Me On Live TV! (Last Week Though)

Last Friday (Sep 23), a reporter hosting an IT-related news show called me up (at 17:00) to ask whether I would like to appear live (at 22:30) on the show which will discuss online behaviors of children. I said yes and you can see the video clip and its transcription here.

SaiJai.net: A Better Society One Child At A Time

Corruption & "Thailand's Iron Lady" (My Heroine)

"Corruption is truly a national priority. Unless this gets better Thailand is going to stall out. You could get away with it before, but not now with the economy at the level it is."

Michael E. Porter,
a world famous strategy professor/guru,
revered by top Thailand's politicians,
at a seminar in Bangkok in 2005.

Now, this is from the Associated Press:

Thailand's 'Iron Lady' Pressured to Resign

The biggest problem for Jaruvan Maintaka is that she knows too much — about corrupt politicians, shady tycoons and multimillion-dollar rip-offs. And that may well cost Thailand's "Iron Lady" her job as the country's first auditor-general.

Jaruvan has been locked out of her office and had her salary frozen, but she refuses to resign unless King Bhumibol Adulyadej endorses the government's pick to replace her. In a move with few precedents, the revered constitutional monarch hasn't signed off on the nomination.
The case has heightened political tensions, generated debate about possible rifts between the government and Royal Palace and focused the spotlight on massive corruption in and around the regime of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

"Jaruvan's tenacity in going after big-time crooks has become the stuff of legend," The Nation newspaper wrote recently. "With only half of her term gone she has amassed a menagerie of adversaries — from vested interests to corrupt politicians — and in the process became a target for elimination."

Cry, my beloved country. The wheel of Karma is turning way too slowly.

Links To Essays In "Best Software Writing I"

Joel Spolsky compiled a list of essays into a book called Best Software Writing I.

I found the book to be an interesting collection of solid, interesting essays. However, I'm not sure it's the "Best Software Writing." To me, the best software writing is Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet.

Neil Kandalgaonkar compiled a list of links to the original essays collected in Joel's compilation.

Wise Words From A Wise Man*

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

When I was a teenager, the most fun science book was the first volume of The Feynman's Lectures on Physics. I frequently slept with the book lying next to me. It actually got me into physics training.

To read his words in the above article brought back a lot of those joyful feelings again.


*Richard Philips Feynman

Data Transformation Adventure

If you are lucky, you will find the contorted logic in this comic strip totally alien.

If you are like me, it would be way too familiar.

For those of you who are not sure how to store your marketing (or any type of) data: Enter it in one sheet of Excel and export it as tab-delimited text or as the csv format. This will be the simplest and easiest to work with computers. Make sure there is no empty row or column. Make sure the column headers are descriptive. Note that Excel can only store up to about 65,000 rows of data.

If your data is too complex for a sheet of Excel, you might want to consider using some kind of a desktop database such as Access. It's not as simple as just typing in Excel but still pretty simple.

If you have a large amount of data and many people will access it frequently, it's time to use a reasonably nice database such as Postgresql, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, etc. The choice depends on your budget and the skill of the person(s) who will help you. Postgresql and MySQL are open source software so they don't cost you any money. The others cost some money but you might be able to piggyback your data onto your company's existing databases.

I remember asking my database administrator friend 15 years ago: Why don't we store everything as simple text file? Turns out that simple text files are quite good for transferring the data between applications but not so good for fast manipulation of data (such as ranking, grouping, summing, etc.) So, if you want to manipulate your data a lot, use a real database (Postgresql and friends...), if you want to transfer the information between different applications, export it from the database into some text format. Tab-delimited text is quite serviceable; for more fancy stuff, you can use XML which is a very fancy text file.

4D Ultrasound Of My Second Baby (Part II)

Today I brought my wife and my son Titus to Bangpo General hospital for my wife's pregnancy checkup again.

The fetus is now 25 weeks old. (The previous post was when she was 12 weeks old, and yes, now we know it's a she.) She is expected in early December.

The first video (7 MB), in which you can see both cross sections and the 3-D reconstruction, is here and the second one (6 MB), in which you can see her arms, is here. For the record, she did not spontaneously transform into a piglet monster--it was just a digital image reconstruction artifact.

For more information about 4D ultrasound, see this guide and this page (where there are many many clips of babies.)

T. Rex Might Have Had Feathers

This is certainly the most exciting discovery for me, considering how ingrained the images of T. Rex are. (I have not seen the pictures of the fossils though, so it might not actually be feathers.)

According to the Times (Britain):

The feather revelation follows a series of discoveries in fossil beds at Liaoning in northeast China where a volcanic eruption buried many dinosaurs alive. It also cut off the oxygen that would otherwise have rotted them away. Some theropod (“beast-footed”) dinosaurs were preserved complete with feathery plumage. Theropod is the name given to predatory creatures that walked upright on two legs, balanced by a long tail. The feathered finds include an early tyrannosaur, a likely ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, two small flying dinosaurs and five other predators. Feathers are thought to have evolved first to keep dinosaurs warm and only later as an aid to flight.

Alien Mind Control

If we were grasshoppers, our body could be invaded by a thread-like alien species (whose length is many times longer than our body length), our mind could be controlled to committed suicide by plunging into the water to our destruction.

From 31 August 2005 NewScientist.com news service:

A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects’ proteins reveal.

Since we are human, we only have to worry about the constant barrages of advertisements making us into docile consumers, doing destructive things to our bodies and souls.

New Knowledge Today: Bulbous Bow

I remembered when I was a kid, I wondered what those round thingy in front of the battleships (especially the WWII battleship Yamato) were. Now I know. It's called the bulbous bow.

Although the detailed physics is not known, bulbous bows are known to give around 12-15% gain in fuel efficiency for the range of speeds they are designed for. The gain is likely to be caused by destructive interferences of the waves in front of the ship and the waves that ride up the bow, giving less drag to the ship.

From the Wikipedia concerning its development:

It is unclear when bulbous bows were conclusively first examined, but research into the effects of bulbous bows was first published in the 1950s. Engineers began experimenting with bulbous bows after discovering that ships fitted with a ram bow were exhibiting substantially lower drag characteristics than predicted, and eventually found that they could reduce drag by about 5%. Experimentation and refinement slowly improved the geometry of bulbous bows, but they were not widely exploited until research conducted at the University of British Columbia in the 1980s increased their performance to a practical level. Bulbous bows were also developed and used by the Japanese before World War II. One example of this was on the battleship Yamato. This research does not seem to have been connected with western research in any way.

The Abilene Paradox

Have you participated in a committee making decisions that nobody wants but nobody objects anyway? Turns out there is a name for this phenomenon. It's called the Abilene Paradox.

The standard parable goes as follows:

Four adults are sitting on a porch in 104-degree heat in the small town of Coleman, Texas, some 53 miles from Abilene. They are engaging in as little motion as possible, drinking lemonade, watching the fan spin lazily, and occasionally playing the odd game of dominoes. The characters are a married couple and the wife’s parents. At some point, the wife’s father suggests they drive to Abilene to eat at a cafeteria there. The son-in-law thinks this is a crazy idea but doesn’t see any need to upset the apple cart, so he goes along with it, as do the two women. They get in their unair-conditioned Buick and drive through a dust storm to Abilene. They eat a mediocre lunch at the cafeteria and return to Coleman exhausted, hot, and generally unhappy with the experience. It is not until they return home that it is revealed that none of them really wanted to go to Abilene–they were just going along because they thought the others were eager to go. Naturally, everyone sees this miss in communication as someone else’s problem!

Abiotic Origin Of Oil

Over the past decade, I'm more and more convinced that the "fossil fuels" are not made of fossils. I'm more convinced that the origin of the fuels is not biological, but is derived from primordial carbon component of the planet. Here is a short article listing evidence for the abiotic origin by Russian scientist. Outside of Russia, the late Thomas Gold is the most famous proponent of the abiotic origin theory.

More Info About Sleep

On a related note, there is an article at BBC about what sleep is with interesting info about the amount of time some animals need for sleep and the following world record:

The current world record for the longest period without sleep is 11 days, set by Randy Gardner in 1965. Four days into the research, he began hallucinating. This was followed by a delusion where he thought he was a famous footballer. Surprisingly, Randy was actually functioning quite well at the end of his research and he could still beat the scientist at pinball.

Drug To Replace Sleep

I often wish I didn't have to sleep. Now, there is a result for monkeys about a drug that reverses the symptom of sleep deprivation. Hopefully it would be applicable to human with little bad side effect.

จดหมายเปิดผนึกจาก ดร. พงศกร สายเพ็ชร์ สำหรับ SaiJai.net

15 สิงหาคม 2548


สิ่งสำคัญในชีวิตของเราคืออะไร

คำถามนี้มีคำตอบต่างๆกันไปขึ้นอยู่กับผู้ตอบ

สำหรับคนในวัยทำงานที่มีลูกอย่างผม ผมเชื่อว่าหลายคนจะตอบว่า อนาคตของลูกเป็นสิ่งสำคัญมากอันดับแรกหรืออันดับต้นๆ
(ถ้าไม่ใช่อันดับต้นๆ ก็ควรลองคิดทบทวนว่าเราได้ตัดสินใจดีแล้วหรือยัง หรือว่าเราควรจะทำหมันเมื่อไร :-) )

บางครั้งเรามุ่งมานะทำงาน หาเงิน หาวัตถุต่างๆ จนบางครั้งเราก็ลืมไปว่าสิ่งสำคัญในชีวิตของเราคืออะไร

บางครั้งเราก็ประสบความสำเร็จมีชื่อเสียง เงินทอง ของเล่นต่างๆมากมาย
แต่สิ่งเหล่านั้นจะมีประโยชน์อะไร ถ้าลูกของเรา เสียคน

ถ้าเรามีเวลาไม่จำกัด เราก็คงสามารถใช้เวลากับลูกเราได้มากตามที่เราต้องการ

แต่เวลาของคนทำงานอย่างพวกเรานั้นมีจำกัด

เราจึงต้องทำการแบ่งเวลาให้สมดุล
ต้องสามารถหาปัจจัยสี่ และอื่นๆเพื่อเลี้ยงครอบครัว
และสามารถดูแลลูกให้เป็นคนที่มีจิตใจดี มีความคิด ไม่ถูกชักจูงด้วยสิ่งยั่วยวนต่างๆจนเกินพอดี

เพราะการขบคิดหาวิธีแก้ปัญหาข้อนี้
จึงเป็นเหตุผลที่ทำให้ ผมและทีมงานประดิษฐ์ ใส่ใจ ขึ้นมาเพื่อแก้ปัญหาบางส่วนที่สามารถแก้ได้ด้วยเทคโนโลยีและคณิตศาสตร์

ใส่ใจ ไม่ใช่ของวิเศษที่จะทำให้ลูกของคุณเป็นคนดีโดยอัตโนมัติ
ใส่ใจ ไม่ใช่สวิทช์วิเศษที่คุณเพียงกด ก็ทำให้ลูกของคุณเป็นอัจฉริยะ
ใส่ใจ ไม่ใช่เครื่องมือวิเศษที่ครอบคลุมทุกแง่มุมของการเลี้ยงดูลูก

แล้วใส่ใจ คืออะไร

ใส่ใจ ถูกออกแบบขึ้นมาเพื่อแบ่งเบาภาระในการดูแลลูกคุณในการใช้คอมพิวเตอร์
ใส่ใจ จะช่วยให้คุณสามารถจัดสรรเวลาในการใช้อินเตอร์เน็ท การเล่นเกม และการแชท ของลูกคุณ
ใส่ใจ จะช่วยกรองเนื้อหาไม่เหมาะสมเวลาลูกคุณใช้อินเตอร์เน็ท
ใส่ใจ เป็นเครื่องมือที่ช่วยคุณเข้าใจความคิดและประสบการณ์ต่างๆของลูก เมื่อเขาอยู่ในโลกออนไลน์

ใส่ใจ เป็นเครื่องมือที่ช่วยให้คุณสามารถใช้เวลาที่จำกัดให้มีประสิทธิภาพ

การเลี้ยงลูกให้ดีนั้น เป็นหน้าที่สำคัญของพ่อแม่ทุกคน
ผมไม่สามารถให้สูตรสำเร็จง่ายๆให้คุณได้
แต่ผมเชื่ออย่างจริงใจว่า สิ่งประดิษฐ์ ใส่ใจ นี้ เป็นของที่มีประโยชน์จริงๆที่จะช่วยพ่อแม่วัยทำงานทุกคน

ผมตั้งราคาค่าบริการไว้ในระดับที่ทุกคนสามารถใช้ได้
ด้วยราคาต่อเดือนน้อยกว่ากาแฟบางแก้ว หรือนิตยสารเล่มสองเล่ม (หรือเบียร์ขวดสองขวด)
ผมหวังพ่อแม่ที่ห่วงใยลูกทั้งหลายจะสามารถใช้บริการนี้ได้โดยไม่กระทบสภาวะเศรษฐกิจเพื่ออนาคตที่ดีของลูกเราทุกคน

ถ้าท่านเห็นว่าความคิดเห็นของผมไม่ใช่สิ่งเพ้อฝัน ก็เชิญทดลองใช้บริการฟรีที่ http://www.saijai.net/ ได้เลยครับ

สังคมที่ดีนั้นเริ่มจากที่บ้าน

ด้วยความนับถือ


พงศกร สายเพ็ชร์

Bowman!

Incredibly addictive Flash game about applied projectile motion.

Interesting Visual Illusions

There are 55 visual illusions to keep you happily dizzy at this page.
The site also contains some explanations about what we learn about our visual system from these illusions.

Tips On Fixing Houshold Appliances & Power Tools

My son Titus is having a lot of fun "fixing" his toys lately, so I'm reading up on the proper way to fix various things around the house to be able to teach him.

Why "Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop"?

For a plausible origin of the phrase, see this entry in the World Wide Words.

I followed the link from Cringely's fun prediction about Apple/Intel Announcement. We will see within half a year whether the prediction is true.

The Real Reason "Kentucky Fried Chicken" Became KFC

...or how politicians became too greedy. (Ha ha, is that possible?)

See here.

The Oldest Working Incandescent Light Bulb

While browsing Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages, I came across this. An excerpt is below:

Today you'll find a remarkable light bulb burning bright at a fire station in Livermore, California. It hasn't been turned off since 1901.

The Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It Or Not and General Electric agree the bulb, of unknown wattage, is the longest-living in history, despite two moves and a few power outages during its lifetime.

The Global Village (?)

You must have seen something similar to the following in your emails:

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following.

There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

It sounds kind of plausible and emphasizes the have and the have-not of the world pretty nicely, but is it true?

According to this urban legend page, there are a few inconsistencies in the numbers above. You might want to check it out before passing on the email.

Earning $1,000,000 The Easy Way*

If you are an astrologer, a psychic, or someone who can demonstrate conclusively any paranormal or supernatural power, run to James Randi Educational Foundation. They will pay you one million US dollars.

From the website:

At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval
of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the "applicant" becomes a "claimant."

Good luck.

*Making Elephant Soup is easy too. First, get an elephant...

Danger Danger!!!

A very scary public warning about a very dangerous substance, "Dihydrogen Monoxide"

According to the site: "Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities. Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage. Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects. DHMO is a major component of acid rain. Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns..."

Meanwhile, back in 1938, there was a very scary news report about space invaders that got quite a few people all shook up.




**in case you didn't check out the linked sites, they are hoaxes :-) Don't panic. Telling your friends about DHMO would be fun though.

Mpemba Effect (or Hot Water Sometimes Freezes Faster Than Cold Water)

In 1963, a Tanzanian student named Erasto B. Mpemba found, while making ice cream at school, that hot mix of boiling milk and sugar froze faster than the cooler mix. He told his teachers but they convinced him that his observation must have been in error.

Later, Mpemba compared the result with a friend who made and sold ice cream and found that the effect was well known in the ice cream making circle.

In 1969, Mpemba, now a highschool student, convinced a professor of physics (Dr. Denis G. Osborne) to write a paper describing the effect. Turn out that the effect was observed for millenia dating back to Aristotle's time.

The effect that hot water can freeze faster than cold water under many circumstances is now called the Mpemba Effect.

Open Questions in Physics

For physics students looking for problems for their term papers, here is a list of open questions in physics.

My favorite is "Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?" Come to think abou it, what is time anyway?

For more ideas for term papers in other subjects, see "List of unsolved problems" at Wikipedia.

Democracy Radio Under Attack

FM 92.25 radio in Thailand is jammed heavily and radio reception becomes impossible. The streaming audio website (http://www.fm9225.net/) was ordered to censor itself. More details at Nation, an English language newspaper in Thailand can be found here. More details at Reporters Without Borders here.

It's a sad, sad day to see my beloved country took a huge step back in press freedom.

ประสบการณ์ Notebook BTO

ซื้อเพราะจะหา laptop ให้ภรรยาใช้แทนเครื่องเก่า เลยอยากลองโน้ตบุ๊คประกอบดูว่าจะดีไหม

ชื้อมาวันที่ 11 เมษา 2548
จากร้าน J** Computer ชั้น 4 IT-Mall

Spec: Pentium-M 1.6 GHz Centrino, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB 5,400 RPM Harddisk, 1024 x 768 14.1" LCD
ราคา: 33,000 (รวม VAT แล้ว)



ตอนรับ ตรวจพบ dead pixel สองครั้ง ต้องเปลี่ยนจอไปสองจอ

เอา RAM ที่บ้านใส่อีก 256 MB ใช้งานได้ดี จอสวย เบา ร้อนมือหน่อยๆที่มือขวาเพราะติดกับ harddisk และตัวเครื่องบาง

ใช้งานได้ถึงวันที่ 9 พฤษภาเริ่มมีอาการดับไปเฉยๆ

ตรวจด้วย Memtest86 เพื่อตรวจ RAM
Prime95 เพื่อตรวจ CPU และ RAM
SpinRite 6 เพื่อตรวจ harddisk
สอบผ่านหมด

ลองสลับไฟระหว่าง battery กับ ไฟบ้านแต่ก็ยังมีอาการ ฉนั้นปัญหาไม่น่าจะเป็นที่ battery

ลองสลับระหว่าง Linux (Ubuntu) กับ Windows แต่ก็ยังมีอาการ ฉนั้นปัญหาไม่น่าจะเป็นที่ OS

วันที่ 15 พฤษภาเอาไปให้ร้านที่ซื้อมาดูอาการ เปิดไว้สองชั่วโมงไม่เป็นอะไร พอเอากลับมาใช้งานก็ดับอีก

ดับถาวรวันที่ 19 พฤษภา
คนขายร้านเคยบอกว่าถ้าเสียมึเครื่องสำรอง จึงโทรไปหา ศูนย์ Synnex ปรากฏว่าทาง Synnex บอกว่าไม่มีนโยบายให้เครื่องสำรอง (เป็นควายโดนหลอกอีกแล้วตู)

ส่งซ่อม ร้านที่ซื้อมา วันที่ 22 พฤษภา
ร้านส่งศูนย์ Synnex
ไปซื้อ IBM R51 (2888-KT4) มาใช้แทน

ได้คืน วันที่ 12 มิถุนา
ใช้ได้ 5 วัน แบตหมดแล้วไม่สามารถเปิดได้อีก

วันที่ 20 มิถุนา ฝากมอเตอร์ไซด์รับจ้างไปส่งโดยตรงที่ Synnex
รอ 1 ชั่วโมง ได้เปลี่ยน motherboard ใหม่ ยังใช้ได้อยู่


------สรุป------

ข้อดี

1. ประกันนาน (Intel CPU รับประกัน 3 ปี, Harddisk Western Digital รับประกัน 5 ปี, Kington Memory รับประกัน LifeTime, Notebook ( Mainboard ) รับประกัน 2 ปี, จอภาพ LCD และแบตเตอรี่ รับประกัน 1 ปี)
2. ศูนย์Synnex บริการดี
3. ราคาไม่แพง เมื่อตอนซื้อ

ข้อเสีย

1. เสียจุกจิก
2. ต้องระวังตอนตรวจรับเครื่อง ดู dead pixel ให้ดี
3. โดนร้านชักจูงจนเข้าใจผิดว่าถ้าเสียมึเครื่องสำรอง
4. รู้สึกไม่มั่นใจในความคงทนของเครื่อง

บทเรียน

1. ของดีราคาถูกอาจจะมี แต่คงหายาก และเราคงไม่ใช่ผู้โชคดีบ่อยนัก
2. ใช้ IBM, Toshiba, Apple iBook ต่อไปดีกว่า (ตอนนี้ ที่บ้านมีคนใช้ IBM R40 1 เครื่อง, R51 3 เครื่อง, Apple iBook G3 1 เครื่อง ที่ทำงานมี Toshiba 2 เครื่อง --ใช้แล้วมีความสุข ไม่เสียเวลากับเรื่องไม่เป็นเรื่อง)
3. IBM มี support บน web ยอดเยี่ยมที่สุด driver update ประจำ มีเอกสารมากมาย รวมถึงวิดีโอการถอดประกอบ/ซ่อม
4. เวลาซื้อของ อย่าซื้อแต่ของถูกๆ เวลามีปัญหาจะเสียหายมากกว่าผลต่างของราคา
5. อย่าเชื่อคนง่ายเวลาเขาพยายามขายของ

Kalama Sutra

NOT to be confused with the Kamasutra.

Kalama sutra is the Buddha's answer to the Kalamas people when they asked him about how would they know when to believe something. It's translated approximately* as:

Rely not on the teacher/person, but on the teaching.
Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words.
Rely not on theory, but on experience.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

In other words, don't believe bullshits too easily. Even when told by respected authority.

*The above translation is from Al's Buddhism Page.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant

I ripped off the title from this article.

If there is a God, I would find it much subtler (and much more elegant) of him (her?, it?) to create all the complexity via randomness and natural selection than the heavy-handed story in Genesis.

What if God does not know how to create things exactly? Natural selection would be a great way to proceed.

To think about our origin and invoke God would lead us to another immediate question about God's origin. Wouldn't it be nice to have one general principle to build all complex entities? I think Darwin's ideas point toward such a general principle.

Anyway, we are probably a simulation anyway according to this philosopher's argument. There is also some peculiar passages in Buddhist sutras about different levels of "heavens" where time proceeds at a different rate. That would be just like simulations within simulations :-)

Democracy Radio Is Back!

FM 92.25, the Democracy Radio, has a streaming audio website at www.fm9225.com

For the past few weeks, I could not listen to the site at all probably because the bandwidth was exhausted. Listening via normal radio is very challenging since there is a lot of interference from silly country music stations and the Ministry of Culture's even sillier broadcast.

Today, we have a clear signal from the website. Let's see how it will do tomorrow.

For those of you who understand Thai and would like to hear a fresh news perspective (as opposed to the news perspectives warped by self consorship induced by economic/political pressures), you can check it out.

Stupid & Evil News of the Day Dept: A man was reported by Thai police to have committed suicide. He has 4 bullets in his chest and one in his head. News in Thai. They must think we are buffaloes. (Buffaloes = fools in Thai, although it is extremely unfair to the buffaloes.)

Gandhi's Quote #1

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.

--Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi

Hmm, that is true because everybody always fall?

Well, we can all hope for a better reality anyway.

4D Ultrasound Of My Second Baby

Today I brought my wife and my son Titus to Bangpo General hospital for my wife's pregnancy checkup. We got an ultrasound done on the 12-week old fetus. The ultrasound probe can render the 3D picture in realtime (hence 4D ultrasound.) The video clip can be found here (5MB.)

For more information about 4D ultrasound, see this guide and this page (where there are many many clips of babies.)

Ultimate Boot CD

Continuing with broken-computer-revival theme, I found the Ultimate Boot CD, a CD that you can stick in your computer, boot from it, and start various tests to see which part of your computer is not working right. You can check your harddisks, CPU, RAM, monitors, and other parts using only one CD. The full list of included utilities is too big for this space but is conveniently located on its homepage. The monitor test is very useful when checking for dead/bright pixels when I buy LCD monitors or laptops--just boot from it and cycle through various colors and look at the screen.

Bios Beep Codes

When your computer fails to start, you can usually hear some beeps. These beeps can give you some clues about what went wrong. This site documents the beeps and the causes of failure. Very handy when need it.

วิธีลง Drivers ใน IBM ThinkPad

แนะนำการลง Software บน IBM laptop ในกรณีไม่มี Windows มาให้ (หรืออยากลงใหม่หมด)
คุณควรจะมี Internet ความเร็วสูงหน่อยเพราะต้องโหลดไฟล์ 100 กว่าเมก

1. ลง Windows XP หรือ 2000 ก่อน (ถ้าไม่เคยทำไปดู http://ichris.ws/node/647 เป็นตัวอย่าง)
2. หา driver network (และหรือ modem) เพื่อให้เข้า Internet ให้ได้ (ขอจากร้าน หรือเพื่อน)
3. ลง firewall ฟรี (เช่น ZoneAlarm) และ Anti-Virus (ฟรีเช่น AVG)
4. ไป http://www.ibm.com/products/finder/us/en/finders?pg=ddfinder
5. กรอก รุ่น laptop ของคุณ (เช่น 2888-KT4, ให้ดูใต้เครื่องหรือบนกล่อง)
6. โหลด "Software Installer for Windows 2000/XP"
7. ใช้โปรแกรม Software Installer ต่อกับ internet แล้วโหลด drivers และ utilities สำหรับเครื่องของคุณ
8. เมื่อเสร็จแล้ว คุณสามารถ copy ไดเร็คทอรี C:\Drivers ไปเก็บไว้จะได้ไม่ต้องโหลดใหม่
9. ต่อเข้า Windows Update

วิธีนี้จะทำให้คุณได้ driver ที่ใหม่และเหมาะสมกับเครื่องคุณจริงๆ

A Very Useful Folder Utility

If you have to work with files scattered in many folders, you will waste a lot of time navigating the folder hierachy. Folder View will solve this annoying problem for you. You will be able to go to your work folders with a single mouse click. The program also integrates with your right click so that you can copy/move files very efficiently. It's a freeware but you can donate money to support the developer.

Opera Browser Resources For Thai Users

If you want to happily use Opera to browse Thai websites you should visit this OperaThai site. One of the first things you want to do is to follow the font instructions here.

Cooking With Solar Power

On sunny days, we have a few hundred watts of power per square meter from sun light and this site has a lot of plans for collecting the power to dry, boil, and cook things.

A rule of thumb is 4 square meters of sun power is about the same as one clothing iron. They are about 2000 watts or so. That's why it's very hot in Bangkok. (That and all the cars stuck in traffic burning imported fossil fuel.)

P.S. Just found this link to Vietnam's solar cooking project. บทความเป็นภาษาไทย

Firefox Internet Browser With Thai Support

For my students who would like to try Firefox for their Internet browsing need, you should visit this page to download the version that can support the Thai language better than the default version. ไฟร์ฟ็อกซ์ภาษาไทย! ไฟร์ฟ็อกซ์ภาษาไทย! ไฟร์ฟ็อกซ์ภาษาไทย!

For me, I prefer Opera, the One True Browser to rule them all :-)

Nifty Relativity Animations

Einstein told us about relativity about a hundred years ago but most of us still don't understand the consequences and ramifications of the ideas. This is mostly because our direct experiences do not include the situations where relativistic effects are easily appreciated. This site aims to remedy the situation. There are computer simulations of what we would see if we are moving really fast or living near a black hole, among other things. (A lot of pages are in German, but you can use Babel Fish to translate them.)

If you decide to make a very fast rocket, you should consult this "Relativistic Rocket" page to gauge your resource requirements.

Now, for something completely different, see zany romance novel covers here.

Physics Notes in Thai & A New Huge Book

My friend Professor Piyapong wrote a few physics notes in Thai about mechanics, electromagnetism, and relativity and made them available on the web. If you wish you had more physics education in your highschool or college and you can read Thai, you can view and download them here.

On a related note, I ordered Roger Penrose's new tome, "The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe." I think I will spend the next year or so looking through it. I hope I would get more satisfaction from it than from Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science." That book is so hand-wavy I couldn't get any meaty science from it. However, keep in mind that Wolfram created Mathematica, a great computer program that is to higher math what a calculator is to division, so there is still a slim possibility that his book contains important truths that most readers missed. (Full text and images from A New Kind of Science are also available.)

Fooling Biometrics With Fake Fingerprints & FM92.25

Here is an illustrated article on how you can fake your very own fingerprints for fun & profits (& possible prison time.)

For those of you who understand Thai and would like to hear a fresh news perspective (as opposed to the news perspectives warped by self consorship induced by economic/political pressures), you can tune in FM 92.25 (aka "Democracy Radio.")

Mondo Cool Computer Science Research!

"Colorization Using Optimization"

It's about converting black & white pictures and movies (!) into full-color with a lot less pain than doing it manually. Much better than an approach based on segmentation.

The Three Great Virtues Of A Programmer

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.

LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.

IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.

HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer."

Programming Perl, p. xiv, by Randall Schwartz & Larry Wall

Top Design Flaws In Software

Here is a very interesting catalog of bugs that we (software practitioners) should pay attention to in our work.

In the "Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs", Bruce Tognazzini, a famous human-computer interaction expert, shares with us a list of serious design flaws that have existed for a long time in many software products, despite their embarassing (or worse, catastrophic) consequences.

On a related note, if you are old enough and you are in the software business, you should have encountered almost all of "The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing" collected by Peter Deutsch.