uneven filtering one can observe. They all do redirect requests hitting the blacklist to a common page

at the MofICT, but the actual filtering is done by themselves.

Technically that's the only way, since most ISPs (the big ones anyway) have links to private uplink providers (Singtel, Cable & Wireless etc.).

--Lannig

NO!

Ever wondered why all internet traffic in Thailand has to go through CAT?

Wild speculation IMO. The main reason is $$$, CAT selling international bandwidth at 10x the market prices (with 1/10 of the reliability) to Thai ISPs by the grace of the monopoly.

Under the old legislation, only ISPs giving 30% free shares to CAT could connect to foreign uplink providers. Now things are becoming more flexible I think, and most of them have non-CAT international bandwidth pipes that they sell to leased line customers at premium price.

I don't think that the folks at CAT are doing any data analysis on network traffic. They probably wouldn't even be technically capable of doing this. They break their network routers every time they touch them...

--Lannig

Ipstar STINKS! Nearly every download is corrupted and a waste of time to even try to download anything. I routinely complain and here is the last reply I received;

Regarding to the problem of iPSTAR service delay and the frequent disconnection during the past few weeks, we have investigated and found that some groups of customers have excessively used the services offered corresponding to the application's conditions, and the bandwidth is consequently congested.

Translation: we don't have enough b/w to serve our customers so everything breaks down when customers get serious downloading or P2Ping. We don't even have a clue on how to configure our own routers to properly implement per-customer b/w limits because our network "engineers" are a bunch of low-paid loosers who can't even read an english-language Cisco documentation.

However, the company have not ignored the problem. We are trying to allocate the bandwidth and to find the best way to entirely support the customers. At the moment, the customers may still face such problem as we are now in the process to find the best solution.

Translation: since we can't figure this out, we've asked the Big Guys to buy more b/w from CAT, but the Big Guys said "no way, this home Internet user business operates at loss anyway, we're going to kill it and sell the satellite b/w to the burmese for their communications. They can't buy any high tech service from any western company so they're willing to buy any kind of service at any price from us".

So live with it.

--Lannig

Gary, these are interesting figures, thanks.

It's good to know about the new Nissans. The older Nissans were really thirsty.

I happen to like the style of the Triton very much (does that make me gay?). It's an approach different from the tank-size style of the Vigo and the D-Max. At least the Vigo is kind of stylish though.

I've been told that A/T means (in my terms) 1 extra L/100km, so that means that I could expect 7L/100km with the 2.5L Triton M/T when using smooth driving. Looks OK to me.

I wouldn't touch an A/T car even if it were given to me anyway

Thanks for your input guys. Let's have more please.

--Lannig

At this point I wouldn't bother. Even if you somehow convince AIS/One-2-Call to block the IMEI of your lost phone it really won't have much of an impact. The phone could be used on other networks (DTAC/TrueMove/Hutch), and/or the IMEI could be hacked. Or they'll get the IMEI number wrong and block somebody else's phone.

I think some countries have made it a requirement that all operators block reported lost/stolen phone IMEI's? Maybe Autralia?

France does.

If it is done properly, the blacklisted IMEI numbers are shared between the local providers or even globally if they use a central registry. eg. the one England uses is talked about at here. IMEI numbers can be changed on some models of phones, but not all. The more recent your phone model is, the less likely it can be changed.

I'm suspecting in Thailand you are correct and there is no shareing between providers even if you can get one of them to blacklist a handset. If it was available it would be better known

I'm almost sure there isn't. Hey, that would force too many phone shops in MBK and elsewhere out of business

In countries where the providers sell handsets they profit from phone theft so I can understand them dragging their feet. I guess here the providers just don't care, which is a real shame given how expensive phones are to the average Thai and the market in second hand phones being large enough that they are an ideal target for thieves.

Amen to this...

I'll try going to the AIS main office when I get a chance and see what happens.

Good luck. Your patience is going to be exercised a lot...

--Lannig

I'm trying to find this Media Player Classic on a PC running XP.

I know it is on there as some VCD's open the program and play.. but I can't seem to find the .exe file anywhere..

Tried searching.. looked through program files.. nothing..

totster

Media Player Classic (a great program!) is not a Microsoft product. It's a freeware replacement for the bloated Windows Media Player 7+, keeping the slim look interface of Media Player 6.4 with much more features.

Find it at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...ackage_id=84358

Note that there are separate downloads for Windows 98/ME and 2000/XP.

--Lannig

My mom is wanting to create a website for her little store, and is asking me which software she should use. I've offered to do it for her, but she is really wanting to learn and do it herself, so that she can update it frequently and easily without bothering me. (Good idea!)

I've been using Dreamweaver for years, but she is a little intimidated by the possible complexity, and especially the cost!

I'm curious to know what other people are using / recommend in terms of a free or cheap WYSIWYG Web page design software and FTP client for uploading pages to the server that are easy to work with / user friendly.

Any recommendations?

I'm an old school IT guy, so developing web sites really isn't my my thing. In the few cases I had to develop something that looks better than my hand-edited HTML, I had found IBM Homepage Builder a really neat program, simple to use yet powerful, coming with a lot of (decent) templates to start with.

I know, an easy to use program coming from IBM sounds like an oxymoron, but it really is (or was).

Unfortunately they've pulled the plug out on this product

Maybe you can still find copies around...

--Lannig

Para is right, there is a 9 second window to skip checkdisk. Bypassing this results in the PC hanging. Then I have to press the reset button.

I really think that your disk has developed bad blocks, so check disk hangs when it tries to access the damaged area and if you skip the disk check, Windows does the same because it can't access files that are vital to booting.

In such a case I would:

- first, use BartPE to save my documents and whatever files I value on this disk to another computer on the LAN

(provided I can access them)

- run a physical disk read test from a bootable CD that includes such utilities (Google for "Ultimate boot CD" or "Hiren's boot CD") to assert the readability of the disk surface

If the disk does have bad spots, Hiren's boot CD includes an utility called HDD regenerator that sometimes works in making the HD readable again (usually not for very long... if the disk is developing bad blocks, odds are that it will fail completely soon). It tries extremely hard to read "something" from the bad blocks and then re-writes what it has managed to read into these blocks. In most cases, that effectively makes the bad blocks readable again, with a significant risk of them containing more or less corrupt data. It can takes ages to complete for a big disk (over 1 day is not unusual) but it did succeed in most cases for me, with no (apparent) corrupt data. Actually that's just what the so-called "low-level format" utilities do as well.

Still, it's just until you can put a new disk in.

Just my 2 satangs.

--Lannig

I would never try to recover data from a failing drive by installing another copy of an OS on it, but by doing so on a new drive, with the old one the secondary or slave, and then find and copy the data from within the Windows GUI.

I just gave this utility a try. I could not access the hard drive from the GUI as it did not show up there, and I assume because the nework drivers weren't loaded, there was no network support. At a glance, I did not see the ability to do anything I could not from the XP/2000 CDs, although it does load faster. Did I miss something?

Peter

If you just do a default build of the bootable CD, you'll get no more drivers in it than what comes on the XP installation CD you use for this. If your box requires drivers that are not in there, then you won't see the corresponding hardware. If that's a SATA disk requiring a specific driver, you won't see the hard drive at all. Same goes for networking. Building a custom image with 3rd party drivers in it is fairly easy and well documented on the web site. I had to do that for networking to work on some systems e.g. my Thinkpad notebook. Never had to do this to access disks, but maybe I don't have access to bleeding edge hardware.

I think it makes it easy to do things that are either very difficult to do from the Windows recovery console (change files, move them around, edit them) or plain impossible (tweak the registry, copy files over the LAN etc.).

But it's not a download-and-play utility.

I've used it countless times on a wide range of computers and it has proven of very high value to me and to the IT support folks I've made it known to.

--Lannig

I agree with Para. chkdsk is there for a reason. If it fails, your hard drive is almost certainly hosed. There is nothing on the XP CD to deal with that kind of problem other than chkdsk.

If you don't have backups of your data, you still may be able to pull it off after installing a new system on a new hard drive.

Peter

To make data recovery easier or to manage any situation of Windows XP not booting, this has saved my life many times:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

PEBuilder is a small program that will let you create a bootable ISO CD image of an fairly complete Windows installation that boots stand-alone from CD, with a (limited) GUI, full network support and all! From this environment you can easily access your data (even on NTFS partitions), tweak the registry etc. It's a breeze compared to the very limited environment of the recovery console. It makes it really easy to copy data out from a failing disk to a shared folder on another computer on the same LAN, much easier than having to install another copy of Windows on that disk (and a more reliable method too, especially if the disk is developing bad blocks).

Obviously for legal reasons no ready-to-use ISO image can be downloaded from PEBuilder's web site. Again, what you'll download is a program that will use your Windows XP installation CD to create that ISO image that you can later burn to a CD.

Oh, and it's free.

Hope that can help someone - it surely did help me.

--Lannig

quite easy, but you need a static (non-changing) IP address, which you probably won't receive with a regular DSL connection, surely not with dialup.

Almost 100% true. Fixed IP is way better but dynamic DNS service (free) like no-ip.org can be an acceptable work-around to no fixed IP. You get a domain name that 'follows' your IP when it changes.I use it for a dynamic TOT ADSL and it works quite nicely.

--Lannig

I am the (now) unfortunate owner of a Mistubishi Strada (old 2.5l atmospheric model) which I bought second-hand almost 2 years ago because it was cheap, in good condition and well equipped. Of course as some of you may know the thing gobbles fuel like hel_l and that's becoming a real concern these days with the litre of diesel soon to hit 30b... Even using a light right foot, I get a fuel consumption within 8.0-8.8 litre/100km (mostly road, no city). Quite a lot. I used to have an old Isuzu TFR before that, the locally-produced station-wagon variant, quite sober (6.7-7.4 l/100km) but noisy as hel_l (both engine and body) and the body falling apart due to rust, as could be expected from a locally-produced variant with no proper anti-rust treatment, cheap paint etc.

The Mitsubishi has a quiet and smooth engine, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to stand the pain when hitting the pump

Stil,l I've learned to like Mitsubishi, because apart from its unreasonable fuel consumption it's comfortable, reliable and has good control. I'm considering a replacement. I really dislike the D-Max: it's ugly, relatively noisy as well for a newer generation pick-up and overpriced. Same goes for the Colorado sister model (just a little bit less ugly). I know it's the most fuel-effective brand now (or so they say), but I'm wondering about the Toyota Vigo and the new Mitsubishi Triton, as well as other less popular brands (Ford, Mazda, Nissan).

- how do they compare in terms of fuel consumption? what is your real-life experience?(we europeans usually express this in litres/100km, but I can use a calculator to make a conversion -- just avoid using gallons please ;-)

- comments about reliability, comfort, noise? (especially noise, I'm very sensitive)

- how do they compare on the 2nd hand market? (I can't afford a new one, although for the Triton I don't expect to find many on the 2nd hand market yet)

- any specific good/bad experience to share?

Oh yes, about the noise: I can't really consider a gasoline engine. I drive a lot and I need a pick-up.

Thanks for any input,

--Lannig