Lannig

Just professionally interested. Anyone here who has details on the HW/SSW/ASW used in the Central Server environment, the network infrastructure and the Client stations in the District Offices?

Access '97 database running off a pirated version of Windows XP ? ;-)

Just joking, I have no clue... and would be interested to know either. I just hope they have good and tested backups, but I wouldn't bet my shirt on this!

Now is a bad time to have you ID card expire in this part of Thailand, I'd say.

I come to Thailand 3-5 times per year x 2-3 weeks per stay. Currently I rent a Toyota Vigo from Budget each time, I will consider alternative offers for pick-up rental (must have Carryboy-style back hardtop). Car pick-up and drop location must be Suwa airport, Bangkok or immediate vicinity.

Will also consider pick-up for sale offers if in the < 400K bahts range.

Recommendations for good, honest resellers for 2nd hand pick-ups in Bangkok, Pattaya or Central region are also welcome if such exists :-)

Make offers by PM please.

It's the same old bla bla. Now they are spending all the money on populistic stuff like tablets to too young children with no internet and no educated teachers, discounts for first buy house, car. Credit cards for farmers and two extra holidays for the governmental employed staff on the last day of the Ramadan on dec 25th. Do the Buddhistic, Christian and muslim people really ask for this ???

Do they even bother to ask what 2 extra public holidays cost the Thai BNP ??? Bananas $^@Q9+->?$aarddrr

So where the money come from to this great project ???

That's something that keeps amazing me about Thailand, especially in these times of several EU countries going more or less bankrupt. Where does their money come from? So many people don't pay taxes at all and the one who do (like I did) don't pay much, really. So much business goes on tax-free in cash (not big business, but millions of purchases every day). Not to mention the big business that goes underground. With the himalayan amounts of money that get wasted by the various governments, how come Thailand isn't bankrupt yet, how come the Baht keeps being so strong?

They even have a public health system to pay for. It's not comparable to what we have here in EU, but it's better than what can be found in countries with the same level of development as Thailand.

I'm sure that a seasoned economist could explain this clearly. I can't. I guess that having almost no retirement pension system, no unemployment compensation scheme could be a start.

Thailand is very politically unstable; Carrefour pulled out last year completely. A number of other companies have done likewise.

As much as I think there's quite some truth in what you wrote, citing Thailand's political instability as the reason for Carrefour to pull out is incorrect. Carrefour has pulled out from Thailand just like they are pulling out from several other countries right now and for the same reasons:

- they're losing money fast and they seriously need some cash, even in their home country (France) they're being eaten alive by competitors and losing market share. So they've decided to concentrate more on France and a few specific other countries

- it's their public policy to pull out from a country if they don't achieve a status of market leader within a given time frame (I could probably find a reference for this, I remember I've read a statement from them, but I can't be bothered right now). In Thailand they were hopelessly trailing Tesco (Lotus) and Casino (Big C)

As for the high-speed train... I don't hold a MBA but even put aside the enormous technical challenges, I don't see a viable business model for this in Thailand. It will be too expensive for the masses, not meshed enough to be a global alternative to road and if it doesn't carry massive amounts of freight it just won't pay for itself. They're making an even bigger mistake than we've made in France by concentrating only on the too expensive TGV and letting regional train lines and freight slowly die down.

Thailand would very, very much more need a solid, meshed network of normal passenger and freight trains that would be a real alternative to road transport, especially in these times of raising fuel costs.

Oh... and no comment on the "hub" laughable nonsense. We've missed the "IT hub" in the long list of "wannabe hubs" mentioned above. How can someone with a vague respect of himself still can utter something so gross?

Last time I flew from Suwa I had the pleasure of being able to use the fast track lane for passport and security checks thanks to my frequent flyer card of the company I was flying on. I was really astonished by the unholy mess of long and winding temporary corridors we had to go through, made of half-painted wood boards with rough edges and even some plastic films. Even the floor wasn't cleaned up and we had to walk on various construction leftovers. Well, I'm not a rich businessman so that wasn't quite as much a shock to me as it seemed to be to some of the business and first class travelers going though this with me. I can imagine what kind of impression these wealthy, high-fare paying passengers have had of the so-called "hub of Asia".

Immigration queues are not -by far- Suwa's main problem at this time... The whole airport sucks, it looks old already, it's impractical, poorly connected and the runways are crumbling down. Even high fare-paying passengers don't get decent facilities.

I think that the Thai Airways web site needs an update to its "history" page:

That's not what the page quoted by Thai at Heart says: net loss of 10.2bn bahts in 2011.

They could do drawings or sketch out letters of the alphabet.

Writing Thai alphabet letters on an el-cheapo touchscreen? good luck. I could barely write ABC on one of them, and I'm quite used to touchscreens.

The only thing they would gain is being even more confused when holding a pen for this, since it behaves in a radically different way.

Even drawings... try sketching something on a cheap chinese 7" tablet.

Thai bought out SAS in 1977 for a pittance.

Huh? reference please? The Thai Airways site says:

which definitely not the same thing. They have bought back the 15% share that SAS was detaining.

Note: I love the "owned by the Thai people". How further away from reality could this be?

WOW much debate on instructing pupils how to play Angry Birds, after all thats all these tablets will ever get used for

If they ever manage to run Angry Birds properly on them. If the sample I have seen is for real, they're really, really cheap low-spec tablets that definitely don't have enough CPU power and graphics abilities to run Angry Bird decently without constant hiccups and freezes.

Tablet issue in Thailand has nothing to do with education it was buying off voters thats all...populist promises

As well as a very large scale corruption scheme. Considering the price they're paid for the said tablet in the said quantities, a whole lot of people are making a whole lot of money on this. I'm sure I can get a better price from the Chinese supplier for a quantity of 10.

An old airplane is not an unsafe airplane

If the maintenance is made according to the international agreed standards, there is no safety difference between an old and a new airplane.

Features, comfort, technology can differ, but a certified plane can fly, as long as the company follows strict maintenance procedures.

Except for one issue: Metal fatigue.

If maintenance is done properly, metal fatigue is not a safety issue either because the maintenance checks include what's needed to detect it before it becomes an issue (borescope inspections). All recent crashes due to metal fatigue were due to improper aircraft maintenance, which obviously can lead to a whole variety of other failures.

Just as I wrote earlier in this thread ...

Death of IE6 still greatly exaggerated, says browser hit squad

http://www.theregist...2/ie6_browsium/

OK, just to add up to the noise I'd recommend Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool. It's free and cleans up whatever it finds. It uses the same engine as their paid product which is IMHO the best one on the market (I'm sure someone will disagree ).

This tool has managed to clean up deeply infected boxes with TDSS-style rootkits that no other tool could manage. Especially not the anti-spyware kind, which don't do rootkits AFAIK.

I used to do all my sw programme installs on a second partition D:

That way, if I had to re-install Windows, XP in those days, the C: drive was formatted, but not the rest.

I still had to reload all the programmes, but the settings were picked up from the previous

time, making life much easier.

Er... are you sure? since Windows 9x most applications store their settings in Windows' registry, which is on disk C:. Only the user part could possibly be on D: if you move your "Documents and Settings" tree there (which I sometimes do for specific reasons). That user part may include part of the settings. Still, the part that is in the system registry on C: is likely to be the most important.

Of course some application still store their settings in .INI files and those will be kept. But not many of them, are there?

One should not block pings (IMO) but instead disable notifications from your firewall.

Every computer that is exposed to the Internet is scanned at least a dozen of times per day. If your firewall is to alert you every time, this will be a nuisance.

When the alert pops up, most firewalls have an option like "don't alert me next time for similar connections". Use it.

Note: blocking ICMPs altogether (not only pings) is a very bad idea. Some essential parts of the TCP/IP protocol (path MTU discovery) rely on the ability for your computer to receive specific kinds of ICMPs. Random connections will fail on a computer that doesn't receive ICMPs at all.

hmm, a quick search found an ubuntu client for juniper and tunneling possibilities for checkpoint (although full 'office mode' functionality (whatever that is) is not possible). i suppose anyone can build layers of proprietary code to make accepted industry standards unusable, but why would anyone in their right mind use them? :-)

You sound like you've never worked in a corporate IT environment.

Most of the time, you don't have a choice. And the people who decide to buy this or that for the corp. VPN don't even have a clue that someone might not be using Windows. More, they don't give a hoot (borrowed from the Night Owl ... hi Bernard, wherever you are). Sad fact of life.

Holy cow... how far have we gone starting from a simple bloody disk to be connected into a computer, something a 12-year-old can do with eyes closed nowadays.

i.e. If your work forces it (like me), you end up with Windows as that's what the office VPN software is for.

vpns are platform independent, you don't need a windows client to connect to a micrsoft vpn

Not all of them are, by far. Both Checkpoint and Juniper offer VPN solutions for which only Windows and Mac clients exist. Although they're based on standard protocols, they've added enough nonstandard stuff in there to prevent interoperability with open-source clients.These vendors are very popular in corporate environments. Not the whole world runs OpenVPN ... I regret it as much as you do, but that's the sad truth.

OK, I'll look into it... but it would mean somehow ripping the disc over the internet ... could I do that?

Of course you can. Teamviewer lets you remote control the desktop of your niece's computer just as if you were sitting in from of it (mouse movements and screen updates are slower, though). The first step would be making an .ISO (a big image file) of that disc that will have to be inserted into the drive. There are a lot of free programs you can use to do this. One that is both good and very simple to use is Imgburn (Google for it). You'd have to install it on the remote computer first (it's a few mouse clicks).

Once you have that ISO file you have to send it to you here. I recommend using the free file transfer service wetransfer.com. If the ISO file is > 2 gigabytes you'll have to split it first because no free file transfer service I know allows sending files over 2 gigs big. Hence my question about this disk being a CD (700 megs) or DVD (up to 9 gigs).

Splitting is no big deal either. Again many free programs to do this, I would suggest 7-zip that will compress is also. Then you can send every part until you have them all, reconstruct the original ISO file with 7-zip again then use any CD/DVD burning program to recreate the original disk.

This, of course, could be defeated if the original CD/DVD has some kind of nasty copy-protection on. But that's unlikely for scientific programs.

Hope this helped a bit.

Like in most countries there's no one in Thailand who is assigned to routinely check your ISP's access log for all the web sites you have been visiting. So even if you accidentally hit a nasty web site, that shouldn't worry you. Unless, of course, you already are under scrutiny from authorities for some reason - I presume you are not.

Of course it's always better avoiding to accidentally open a web page mentioning He Whose Name We Do Not Speak in any way. Even if not explicitely blocked. Just in case...

I'm not sure that my niece is reasonably comfortable, to be honest. I basically don't want to take too much of her time. Before I left UK, I knew I'd be in this situation, so I left a prestamped envelope, signature-on-delivery form etc. so she can just pop it in. I was just asking about the Panthip possibility because I'll need to decide where to have the physical disc sent to and the chance of it being lost. If I can't get this locally, then it's plan B I guess.

Understood. There's another way: do it yourself. Let her install Teamviewer (Google for it) on her PC @UK. After 3 or 4 clicks it will be installed and it will show a user ID and password she must pass on to you. Then you can control the screen remotely. If the said disc is in the drive you can handle all this by yourself.

Teamviewer is a blessing. I use it A LOT to support not-too-computer-literate friends.

I shall be bound to BKK soon, planning to take my usual shoot of IT shopping at Zeer because I like this place and it's along my path. It was severely flooded and closed, does anyone know what its status is nowadays? No floods anymore I know of course, but open or not? all floors or not?

I'd rather avoid going to Panthip or Fortune if possible. More hassle.

trying to hunt for the registration page and going to try a name with an incorrect ID number

I have doubts that they managed to link their on-line subscription page to the (presumably huge) national ID registry database, but I might be proven wrong.

Please share the result of your attempt. That's interesting.

The Galaxy Note had an impressive review on a web site I tend to trust: The Register.

See http://www.reghardware.com/2011/12/05/review_samsung_galaxy_note_android_tablet_and_phone/

Of course that doesn't match other people's first hand experience, but it might be a hint. It certainly made me willing to have one but it isn't cheap.

Er... before you start reinstalling... have you talked to the other people in the building? making sure they are not suffering from the disconnects as well? It might well be the access point misbehaving, rebooting itself or whatever. Sorry if your reply's going to be "of course I did"

Because I only know my niece in UK, and she doesn't know how to do that (actually, I don't think I do either).

I can help if you wish. It could be much simpler than some posters seem to make it. First question would be: is the disc a CD or DVD? If it's a CD, I'd say it's a go for the online transfer. If it's a DVD, there will be an extra step to split the image into parts small enough to be sent, so it will add a bit to the complexity, but this still in within the reach of someone who's reasonably comfortable using computers. PM me if you want me to elaborate.