Dr. Thiti Vacharasintopchai, ATSI-DX, CISA

iTunes 6.0 on my Windows XP laptop stopped playing my purchased music and required me to enter a user name and password to reauthorize the computer. It can connect to Apple server but "error -208" screen pops up just after it says authorization completed. iTunes still wouldn't play my purchased music. I search around and found the following two postings relevant: GadgetGuy: October 18, 2005 PrayToTheMachine.com: October 18, 2005 . What a coincidence they are both posted on October 18, 2005. Basically here's what they say: 1. Close iTunes and QuickTime 2. Remove the folder "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\SC Info" I guess error 208 happens because of a corrupted authorization information, which could likely be stored in the "SC Info" folder. I followed the advice to remove "SC Info" and everything is back to normal now. Keywords: itunes , errors , authorization , digital-rights-management

While looking for a CD-R/DVD-R emulator in Windows, I came across this thread with a posting related to my audio CD copy protection issue . One of the posters said: It is perfectly legal under copyright (proven in court) to convert music you have purchased to different formats for your own personal use for things like mp3 players. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if this is actually true or not. But it is interesting enought to post it here. Keywords: legal , copyrights , music

I've been busy reading the "Cultivating Communities of Practice" book and haven't updated this blog for a while. The book is yet to be finished but something came up last night and I recall a morale quote my middle-school English teacher at Assumption College, Master Assawin Maneerat, taught me back in 1990: Behavior is before knowledge. Be honest to our duties. Be grateful to our benefactors. Abide by virtues forever. Keywords: quotes , life , morality

While browsing thru books on Amazon.com directed from a Google search on " community knowledge sharing ", I found my current research interest to resemble a management research area "Community of Practice." Here are the three books that interest me and I would find a chance to look into them: Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier , by E. Wenger and W. M. Snyder. Harvard Business Review (January 1, 2000). 12 pages. Cultivating Communities of Practice , by E. Wenger et al. Harvard Business School Press (March 15, 2002). 352 pages. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , by E. Wenger et al. Cambridge University Press (December 1, 1999). 336 pages. All books link to Dr. Etienne C. Wenger so I looked up Google and got this link to him. Happy researching! Keywords: books , community-of-practice Update: Nov 3, 05: Here is Dr. Wenger's introductory article to the Community of Practice (CoP): Communities of Practice: A Brief Introdu

Two interesting pages I got from Blind Rapture during a Blogger.com browse/search on "phd students." I will try to read them some time later. John Perry's "Structured Procrastination" Phil Agre's "Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students" Keywords: phd

iLounge.com: Sony BMG, EMI offer iPod-incompatible CDs Thru a discussion on iLounge.com I was aware of copy-protected audio CDs not being compatible with iPods and iTunes for a while. This kind of protection is targeted at Microsoft Windows-based computers (and perhaps Apple Macs, but I don't know since I don't have a Mac). When inserted a copy-protected audio CDs on a computer, it won't recognize the CD as an audio CD. We need to use a special software located on the CD to play it. Since Windows won't recognize the CD as an audio CD, iTunes won't be able to "import" it for playbacks on an iPod. Also, duplication or backup of CDs won't be difficult, if not possible, because the copy-protection technique creates a number of tracks that CD copying software thinks as bad tracks and simply skips them. Duplicated CDs will give extremely skipping playbacks. I thought these kind of protection is only used CDs produced by the U.S. records giants, like Sony BM

J. Mgmt in Engrg: Knowledge Management in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Consulting: A Case Study This article by Mezher et al. (2005) reiterates the key bases that would be useful for researches in engineering knowledge management: The goal of knowledge management as a process is to improve the organization’s ability to execute its core business functions more efficiently and effectively. The key to knowledge management is capturing intellectual assets for the tangible benefit of the organization. ...the aim of any design engineering consulting firm is to produce projects with high quality and in less time. Keywords: engineering-knowledge-management , quotes , journal-papers

From Locke et al. (1999) on reviewing the literature: In writin a research proposal, the author is obligated to place the (research) question or hypothesis in the context of previous work in such a way as to explain and justify the decisions made. That alone is required. Nothing more is apprepriate, and nothing more should be attempted (page 68). ...sound proposals devote most of the literature review to explaining (a) exactly "how and why the research question or hypothesis was formulated in the proposed form" and (b) exactly "why the proposed research strategy was selected." What is required...is a step-by-step explanation of decisions, punctuated by reference to studies that support the ongoing argument (page 68). ...there is no place for the "Smith says this..." and "Jones says that..." paragraph-by-paragraph recital...This is the place to answer the reader's most immediate questions: What is it the author wants to know, and why has thi

I have a lot of music files, take a lot of digital pictures and save a lot of webpages locally on my computers and have had trouble looking for a right file or folder when hundreds or thousands of them are accumulated on the hard drive. Apple iTunes has helped me a lot on music and PDF files and I have had less trouble looking for a right one when I need it. iTunes is now my favorite tools to manage my music library and the PDF-based research papers. I don't prefer to use software like ACDSee , which I believe use the same principle as the "iTunes Music Library", to manage my picture library because it's not practical to store all pictures locally on a hard drive as I normally take pictures in RAW format, the size of which is typically 6 megabyte each. I need to archive them to DVD discs from time to time to free up the space of my hard drive, even though now it's 200GB in size. What I usually do with my files or folders naming convention is that I try to put a