i void warranties

Red Friday

2012-01-05T23:28:00.002+07:00

I never knew there's such a thing as Red Friday as opposed to Black Friday. But here it is.

Most things are roughly 10% off, equivalent to the Black Friday sale in countries that celebrate Thanksgiving.

Fixing lock up on SerialPort.Close()

2012-01-04T21:30:00.000+07:00

Earlier this year I bought several Arduino boards to do some hardware interfacing and programming. It all worked out pretty well excep the part where the application locks up completely.

The Arduino connects to the computer using USB, but it emulates a serial port, it's really easy to communicate with the Arduino using the standard SerialPort Class in Visual Basic 2008, but the application sometimes locks up when I'm done using the serial port and attempt to close it. A Google search reveals hundreds of other people facing the same issue, and apparently no easy solution. So after some head banging, I found that the trick was to put the SerialPort.Close() method into a thread, and also handle the I/O exception that sometimes happens. See below for code.

Instead of just closing the port, I created a thread:

Dim t As New Thread(AddressOf ClosePort)
t.Start()

And put the actual Close() method into a subroutine:

Public Sub ClosePort () SerialPort1.Close()End Sub

In the subroutine that handles DataReceived events, I added an exception handler:

Private Sub SerialPort1_DataReceived(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.IO.Ports.SerialDataReceivedEventArgs)
On Error Resume Next
Me.Invoke(New myDelegate(AddressOf updateTextBox), New Object() {})
End Sub

In this example, the subroutine invokes the updateTextBox subroutine, which does a ReadLine on the serial port and sends the captured data to a textbox.

It's obvious by now that because SerialPort.Close() sometimes waits on DataReceived and the UI, so just closing the port when that occurs hangs the application. By putting SerialPort.Close() into a new thread, instead of the application hanging, the DataReceived event started giving exceptions due to the port being closed, so handling the exception fixed that issue. At first I tried removing the event handler, but that only reduced the frequency of the exceptions, but did not completely get rid of it. Using an exception handler was probably best, but also see disclaimer below.

Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, and this may not be the best way or even the right way to solve the serial port lock up issue, but it works for me.

WRT54GL vs. H2O

2011-12-26T23:30:00.000+07:00

This is the PCB of a good old Linksys WRT54GL that was completely submerged for approximately one month during the Great Thailand Flood of 2011. Oh, the router was actually placed on a desk, the water level was much much higher than that.

My domain and database servers were all safe since they were on the second floor, but I had to evacuate them (by boat) to another site, which I'll write in detail the next time. Computers that were on the ground floor were all dead, either directly by water or rusted by the humidity. Some I could actually salvage the hard drives or CPU's since the water level was lower, others were completely underwater.

Server evacuation

2011-10-24T10:30:00.000+07:00

I'm stuck in the middle of the Great Thailand Flood of 2011. My entire factory was flooded, and I had to evacuate my server backups to a safe and dry place.

A few years ago, when I was writing policies for SOX compliance, there was a section about risk assessment and business continuity planning, and one of the issues was how to resume operations in case of fire or flood or other acts of God. Who would've thunk that after less than four years, everything I wrote has to be put into actual usage?

So, we were evacuated out to a nearby hotel with free Wi-Fi, and all the managers are connected to the free Wi-Fi, and then they need printing. So I went back to the flooded factory and took out (by boat) a trusty Linksys WRT160NL and a Canon inkjet printer. Previously I talked about using the WRT160NL to share USB printers, but this is slightly different since I don't actually have a LAN any more.

It turned out to be quite easy, I just joined the WRT160NL to the hotel's free Wi-Fi by using client bridge, then used Angry IP Scanner to find a free IP address outside of what I think is the normal DHCP range, and then I just pointed everyone's printer to the new IP address of the WRT160NL, and then we got printing.

While setting things up, I suddenly lost Wi-Fi connectivity, and I called the hotel's front desk to ask them to reset the Wi-Fi, and they told me the only Wi-Fi they have is down at the lobby, and it was working perfectly. I ended up having to find a maid on my floor to ask her if she has ever seen a little box with blinking lights, and she pointed me to a Linksys WAP54G. I simply power cycled the access point and all was fine again.

RIP Steve

2011-10-06T07:36:00.000+07:00

When I was growing up, the first computer I ever used was the Apple ][. (And yes, I have to write II like that.) Even though when I finally saved enough money to buy my own Apple ][, somehow I ended up with a Commodore 64, but the Apple ][ always had a special place in my heart, and I totally admired Apple's founders.

Of course, being the young geek and future engineer that I was, Steve Jobs was always "the other Steve" to me. Fast forward thirty years, I guess few people these days even know of Woz except for us engineer types and students of computer history. It's all about Steve Jobs and his Apple Empire. But I still totally admire the two Steves and what they have done.

Rest in peace.

Virtual Windows 8

2011-09-15T01:00:00.000+07:00

I installed Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox. I normally use VMware, but for some reason it didn't work with VMware, so I tried installing it in VirtualBox and it worked, er, out of the box.

The setup is simple and somewhat faster than Windows 7.

I'm installing Windows 8 the minute it's released. The reason? The up arrow returns!

Windows reimagined

2011-09-14T07:30:00.005+07:00

I watched the Windows 8 keynote streamed live from Microsoft BUILD. It was really interesting, and I could already hear my users exclaim, "Windows 8 already?! We haven't even started to use Windows 7 yet!"

In one of his motivational talks, my boss said that we should continue to improve ourselves, otherwise we wouldn't be learning from experience. If we worked on the same thing for ten years that we learned on the first year on the job, then our work experience would be just one year and not ten years. Well, in this case, my work experience would be exactly 0 years, since we keep getting new things year after year after year. I'm downloading the developer build of Windows 8 right now.

Linksys NSLU2 and OpenWrt

2011-08-20T04:35:00.000+07:00

I have two Linksys NSLU2's that I bought three years ago, during the early days of this blog, to use as print servers. I chose to run the Unslung firmware and use CUPS as the print server. Unfortunately, after using them for a while, I discovered that NSLU2+CUPS was not stable enough for volume printing, and as I was able to get p910nd to run completely stable on a number of other wireless routers, so I had set the NSLU2's aside and switched to using wireless routers with USB ports. I loved the NSLU2's for what they're capable of, but a wireless router doubling as a print server and an access point is far more practical than a single purpose print server that needed a USB flash drive to work.

Recently I suddenly needed additional print servers to support our growing printing needs, and because the WRT160NL was discontinued, I decided to dust off the NSLU2's off and install OpenWrt on them. I thought that since OpenWrt has a much smaller footprint, and if I'm only going to install p910nd and the necessary USB support, it should fit the onboard memory.

I had to use VMware to run the Sercomm upgrade utility, since it doesn't work with Windows 7. When the NSLU2 is placed into recovery mode for flashing, it automatically takes an IP address of 192.168.0.1, so I had to change my VMware's IP address to the same subnet. I installed the latest version of OpenWrt "Backfire" which is 10.03.1-RC5 as of this writing.

After flashing, the NSLU2 automatically changed its IP address to 192.168.1.1. Because I did the flashing inside VMware, and I could configure the NSLU2 using a web browser in Windows 7, I actually had to change my Windows 7's IP address to connect to the NSLU2. I gave it a new IP address to go with my LAN, and plugged it into the LAN.

After that, I installed the p910nd and the USB support packages. These packages are needed: kmod-usb-core, kmod-usb-printer, kmod-usb-uhci, kmod-usb-ohci, kmod-usb2, kmod-usb-printer, p910nd, luci-app-p910nd. I was mostly concerned whether I would have enough memory, but as the image shows, no problems there.

After enabling p910nd and plugging in my USB printer, I could print right away without any problems, but after some testing, I found that once in a while I get a timeout when the print jobs are finishing up, which suggested that I needed to disable bi-directional signaling on the print server, and there's an option for that. One funny thing about OpenWrt on the NSLU2 is that it doesn't turn on the power LED light by default, but there's an option for that too.

So I'm happy with the NSLU2's again.

Upgrade pains

2011-08-19T17:30:00.000+07:00

Sometimes I hate buying new hardware. It's one thing to experiment with new hardware, learning and breaking things in the process, but it's another thing when you've experimented enough and want to put the newly gained knowledge into production use, but only to find out shortly later that everything was in vain since that particular piece of hardware was discontinued.

This happened recently with the Linksys WRT160NL. I've wrote about the WRT160NL previously and mentioned that it was quickly turning into my favorite router. Coupled with recent versions of DD-WRT (17201 as of this writing) it's an extremely stable and capable wireless router. I have a number of them running as regular routers (ha!) as well as USB print servers and VPN servers. Unfortunately when I tried to buy more recently, the shops told me they're discontinued and want me to buy the ~~Linksys~~ Cisco E2000 or E3000 instead. I know the E2000 and E3000 are newer dual band routers with gigabit Ethernte ports, but I already have the WRT160NL running smoothly, buying an entirely different series would mean starting everything over again, and with a different chipset too. (Atheros vs. Broadcom.)

After some research, I found that the Cisco E2100L is the equivalent of the WRT160NL. Unfortunately, the E2100L isn't available locally. I called all my suppliers and they managed to find three WRT160NL's for me, so I bought them right away to keep them for future use. Over the past few months I've also recommended the WRT160NL to serveral friends, so I'm actually tempted to buy the E2000 to exchange with their WRT160NL's. I wish I still lived in the States as the WRT160NL is still available from Amazon.com. (Don't trust those reviews on Amazon.com.)

Still, it looks like it's time to break more things again.

I'm a computer, not a tablet

2011-08-07T13:51:00.001+07:00

I hate Gmail's new look, and I hate Google Calendar's new look even more. I always thought Google is big on the usability front, but apparently they either think everyone's using huge 22" monitors, or everyone's using tablet computers.

P.S. The above is an actual screen capture of Google Calendar's new look from my notebook. None of my events can fit properly on the monthly calendar view.

SysAdminDay 2011

2011-07-29T09:00:00.000+07:00

Happy SysAdminDay! The amount of posts I make here is indirectly proportional to the amount of work I have. I'm now deep in the middle of business process re-engineering, and I seem to have been in stuck in more meetings in the past few months than in my entire life combined, including the times we were implementing the ERP. I only wish the new boss was here when we implemented the ERP years ago!

I was just thinking about how my job has changed over the past two years or so (under the new boss) from massaging the servers into managing projects and implementing business processes. I know IT is business and all that, but it's still a big change for me to go from managing machines to managing people, and I'm still getting my feet wet. And then I saw this article on TechRepublic: The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs. Perhaps starting this November I'll be celebrating Project Management Day.

While searching for an image to go with this post, I came across this great post. It's exactly how I feel too!

Samsung S1 Mini

2011-06-09T19:10:00.004+07:00

I have a 32 GB Kingston DataTraveler 200 Flash drive that I carry with me wherever I go for installing warez^H^H^H^H^Happlications. I have an older 4 GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite that I use for data.

Frankly, 32 GB isn't enough in these days of multi-gigabyte applications, and I really don't like to carry around a 2.5" portable drive, even though I have several of those. I've been wanting to get something larger, perhaps the 128 GB DataTraveler 200, but the price is just slightly out of my reach. (Actually, I paid more for the 4 GB DT Elite back in 2005 compared to the 128 GB DT 200 today, but it's painful to pay such high prices year after year to get the latest and greatest.) So when I came across the Samsung S1 Mini, a portable 1.8" with a reasonable price, I bought it immediately. The S1 Mini comes in six different colors, I bought the black one to go with my ThinkPad. The S1 Mini has been out for around two years, but it was never available here.

Here's a comparison shot between the WD My Passport Essential 500 GB portable drive, the Samsung S1 Mini, the Kingston DT 200, and Kingston DT Elite. The keyboard below is a ThinkPad X61 so it's slightly smaller than a standard sized keyboard.

One thing that always worries me when buying shrink-wrapped hard drives is how the USB port looks like. Sometimes drives claim to use standard USB ports, but they need a proprietary cable to fit into the proprietary hole. The iPhone was famous for this: it had a standard earphone jack, but it's recessed and most earphones won't fit into that hole. Portable hard drive reviews need to show how the USB port really looks like.

The drive speed is nothing to write home about. I didn't expect it to be any fast since it's a 1.8" drive, but it still me a long time to copy all my installation files from the DT200 to the S1 Mini.

Oops. I just noticed my mouse pointer got captured into the photos in this post. I was doing a demo earlier and needed to capture the mouse pointer, and I forgot to turn it off. I'm too lazy to remove them so I'll leave them as they are this time.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard

2011-05-23T09:00:00.051+07:00

When I started taking notes using Moleskine notebooks a bit over two years ago, one other thing I had to do was get a good pen to go with the notebook. Even though I didn't mention it at the time, I bought the supposedly hugely popular Pilot G-2 pen. I liked it so much I even bought the G-2 Pro a few months later.

Unfortunately, I don't know if it's the weather in Thailand or if it's bad usage (I write very softly), but so far all of my G-2 refills except one have died on me, and each time it happened it was the exact same symptom: the ball of the pen came out from the tip (see photo) when I let someone borrow my pen just for a few seconds. Until finally it happend to myself. While I was taking notes during a meeting the pen just suddenly stopped working and the tip came out. I wasn't even doing anything special.

So I went to the office supply place to pick out a new pen without reading any reviews, and I picked up the Pentel Vicuna. A quick web search shows that it's new and appears to be quite popular. Strangely enough, even though only the dark blue colored body is supposed to be blue ink, mine is the light blue / violet colored body, and it even says black on the barrel, has blue ink inside. Unfortunately, even though when I tested the pen at the store it was really smooth and the ink looked good, but when I actually took notes during today's meeting, a lot of ink globs were visible and lines were uneven.

While searching online to see if others are experiencing the same problem I have with the Pilot G-2. I came across a whole bunch of sites "teaching" people how to swap the G-2 refill for a Mont Blanc refill. I thought the whole idea of using the G-2 pen is for the smooth writing and ink quality. Perhaps the grass is greener on the other side? I also see a lot of people complaining that Mont Blanc refills dry up very quickly, but Mont Blanc rollerball pens are capped, so I wonder how many of those people complaining are actually using Mont Blanc refills on other pen bodies such as the retractable Pilot G-2 body?

I've also been using Evernote more frequently lately. Maybe one day these traditional pens (like cameras) will be called analog pens, and I will finally be taking notes with digital pens.

Technical PDF on the iPad 2

2011-05-21T22:30:00.001+07:00

After using my iPad for the past half year as my main reference tool, I discovered the biggest problem was that GoodReader is just not that fast for searching through files, and "flipping" is also quite slow with the page needing to refresh. (In fact, this was the original problem I had with attempting to use the Kindle as a reference tool.)

The slowness problem have been resolved with the iPad 2's faster A5 CPU. The iPad 2 is also lighter making it much easier to hold with a single hand, even for the 3G version. The iPad 2 is also much thinner and weighs much less than my Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed book. Besides the faster CPU and the cameras, there's really not that much difference for my uses, so I'll wait for the iPad 3.

From zero to hero

2011-05-11T12:18:00.035+07:00

Computer books get outdated so fast, but I still buy them once in a while even though I have an iPad just for reading ebooks. It's just awesome to have (almost) my entire library in ebook format and always have them with me, but they're somewhat poor as a reference tool if you need a whole series of instructions (such as doing an installation) and need to keep going back and forth between a number of pages or even chapters, and searching is really slow on the iPad. I've yet to try PDF reading on the iPad 2 (since I don't have one), but the faster processor could help with both issues.

Anyway, my most recent book purchase is Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed even though I already bought the ebook earlier. I've always bought Microsoft's own books when it comes to Windows servers and I wanted to get Windows Server 2008 Inside Out but for some reason it wasn't updated for 2008 R2. I know that R2 doesn't have that many new features, but it's nice to have the latest edition and to prevent a new edition from being released the instant I buy the current edition. The book is 1600+ pages and has thin pages similar to the pages you normally find in the Bible, so physically the book is not that thick, but it's really heavy and I get a free workout every time I pick it up.

It's not always a good idea to buy the ebook then the paper book. O'Reilly has an offer where if you already have the paper book you can register it then "upgrade" the paper book to an ebook for only $4.99. Of course, nothing stops you from registering a book that you don't actually own, but hey, honor counts when it comes to ebooks.

Before ebooks and the term n00b were invented, I uesd to buy lots of books, and I kept almost all of them. Running Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 was the one that got me started in all this.

Like getting a brand new computer

2011-05-10T19:25:00.001+07:00

Now that Sandy Bridge is out in force, I've been seriously thinking about buying a new notebook. I went backwards a bit earlier this year when I stopped using the MacBook and switched to an older ThinkPad X61 with Core 2 Duo, and when I play with friend's newer Core i notebooks, the Core 2 Duo just feels slow.

However, one of my most frequently used programs is VMware Player, which is far more dependent on RAM than on raw CPU power. I have a virtual network inside VMware that consists of a domain controller and multiple Windows client versions that I use to do my testing, and having only 4 GB of RAM sucks when I need to open more than two virtual machines. I decided I should either get a new notebook so I can get cheap DDR3 RAM, or hold out by getting expensive DDR2 RAM or getting an SSD.

So... while searching online for some RAM and SSD prices, I found to my dismay that to take advantage of SSD speeds, I needed a BIOS hack for the X61 to enable SATA II speeds. The same BIOS hack also has a function called Dual-IDA that forces IDA on both CPU cores. Intel Dynamic Acceleration is the precursor to Turbo Boost that Intel heavily advertises on the Core i5 and i7 CPU's. But back in the Core 2 Duo days, they've already had this technology. The basic idea is that if you're only using one CPU core, it automatically overclocks by one multiplier level (i.e., 200 MHz on my Core 2 Duo T7100 CPU). The BIOS hack forces this overclocking on both cores all the time. So my 1.8 GHz T7100 would constantly run a 2 GHz. The equivalent CPU would be the T7250.

The BIOS upgrade turned out to be really hard. The ThinkPad BIOS upgrade utility for older notebooks don't work in 64-bit Windows, so I had to burn a bootable CD. The bootable CD upgrade program didn't work with the original Lenovo DVD-ROM drive that came with X61, it just says no CD-ROM drive found. So I searched around for one of those WinPE rescue discs, which also didn't work since they don't seem to detect that I have a battery, and the BIOS flash utility doesn't work if it doesn't detect a battery.

Sigh. Finally I found an old hard drive lying around. I swapped the hard drive in the X61 and installed 32-bit Windows 7 just to do the BIOS upgrade. With the BIOS upgrade and IDA enabled. My Windows Experience Index for the CPU went from 4.9 to 5.0, and CPU-Z shows the CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz.

After flashing the Dual-IDA capable BIOS, I had to use ThrottleStop to actually enable it. ThrottleStop also allows adjusting the CPU core voltage to more manageable levels. Normally, the core voltage dynamically adjusts itself according to the CPU speed. But since the speed is now locked at 2 GHz, it would be always using maximum voltage. Eventhough the core voltage is still fixed, but I could adjust it down, and the image above shows that it's fixed at 1.05 V. Even though the CPU now runs hotter at idle, but when the CPU load is higher, the temperature is cooler since it's locked at 1.05 V.

In addition to using the Dual-IDA BIOS, I decided to go for the DDR2 RAM. The RAM was really really expensive, but it's still cheaper than having to buy a new notebook just to use the newer DDR3 RAM. VMware Player now screams with 8 GB of RAM, so I'm happy again. At least I can put off buying a new computer for at least a year, or until the X61 breaks down.

RAIDers of the lost archives

2011-04-20T15:30:00.007+07:00

I don't know about other IT support people elsewhere, but for me, we always have computer problems after a long break, like the first day after the New Year, or, often worse, the first day after Songkran festival.

On the last day of the long Songkran festival vacation, the employee RFID scanner's UPS died and somehow took out the scanner's power supply, I had to quickly find a replacement power supply before people started coming in to work. At 8 AM on the first day of work, everyone started turning on the lights and computers at the same time, and all the breakers automatically cut off. Normally someone just had to manually reset the breakers but for some reason resetting didn't work this time, so they just called the building maintenance people then switched all the breakers off, without notifying the IT people, and then the power to the servers went out.

After the power came back, the affected RAID drives (the SQL server has an SSD RAID1 array) started rebuilding themselves, and I started getting support calls that users can't login to the ERP database. I looked at the SQL server and saw alert level 024: Hardware Error. Unfortunately, eventhough I have a nightly backup routine, it failed to activate since earlier last week, and the SQL Agent didn't notify me of its failure. If I restored from last good backup, I lose two days of work and get killed by the users and the boss. If I repair the database, I lose less work but my ERP support guys have to fix it. DBCC CHECKDB REPAIR_ALLOW_FOR_DATA_LOSS it is then.

Fortunately, there wasn't much data loss and internal consistency wasn't compromised, but my ERP guys are still working on the problem as I'm typing this. Later in the afternoon, more support calls started coming in from users using non-standard clients such as Windows 98 and things like scanners that automatically scan and save to shared folders on the server. I turned my attention to the new domain controller to check user and folder rights. Then I notice a little blinking icon on the task bar: one drive on the RAID array had failed.

One of the first posts of this blog was about putting Western Digital RE2 drives into a Buffalo TeraStation. That was in early 2008. Three years later, five of the original fourteen RE2 drives I bought have already failed. The reason I got fourteen drives at the time was to put four each into two Terastations, and three each into two Windows servers. I thought these are supposed to be special drives designed for RAID use, but the stupidly cheap "consumer" drives that I also use for RAID have not had any problems, and these expensive RAID drives are dropping like flies.

One time it was so bad because one drive failed in a TeraStations' RAID5 array, and when I put in a new drive to rebuild the RAID array, another drive went bad took out the entire RAID array. I had to reflash the firmware to bring it back. Last year, one drive in a server's RAID5 array went bad, imagine how bad I felt when it took 30 hours to rebuilt the array.

Luckily I happened to have a test server in an isolated network, so I quickly joined into into the domain and promoted it as a domain controller, then proceeded to replace the failed drive.

During Songkran vacation, while I worked to replace the old server, which I'll write about another time, there was a bunch of half-naked ladyboys outside making noise and splashing water. Had I known I was gonna have all these problems, I would've invited them to come in and just blow up my servers and preemptively end all this misery.

My SQL data and failed hard drive have gone to Bit Heaven. They served well and died without thanks. May they rest in peace.

Throwing hardware at the problem

2011-04-16T10:40:00.002+07:00

My ERP project had been live for a few months, but I never managed to resolve the slowness issue. I'm not very good with SQL Server, and all the optimizations I did probably had limited effects on the performance since Dynamics NAV's C/SIDE code is executed client side and the idiots I have for consultants don't know the difference between native database and SQL Server. I couldn't get to the ERP's code, and even if I could, I probably wouldn't want to hack the code anyway.

Few months ago my boss suddenly told me that we made huge profits this month, and to avoid paying huge amounts of tax on the huge profits, he's giving me special permission to buy stuff. A lot of stuff.

Old server specs (purchased in October 2007): Intel Core 2 Quad Q600 (2.4 GHz), 8 GB DDR2 RAM, ASUS P5K Premium, and 2x500 GB SATA (RAID1). (Was 3x500 GB SATA RAID5, but I listened to the consultants and changed the RAID5 to RAID1, with no difference in speed whatsoever.)

New server specs (purchased in late 2010):

Oh wait...

New server specs: Intel Core i7-950 (3.06 GHz), 24 GB DDR3 RAM, ASUS P6X58D Premium, and 2x160 GB SSD (RAID1).

Windows 7's experience index score is 7.5 on the CPU and RAM, and 7.9 on the hard drive. I wanted to buy a faster CPU, but the 950 is most cost effective, and RAM is maximized for Core i7.

Oh, and the ERP didn't run any faster than before. None whatsoever.

I've talked about my Core 2 Quad Q6600 servers many times before. They were originally bought to replace the older domain controllers and run the ERP database. But I used them for SQL only due to performance recommendations, not that it made any difference since my database is so small. Now that I have the Core i7 dedicated to SQL, I decided to replace domain controllers with the Q6600 servers, and also upgrade the entire domain to 2008 R2 functional level.

Arduino relays

2011-03-18T19:22:00.000+07:00

I'm putting my newly learned Arduino knowledge to practical use. Since I don't really know any electronics, I went to a local electronics supplier called ETT to see what pre-made boards they have. While looking around, I discovered that they make a custom Arduino board with a mouthful name called ET-EASY MEGA1280 Duino Mega that easily connects to their boards using a simple 10-pin connector.

This is the Duino Mega connected to a 5V relay board. The 5V board can be powered directly from the Duino Mega board which is powered from USB. Also connected is a Sharp GP2Y0D21YK infrared sensor. The sensor is a digital sensor with a 24 cm range.

Here's another relay board also produced by ETT. This is a 12V relay board that needs to be externally powered. Actually I got the 12V board first, but then I saw the 5V board that can be powered from the Arduino. But after getting the 5V board I was afraid that it might draw too much power. But both seem to work perfectly fine.

I wrote a little sketch that controls the relays using commands transferred over USB serial as well as reads the status of the infrared sensor. My first Arduino project is a motorized computer scale system. One relay is used to control the motors of the conveyor belt and the second relay is used to toggle a warning siren. The infrared sensor (which will be replaced by a laser sensor in production) is used to sense when to stop the conveyor belt in order to weigh the product.

Of course, the system has a load cell and a weight indicator that also has to be connected to work. The load cell is connected to the indicator through a special load cell connector, and the indicator is connected to the computer using a simple USB serial port converter.

It's complicated

2011-03-14T12:49:00.000+07:00

I bet it is.

Linksys WRT160NL and DD-WRT

2011-03-10T10:30:00.028+07:00

A few years ago, I wrote about the Linksys WRT310N and DD-WRT. I no longer have that router since a friend decided to borrow it permanently, and I ended up selling it to him.

When my ASUS WL500gP died last year, I tried to buy another unit only to find it wasn't available locally any more. So I went looking for an alternative, and the Linksys WRT160NL was what I found. I've had one for a few months already, and recently I bought a few more as it's quickly turning into my favorite router.

WRT160NL has a 400 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, and 8 MB Flash. The It has a USB port ("Storage Link") for attaching USB storage devices. However, with DD-WRT, it can also be using for USB printing. The box has a penguin logo and it's just inviting me to put a third-party firmware on it.

I'm running the most recent DD-WRT (16214 as of this writing) on it. With this version, I can enable USB Printer Support from the web interface and it automatically works with my inkjet printer. With earlier versions I had to manually install p910nd to get printing to work. DD-WRT doesn't have a detailed changelog so I don't know when this happened, but I'm glad it works "out-of-the-box" now.

The DD-WRT router database currently shows version 14896 for download. This version seems to have wireless problems since I seem to lose wireless connectivity after a while. 16214 also seems to have fixed that problem.

While trying to figure out the wireless issues, I also followed the recommendations in this thread and set my TX Antenna to 1+2+3 and RX Antenna to 1+3 and Antenna Gain to 2, which seems to greatly increase my wireless stability and connectivity.

Oh, while I was playing with upgrading the different firmwares, the WRT160NL locked up completely. It would no longer finish booting and the power light just flashes. However, upon closer inspection, I discovered that the router wasn't actually "bricked", and I managed to recover it simply by using tftp to upload the linksys-to-ddwrt-firmware.bin to it. After it rebooted, then upload the actual wrt160nl-firmware.bin to it using the web interface.

Just to be sure that it wasn't pure luck that I recovered the router, I purposely crashed the router several more times, and each time I managed to recover it by using tftp.

The WRT160NL also works with Gargoyle, which I'll talk about next time.

Giant iPod touch

2011-03-03T05:20:00.007+07:00

iPad 2 was released earlier today and it looks almost exactly like the leaked photos. I was one of the few people that thought the leaked iPad 2 photos were real, since it follows closely Apple's recent design paradigm: no more round backs. The iPad 2 looks almost exactly like the fourth generation iPod touch, which I really like.

But what I like most about the iPad 2 is that it's much lighter! I've had the iPad 3G for a few months and I no longer really notice the weight, but whenever I pick up iPads without 3G I notice how much lighter they are. The iPad 2 with or without 3G are both lighter than the original iPad. But I probably won't upgrade unless I can get one for free. Besides, my iPad is jailbroken.

Bye OS X

2011-02-25T18:00:00.002+07:00

It might be funny to pick the day of the Intel Core 2011 Macbook Pro introduction to post this, but after two years of mostly enjoying OS X, and learning to program Objective-C, I'm going back to Windows. To be precise, I'm moving on to Windows 7, and not going back to Windows XP.

Oh, I love OS X and its Unixness, but there are just so many things that prevent me from being a happy and productive user. One of my biggest gripes is that I can't print to any of my networked printers except an older LaserJet that has a JetDirect card. But even with that printer, I have to manually select Tray 2 every single time, eventhough it's already set to Tray 2 by default both in Settings and in CUPS, but it doesn't work. Still, once in a while it would completely refuse to print, and I would just twiddle my thumbs until it would suddenly work again after a random number of hours, sometimes after days.

My MacBook is the early 2009 model upgraded with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, but it's just so unbearably slow. I try to avoid websites with Flash, since that just slows it down even more. I'm back to using an older ThinkPad X61 (the one I used to test all the Linux distributions). The X61 is 3.5 years old and only has 2 GB of RAM, but it's running circles around the MacBook. Oh, and the X61 is running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, while the MacBook is running OS X 10.6.6.

I'm also back to using Firefox. Firefox was unusably slow on the Mac, so I changed to Safari like a good OS X user should, until I ran into problems with non-English filenames, then I switched Chrome. Chrome is really really nice, but it doesn't support automatic downloading using a download manager, and again, Flash is unusably slow. Flash is really fast on Safari, and Safari works with download managers, so I ended up having two web browsers open all the time.

I really miss iCal though.

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

2011-02-24T18:15:00.007+07:00

Service Pack 1 for both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 was out for Volume Licensing customers since last week, and was released into the wild earlier yesterday. I didn't have time earlier to download it from the Volume Licensing site, but I decided to take some time to download my updates today.

For some stupid reason the downloads keep getting stuck at exactly the same place every single time. For example, the Windows 7 Professional X64 English ISO, which is 3,181,668,352 bytes, always gets stuck at exactly 2,682,257,408 bytes, even if I use a download manager, even if I use Microsoft's own Java-based download manager, even if I use IE instead of Firefox. I tried downloading around the erroneous byte by using Flashget, but even when the file is 100% loaded, that single problem byte is still stuck and attempting to load it just gives me a server error. After trying numerous times, I looked at my firewall logs and noticed I've already downloaded over 100 gigabytes today, without getting anywhere.

Luckily, I still have The Pirate Bay at my disposal. So even though I'm a Volume Licensing customer for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, along with a whole bunch of other Microsoft products, I ended up having to download ISO's from The Pirate Bay. Arrrrrrrrrrr!

Update: after a few weeks, I went back to the Microsoft download site and still couldn't download the problem files. I found a place for leaving comments and left a comment, and a few days later, I could successfully download the files. I don't know if the problem was with Microsoft or with the local Akamai mirror on my ISP, but it's hard to imagine I was the only person with problems...

Science for adults

2011-02-08T09:20:00.006+07:00

Robots are one of the most fascinating things ever, it's one thing to write programs to watch the flashing bits on a monitor, but it's completely different when you can program physical objects to ~~destroy the world~~ behave according to your instructions.

So, I've been looking at the Lego Mindstorms NXT and the Arduino for ages, but I never bought into them since the NXT is so crazy expensive locally, and I couldn't find Arduino anywhere, and I don't want to risk having to pay through my nose for import tax, without having a little hands-on first.

Unfortuntaely, this kind of backwards thinking is not very good for me and I never got my robots, until I came across Vol. 27 of Otona no Kagaku (literally, science for adults) at the local Kinokuniya bookstore by pure chance. Vol. 27 includes a Japanino (an Arduino clone), an LED bar, and Japanese instructions for building a POV (persistence of vision) device. I can't read Japanese very well, but the Otona no Kagaku website has English instructions for download.

Since I'm relatively late to the Arduino game, there are literally millions of Arduino resources on the web at my disposal. I'm a hardware (PC) person, but I've never really been an electronics guy, I hope this will get me started.

Update (2011-02-18): I kept having trouble uploading sketches to the Japanino on my MacBook. It appears to be due to hardware design according to this page at Switch Science, and this page seems to describe USB overcurrent problems and how to fix it, but I'm just guessing since I can't really read Japanese.

Request more users

2011-01-08T06:00:00.001+07:00

I received mail earlier today from Google announcing support for DKIM for all Google Apps editions. My boss has always complained that he couldn't send email to or receive email from his boss, and the IT people at his boss' company always refused to check their in-house email server for problems and keeps telling me to check my email server for problems.

Occam's razor moment. An in-house email server with hundreds of users vs. Google Apps. What are the chances the problem is on my end? DKIM doesn't really have anything to do with inability to receive mails, but I like to throw acronyms at my boss, so, I enabled DKIM on Google Apps and set my DNS accordingly, and on another tab, I was doing user transitions to the new Google Apps infrastructure. While I was doing this, I suddenly noticed on the Dashboard I can request for more users. The request for more users button was disabled a few years ago when Google Apps started the Premier Edition (now simply called Google Apps for Business) and since I already have 200 users I never actually needed more users. (Unlike new Google Apps users that can only get 50 users, I've been using Google Apps since 2006 and started with 100 users, and I've requested for 200 users in 2007.)

To make sure I wasn't imagining things, I googled and found this TechCrunch article, which is exactly what my dashboard looked like earlier. And just to make sure I'm not dreaming, I immedidately requested for 100 more users.

Yay!

Loving Linux Mint

2011-01-07T18:00:00.001+07:00

(Continued from Part 2)

After trying openSUSE and Fedora and getting frustrated, I was almost ready to give up. Surely if people are trying to get Linux onto desktops, it should be easier than this? All those people that are saying Linux is ready for personal use must be delusional, or have really simple needs.

Anyway, my next was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is by far the most popular Linux distribution with a huge commercial backing. The installation screens of Ubuntu is also different from others in that it highlights Ubuntu's features instead of showing technical messages that most people probably won't understand.

Ubuntu has multi-lingual support built-in, but maybe because they don't have a lot of Asian developers, their selection of pre-installed input method are more than strange, to say the least, and the most commonly used Pinyin input, ibus-pinyin, isn't available by default, and none of those Chinese input selections in the screen below worked in a useful manner.

You might also think I'm easily discouraged. The thing is, I have no problems with using Windows or OS X in my daily work. I don't think Bill or Steve are the devil, and I use the right tool for the right job. I can easily learn to compile my own kernel or drivers, but I want to see how difficult it would be for an average person to get Linux going, without getting all frustrated.

Like Fedora, Ubuntu supports brightness and volume OSD out of the box, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggling using Fn-F5. Trackpoing scrolling and sensitivity can be installed and configured the same way as Fedora.

The big surprise was for Active Protection System, which I couldn't get to work in Fedora. In Ubuntu, both tp_smapi (called tp-smapi-dkms) and hdaps are available in the repo. After installing them from the repo, APS worked right away without additional configuration.

I was almost going keep Ubuntu when I went to uninstall Evolution. I don't use a desktop mail client, so Evolution is no use for me, but when I tried to remove it, Software Center also wants to uninstall ubuntu-desktop as well, which is probably not a very good idea. Evolution is just too integrated with Ubuntu to make a full and clean uninstallation possible.

Next and final in queue, Linux Mint.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are almost exactly the same thing. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but with somewhat different pre-installed applications and themes (Thunderbird instead of Evolution, Pidgin instead of Empathy, and it's green instead of brown), the partner repo is pre-enabled, and video codecs are pre-installed instead of auto-installation on first use.

Linux Mint's Software Manager is a lot like Ubuntu's Software Center. But it adds community reviews and stars, which sounds like a good idea at first, until you see the reviews for programs like Adobe Reader which is really useful for enterprise users like me, but typical "fanbois" would hate. I think this is Linux Mint's only drawback, and I wish there's a way to use the Software Manager without seeing those amateur reviews and scores.

In conclusion, I've been using Linux Mint for a couple of weeks now. As of this writing Ubuntu 10.10 is out, and I imagine a new version of Linux Mint would be coming soon.

(To be continued...)

Skype

2010-12-23T20:30:00.000+07:00

7 million Skype users are online, and none of them are my friends. Skype has been down for almost 24 hours, and my phone has been ringing off the hook since this morning from desperate users who can't get in touch with their friends or customers. It's amazing for my users to realize how much they depend on technology when they're suddenly cut off from it.

I most definitely wouldn't want to be a member of Skype's IT team right now.

Technical PDF on the iPad

2010-10-29T22:35:00.005+07:00

I've wanted an iPad since it was released to read my technical manuals in the PDF format (mostly because the Kindle didn't work so well). Unfortunately, I could find hundreds of iPad PDF viewer reviews online, but none of the reviews I found talk about the actual usability or display quality, and none of the iPad's I saw in real life have any PDF's loaded. I've walked up to strangers in public asking to see if they have technical PDF's in their iPad's, but all I've ever seen are games.

Since I couldn't find out the quality of iPad PDF displays and I didn't want to buy one blindly, so I gave up the idea of buying an iPad earlier this month. But of course, fate works in mysterious ways.

You need to click on the image to see the full size. The PDF's I loaded are Wrox's SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting that I've been digging into lately, and a "borrowed" copy of Wiley's Mastering AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011 so I can see display quality of images inside PDF. It has already been deleted as I'm not an AutoCAD user.

iBooks is the ebook app and store frontend from Apple, but it also handles PDF files. The display quality is good. But like most Apple programs, there's no way to customize the program at all.

Stanza is probably the most well known ebook reading app and it's available for every device. It handles PDF really fast, and there are all kinds of customization settings that helps the "reading experience". However, maybe because the program is optimized for real ebook formats such as ePub, the PDF display quality is really really poor.

GoodReader is perhaps the best known PDF reader, having separate iPhone and iPad versions. There are tons of customizations, but none of them seem to be really useful. I also hate that it has page flipping animation if you swipe to turn the page, but no animation if you tap to turn. However, the PDF display quality is by far the best. As can be seen in the images below, the graphics in the PDF can be seen clearly without zooming, and the AutoCAD image is smooth without jaggies.

ReaddleDocs is probably the most famous PDF reader since I see glowing reviews for it all the time and it's promoted everywhere. In fact, it was the first I tried. But it turned out to be really bad. Both the controls and image quality can't compare with any of its competitors. There is also a separate iPhone version available.

Fast PDF is not fast.

iRead PDF is the free version of iAnnotate PDF without the annotation features. iAnnotate PDF was popular for a while for being the first iPad PDF app that allows annotation simply by writing and marking with your fingers, but most of the competitors have now added similar features, and it just doesn't stand out any more. Also, it seems to be geared toward annotation and not reading, so the "reading experience" is lacking. There's no capture of the AutoCAD book since I just didn't care about the program enough to keep going.

pdf-notes is a free app that allows annotation. But it's slow and doesn't handle PDF display that well at all. Once again, there's no capture from the AutoCAD book.

It's quite obvious that the display quality of embedded graphics is greatly enhanced by anti-aliasing the graphics. But I looked and none of the apps have a setting to toggle anti-aliasing. It's either there (iBooks and GoodReader) or it's not (the rest), which is why iBooks and GoodReader are the best choices for PDF with embedded graphics.

Finally, I have some photos taken with my iPad next to the SQL Book. The first photo is the book opened to the same page as the screenshots above, and the second photo is opened to a random page that shows some code. The iPad is running GoodReader.

Some moiré is visible on the iPad screen due to the low quality screen protector film. This is not a screen protector film review, but that particular film is so bad that after two days, I already have permanent markings on the film on frequently used areas such as the area where I tap to go to the next page! And I don't know where they get the "anti-reflection" from. Maybe it reflects so much light you get blinded so you don't see any more reflections.

GoodReader is by far the best of the PDF readers I tried. However, I really don't like not having page animation when tapping to turn the page. The program is highly customizable, but the things that can be customized just aren't useful. But the display quality and speed more than make up for the shortcomings.

As for Stanza, I've been using it for a long time on my iPod touch to read ebooks and I've customized it exactly the way I like it. I would continue to use Stanza to read PDF files that aren't technical books. Unfortunately, since GoodReader can't be customized as much as Stanza, I've had to "un-customize" some of my preferred Stanza settings so the two programs can behave in the same way so I don't keep confusing myself.

iBooks is also recommended if you prefer to use Apple's ebookstore and don't want to customize anything.

Happy reading!

Windows Server 911

2010-10-21T10:21:00.001+07:00

What could be worse than never performing backups? Server crashes in the middle of the backup process. Which was exactly what happened to me a few days ago, while I was backing up SQL data off our ERP server, and then the work day started and users started calling in the complain.

After the server rebooted, the Intel ICH RAID started rebuilding itself and was stuck at 33% and the ECC errors kept on climbing, which indicated a bad hard drive. The Intel console didn't say which drive was going bad though. Fortunately, the BIOS settings page did say that drive 0 was bad, so I replaced the drive with an identical one.

Unforunately, after the drive was replaced, it restarted the RAID building process, but the Intel Matrix Storage Console also complained that there's a missing drive. I kept wondering if I did something wrong, but luckily, after about 30 hours of RAID rebuilding, the process completed and everything was fine, and the missing drive error disappeared. (I didn't capture an image of the missing drive error, since I thought it would be there even after the rebuild was complete.)

So everything turned out to be fine. But during the 30 hours that the RAID was rebuilding, I took another full backup of the SQL data and restored it into my server's identical twin with the newer OS. So now I have two identical servers with different OS's and different versions of SQL Server.

The older server is Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008, and the new, live, server is Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2. After some testing, I decided to just take out the older server and replace it with the new one, since I've been wanting to upgrade to R2 for a while. So the drive crashing and stressful server rescue (and getting abused by the users) turned out to be a good thing after all.

Before:

After:

Oh, and what could be more stressful than bringing a new server with restored databases online? A database went missing. But this was a result of the bad information our ERP consultants gave me (i.e. I should always restore database backups using the ERP client and not using SQL Server), which further proves their uselessness.

The accidental DBA

2010-10-15T21:07:00.004+07:00

A lot of DBA seem to be accidents. A search for accidental DBA on Google turns out millions of matches, and now I'm one of them.

A few months ago, when my Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP project was about to go live, one of the last things we got stuck at was a process called adjust cost item entries ("ACIE"), which basically takes all the transactions you've made, and figures out the average or FIFO cost of a particular item in your inventory.

So I was looking at the adjust cost process, and it was taking a long time. A loooong time. A looooooooong time. A looooooooooooooooooong time. After a few hours, I killed the process and decided to ask the consultant about it.

The mor^H^H^Hconsultant said something like... your server is probably way below our recommended specs, adjust cost only takes two hours on her notebook, you need to buy a new server, or install a modern OS like Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005. I told her that our server already runs Windows Server 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008. Both are 64-bit. The server has a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8 GB RAM, and loads of disk space in a RAID5 configuration. She then mumbled something about Windows Server 2008 is too new and probably incompatible with our hardware, but then she suddenly jumped and said that RAID5 is baaaaad for SQL Server.

Hmmf. I do know that RAID5 is not a very good choice to run SQL Server on, and our server really wasn't all that powerful in 2010 (it was bought in late 2007), but then the server was specifically bought to run the ERP software, our database wasn't that big, and we only have 20 users. Even if it's sub-optimal, it shouldn't take forever to do something that needed to be done weekly or even daily.

After trying a whole bunch of settings on both the hardware and on Windows, and being nagged to no end by the consultants that my RAID5 setup is no good for running SQL Server and that I need to buy the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server instead of the Standard Edition, I finally brought my second server with identical specs online, but I installed the database files on separate drives. It's not RAID10 like they asked, but it has separate drives for the OS, for SQL Server itself, for the database files, for the log, and tempdb. I also installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.

So I started the adjust cost batch process on this server, and exactly 24 hours later, it completed! I had never been able to complete the adjust cost process on the live server, since the database server can't accept posting entries while ACIE is running. But running for 24 hours wasn't exactly acceptable. (I could even accept 12 hours (!) since our working hours is 12 hours.)

I couldn't understand why the process only takes two hours on her notebook, so I decided to steal a look at the notebook when she wasn't looking to see how things were configured there. But then I discovered that she was running the native client version of the Dynamics NAV software. GAH!

Dynamics NAV comes in two different versions. The native version uses a file based database, and the SQL Server client version which, of course, uses SQL Server. They're very similar, but code has to be optimized differently depending on which version is used. I realized then that the idi^H^H^Hconsultants had absolutely no clue whatsoever about SQL Server, and decided to take matters into my own hands. (Okay, I had an idea earlier that they were clueless when they installed the entire database into my boot drive when the data drive had 1 TB of empty space, but they argued that I set up the drives wrong.)

Oh, I did get the ACIE issue resolved. While I was trying out different hardware settings, one of their other consultants (PURE GENIUS, by God!) mumbled something about bugs in the ACIE routine, and sent me an object, which immediately resolved the issue, and my ACIE time dropped from 24 hours to minutes. Proving that all the problems had nothing to do with my hardware whatsoever.

Since I was taking matters into my own hands (becoming the accidental DBA), I had to start learning first. I first went to Amazon and bought The NAV/SQL Performance Field Guide, which is targated at Dynamics NAV and Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, which is targated at SQL Server in general. Unfortunately, since I was such a newbie at SQL, and I like Wrox books in general, so I also got Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration. (Since then, I've also bought Manning's SQL Server 2008 Administration in Action, which is by far my favorite right now.)

After burying myself in the books for a few weeks, I started working on the SQL Server. First, I discovered that the consultants had allocated 40 GB to the NAV database's PRIMARY file, and it was only using 60 MB. The data filegroup, however, was set to auto-grow and it was at 12 GB with 99% full. So I resized it into a more logical 128 MB PRIMARY and 16 GB data. They told me that I had allocated too much space when they were the ones that did the idiotic allocation.

Second, I discovered that the NAV log file was 200 GB. We've never done a backup using SQL Server, since the consultant insisted that we should backup only using the Dynamics NAV client and not through SQL Server. I backed up the log which cleared it out, and resized it to a more logical 8 GB. Since we only do daily backups and don't care about data loss during the day, I also decided to change the recovery mode to simple.

After the above, I made maintenance plans to make daily backups using SQL Server's backup function. Backing up using the NAV client by then took nearly an hour, and restoring the database took nearly three hours. Backing up and restoring using SQL Server only took about 5 minutes.

Next, The Dynamics NAV/SQL Performance Field Guide provided an index defragmentation script, which took more than an hour to complete on the first run. I guess it was an indication how fragmented my database was. Nowadays it takes about 2-3 minutes to run.

The consultants also said that my server has way too little RAM (it has 8 GB) since task manager indicates that SQL is using all the memory. 8 GB is not that much for SQL Server, but we have a very small database! Besides, SQL Server is designed to cache data in memory and it's normal for SQL Server to use large chunks of memory. But I still made changes to SQL Server so it doesn't automatically take up all the memory.

I wrote above that the ACIE issue was resolved. However, the ERP software was still suffering performance problems, and the assw^H^H^H^Hconsultants were still insisting that my RAID5 (and lack of RAM) was causing problems. By this time I've given up explaining to them patiently that my RAID5 had nothing to do with the sluggishness, since the ACIE problem was fixed by a simple object. (Anyway, just by pure chance, or maybe it was the Will of the Gods, one of the drives in the RAID5 array died and I ended up in a RAID1 configuration, which I describe in another post.)

After doing all that, the ERP software is still uselessly slow most of the time. What do I do in times like these? Why, throw more hardware at the problem, of course.

(Image source: Imagine-Net Technology)

10/10/10 10:10

2010-10-10T10:10:00.002+07:00

Happy 10/10/10 10:10!

In other news:

limera1n untethered jailbreak is out for iOS 4.1 for all devices. More coverage on the Dev-Team Blog.

Finding the right Linux distribution

2010-09-30T07:35:00.018+07:00

(Continued from Part 1)

After picking my distributions using VMware, I installed them on my test laptop, a ThinkPad X61. The X61 is an older Penryn Core 2 Duo machine with 2 GB RAM and 80 GB hard drive. It also has Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, but no WWAN and no webcam.

My goal is to have a Linux distribution that supports all of the X61's hardware properly and is easy to configure and use day to day. i.e. as a machine that I can do work with, and ocassionally watch some movies, and not something that I need to continously update in order to get things to work.

I started with openSUSE, which was actually my favorite of my four final choices while testing out with VMware. openSUSE is also special is that it knows it's running inside VMware and automatically installs VMware Tools. openSUSE is the community supported edition of SUSE Linux Enterprise, which is commercially supported by Novell. This is also one of the reasons I'm interested in openSUSE.

For the ThinkPad X61. Out of the box, openSUSE supports trackpoint scrolling, brightness control (without OSD), volume control, Fn-F5 to toggle wireless, and also hold down Fn-F5 to toggle Bluetooth.

Unfortunately, for some reason Wi-Fi didn't work out of the box, after some trying, I restarted networking by issuing the command /sbin/rcnetwork restart which started thing up, and after that it just worked, even after reboots. I have no idea why it didn't work the first time.

openSUSE doesn't have any non-free software installed by default or even enabled, so I had to first add the contrib repo and restricted formats repo (for playing videos).

Also due to licensing issues, openSUSE doesn't have subpixel smoothing installed by default, so I had to add the subpixel repo and enable it. Strangely enough, I noticed that the Gnome edition of openSUSE does have subpixel smoothing already included and enabled. Unfortunately, with either the KDE or Gnome editions, having subpixel hinting enabled didn't mean that it automatically works with all applications without some hacking.

Aside from subpixel smoothing, openSUSE seems to work perfectly at this point, except the KNetworkManager would randomly segfault. I was about to attempt to get APS to work (see below) when it froze and hung the entire OS (thought this wasn't possible with Linux, but people also say the same thing about OS X and I've had OS X freeze up more times than I could count). When I rebooted, KNetworkManager kept segfaulting non-stop and the network kept going down, so I decided to give up and installed my next favorite: Fedora.

Fedora for some reason can't find my external USB DVD drive when installing from the install DVD. So I had to install using the Live CD.

Out of the box, volume and brightness OSD work, and Fn-F5 toggles Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Subpixel hinting is available in Fedora, but disabled by default. Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts to enable it.

One surprise in Fedora is that iBus is already installed and enabled by default. This is really helpful for non-English users since there's no need to figure out how to install iBus and an input method.

Unfortunately, when I tried to play a movie, Fedora automatically offered to install the appropriate codecs for me, but no matter what I did, the installation always fails and I couldn't get any videos to play, since attempting to play would just bring back the failed to install package error again.

Unlike openSUSE, trackpoint scrolling wasn't available by default. I had to install gpointing (from the repo) to enable it. Trackpoint sensitivity can be configured after installing configure-trackpoint. No problems here.

Active Protection System turned out to be really difficult. APS is what ThinkPad calls their hard drive protection system that automatically parks the drive head when a vibration is detected. Normally Linux needs tp_smapi to read the vibration sensor, and hdapsd to read the output from tp_smapi and do the actual parking.

For Fedora, hdapsd is already included in the standard repo, but tp_smapi was nowhere to be found. I eventually found a site that has tp_smapi pre-compiled but there were four different ones available for download with no documentation whatsoever, and none of them worked. Google turned up nothing helpful.

So at this point, I gave up and installed the next in list, Ubuntu.

(Continued in Part 3)

redsn0w for iOS 4.1

2010-09-21T13:33:00.001+07:00

This is the just released redsn0w 0.6.9b1 for for jailbreaking iOS 4.1 on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G only. This is the OS X version, Windows version coming soon. No warranties, of course.

Download from Rapidshare

Download from Hotfile

Team issue tracking with Redmine

2010-09-20T23:14:00.000+07:00

Two years ago, while struggling with SOX audits, one of the things I was asked to do by the auditors was to deploy an issue tracking / helpdesk program for my IT team. There are a whole bunch of issue tracking programs available, but my entire IT team consists of five people, including me. All of the issue tracking programs I looked at were too complex, too expensive, not internationalized (e.g., doesn't support dd/mm/yy format), or all of the above.

I didn't forget the open source projects such Trac, Mantis, OTRS, or Redmine, but they all seemed to experimental or overly complex due to feature creep, and I really wanted something online that could be accessed from anywhere. I kept stalling this project but I've kept my eye on things for the past two years. Recently though, my projects have gotten complex enough that I actually needed an issue tracking system myself, and not just for satisfying the auditors.

Redmine 1.0.1 ("very stable release") was released not long ago, and when I looked at it, it has just the right features for my team to use. Oh, before I finally decided on Redmine, I was almost going to go with Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker is free and has just the right features for me as well, but the website and its AJAX interface was somewhat slow, but this maybe due to my Internet connectivity.

I decided to install BitNami's native Redmine stack for Windows since I already have some Windows terminal servers. I could've rolled my own Linux server, but those Windows servers are mostly idle enough to run an additional service. I've already used BitNami many times in the past, and BitNami Redmine installed without a hitch.

Unfortunately, when I tried to set up email notifications according to these instructions, it didn't quite work for the Windows native stack version, probably because some of the expected commands such as ruby or git aren't automatically in the path, but I kept getting "plugin not found error".

My solution was to download the TLS plugins files as a source archive directly from the git repository, and extract it into "C:\Program Files\BitNami Redmine Stack\apps\redmine\vendor\plugins". I also renamed the extracted folder into "action_mailer_optional_tls" like the git installer does, but I don't know if that's necessary.

After that I made the necessary changes to email.yml according to the instructions in the website above, and it all worked, right on the first try.

(NOT! It not just didn't work on the first try, I spent like three hours on this thing with like five different versions of smtp_tls.rb and tls_smtp.rb placed into various folders, I tried different settings in email.yml, I tried editing production.rb and environment.rb to include the plugin. All because I read that the plugin wasn't necessary any more since TLS support is now built-in, etc. etc. Finally I downloaded BitNami's openSUSE Redmine virtual appliance and installed the plugin there using git to see which files get changed, then manually did the installation in Windows. No thanks to outdated and contradictory documentation floating around on the web.)

Ahem, anyway, while writing this I realized Redmine doesn't have an official logo. I really like the one Cyber Sprocket Labs uses, plus the favicon displayed by Redmine is also the same red arch. I also installed the Watersky theme to remind myself of the babes at the beach rather than burying myself in managing projects. (See picture above.)

Finally, Redmine does have an issue accepting date formats in our local preferred dd/mm/yy format in date input fields. But this is a relatively minor issue since all date input fields have a handy pop-up date picker tool.

Cancel all technology

2010-09-17T07:38:00.003+07:00

In mid-2005, I bought a Nokia 6630. At that time, the Nokia 6680 was just released, so the 6630 had dropped in price, which was why I decided on the 6630 and not the 6680. There's really no difference between the two models aside from the looks and the front-facing camera. The salesperson kept trying to talk me into getting the 6680, the main reason of course being that the 6680 has a front-facing camera.

"You can use the front camera for video chat!"

"But there's no 3G in Thailand."

"It's coming soon!"

"But it was coming soon since last year."

"It's definitely coming this year! Before end of 2005!"

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"You'll regret it, you'll be buying a new phone next month to get video chat!"

Fast forward to 2010. After months of 3G auction schedule confirmations for September 17, CAT wins fight to kill 3G auction. Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.

Image source: Thailand Business News

Linux distributions

2010-09-12T15:10:00.006+07:00

What happens when an experiened Windows guy with a bit of OS X experience tries out Linux for the first time? Well, not really the first time, I did use Linux long ago, and I use Linux inside VMware for some cross-compiling, I also have Linux on my netbook for browsing, but what happens if I install it on a regular laptop, and attempt to use it like a regular desktop OS?

Man, installing Linux in 2010 is nothing like it was in 1992. (1992 in computer years is a little bit like 1492 in human years.) The first thing I had to do was determine which distribution to use. My "long ago" Linux was SLS Linux, or Softlandindg Linux System, which was the great-great-great-grand daddy of all distributions. It wasn't really even a distribution, it was more like a set of floppy disks that gets the Linux kernel installed on the hard drive and made bootable, and creates a user then a login prompt, that's it. Everything else had to be downloaded (at 28.8 Kbps!) and manually compiled and installed. I even had to install X (X11R5) and fvwm and create the Xconfig, all by hand.

Oh, it's not like I haven't kept in touch with the Linux world. I know of all the popular distributions and I've tried them out from time to time inside VMware. I just don't see why there are so many distributions, surely there's no need for religion specific distributions?!

Anyway, I don't want to do a lot of things manually now, so I want a modern distribution that's easy to use. Isn't Linux supposed to be taking over the desktop? So things should be easy? Let's find out.

Testing Linux distributions is really simple with Live distributions or installation through VMware.

The images above were captured from Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, and openSUSE, using their default desktops, in the order they appear on distrowatch.com. I actually tried a whole bunch of distributions, but these four were my favorites based on ease of use and initial configuration. It's no surprise that they also happen to be the top four on distrowatch.com. After trying them out in VMware, I then proceeded to install them on my laptop.

(Continued in Part 2)

iOS 4.1 pwnage

2010-09-10T23:33:00.000+07:00

SHAtter is such a great name for an exploit. Word has it that this exploit can jailbreak all current iOS devices including iPhone 4, iPod touch 4th generation, and iPad. Details still scarce, but I can't wait.

Google instantaneous

2010-09-09T09:09:00.001+07:00

I've been having trouble with Google searches for the past week or so, where the suggested items wouldn't disappear when a search is finished and just ends up covering the top results; and clicking on the suggested items in the search bar caused unpredictable behavior. All was resolved yesterday when Google officially brought out Google Instant.

Google Instant shows search results while I'm still typing, which is kinda annoying at first but I realized it's much faster than having to wait for search results to appear after pressing enter. The best thing though, is that when going through additional pages of search results, it's almost instantaneous. There's no longer a delay to wait for the additional pages to load. I like it.

Happy 9/9!

Internet over VPN

2010-09-04T14:00:00.002+07:00

The kind of VPN that I know best is site-to-site VPN, which I've implemented a number of times using low-cost hardware. Recently though, I've became interested in using VPN tunnels to secure and encrypt my Internet connectivity, and also to access sites that I otherwise can't.

Before.

After.

Okay, the Wikileaks site I could always access by typing in the URL differently, but the other sites only work with an USA IP address.

Apple special event

2010-09-02T00:01:00.006+07:00

Steve is congratulating himself on all the new Apple stores (Shanghai one in the screen cap above). Bring on the new iPods!

The new iPod touch (4th generation) incorporates all the new features from the iPhone 4 such as the Retina display and gyroscope. More interestingly, it now has front and rear facing cameras, speaker grill, and microphone. These were necessary to enable FaceTime functionality for the iPod touch. The built-in microphone is a really great addition as it will enable applications such as Skype, Shazam, or Voice Recorder to work directly without having to plug in a headset or a microphone.

The rear facing camera is only 960x720 (0.7 megapixels), but that's good enough for video conferencing, and taking HD videos as an added bonus. But I imagine many people will complain that it's not 5 megapixels like the iPhone 4. One thing worries me though, the tech specs doesn't show it as having autofocus, but it's probably unimportant due to the low resolution anyway.

One other surprising thing is the cheapest iPod touch is now $229 instead of $199. But the $229 iPod touch is the 4th generation like the 16 GB and 32 GB models, unlike when the 3rd generation was released, the $199 8 GB model was actually a re-released 2nd generation.

Both the iPod shuffle and iPod nano were also updated, but how much can you really improve an MP3 player?

Acer D255 with Atom N550 available in stores

2010-08-31T08:30:00.002+07:00

The picture above taken with my phone is way too blurry to read the spec list in the palm rest, but it's the Acer Aspire One D255 with the newfangled dual core Intel Atom N550 CPU that was just announced last week, and it's already in stores this week.

Specs are: Atom N550 (1.50 GHz, dual core), 1 GB DDR3 RAM, 320 GB HDD, 6-cell battery. No OS. For only 11,780 Baht, 7% tax included. Which would be US$375 at today's exchange rates. Three colors are available, blue, purple, and black.

Stupidly enough, right next to the new D255 was the older D255 with the Atom N450 (1.66 GHz, single core), 1 GB DDR 2 RAM, otherwise identical specs, selling for exactly the same price. I asked why anyone would want to buy the older model, and the salesperson looked at me strangely and told me that 1.66 is faster than 1.50, and DDR2 is cheaper than DDR3 so it's more affordable to upgrade. Right.

Getting things done?

2010-08-30T04:30:00.002+07:00

Early this year, I wrote about using Toodledo (referral link) to manage my tasks. I use the online version inside my web browser, and I also access it using Pocket Informant, and it was all working wonderfully, until I discovered, much to my dismay, that the web version, eventhough written in AJAX, does not automatically refresh itself when new tasks are added from another location, such as from Pocket Informant, or from another browser.

This is quite important to me since I don't want to have to open the Toodledo website each time I want to look at my tasks. It actually took me quite a while to notice this deficiency, since normally I always work from the web version, and in fact always keep it open in an tab in my web browser. But this is exactly how the problem happens, Toodledo will only refresh its tasks when loading the website, or when changing tabs, or when 'r' is pressed. The refreshed time is shown on the lower-left corner.

I was also on the verge of pushing out Toodledo to my team when I discovered this problem. I kept wondering, if sharing was enabled, but there's no auto-refresh, would I or my team member notice that tasks have been updated, unless they keep manually refreshing?

After a few weeks of pressing rrrrrrrr, I moved on to Omnifocus.

P.S. Incidentally, Remember the Milk for iOS now has limited (once per day) syncing even without buying a Pro account! Still no subtasks though.

Reviving EEE PC 701

2010-08-29T21:45:00.002+07:00

Since installing Ubuntu Netbook Edition I've actually put my old EEE PC 701 to great use. I went on two trips without having to carry my MacBook with me. I only needed to access my mail and use Skype, so the little EEE PC was all I needed.

While researching which distribution to install earlier, I also came across Jolicloud and EasyPeasy. I chose UNE at the time since it was just released, while Jolicloud was still in beta, and EasyPeasy was based on a previous version of Ubuntu.

Since my EEE PC really doesn't have anything important on the SSD and I don't really care if the SSD dies by overuse, I decided to give all of them a try. (Note: the screenshots below are not taken from the EEE PC's 800x480 screen.)

Jolicloud application directory

Jolicloud has a completely different home screen that's not based on UNE. The strange thing about Jolicloud is that you have to "activate" your installation, and then it automatically syncs the applications installed from the application directory between your computers. I don't really see how useful this is. I mean, who has multiple netbooks?

Kubuntu Netbook Edition

Thanks to Plasma Netbook, Kubuntu Netbook Edition has by far the best looking desktop that's closer to a... er, desktop rather than a netbook specific look. Strangely enough, even though it's supposed to be designed for netbooks, it requires 3D capability, and I guess this is why it's really slow on my EEE PC.

Skype on EasyPeasy

EasyPeasy looks exactly like Ubuntu Netbook Edition, except it's green instead of brown, and has proprietary third-party applications such as Skype and Picasa installed by default. The most surprising thing about EasyPeasy is that it fixed the 1.9% battery bug. Due to all the extra installed programs, EasyPeasy takes more than 3 GB when installed.

Unlock Keyring on Leeenux Linux

Lastly, I tried Leeenux Linux. Leeenux Linux's idea is to create a tiny installation (less than 1.5 GB when installed) by using only GNOME and GTK+ applications. So you get GNOME Office applications like AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice.org. The idea is completely opposite of EasyPeasy above. Leeenux Linux has some annoyances such as having a non-obvious default keyring password (the password is '1'). Not a big issue, but it means I had to look it up instead of being able to guess the password.

In the end, I decided to use EasyPeasy on my EEE PC. I removed all the applications and games except for Firefox and Skype and got the installation down to a slightly more manageable 2.5 GB. But 2.5 GB is still a lot of space to run just those two programs. When I got my EEE PC in early 2008 I installed Windows XP as well as Microsoft Office XP in less than 2 GB. Linux shouldn't be so bloated... so I downloaded deborphan and tried to remove all stuck packages, and that got it down to 2.4 GB.

My EEE PC only has 512 MB and EasyPeasy automatically created a 200 MB swap partition. I guess I could get a bit more space if I installed more RAM and completely got rid of swap.

syn-Propanethial-S-oxide

2010-08-19T22:14:00.003+07:00

Skype no sound

2010-08-18T21:50:00.001+07:00

One of my users complained to me that her Skype contacts couldn't hear her. We had recently upgraded her computer to Windows 7 x64 so I figured it must be a bad setting in the recording device. So enable microphone boost, turn up the recording volume, make sure the microphone actually works, make sure the latest version of Skype (4.2 as of this writing) is installed, it all looked good, but her contacts still couldn't hear her.

Skype has a great built-in way to test calls by simply adding or calling the user "echo123". I called echo123 from her computer, and all I got was silence from my side. I tried yelling into the microphone and turned out I could hear myself in the distance. So the microphone actually worked, but it was just really really soft.

The strange thing is, all other recording applications worked fine, such Live Messenger or Google Chat, so it must be a Skype thing. As usual, Google searches only turned up recommendations that I've already tried, and it was quite obvious that the people giving "solutions" never experienced these problems themselves. However, I did learn that I could change the default recording format, but that didn't work for me either.

It turned out that the motherboard (ASUS M2NPV-VM) has a SoundMAX AD1986A chipset and Windows 7 automatically installed drivers for it, but Skype has compatibility problems with the standard drivers. After installing this driver on the ASUS FTP site everything worked as expected... but since I had mic boost turned all the way up and recording volume at max, I nearly blew my ears out.

Panasonic Lumix LX5

2010-08-03T03:07:00.001+07:00

I bought the highly acclaimed Panasonic Lumix LX3 early last year. I spent months convincing my SO that the LX3 is a wonderful little camera, showed her plenty of sample shots from the Internet, until she finally agreed to let me buy it. Of course, right afterwards, it became hers.

The LX5 was announced last week to be released later this month. Maybe she can have her LX3 and I can have my LX5.

Even though the specs and all the news sites are gushing about the Leica DC VARIO-SUMMICRON f/2.0 lens, it's in fact a variable aperture lens that goes from 2.0 to 3.3. The actual specs of the lens is 5.1-19.2/2.0-3.3, which is equivalent to 24-90 for 35mm cameras.

Compare that to the LX3's 5.1-12.8/2.0-2.8 (equivalent to 24-60 for 35mm). The LX5 has more zoom, but it seems to have a smaller aperture, but actually, when the LX5's zoom is at 12.8 (60 for 35mm), the aperture is also at f/2.8. Only when the zoom is at maximum then the aperture reduces to 3.3.

Slide to jailbreak

2010-08-02T05:08:00.003+07:00

Just visit www.jailbreakme.com on your iDevice to jailbreak. Can't get any easier than this! (Yes, this works on the iPhone 4, and iOS 4 for all iPhones or iPod touches.)

Happy? SysAdminDay?

2010-07-30T07:03:00.004+07:00

Once again, it's the annual SysAdminDay. I think I'll take the rest of the day off.

Last year, I bought myself a Skeletool CX. This year, I've been way too busy to find something for myself. The new, lower-priced Amazon Kindle (3G+Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi only) was just announced yesterday and since there's no sign of the iPad being released here, maybe I'll just reward myself with a Kindle.

iBooks and jailbreaking

2010-06-23T17:15:00.002+07:00

iOS 4 was released yesterday, and it's already jailbroken. However, iBooks only works in iOS4 on devices jailbroken with PawnageTool 4.01 and redsn0w 0.9.5b5-4 or newer. For some reason I couldn't get PawnageTool to work so I used redsn0w.

The images below are captured from my iPod touch 2G.

The iPhone ebook in the image above is the iPhone SDK Development book in epub format that I bought from The Pragmatic Programmers that I also used in the Amazon Kindle review previously.

Geniuses at work

2010-06-21T19:15:00.007+07:00

More Internet censorship going on in Thailand as the government blocks more and more websites for absolutely no good reasons whatsoever. Most recently, for some unknown reason, they decided to block the entire Vimeo site. However, this time, instead of blocking the IP address like what they did in the Google blocking fiasco, they decided to simply block it by the URL, "www.vimeo.com". Fortunately, like all good websites, "vimeo.com" also works for accessing the site, and the geniuses at the government failed to block that URL. So to access your favorite Vimeo videos in Thailand, simply use http://vimeo.com/.

Mac OS X 10.6.4

2010-06-16T11:50:00.003+07:00

Mac OS X 10.6.4 is released. Full details here. Combo update here.

10.6.4 just came out this morning and I quickly updated. The reason was that since installing 10.6.3 two months ago, I've had this really bad problem where when I resume from standby, the screen's back light doesn't turn on and I have to manually change screen brightness to make it light up. Sometimes though, even doing that doesn't work, and I have to close the lid and re-open, sometimes multiple times, until the screen works again.

After upgrading, the problem seems to have disappeared.

Multiseat Windows

2010-06-06T22:24:00.002+07:00

I've been keeping my eyes on multiseat Windows for the longest time. The idea of multiseat Windows is to connect two or more monitors to a single computer, and let two or more users share the computer, running different programs. There are a number of such solutions on the market, the most famous probably being BeTwin, but they all seem to be hacks and probably breaks some licensing agreements. I've tried using BeTwin, but it has very specific hardware requirements, and wasn't stable enough for my needs.

Multiseat Windows seems like a throwback to the olden days where dumb terminals connect to a single mainframe for computing tasks, but it's actually quite different. The difference is that multiseating Windows actually involves having multiheaded displays on the system running Windows itself, instead of having a local display buffer like with most terminals.

The market suddenly boomed this year when Microsoft announced MultiPoint Server 2010. MultiPoint Server is actually a combination of the two ideas above. It has to have multiple displays on the system itself, and yet it uses remote desktop services to generate the image. Through a friend's cousin's ex-girlfriend's uncle who works in the academic sector, I managed to borrowed a copy to give it a spin.

I installed it on a cheap Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-S2 motherboard with a low-end Athlon II X2 CPU and 2 GB of DDR3 RAM that I happened to have on hand. The installation is almost exactly like installing Windows Server 2008 R2, since MultiPoint Server 2010 is based upon that. After installation, it gave me 3 days to activate, just like Windows Server.

The Gigabyte board has two video outputs, DVI and VGA, I simply had to hook up two monitors (one DVI and one VGA), two USB keyboards, and two USB mice, and MultiPoint Server automatically detected everything. At first was that I couldn't get the keyboard and mice to go to their individual monitors, but after looking at the setup diagram from Microsoft, I realized they needed to be on separate USB hubs, so grouping a set of keyboard and mouse onto the same set of USB port at the back of the motherboard worked. The MultiPoint Manager then showed the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all grouped together and linked to their respective stations.

Since MultiPoint Server is actually running as a remote desktop service, and the individual stations are behaving as if they're running remote desktop clients, not to mention this is a Microsoft product and not a hack like all other multiseat Windows solutions, the entire setup is completely stable. Unlike BeTwin that I mentioned above, it also works with all hardware that are supported by Windows. However, running as remote desktop also means everything is slightly laggy due to the remote desktop protocol.

I could only connect two stations to my motherboard since I only have two video outputs on my mainboard. To connect more I would need either another video card, or one of those USB DisplayLink adapters. HP also makes the MultiSeat t100, a MultiPoint Server specific thin terminal that has everything built into a small box.

MultiPoint Server is actually designed for the academic sector, to reduce costs of computers for schools, especially in emerging markets. However, the cost saving may be limited, since only the cost of one (or more) computer can be saved. The software license is still required. For example, Microsoft Office's license is based on the number of users, and not on the number of system it's installed on. Saving from reduced usage of electricity is also limited, unless you're saving the planet. I looked at our relatively cheap electricity costs, the amount of money I could save by using four full computers vs. one single MultiPoint Server with four heads is less than $1 per year.

Finally, one issue I ran into is that since MultiPoint Server is based on Windows Server, many programs that detect the operating system due to either OS differences or (more likely) licensing issues, won't install. So even if the academic institution saved money in hardware purchases, they may need to purchase different software designed to run on a server OS.

Windows remote printing madness

2010-06-04T17:26:00.001+07:00

Recently we've starting moving to Windows 7 x64 clients at work, especially for the newer computers. Of course, we still have the Windows Server 2003 R2 that I installed earlier. However, my users complained to me that they couldn't print when logged on to the server remotely, eventhough we've been using this setup since last year and we've not had problems before.

After looking at the system logs, I realized that the printer driver was missing. The Windows Server is a 32-bit system, while our new clients are 64-bit. Not a problem, so I installed the x64 printer drivers onto the server. Still not found...

After fiddling some more, I noticed the server has our Canon printers listed as "Canon iP3600", which is the driver that came bundled with the printer, while the Windows 7 clients have it as "Canon Inkjet iP3600", which is the driver that came with Windows. And since the names don't match, driver installation didn't work. I also couldn't just install the Windows 7 drivers onto the server though, since terminal services expects drivers to be pre-installed before they can be used.

This would probably have been easier if I had set my server up with a print server role, but I didn't, and I didn't want to kick all my users out to install a role. So I fired up the Remote Administration Tools for Windows 7, and added the x64 printer driver that came with Windows 7 onto the server.

That still didn't work, then I realized since the server is actually 32-bit, I need to install the 32-bit drivers and not the 64-bit drivers. Unfortunately, the 32-bit drivers only comes with Windows 7 x86, and there didn't seem to be any other way of doing this, short of running the Remote Administration Tools from a 32-bit Windows 7 installation.

Finally, after another hour of installing Windows 7 x86 just to install a printer driver. I now have four different printer drivers on the Windows server for the same printer, and everyone's happy.

Beating government censorship

2010-05-24T00:35:00.001+07:00

Official word on the streets is that the social network censorship that happened a few days ago was due to ISP routers unable to handle the load since everyone is at home reading news. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I believe you. And pigs can fly too.

Earlier when I thought this blog was also being blocked turned out to be that the government was blocking access to ghs.l.google.com, which is the address that Google Apps based services (including blogger.com) resolves to. However, since ghs.l.google.com is on a round robin DNS system, and they were only blocking some sets of IP's, so it appeared that the blocking is random and goes on and off. (And the government is using this as an excuse that the ISP's can't handle the load.) But this actually due to the fact that some IP's being blocked and some aren't. Facebook.com and other social networking sites were affected in the same way.

One of the mysteries I encountered at work is that some of my users when traveling to China to our subsidiary would have trouble accessing our Google Apps based mail, while others have no trouble whatsoever. This is quite difficult to debug when China is about 2,000 miles away.

Last month when I finally had a chance to go to China myself, the first thing I did after arriving and getting Internet access, was to open the company's email. ... and, nothing. A quick look proved that I was being blocked by the Great Firewall.

What does the Great Firewall have to do with the Thai government censorship? Turns out they both block ghs.l.google.com. However, there is a way to access Google's services, and that is through the google.com domain name itself. So, instead of going to, say, www.ivoidwarranties.com, which resolves to ghs.l.google.com, simply go to ivoidwarranties.blogspot.com, which resolves to blogspot.l.google.com.

Or in case of Google Apps, instead of going to, say, www.capothai.org, which was a case of the right hand blocking the left hand, simply go to sites.google.com/a/capothai.org/www

As of this writing, 74.125.77.121 is still blocked by the ICT, so hopefully this post will help.

Bangkok burning

2010-05-19T18:03:00.012+07:00

View from my office not long after the soldiers stormed the protesters and the protesters set fire to a number of buildings including Central World.

Of course, most people probably only care since they can't shop there anymore. Amazing Thailand, Amazing Value!

Update (later in the day): Oh yah, notice how blue the sky is, with clouds visible? Normally the sky in Bangkok is never blue like that except in long weekends. Closing down the central business section and everybody staying home from the protests actually was actually good for the environment!

Update (still later in the day): It appears that my blog is blocked by the government, w00t! This is what happens when I go to www.ivoidwarranties.com now:

Update (5/20/2010): Boooo, I don't feel so special anymore, looks like the web blocking is directed at the Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES) itself, which happens to be hosted on Google Sites, and poor me being blocked is just a side effect. Different factions of the government attacking itself? Rogue hackers at work?

Bangkok war zone

2010-05-15T20:15:00.004+07:00

Thailand's political situation is really hard to grasp, unless you've been living in Thailand long enough. Let me see, back in 2006 Thaksin got ousted in a coup lead by the military, then the Yellow Shirts through mass protests and questionable means brought down the replacement prime ministers that they didn't like.

Of course, this brought the UDD, aka The Red Shirts, or Thaksin-supports to start their own protests in the streets. After all, if they could do it, why can't we? As usual, the media coverage is all about how the Red Shirts are destroying the country and nothing about the reason they're holding the protest. Personally, I think the Red Shirts picked a bad name.

Since most of the Thai media are utterly biased against either the red or the yellow, I choose to follow B B C News. Imagine having to read news from a website across the world on what's happening on my doorsteps.

Anyway, since it's like a war zone out there almost right outside of my office so I better head home. I'll fix my servers another time since if any of the fighting happens to blow up my office by mistake, I would've saved time by not fixing my servers!

BNE is everywhere!

Spirit Jailbreak download

2010-05-03T09:52:00.005+07:00

Spirit Jailbreak is out for current firmware versions of iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. (Requirements: 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.2). The server seems to be bogged down now so I'm mirroring the files on RapidShare. The files were downloaded directly from spiritjb.com, but no warranties of course.

Download Windows version.

Download Mac OS X version.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

2010-04-30T20:48:00.003+07:00

I have an original EEE PC 701 that I've not used since getting my MacBook. The stupid reason was that I didn't have enough RAM in the EEE PC to run Windows XP since I moved that RAM into my MacBook.

However, recently I wanted to put the EEE PC to use again by installing one of those netbook-specific Linux distributions. Since Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") happens to be released today, I decided to go with the newest. Starting from 10.04, the netbook version of Ubuntu is called Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It used to be called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which I think is a much better name.

I have an external DVD drive, but I wanted to try installing from a USB flash drive, so I ran the USB creation utility included in the Ubuntu CD to create a bootable USB drive to do the installation.

The entire installation only took a few minutes, and it automatically detected all the hardware of the EEE PC 701. It just works. One issue I have is that since the EEE PC 701 only has an 800x480 screen, a lot of the dialog boxes are cut off on the bottom. However, it's possible to drag dialog boxes off the top edge of the screen by holding down the Alt key and dragging anywhere inside the window.

The second issue is that when waking up from standby, Ubuntu complains that "disk is being used outside design parameters", which is apparently a known bug. Since my EEE PC has a 4 GB SSD, it shouldn't have any trouble, so I just ignored the warning by clicking "don't warn if the disk is failing".

I had a lot of experience with Linux a long time ago before it turned all graphical, but recently I've only used Linux to cross-compile router firmware. The only Unix-like OS I still use these days is actually OS X, which is Unix-like, with a GUI. So with these experiences behind me, you would think that I should have no trouble using Ubuntu, especially the simpler netbook specific edition. But noooooo, I can't even figure out how to install Skype from the GUI.

After a lot of Googling, I found out the best way is to install Ubuntu Tweak, which is supposed to help with the installation of third-party software from in third-party repositories. After installing Ubuntu Tweak, I could see Skype being an installable option in Ubuntu Tweak's Application Center, but no matter what I did, I still couldn't get it to install.

After like two hours of Google and trying everything in the GUI without getting anywhere. Give up simple user interface. Open terminal. "sudo aptitude install skype". Done.

MacBook Pro 2010 pricing

2010-04-19T20:28:00.003+07:00

I was away for a week with no access to the Internet of the free world, and a whole bunch of things get released. By now everyone's arguing whether the new 13" MacBook Pro should've gotten the Core i3/i5 or not, but to me, the bestest thing about this refresh is that they finally updated the local pricing to more accurately reflect the value of the Thai Baht.

The base $1,200 MacBook Pro now costs 40,900 Baht instead of the original 46,900 Baht. Now I can more easily talk my boss into buying it for me. Maybe when the iPad is released here sometime next month they will also use the new exchange rate, then maybe I can talk my boss into buying both the new MacBook Pro and the iPad for me.

Yesterday's technologies, today

2010-04-08T01:00:00.001+07:00

A few days ago, I added Socialwok to my company's Google Apps account. Socialwok is like having a private Facebook or Google Buzz inside my own domain. Yeah, I should be using Google Buzz, but Buzz is only available to regular Gmail, and not Google Apps. I would probably switch to Buzz when it's released for Apps.

Anyway, so I was "training" some of my users on using Socialwok when one of my users complained that he couldn't update his status. The symptom was that when he clicks on the status bar, nothing happens. I logged onto his laptop remotely, and discovered that he was still using Firefox 1.0.

Right. Not a problem, I'll just update it to the latest Firefox (currently at 3.6.3). But then I discovered that he was still using Windows Me! And FF3 doesn't support Windows 98/Me. So... I guess I would use FF2 then. I went to oldapps.com and downloaded the final version of Firefox 2, which was 2.0.0.20.

Unfortunately, Socialwok still didn't work properly. Now clicking on the status works, but the keyboard doesn't respond inside the status bar or any other typing area. I thought about installing Google Chrome, but Chrome also doesn't support Windows Me. Then I remembered reading about a patch that makes FF work on older versions of Windows.

Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up KernelEx, which allows some modern programs requiring Windows 2000/XP to work with Windows 98/Me. Installing KernelEx also requires the installation of the Microsoft Unicode Layer. I've actually had the Unicode Layer for a while, but could never figure out what it's used for, since it doesn't seem to actually allow displaying Unicode.

Anyway, after installing the Unicode Layer and KernelEx, FF3 installed, and Socialwok worked, and everyone was happy.

P.S. It actually took a long time to do all this. My user's computer was so incredibly slow, installing oth versions of Firefox and the system patches took something like 1.5 hours. Plus, in the end, Socialwok still didn't work that well, since it's probably designed for modern displays, and his computer only has a 640x480 monitor...

Come to think of it, I should probably just give him my first gen Eee PC 700, since the Eee PC has a higher resolution (!) display, and is also much (!) faster than his ancient laptop.

Amazon Kindle for iPad

2010-04-03T08:42:00.003+07:00

The Amazon Kindle app is now updated to be a universal app that works for both the iPhone and the iPad. I don't want a Kindle any more.

iPad apps are here

2010-04-02T12:35:00.008+07:00

When I opened iTunes this morning, it updated some of my apps to iPad compatible versions, eventhough Thailand's App Store doesn't have an iPad section yet. Then I noticed eventhough there's no specific iPad section, I can still search for apps and then an iPad section will appear.

Unfortunately, it appears that many apps, especially games, aren't dual iPhone / iPad compatible but has an entirely separate iPad release that requires re-buying the app again.

iPad specific apps get their own section in iTunes

The reason I want an iPad: iBooks, a free download. Now where's my iPad?

iTunes 9.1 and iBooks

2010-03-31T07:22:00.000+07:00

With the imminent release of iPad this weekend, iTunes has been updated to 9.1 and supports iBooks.

As mentioned on the Apple website, EPUB files can be dragged into the iTunes Library. The above shows my iPhone SDK Development ebook in the Library. Apparently this is for syncing to the iPad only, since iTunes doesn't provide a way to read the EPUB files.

Mac OS X 10.6.3

2010-03-30T00:30:00.001+07:00

Mac OS X 10.6.3 is released. Full details here. Combo update here.

Just installed. I hope it would magically make my networked printers work. But probably not.

And I lost my uptime, again.

Windows 7 XP Mode update

2010-03-19T21:35:00.008+07:00

Microsoft has released an update that removes the requirement of hardware virtualization when running Windows 7's XP Mode. This is such welcoming news. I always get people asking me why their brand spanking new computer couldn't run XP Mode, and they often sound like this.

"Hey, I downloaded Windows XP Mode program that's supposed to allow me run all my old games on my new computer, but it says something about hardware visualization is disabled."

"Dude, it's virtualization, and it's disabled because you bought a low-end computer with a low-end CPU."

"What?! It's a Centrino Duo 2 Core with a 500 megapixel hard drive!"

"It's gigabytes, and your Core 2 Duo CPU is hardly top of the line."

"Ahhh! My new computer sucks and Bill Gates sucks!"

Getting rid of Windows

2010-03-18T19:50:00.003+07:00

After almost a whole year of using OS X, I still need to keep running VMware Fusion because of one single program: NetOp Remote Control. For everything else that I need to use, I have either installed the Mac OS X version of the program, or found programs with equivalent (sometimes better) functions. NetOp actually makes a Mac version, but only the "Host" side of the program and not the "Guest" side. I need to use the Guest side to remote access my server and to spy on my users.

I was reading somewhere about Valve's announcement of OS X support for their games when I saw someone mention CrossOver Mac. CrossOver is a commercial version of Wine which allows Windows programs to run natively inside Linux or OS X. I've used Wine ages ago when I used Linux, but it was really primitive back then. It should've been obvious that Wine had been ported to OS X, but I never thought to check.

After searching a bit, I downloaded and installed WineBottler, which is Wine packaged ready to run on OS X, then started the NetOp installation. But the NetOp installer keeps bombing out with an installation error. I thought maybe the newer version of NetOp was the problem, but trying all the different versions only made it bomb out with different errors! So I thought I would try using CrossOver for Mac, so I downloaded a trial version, and the NetOp installer bombs out with the exact same errors, just proving that CrossOver indeed is a commercial version of Wine.

Fortunately, NetOp itself has a built-in option to create an installation free or "USB application" of itself. It's found in Tools -> Copy Guest to removable media. So I used that to create a copy of the program, and moved the whole thing into Wine's Program Files folder. And it worked right away. For some reason though, I get some garbage graphics when connecting to one of my servers eventhough all my servers have the exact same hardware configuration and NetOp versions.

Quite unfortunately, after getting everything to work, Activity Monitor tells me that Wine and the required X11 subsystem actually uses more RAM than VMware Fusion. But it's nice that I don't need to boot up Windows XP just to use a single program. But come to think of it, I always have VMware Fusion running. In fact, while testing this, I restarted VMware Fusion, and it tells me that a new version is available. But the new version was out since about three weeks ago, and I hadn't exited out of VMware Fusion at all in all that time. (As of this writing, my MacBook has an uptime of 41 days. The last reboot was when I had trouble ejecting a CD and I had to force eject during boot.)

But even with the extra memory usage, I have NetOp running "natively" inside OS X, and it does work a bit smoother than having to swap back and forth between OS X and the virtual Windows XP.

Here are the screenshots for using NetOp to control one of my remote servers. First, running under VMware Fusion.

And running under Wine. This is from that one particular server that's having graphics issues. The last bit of every line of text is cut off.

While I was typing this. Kindle for Mac was released. One less reason to use Windows!

Update (2010-03-23): Not long after posting this, my MacBook crashed and I lost my 41 day uptime. How ironic.

ThinkPad X100e screen contrast

2010-03-17T09:30:00.000+07:00

I borrowed one of the new ThinkPad X100e's to check it out and compare it with the IdeaPad S10 I have. The X100e has a matte screen, but it's not completely matte unlike the S10. I don't have my ThinkPad T60 handy, but the S10 is more matte than the T60, and the X100e is somewhat shinier than the T60. The S10 is showing a lot of fingerprints!

Of course, nothing like my MacBook's shiny screen.

While playing with the X100e, I discovered that when it's running on battery power, the screen loses a lot of contrast. It's most obvious when running Excel 2007 since the cell grid lines become almost invisible. Once the adapter is plugged in, the grid lines become sharp and contrasty. I had to give back the X100e so I didn't get a chance to take a photograph, but it's pretty bad.

IT audits

2010-02-26T12:15:00.006+07:00

I was writing about IT auditing earlier, and since I'm facing more IT audits next week, so I decided to do a Google image search for a related image and make a post about it. The above was one of the first matches on the image search.

However, this is what IT audits look like in real life. I want that hot chick to be my auditor too.

Guest account

2010-02-25T20:57:00.004+07:00

I've been so terribly busy lately, which could be obvious from the number of posts I've made recently. The first reason I was so busy was I that I was facing IT auditors. The second reason was I was working with optimizing our ERP software, which I'll post about later this week.

About the auditors, one security problem the auditors found while auditing my network was that I had the guest account enabled on the Windows domain. Normally I agree with the auditors on all the security issues they find, but in this case, I had to disagree with them, and I wrote a huge email as my reply to their management letter, some of it I post below.

Names have been edited out, and some of the text have been re-edited for readability and context. Some of the wording might be slightly confusing since this consists of my original email and a follow-up when I was asked to clarify some points I made in the first email. Read on...

Guest account will be disabled from February 2010 onwards according to EY's recommendation. However, the IT team finds that EY does not have any understanding of the concepts or workings of a secure and correctly configured Microsoft Windows network; our IT and business processes or requirements; and how computers and networks are used in the real world.

Unlike default administrative or priviledged accounts, the guest account is not even an interactive logon account. It's not like "sa" of SQL Server 2000 that has an initially blank password or "admin" of most devices that have the initial password of "admin". I agree those accounts must have a secure and complex password set as soon as the program is installed or the device is powered up for the first time. However, the Windows domain guest account has no need for a password, and password changing is disabled. The guest account also can not be used to login to workstations (no interactive logon capability). Let's pretend for a second that a user can login to a workstation using the guest account, but then there's nothing they can do since the guest account can't access network file shares (which means the login process can't complete), and they can't change any workstation settings. A created user account, on the other hand, can access network file shares (which means they could put a virus or trojan in the network, or infect the network with a worm) and change workstation settings. With the guest account, visitors can easily access network resources such as printers and scanners after having received authorization from the IT Dept. There is no possible way for visitors to enter the network without prior authorization from the IT Dept.

The operating system itself may also need the guest account to access network resources or perform system maintenance tasks. Like I've mentioned before, the guest account is not a user account named "guest", but is a special account used for accessing company provided network resources. I also quote from Microsoft website: "We do not recommend that you disable the Guest account. If you disable the Guest account, you may not be able to access network resources. Additionally, you cannot access resources on a local computer from another computer on the network."

Firstly, we does not and will not have any kind of outside accessible network services such as e-mail server, web server, e-commerce server, remote desktop server, file transfer server, conferencing server, VPN server, SharePoint server, BlackBerry server, or any kind of Internet accessible services whatsoever. There is no possibility of any outsider access that even necessitates disabling the guest account. Our business processes and requirements do not ever require such services to be installed. And in the unlikely event that any Internet accessible services are ever to be installed, IT will do security and penetration testing accordingly before such services will be installed. Plus, eventhough there are no outside accessible network services and no ports open to the Internet, the internal network is protected by a firewall at the network level.

Internally on the local network, everyone can use the guest account to access network resources if they want, just like everyone is allowed to use the telephones or fax machines. But internally no one would want or need to use the guest account, since users are already logged into the network, they have far more access rights than the guest account.

In the Microsoft Windows network environment, the guest account in a domain is a special pre-configured account with lowest access rights and security levels, and as the name itself suggests, suitable and should always be used for guest access. Creating a user account for outsiders will not only go against our security policy of assigning user accounts, but will actually give the persons too much access to the internal and private network, such as giving access to file sharing access on the internal network, which is not accessible to guest users. Finally, the guest account allows simple network devices such as network shared printers or switching hubs to be purchased and used inside the network instead of always having to purchase "enterprise-grade" hardware with advanced security features. A simple calculation at the current market prices suggests that disabling guest access will require the IT Dept. to always purchase such advanced hardware that will inflate the yearly IT budget for networking hardware by 20 times or more. In additional, additional budget needs to be provided to retire and redesign the existing infrastructure and to purchase hardware to support such enterprise-grade hardware to be used on the local network.

Creating an user account for visitors means that I will probably need to join their computer into the domain, which is an extreme security risk from the fact that the visitors' computers may contain malware. I would also need to type the domain administrator password on the visitors' computer which could be recorded by key loggers, and the visitors will need administrative access to their computers.

Thus, disabling the guest account will only hinder our own employees, most notably members of the upper management, from correctly accessing the internal network and network devices. The IT team will also need time and budget to rework the entire network design to upgrade the existing infrastracture. Additionally, the guest account is used by EY's own auditing teams to access Internet and printing on the network shared printers while at the company's premises.

Most members of the upper management use notebook computers and travel frequently. Joining their computers into the domain is problematic when they're out of the network for extended periods and have no access to the domain controller. With guest account disabled, when they're back in the office, they also have to remember to login to the domain instead of login to the local computer in order to access network resources. Having to log into the domain and local computer separately also means there needs to be two separate accounts kept in the computer and two completely different locations for saving documents, leading to confusion for the users. These problems can be resolved by simply enabling the guest account.

However, the IT Dept. has already disabled the guest account according to EY's recommendation, and will hereafter refer all network access problems and issues arising from this change back to EY.

Recently we have faced many issues where the external auditors make recommendations that are against our standard workflow or recommendations that we are simply unable to comply since it's not how our business functions, and often we end up having to make up documents or make changes in workflow just to show the auditors that we're following their recommendation, when in fact those changes have no use to us whatsoever in our particular business (or IT) environment.

When presenting the changes to upper management, we're always faced by angry managers asking us why we don't make our cases clear with the auditors so we don't end up doing extra work for no reason at all? I'm simply presenting this as evidence.

Whew!! Of course, I realize that I made up a lot of this. But I was simply pissed that the auditors have to have things their way and no argument would make them see how things work in the Real World.

My heart would be in it

2010-02-14T06:15:00.004+07:00

I wish I could open my window
and send a message on the wind
so that the next time you feel the touch of a breeze
my heart would be in it

(Image credit: Endless Love by Alfred Gockel)

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Chinese New Year!

The year we make iPad

2010-01-28T07:00:00.002+07:00

Apple iPad

I think Apple has a winner here. Unlike the UMPC or most typical netbooks running Windows slowly, painfully, and expensively. The iPad runs the iPhone OS, so it's actually scaling up a smaller device, so everything will be faster and work better than before.

I want one. Now.

Upgrading DD-WRT on the Linksys WRT310N

2010-01-26T10:54:00.001+07:00

I let my boss borrow my WRT310N a few months ago. I didn't need it back since I had so many other routers to work with. By the time he gave it back, newer versions of DD-WRT had been released.

So I downloaded the latest beta release and tried to update it, but unfortunately, it seemed to brick the WRT310N. It did seem to respond to pings when booting, and I was able to tftp a firmware file into it using the reset button/tftp method, but no matter what I did, it wouldn't finish booting.

Finally I realized that to tftp a firmware file correctly, I had to hold down the reset button until the power light starts to blink, then release the reset button, then start the tftp transfer. It seemed funny that I'm only realizing this now after having done hundreds of firmware updates using the reset button/tftp method.

Task management with Toodledo

2010-01-24T19:12:00.006+07:00

Early last year I wrote about using Remember the Milk (RTM) to manage my tasks. I even paid for a Pro account in order to sync to my iPod, but unfortunately, the lack of updates in both the main program and the iPhone app, plus having to deal with the often non-functioning reminder system eventually turned me to Google Tasks. Google Tasks is much simpler, but it integrates with Google Calendar and I could even have it send reminders to my cell phone.

A few days ago I noticed that Pocket Informant was on sale and they were donating proceeds towards the Haiti earthquake. I've been keeping an eye on PI for a long time, but the price always seemed just slightly out of my reach, but since it's on sale and giving towards a good cause, I immediately bought it.

Pocket Informant can only sync tasks to Toodledo (referral link) and not RTM. But in the ten months since I wrote my original post, Toodledo has improved by leaps and bounds and now completely meets and even exceeds my expectations. While I needed to pay for RTM's Pro version in order to sync to an external program, Toodledo's external sync is completely free. Toodledo's Pro version actually offers additional features such as subtasks (not possible with RTM) and longer retention times for completed tasks.

I also have PI sync my Google Calendar. Pretty soon I don't need to carry my laptop around any more. I still carry my Moleskine notebook around to take notes though. No matter how hard I try, I still find it much easier to take notes and doodle with a paper notebook.

iBooHoo

2010-01-11T22:30:00.003+07:00

I never paid much attention to the iPhone 3GS since I already have an iPod Touch. But my boss was looking to buy a new phone, so I immediately recommended the iPhone 3GS to him. Unfortunately, only after buying it for him I realized that there's a new "iBoot-359.3.2" that can't be jailbroken without tethering. I can imagine explaining to my boss to use this phone with care, never let it run out of battery, never let it crash, and never turn it off, otherwise you'll need to hook it up to your computer...

But wait, surely my boss doesn't need a jailbroken phone? Actually, the iPhone for some stupidly reason has pathetic keyboard layouts obviously not designed by actual users of those languages.

This is the default Bopomofo keyboard on the iPhone. Bopomofo is a system for phonetically writing the Traditional Chinese characters.

And this is the modified Bopomofo keyboard in the more traditional layout that every Bopomofo user on the planet is used to, and it's only available to jailbroken phones.

At first glance, it might seem that the better layout is simply a vertical layout compared to the horizontal layout, but the horizontal layout is actually all the phonemes lined up in order. Imagine if the iPhone's English keyboard is laid out as A B C D E F G H... instead of the standard QWERTY layout.

The exact same problem also occurs for the Thai language keyboard. This is the Thai language keyboard that was much advertised as a new feature included in iPhone OS 3.0.

Unfortunately, that layout is completely unusable in real life since it's not based on any standard. This one, again, is only available for jailbroken phones.

Once again, at first glance, it seems that the second keyboard contains seemingly random characters. However, that is the standard Thai keyboard layout used on every computer and typewriter.

Oh, and when I was paying for the iPhone, the salesguy turned his back on me and typed something really quickly into the iPhone. I couldn't figure out what he did until I came home. He modified the email signature to read: "Sent from my TrueMove iPhone3GS".

Kindle officially in Thailand

2010-01-06T22:01:00.002+07:00

Both the Kindle and the Kindle DX are now officially available to Thailand. What a great way to start 2010!

Red ThinkPad

2010-01-04T00:01:00.001+07:00

I want one, even if it's in red, and doesn't have the traditional 7-row ThinkPad keyboard. Oh wait, I'm a Mac user now. Doh!

Domain controller crashed

2010-01-02T20:30:00.002+07:00

I can't believe I had to start the year fixing my servers, again. During the new year vacation, the maintenance people turned off the power to the entire building for, er, "maintenance", without notifying anyone.

Not to mention I was away, supposedly on vacation! When the power returned, my domain controller couldn't boot up, one of my RAID backup devices had read errors, and the other one had a kernel error and couldn't finish booting.

I do have UPS's on all my servers, but the power was out for so long due to maintenance jobs being done, and when it came back, there were power surges that caused the main power to flicker, thus causing all the problems.

Sigh...

Update (01/04/10): That's nothing yet, on the very first day of work, a truck crashed into the telephone pole in front of my office and took out our leased line. It should've just crashed directly into my domain controller to save me the trouble.

Happy Y2.010K

2010-01-01T00:00:00.002+07:00

It seemed only like yesterday when I was making the Happy Y2.009K post. 2009 seems to have passed in just a blink of the eye. I've been so insanely busy, and this is probably obvious from the number of posts going down from 70+ in just the second half of 2008 to 70+ in all of 2009. It might seem that because I only started this blog in the second half of 2008 so I might have more to say back then when it was all new and exciting, but in fact, I have hundreds of saved drafts that need polishing before being posted.

A few days ago, we were talking about the old programmer that used to work here, and I suddenly remembered that one of the things she worked on when she was here was resolving Y2K issues in our programs, and that her husband (who was a programmer at a large financial institution) had to stay overnight at work on New Year's Eve to keep an eye on the computers. How time flies!

Thinner client

2009-12-31T17:30:00.001+07:00

I've been interested in thin clients for a long time. Unfortunately, the biggest problem for me was that thin clients often cost more than a "fat client", that is, a full computer. Some may argue that a thin client has other cost-saving advantages that a full computer can't match, such as Windows licensing costs, space saving, and electricity saving. But with a computer, I get a powerful processor for running applications without having to have a powerful server, so why would I want a thin client that may become non-functional if my network goes down?

But recently, I noticed that Norhtec now lists a cheap $99 thin client called the MicroClient TC on their website. At that kind of price point, the thin client becomes interesting again, since there's no way I can build a full computer for that kind of price, and now that email is considered "mission critical", thin clients would really save a lot of money for users that only need to use email and nothing else.

Norhtec is relatively well known in the embedded Linux market for making small PC's and servers and thin clients. Unfortunately, when I looked at their thin clients a while ago, they also had the same issue as being costly. Norhtec is practically next door to where I work, so I called them up to see if I could order a unit or just go over to pick one up.

Stupidly enough, I seemed to be the very first person to ever inquire about the MicroClient TC, and the person who answered the phone mumbled something about not able to deliver the product immediately, then referred me to a salesperson that's actually from a different company. Eventually I ended up getting the Kaser NetClient, which is identical to the Norhtec MicroClient TC, except it seems to be housed in a cheaper plastic case, and it cost me $117 (today's exchange rate) instead of $99. The salesperson also didn't know anything about the NetClient either, and said I was the very first person to buy it from his company. He also claims the unit doesn't come with an OS and I need to install a hard drive first and install my own OS. Uh... right.

MicroClient TC image from the Norhtec website:

YF-700 NetClient image from the Kaser website:

After I took the photos below, I noticed that the Taiwan Kaser website has better photos:

This is the front side with an SD/MMC slot. Three USB ports and audio ports. Reset button. Indicator lights. My unit doesn't come with the wi-fi option so there's no antenna.

Backside with power switch. Proprietary power adapter jack. LAN. VGA. Mouse. Keyboard. The metal thing is a mounting bracket for mounting the unit to the back of monitors.

With the mounting bracket removed, what appeared to be a door turns out to hide an IDE port. I think it would make more sense to have a CF port.

The relatively large power adapter, and comparing the NetClient to a DVD disc.

Unfortunately, the QuickRDP software included in the NetClient unit has a problem with screen refreshing. When the screen is refreshing and the mouse pointer is inside the area that's being refreshed, the mouse pointer freezes until the screen finishes updating. This causes a huge problem when doing repetitive tasks that involve mouse movement and screen updates. In fact, the main reason I'm interested in these thin clients is to connect to our terminal servers to access Dynamics NAV. The ERP software has huge amounts of data entry fields and drop down boxes that need to be clicked on repeatedly, and the screen refreshes constantly as the onscreen data loads and updates.

One other problem with QuickRDP is that it that it appears to only support 1024x768 resolution. Haven't they noticed that only widescreen monitors are available in the market these days?!

PSD_DISABLEPRINTER

2009-12-16T05:10:00.000+07:00

I mentioned going back to Windows Server 2003 R2 earlier, and here I'll talk about why. While testing our Dynamics NAV ERP software under Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2's Remote Desktop Services, I discovered one serious issue.

The "Printer..." button was missing from the Page Setup dialog. The printer selection button is very important since we have different types of pre-printed forms pre-loaded into different dot matrix printers. Since the paper size has to be preset into the printer form page, without the printer selection button, there's absolutely no way we could get custom sized forms to print. As usual, our hopeless ERP implementors were no help, since they have no experience with anything newer than Windows XP. ("Use XP" was what they said.)

After a lot of searching, I discovered here that the printer selection button was deemed obsolete from Windows Vista onwards. There are various workarounds and code samples posted at various places to deal with the problem. However, since I wans't writing my own application but was running Microsoft's own ERP software, the missing button turned out to be critically important, and I was forced to go back to Windows Server 2003 R2.

The Page Setup dialog from Windows XP.

Page Setup dialog from Windows Server 2008 R2. Note the missing "Printer..." button in the lower right corner.

The margins and stuff are different since they're captured from different computers.

Kindle for PC

2009-12-15T12:05:00.000+07:00

Interestingly enough, when I looked at the Amazon Kindle page, I noticed some of the description text changed from when I last posted. Just to see if Thailand is now supported, I tried clicking again, and sure enough, the availability description different now.

Before: "Unfortunately, we are currently unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle contents in Thailand."

After: "Unfortunately, we are currently unable to ship Kindles to Thailand. Customers in Thailand can read over 310,000 Kindle books on your PC with our free application for your Windows PC - no Kindle required. Click here to learn more."

While I was typing this post, I noticed that there's a new version of Kindle for the iPhone, and Amazon even announced that it's now available in more than 60 countries. Sure enough, it's now available in the Thai iTunes store. Previously, I had to use my US iTunes account to download it.

Unfortunately, still no option to select which side of the screen to tap to turn the page. I like to hold my iPod with my left hand and tap the left side of the screen with my thumb to turn the page. Stanza has it, why not Kindle for iPhone?

Just to double check if the Kindle device is now available to Thailand, I went back to the Amazon Kindle page. Still no Kindle, but it now lists 320,000 books available.

Amazon Kindle in Thailand

2009-12-07T23:30:00.003+07:00

I was so incredibly disappointed in Amazon not shipping the Kindle to Thailand when the Kindle 2 International was announced.

Recently though, I found about a local importer of Kindles appropriately named KindleThai.com. At first, I thought that the price they charge is slightly too high, but they do have a 30-day warranty, so I felt the price was worth it, considering that if I bought a unit through friends in the States or another country, warranty claims could be a huge issue if I ran into a DOA unit. Plus, they pre-register the Kindles they sell to a U.S. account and pre-configure the Kindles to buy books correctly, which is a great help for non-technical people.

Surprisingly, the Amazon Whispernet works in Thailand, even if they don't sell Kindles directly to Thailand.

While playing with the available wireless providers setting, I discovered that the Kindle's time zone setting appears to be retrieved from the provider. At first, the Kindle always displayed the time in universal time (GMT), but after switching providers, suddenly the Kindle was displaying the correct local time.

Even more surprisingly, I could "purchase" free Kindle books from my computer, and then load them directly on the Kindle by using the Archived Items folder, for free, eventhough it says that a $1.99 surcharge will be placed for international delivery. Maybe the surcharge only happens when a direct purchase is made from the Kindle.

The Kindle I got already came preloaded with the new 2.3 firmware with native PDF support. However, since PDF is normally formatted with the printed page in mind, so there's always a lot of margins. Hopefully, Amazon will fix this in a future update by implementing zoom or some kind of fit to display option.

I happen to have Pragmatic Bookshelf's iPhone SDK Development ebook. Here are some comparison shots between the PDF version and the Mobipocket (mobi) versions, in both portrait and landscape modes:

This is Kindle 2 displaying native PDF, compared to Adobe Reader 9 running on my MacBook. The text is way too small to be read, unless you're an ant.

Again, in landscape orientation. This is legible, but it can't scroll the page up and down, only "flip" up and down, so it's very uncomfortable for technical manuals that you need to go back and forth on, but it's okay for reading novels.

And here's the ebook-specific Mobipocket format. Stupidly enough, the Forward is marked as Chapter 1 in the mobi file, so the chapter numbers are off by 1.

The Mobipocket version is perfectly readable even in the smallest font size.

Sorry for the poor photos. The huge difference in brightness between the MacBook's screen and the Kindle's E Ink screen made it really difficult to get a consistent exposure, and I was too lazy to get my tripod out. The E Ink screen looks really dim in these photos, but this is not a review of the Kindle's screen quality.

Unfortunately, this Kindle is going to be given away as a gift so I only got a few days to play with it. Now taking donations to get my own unit.

Update: Kindle is now officially available in Thailand.

4 GB RAM on 32-bit OS

2009-12-04T12:30:00.003+07:00

Due to various incompatibilities with our ERP software soon going live, I decided to revert back to using Windows Server 2003 R2's Terminal Services instead of using the far superior Windows Server 2008 R2's Remote Desktop Services and the streamlined RemoteApp functionality.

Since we're going back to Windows Server 2003 R2, I decided to use the 32-bit (x86) version so I can keep the printer drivers in sync with our Windows XP clients. Unfortunately, the 32-bit version only supports 4 GB of RAM, and when I installed 4 GB of RAM, I could only see 3.5 GB.

There are a lot of solutions online to attemp to see 4 GB, such as using the /PAE switch in boot.ini, enabling DEP, and even editing the registry. Unfortunately, none of those things I tried worked. Then it occurred to me, since I can't see the last 512 MB. What happens if I put in more than 4 GB?

There it is. 4 GB of RAM. Windows Task Manager also shows the full 4 GB being accessible. And yes, since this is the Standard Edition of Windows Server 2003 R2, it only supports a maximum of 4 GB, even if I put in 8 GB. (I tried.)

It's flooding ThinkPads

2009-11-18T22:10:00.003+07:00

My (not so) new (any more) boss uses one of the really low end ThinkPad R61's. The reason being that the old boss didn't want to get a good notebook for the new boss, at the time when the old boss was still the big boss and the new boss was the new kid on the block. (The old boss uses an X61.) I've made plans to get the new boss an X200 or whatever the next year's equivalent is early next year.

But yesterday when I stopped by my ThinkPad dealer to see if they have any new things in stock. Instead, they showed me some clearance prices for the X301 which were close to 50% off from the original price. Wow! I immediately put in a proposal to my boss to replace his R61 with the much sleeker X301. He immediately approved my proposal, but not for one X301, but for two X301's, one for himself, and one for the vice boss.

They're clearance models so they're older models with the Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, and only 64 GB SSD. But that's plenty of speed and space for the bosses.

Hmm, people like to stack their notebooks and take photos. I should do that too.

Drupal novice

2009-11-16T19:30:00.001+07:00

While reading about Drupal, I came across many sites that compare Drupal to Joomla! and WordPress. I mentioned earlier that I had no experience with regards to web CMS, so I decided to check both of them out. This time, instead of downloading the distribution and installing manually, I decided to do things the quick way by downloading complete application stacks through BitNami.

BitNami's application stack lets me run a complete web application using a simple installer program. They also offer ready-to-run virtual machines images ("virtual appliances") if I don't want to install the stack into my OS. The virtual appliance includes its own Linux distribution, and the application stack pre-installed and ready to run.

I mentioned in my first Drupal post that getting Drupal up and running took less than an hour. Getting both Joomla! and WordPress up and running, using the BitNami stack, took less than 10 minutes, including the download time.

Both Joomla! and WordPress do seem easier to get started for most people. At least, they both came with WYSIWYG editors built in, and have nice friendly administrative menus without having to install a module like the admin module or the admin menu module like in Drupal. I don't know, maybe it's my old Unix background, but I found Drupal's standard menus faster and easier to use than fancy icons.

Anyway, what's better for learning than trying to build an actual project? I'm still feeling guilty over last year's blunder (though not my fault at all) on recommending an e-commerce site for my friend's website. So I decided to rebuild the site for her, using Drupal.

Drupal newbie

2009-11-14T19:50:00.002+07:00

Eventhough I've been using computers since the days of B.I. (Before Internet), I was never really good at this web thing. Sure, I use the web every day to research problems; I set up the very first personal web server in Thailand back in 1993; I use Blogger to keep this blog; I've also helped friends set up their websites and debug website problems; but I never bothered to learn the intricacies of coding HTML or CSS or implementing a CMS.

So, I was just browsing around randomly on Amazon.com when I came across Drupal For Dummies. I've always heard that Drupal is a complex but fully-featured content management system, but graduating into a Dummies book? (Then again, I shouldn't feel too bad, since Windows Server 2008, which I live and breath everyday, is also a Dummies book.) But, I thought I would check it out just to prove that I'm not a dummy. Off to drupal.org to read some docs. It looked interesting, so I thought I would give it a go.

But first, I had to get MAMP to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my Mac. Next, I downloaded the Drupal distribution and extracted it into the htdocs folder inside MAMP. I created a database using phpMyAdmin, then browsed to to the local website, and completed the Drupal installation.

When I tried to make the first test post, I found to my surprise that the editor isn't a WYSIWYG editor. Off to drupal.org again. I realized that I have to install a module, and there were actually a number of WYSIWYG editors to choose from. I picked FCKeditor since I was familiar with the name when I helped someone with her website last year. My next surprise was that even with FCKeditor installed, there was no easy way to upload images. (I'm comparing Drupal with Blogger's editor, which is the only web editor I'm familiar with.) After a bit of browsing around, I picked IMCE and installed it into FCKeditor.

So now I had a near fully functional CMS site running on my Mac. All in less than an hour of work!

My Internet is slower than yours

2009-11-09T07:36:00.002+07:00

I now have 16 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload from True Internet. This is just the speed to the ISP and local sites that are directly connected to the ISP though. Actual usage doesn't feel any faster, since the pipes are still well clogged. I can't even get YouTube to play smoothly half of the time.

Googasm

2009-10-29T11:52:00.002+07:00

Shares Of Garmin Ltd. and TomTom N.V. Plunge On Droid Launch-WSJ
Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009 02:41pm EDT

The Wall Street Journal reported that Garmin Ltd. and TomTom N.V. plunged after Google Inc. upgraded its smart-phone software to include a free navigation feature. The smart phone to feature Google's new navigation software is the Motorola Inc. Droid, which was unveiled Wednesday. The phone goes on sale November 6 through Verizon Wireless, which plans to aggressively market the device. In a blog post, Google said its new Google Maps Navigation feature provides turn-by-turn directions based on up-to-date maps and business listings from Google Maps. It will be available to other smart phones through a new version of Google's Android operating system. The news sent shares of the companies reeling.

(Source: WSJ)

7

2009-10-22T07:07:00.000+07:00

MacBook obsoleted

2009-10-21T07:30:00.005+07:00

Six months since I got my MacBook, and it's officially obsolete today with the introduction of the unibody MacBook. With the difference in exchange rates, the local price even went down too. I hate typing on my MacBook since the palm rest keeps trying to slash my wrists, and I notice the problem doesn't exist on the unibody aluminum models. I hope the unibody plastic model also makes improvement in this area.

Time to upgrade...

Anti-piracy cycle

2009-10-02T18:03:00.001+07:00

Around the same time last year, the Thai Cyber Police announced that they're putting an end to piracy once and for all and that they have names of all corporations using pirated software. Of course, Thailand being Thailand, absolutely nothing happened, and one year later, they're announcing the same thing all over again.

The funny thing is, Firefox is now flagging the anti-piracy site as an attack site. Which is true mostly, since I've been getting spam from them both in email and regular snail mail. How annoying.

Panasonic LX3 2.0

2009-09-28T22:12:00.001+07:00

Panasonic just released firmware 2.0 for the LX3 camera. It's almost like getting a new camera for free! Hard to believe that in these days of disposable electronics, a manufacturer would release such a large update for a camera that's been on the market for just over a year.

Changes in firmware 2.0:

Improved auto white balance performance.
Auto Focus speed-up.
Recording function with an aspect ratio of 1:1 has been added.
A white balance (WB) bracket function has been added.
[HIGH DYNAMIC] has been added to scene mode.
[LENS RESUME] has been added to the [SETUP] menu.
[MENU RESUME] has been added to the [SETUP] menu.
The exposure compensation and the auto bracket compensation can now be set up to ±3EV.
Position of the guide line can now be set.
It is now possible to display the highlights in playback mode.
It is now possible to record the user’s name in the picture.
Digital red-eye removal has been modified.
Items saved in the custom set have changed.

ALIX 2D3

2009-09-22T20:57:00.005+07:00

Since I'm using pfSense now I decided to order some ALIX 2D3 to try out the multi-WAN functions. I also got some 2 GB CF cards since that's the smallest size I could find locally. Pretty sad that the smallest size at less than $10 a piece is faster than the ones I use with my DSLR, and I got those for like $200 each.

Windows Server 2008 R2 on DreamSpark

2009-09-19T07:55:00.002+07:00

Just noticed early this morning that Windows Server 2008 R2 is now available on DreamSpark. If you're still a student, hurry over and grab your free product key.

09/09/09 09:09

2009-09-09T09:09:00.002+07:00

While the Chinese consider 8 to be the most auspicious number. Thais considers 9 to be the most auspicious number. Happy 999999!

Eventhough the number 9 isn't especially special in other parts of the world, 09/09/09 doesn't come very often, so a number of companies are taking advantage of this date to launch their new products.

Good thing I'm getting paid for a number of my projects this month. Will post some pics when I have more free time.

Leica M9 leaked

2009-09-06T20:08:00.003+07:00

Mmm... full frame...

EOS 7D leaked

2009-08-30T07:55:00.004+07:00

Meet the Man behind ThinkPad

2009-08-29T07:00:00.001+07:00

I'm meeting Matt Kohut of Inside the Box blog next Monday. I should probably leave my MacBook at home.

Gmail contact chooser

2009-08-28T07:28:00.006+07:00

We've been using Google Apps at work for years, ever since the service was first offered. Unfortunately, I was never able to force^H^H^H^H^Hconvince the old^H^H^Hsenior management people into using it, as they're all comfortable with using Outlook Express or in some cases, Thunderbird, on their notebooks.

I still can't believe how bad Outlook Express (and even Outlook) is. I got bitten by Outlook's 2 GB limit per mailbox so incredibly many times that I have all the tools and the fixing steps memorized by heart. Unfortunately, all the senior management love Outlook Express because it has a simple way to click and select contacts that you want to send emails to.

My prayer has been answered, in the form of the contact chooser.