Baltimore Bullet wins as usual

Wow, just watched Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Congrats! Michael broke seven world records at the Olympics this time, and yesterday he beat Milorad Čavić by 1/100 of a second!

Almost (?) all the swimmers at the Olympics are wearing the Speedo LZR RACER. This high tech swimsuit coupled with modern training techniques assure that more records will be broken in the future.

Internet 1984

The Thai cyber crime law (officially unofficially the Computer-Related Crime Act of B.E. 2550) comes into effect next week for all "service providers". This law essentially requires all "service providers" to log everything that users do for at least 90 days. It also allows police free access to home computers and online contents of individuals suspected of... well, basically anything they want.

The most absurd thing about this law is that "service provider" is taken in the broadest meaning possible, where anyone giving Internet access to another party is considered a service provider. So if you're a company giving e-mail access to your employees, you have to log all employee activities. If you're a little coffee shop giving free Internet access to customers, you must log their activities. If you're a home user sharing your Internet with someone else living in your home, you have to log their activities too. Where is the privacy?

This law is a huge boon to the firewall and logging devices industry though. Just the past month alone I must've received at least 5,000 calls from vendors selling firewall devices with logging capabilities for many times they are worth, trying to scare small businesses into buying their products. Unfortunately, non-compliance with the law is considered a criminal offense. Makes you think that the people that made up these ridiculous laws probably own more than a number of these firewall dealers.

It sucks that the large IT shops and influencial people are not doing anything to prevent the law from being passed. Instead, they are holding expensive seminars and speaking in public to "teach" people about how important and useful this law is.

Why doesn't the government just unplug the Internet and let's all go back to the stone age?

Linksys WRT310N and DD-WRT

I mentioned having a Linksys WRT310N earlier.

One day I walked into a networking shop and they happened to have the new Linksys WRT160N and WRT310N on the shelves. I asked the salesperson for their prices and they were selling them for exactly the same price! I asked why anyone would buy the WRT160N when the WRT310N is exactly the same price, and he said the prices came directly from Linksys.

So... I bought the WRT310N, and two minutes after arriving home, the warranty is void.

I had to install DD-WRT because it supports far more devices than Tomato does. I don't dislike DD-WRT, but when I last used it, I kept running into a problem where if the router loses power, it resets to the default configuration. This bug seems to be fixed in the current release.

(Click to see larger images.)

WRT310N has a 300 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, and 4 MB Flash.


The good ol' WRT54GL's 200 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, and 4 MB Flash.


The WAP54G with 200 MHz CPU, 8 MB RAM, and 2 MB Flash. Running DD-WRT Micro.


DD-WRT Special has advanced QoS settings with detailed bandwidth control.


I loaded the WRT310N with DD-WRT regular edition to capture the standard QoS settings screen.


Some older chipsets also support Ethernet port priority. (Not sure if it works on the WRT54GL, but it's not shown in the WRT310N QoS screens above.)


DD-WRT Special has other nice things like PPPoE server built in.


Another DD-WRT Special feature, Zero IP Config.

Building computers for aggravation and frustration

This is probably a common experience to all the tech people who ever built computers for families and friends. They never seem to appreciate what you've done, and often they even argue with you.

A long time ago, I used to go out and pick out the parts for my family and friends. Build everything up at my workshop, then drive to their houses to deliver the hardware, then help them install the software that they needed. All these for free, and they always complain that I charge (?!) them too much. Aren't computers supposed to be really cheap?

So later on, I would just bring them directly to the computer shops and pick out the parts in front of them and let them pay directly to the shop. Which turned out to be an even worse experience because they always want to haggle with the shops. (Aren't computers supposed to be really cheap?) But the reason I bring them to those particular shops in the first place is because I know the shop owners, and they would already give me a discount, but they always think that I'm somehow conspiring with the shop owner to overcharge them.

Fine. So more recently what I do is just ask them how much budget they have, and just write up a list of parts and let them go to the shops to buy those things. I even put in a slightly higher price than what I can normally get, so when they go to the shops, they always think that they managed to get a cheaper price than me, and would always come back to boast. (They never do, since I can almost always get dealer prices.)

So is this the perfect solution? Obviously not, or I wouldn't be writing this.

The latest wrinkle to helping people pick out computers is that many people are still stuck to stuff they knew from ages ago. Few weeks ago I wrote a list of parts for someone to buy based around the Core 2 Duo. A few days later he called me back and said he doesn't want a Core 2 whatchamacallit. He wants an Intel.

"The Core 2 Duo is an Intel."

"I want a Pentium."

"No no, the current Pentium name is a low end product. What you want is the Core 2 Duo."

"I want a Pentium 4. That is the best Intel CPU."

"No, the Pentium 4 was succeeded by the Pentium D, then the Core 2 Duo. Then the Pentium name was brought back as the low priced Pentium Dual-Core." (Why was I even bothering?)

"I saw on TV that the Pentium 4 can make the Internet faster."

Ahhhhhhhhhhh! Boom. (Brain implodes.)

Man, I can't wait for the Core i7 to be released.

My pain was felt

Recently we've been having a lot of problems with Gmail at work (we use Google Apps) and it's good to find out that I'm not the only one.

One thing about email problems is that I get notified very quickly. My users would call me up the instant anything goes wrong and demand me to fix it. Unfortunately, when the email is hosted elsewhere, there's very little that I can do. I tried to get my boss to pay for the Premier Edition with uptime guarantee, but since we have a lot of users, the cost is just way too high. I hope one day Google will have a lower priced edition with uptime guarantee but without the other fancy stuff.

The Gmail guys really work out their problems very quickly though. So I would always tell my users that I'm working on a fix, and after a few hours they'll call me back and tell me that they can use their email again!

Today is also H.M. the Queen of Thailand's Birthday and also Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day!

2008 Olympics opening ceremonies

The opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was completely spectacular. I watched it live on TV since there's just an hour's time difference between here and Beijing. I tried to find video clips of the event on YouTube but they were all taken down due to copyright issues. These are some of the pics I found online that I really like. Copyrights belong to their respective owners.

The lighting of the Olympic flame performed by former gymnast Li Ning was awesome. Li Ning was a six medal winner at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and after retirement, owner of the sportswear company named after himself. Unfortunately, the harness carrying him didn't seem to be completely in sync with the unscrolling of the images on the video wall in the background. He was going too fast at first, and when they slowed him down it was too slow and the music seemed to end before he reached the flame lighting point. Plus they already had a flying kid with the kite running in the air during the performances.

Later... I found clips of the complete opening ceremony at HiNet and they appear to be viewable from anywhere in the world. Part 1 and Part 2. The same site has shorter clips of the individual performances of the opening ceremony too and clips of competitions that are constantly updated. Check them out!