Dr. Thiti Vacharasintopchai, ATSI-DX, CISA

Choosing a Bluetooth Headset for a Pocket PC Phone: Matching Matters I have had trouble using bluetooth headsets with my ASUS P505 Pocket PC phone. My good old Jabra BT200 headset, which worked perfectly with my Sony Ericsson T630 cell phone and my friend's Dopod 818 Pro Pocket PC phone, produces static noises when it is only 1 meter away from the P505. The problem is worst when I'm on the phone walking in a shopping mall or a crowded place -- I hardly hear anything but static noises even when the phone and the headset are 1 meter apart! My BT200 is about 3-4 years old and I thought the problem might be because the technology in the BT200 is too old and is not compatible with the P505. So I started seeking for an alternative. I had tried many headsets during the past two weeks, from a new Sony Ericsson model, the Nokia BH-200, the tiny Samsung WEP200, the Jabra BT500 and BT800, and the pricey and stylish Jabra JX10 . I finally bought the JX10 last Tuesday because it sounded be

I was starting a not-so-small Tomcat servlet development project -- to modify and extend the Blojsom blogging server for my thesis work. I was suggested that Borland JBuilder is a better tool for servlet development. I liked JBuilder when I hadn't known Eclipse. But now that I'm so used to using Eclipse, I don't want to go back. I was misled that I need a "Tomcat plug-in" for Eclipse to develop servlets. Spent 5-6 hours trying to get the seems-popular Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher plugin V3.2 Beta 2 to work the way JBuiilder servlet development tool worked for me. It just didn't work the way I like. Finally I found a discussion thread on an Eclipse site that refers to the WTP Tutorials – Building and Running a Web Application article by Naci Dai which showed me how to make Eclipse work the way I like: According to Dai, all I have to do are: 1. Get the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) from eclipse.org (which I already have) 2. Start the WTP and go to the me

Here's a very touching quote by Mr. Phuriphat from a thread on Mr.Palm webboard: ไม่ขวนขวายหาความรู้ด้วยตนเอง เอาแต่ถามผู้อื่นอยู่ร่ำไป แล้วความรู้ที่ได้มามันจะมีค่าอันใดเล่าครับ? Keywords: quotes , thailand , learning , self-reliance

This is a beautiful quote I heard during the AIT Alumni Annual Meeting at Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel last month: Joel Barker: Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world. Keywords: quotes , visions , business

I had a major trouble after installing a system extension on my Mac OS X 10.4.7 installation last night. After configuring and installing the extension called Callisto Build 008, the Mac OS X failed to boot on restart. The usual Apple screen showed up but after a while a nice error screen was presented demanding me to press the Power Button to shutdown the computer. I was so frustrated fearing that I need to format and reinstall the OS from scratch without having backed up my work data. I believe there must be a solution to this...that doesn't require me to reformat the hard drive. In Windows case, I can use the installation CD to access the hard drive and manually fix the problem. I'm expecting the same thing on Mac OS X -- to enter a command-line text interface and manually remove the offending system extension. I went ahead browsing my favorite Insanely Mac forum and found an interesting thread as a starting point. Here's my actual procedure to fix the problem: Use F

I'm trying to switch my Java development platform from Windows XP to Mac OS X Tiger. Wondering how to colorize the Terminal screen, I spent some time googling. From the discussions at the end of this page: macosxhints.com - Add full ANSI color support to Terminal.app Here's a summary of how to enable it: With bash shell as default, simply add export TERM=xterm-color [I prefer this for Linux compatibility] or export TERM=dtterm in the ~/.profile (single-user) or /etc/profile (system-wide) Color terminal is enabled. Use ' ls -G ' (the -G enables color output) to test. Add alias ls='ls -G' in the profile file for convenience. Keywords: mac-os-x , unix , terminal , shell , tips

Here's an interesting quote from Today's Google Quote of the Day : People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. - AJ Liebling Keywords: quotes , newspaper , news , etiquette , journalism

I've been studying the source code of the DSpace Lightweight Network Interface (LNI) for a few days. The example client code is referred to as a Smoke Test , which sounds suspicious to me. I googled today and here's my findings: MSDN: Guidelines for Smoke Testing : In software, the term smoke testing describes the process of validating code changes before the changes are checked into the product’s source tree . After code reviews, smoke testing is the most cost effective method for identifying and fixing defects in software. Smoke tests are designed to confirm that changes in the code function as expected and do not destabilize an entire build. NoteNote The term smoke testing originated in the hardware industry. The term derived from this practice: After a piece of hardware or a hardware component was changed or repaired, the equipment was simply powered up. If there was no smoke, the component passed the test. Keywords: languages , programming , deployment

For DSpace Users in Windows Platform: If you haven't already known, here's a workaround I discovered today after spending 1-2 hours trying to enable the full-text indexing feature of the DSpace Digital Library software in Windows XP Professional SP2 on my laptop: In Unix or Linux the "filter-media" shell script in [DSpace]/bin needs to be manually scheduled ( cron ) for daily update of the full-text database. The Windows counterpart of the "filter-media" shell script is not provided in the DSpace distribution. With the environmental variable DSPACE_HOME set to C:\DSpace , a "filter-media.bat" batch file is written. "filter-media.bat" can be manually run periodically or scheduled to be run automatically by Windows (to further investigate how to schedule a task). Essentially, "filter-media.bat" is simply a batch file that executes the class MediaFilterManager in the package org.dspace.app.mediafilter -- by using the batch-fil

I am looking for a blog server for my present research in the application of blogs and digital libraries in knowledge management. Blojsom and Pebble, two Java blog servers for hosting under Tomcat 5, seem interesting to me. Blojsom is a well-established product and is the technology that underlies Apple Mac OS X Server Collaboration Services . It comes with a wide variety of plug-ins (which imply its extensibility) and is also accompanied by a good-looking javadoc . Pebble, on the other hand, impressed me with its fancy support for del.icio.us-like tagging –see the developer's own blog here for example. But after spending some time looking at its documentation and mailing list on SourceForge , despite the developer's enthusiasm to support the community of users, I found Pebble less friendly to 3rd-party developers than Blojsom and anticipated troubles–with me and the developer–adapting it to my research work. Therefore...I think I would rather go with Blojsom. I spent some tim

Resolving an unable to fork PHP warning in Windows I was trying to execute a PHP script which launches a batch file in Windows. Althought I verified that the path to my batch file is in the PATH environmental variable, I always get the following error: Warning: system() [function.system]: Unable to fork This problem happens now that I use Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) as the web server. It didn't happen when I was using Apache HTTP Server 2.0. After 15 minutes on Google here's what I found out: PHP's Unable to Fork problem is related to Windows security setting. By default, the system's "Internet Guest Account"–the IIS's anonymous web client account–is explicitly blocked from executing cmd.exe –the command line shell. At the risk of system security being compromised , according to the instruction on Somacon.com , we can allow the Internet Guest Account to execute cmd.exe by: Open Windows Explorer and browse to the c:\windows\system32 or c:

Fanatic Live - All about MSN Messenger & Windows Live technologies If you're using a NetGear wireless router and you're experiencing Windows Live Messenger (or MSN Messenger) Error Code: 80048820 / Extended Error Code: 80048439, try reducing the size of the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) in the Router's WAN Setup page – from 1500 bytes to 1400 bytes. (However, see Updates below for optimal values.) I have had this problem for several months. My office network is connected to the Internet via a set of transparent proxy servers. Windows Live Messenger's does not detect any connection problem. However, it just does not sign on! Today I looked into this problem again, and fortunately after Googling for a while, I found a viable solution from Fanatic Live website: Stretch suggested that NetGear users go to the WAN Setup page and change the MTU size to 1400 bytes. I followed his suggestion and it worked like charm! Thanks, Stretch. I appreciate it! Keywords: msn-mess

Vegan Factory : Authentic Vegan-Thai Cuisine If you live in the Los Angeles area and would like to try authentic Thai food, I'd like to recommend the Vegan Factory restaurant. Please visit the website for phone number, map, and menu. Keywords: vegetarian , vegan , thai-cuisine , foods , los-angeles , california

My younger brother has been wanting to use GPSProxy + Garmin Que on his HP iPAQ hx2490 Pocket PC which runs Windows Mobile 5 (WM5). We'd had no luck during the past few months trying to get this configuration to work. First there is a serious conflict between the Thai language software SmartThai such that GPSProxy fails to load when SmartThai is enabled -- i.e. its shortcut exists in \Windows\StartUp folder. We disabled SmartThai and got GPSProxy successfully loaded but the next problem is that its Virtual COM Port driver always fails to load. The problem is that the HP iPAQ Bluetooth Software takes up all available COM ports, and GPSProxy Virtual COM Port cannot be loaded nor initialized. I tried several hacks, which include using a registry editor to delete a virtual COM port key allocated by the iPAQ bluetooth software. Unfortunately, these keys are protected by the operating system and cannot be deleted. Well...today...by chance...we found a way out. The solution: Turn off B

EASEC-10 My school is organizing an international conference: The Tenth East Asia-Pacific Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction (EASEC-10), and I've been helping my professor on the website -- as "the" webmaster & web programmer. I was a successor to a computer science master student who programmed the website in Active Server Pages (ASP). ASP is an old technology and is quite difficult to manage. So I decided to upgrade the website to ASP.NET 2.0 and pushed myself in the learn-by-doing mode. It works! I've learned a lot about ASP.NET 2.0 during the past week. I've just finished starting a blog section also. My personal blogging skill has helped a lot. You are invited to visit the website at www.easec10.net . Keywords: events , school , blogging , conferences , structural-engineering , civil-engineering , phd

I came across a problem to convert a historical data in comma-separated format (CSV) into a modern & more useful XML format. There are many ways to do such conversion. The most obvious one is to do it programmatically by writing a program to read CSV data and exporting it to an XML file by means of the Simple API for XML (SAX) or the Document Object Model (DOM) libraries. But I was too lazy to do it. I knew that Microsoft Excel 2003 supports exporting worksheets into XML data. I tried it out but found that it is not that simple -- we have to define an XML schema and bind each element to each column of the worksheet. So I went on researching. Finally, I found a very useful tool on MSDN: Excel 2003 XML Tools Add-in Version 1.1 ( download ). The Excel Add-in's "XML Tools -> Convert a Range to an XML List" menu command allows us to simply select a range in a worksheet (with or without first row as column names) -- with the advanced options to specify the XML root

I've been wondering why I cannot send a file via Bluetooth from my ASUS P505 -- the built-in File Explorer just cannot find any other recipient but an infrared device. I don't think there is a problem with the hardware because I regularly use my Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Bluetooth headset. I came across this thread on PDAMobiz.com (in Thai) and it confirms that someone using ASUS P505 is having the same problem. I continued to Google and found this thread on PDAPhoneHome.com that mentions about Resco Explorer 2005 . I've known for a while that Resco Explorer supports "send to Bluetooth recipients" but never compared it with the built-in File Explorer. So...I tried Resco Explorer 2005 right away, and "it works!!" If you own an ASUS P505 Pocket PC phone and have problem sending a file via Bluetooth like me, let's try Resco Explorer 2005. For reference, the ROM version of my ASUS P505 is V3.15.73 WWE, and the Radio firmware is V4.5.0. Keywords: a

I tried to use my new ASUS P505 Pocket PC phone with my favorite GPS configuration: GlobalSat BT-338 bluetooth GPS receiver + Garmin Que software + Andrew Klopper's GPSProxy software. This configuration worked fine while I was using my HP iPAQ h4150 Pocket PC. Unfortunately, somehow the notorious "Failed to Load Virtual COM Port Driver" always occurred on my ASUS P505 whenever I started GPSProxy--both the latest version 2.2 and the older version 1.6--and the proxy engine just wouldn't start. At first I noticed this problem occurred when I turn on ASUS Menu animated screen saver (via ASUS Menu -> Personalization -> Animated Home Screen -> Animation). Later, I noticed that the problem still occurred even after the turned Animation off. After spending long hours identifying the source of the problem, here are the list of software that conflict with GPSProxy 1. ASUS Menu : To disable, go to Start Menu -> Settings -> ASUS Menu -> Uncheck the "Ena

Personal knowledge management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Interestingly, I've discovered that the research area that I have recently been working on--managing and exchanging individual's personal portfolio of knowledge--has a special title "Personal Knowledge Management", with the "PKM" acronym. I checked its explanation on Wikipedia and this is exactly what I've been researching on. Here is a quote from Wikipedia: Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a concept that has grown out of a combination of knowledge management (KM) and personal information management (PIM) and cognitive human abilities. More particular, the Personal KM is focused on helping an individual be more effective -- to work better. PKM has recently been linked to social bookmarking , blogging or k-logs . The idea is individuals use their blogs to capture ideas, opinions or thoughts and this 'voicing' will encourage cognitive diversity, promote free exchanges... Well.

I just bought a used ASUS P505 Pocket PC Phone last Friday. (See review here .) It runs Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition and supposedly plays MP3 ring tones. The firmware allows us to select (and "preview") an MP3 file to be ring tone. Unfortunately, the P505 does not play the selected MP3 file properly. I asked a junior friend who has owned a P505 for more than a year and was informed that this is a known bug in the present firmware (ROM version 3.15.73 WWE). He recalled that there is a patch/fix posted on ASUS website. I went ahead to ASUS.com and finally found this MP3 Ring Tone Patch . I downloaded the patch, unzipped and installed the extracted CAB file, and soft-reseted the handheld. The patch is listed as "ASUS MP3 Plug-in" in Settings -> System -> Remove Programs. I proceeded to Settings -> Personal -> Phone, and tried some MP3 ring tone files out. Bravo!! My P505 now plays MP3 ring tones properly. Personal ring tone management software, such

I found a webpage on Pantip.com that contains an excellent article Why We Thai People Love Our King Bhumibol So Much . I tried to save the page to my hard drive in the MHT (MIME HTML) format with Mozilla Firefox's " Mozilla Archive Format " extension. I prefer saving a web page as an MHT file over the "Web Page, complete" option because it is more handy to get an archive of a webpage in one single MHT file than getting so many files inside a folder generated by the complete Web Page method. I sent the MHT file as a attachment in an Outlook 2003 email to my girlfriend and by chance learned that this is an extremely more convenient way to send an archive of a webpage to someone than to "copy all and paste" a webpage in Outlook's Microsoft Word editor. From my experience, Outlook takes unacceptably long time to process pictures, texts, and formatting pasted into its Word text editor from Internet Explorer or Firefox. Sending a webpage by an MHT att

Mocom.ru To my fellow IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad laptop fans, here is an excellent archive of (what I believe to be) the official wallpapers from IBM and/or Lenovo. Most of the pictures on this website are the same as those on my new ThinkPad T42, but in higher resolutions--up to 1600x1200 and 1400x1050 pixels. Keywords: thinkpad , wallpapers , downloads

PatchBurn Homepage Hacking Mac OS X Panther and Tiger to burn to Generic non-Apple DVD/CD Burners I was helping my younger brother find a software that would let him burn iTunes music and iPhoto pictures to an external DVD burner--the NEC ND-3500A burner in a USB 2.0 external case. I used to do this for him once when he was using Mac OS X Panther. Unfortunately, he's never been able to burn a DVD again since he upgraded to Tiger because I could not remember the name of the software. I spent some time searching thru my software archive today and finally got the name and the link to the homepage of this software here . I think it would be useful to many of you. Here is the description from the PatchBurn homepage: PatchBurn is a tool to patch existing CD/DVD-drivers (under Mac-OS X 10.2.x) or to generate and install new device profiles (under Mac-OS 10.3.x and later) It allows many, otherwise unsupported burners to be used directly with Mac-OS X, iTunes and DiscBurner. Keywords: itune

Google Suggest: Type-ahead Keyword Suggestion on Google I got a link to Google Suggest -- a research product from Google Labs -- while I was reading the Foundations of Ajax book. Google Suggest's type-ahead keyword suggestion is an example application of AJAX technology -- a combined use of JavaScript, XML, CSS, and related technologies to make web applications more responsive to users. It's fun to use and I think it would make us more productive in formulating a web search. Keywords: google , tips , ajax , fun , productivity

I got an interesting quote while reading Chapter 1 (p. 20) of the book " Foundations of Ajax " by R. Asleson and N. Schutta. ...just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I was critized by my advisor once that I lacked the communication skill -- I seemed to put too much detail in Powerpoint presentations. So much that the audience was overwhelmed. My advisor said he knew I was trying to show-off -- to show the so-many-things that I did. But I was supposed to focus on the audience -- to understand what they wanted to here and what they didn't. Keywords: quotes , working-smart , research-methodology , phd

Here is a very nice quote on originality and innovation from Howard Aiken presented on my Google homepage today: Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. Keywords: quotes , plagiarism , phd , research-methodology , originality , innovation

Welcome to Thiti's Home Page If you are interested, here is the link to my very first homepage back in the year 1999. I made it when I was in a master-degree program at AIT. It reminds me of the good old days back then. Keywords: history , fun , websites

IBM Personal computing support - Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI adapter software for Windows 2000/XP - ThinkPad R40, R50/e/p, R51, T40/p, T41/p, T42/p, X31, X40 Problem: ThinkVantage Access Connection software on IBM ThinkPad T41 with Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI adapter cannot control turn wireless radio on and cannot detect any wireless network . I formatted my brother’s ThinkPad T41 and used the ThinkVantage Software Installer to install all related drivers. To my surprise, after every driver was installed, ThinkVantage Access Connection could not control turn the wireless radio on nor can it detect any wireless network. However, if I check the “Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings” button in the Wireless Network Connection Properties, Windows XP's Wireless Zero Configuration itself was able to detect my home wireless network and could perfectly connect to it. I consulted a friend who is very knowledgeable in ThinkPad and learned that there

Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work A link to Matt Raible's Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work appeared on del.icio.us frontpage this morning. It really interested me because I feel I am not a very productive type of person. I checked it out right away and found it very useful. The tips I like most are "Write stuff down" and "Work disconnected". I personally find that I am more productive when I write to-do lists and work at a coffee shop like Starbucks. So, Matt, I do agree with you! Keywords: life-style , self-improvement , working-smart , tips , troubleshooting

One single line in the /etc/hosts file on my Ubuntu Linux machine wasted my precious whole afternoon. I had some assumptions about the cause of this problem but I don't want to spend too much time investigating on what really caused the trouble. Anyway, here are the listings of what worked and what didn't: /etc/hostname ubuntu mpd.hosts.cluster master worker-01 Bad /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain ubuntu 192.168.200.128 master 192.168.200.129 worker-01 Result thitiv@ubuntu:~$ mpdboot -n 2 -f mpd.hosts.cluster thitiv@master's password: mpdboot_ubuntu (handle_mpd_output 359): failed to ping mpd on master; recvd output={} Good /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain 192.168.200.128 ubuntu master 192.168.200.129 worker-01 Result thitiv@ubuntu:~$ mpdboot -n 2 -f mpd.hosts.cluster thitiv@worker-01's password: thitiv@ubuntu:~$ At this point, with the /etc/hosts now fixed, the MPICH2 cluster could be booted up successfully. I don't want t

If you have Garmin MapSource, a Pocket PC, and the Garmin Que software, you should be able to download/upload your waypoints and tracks from/to Que on the handheld to MapSource in Windows. Unfortunately MapSouce on some computers does not ActiveSync properly -- it does not recognize Non-Garmin Pocket PCs that have the Garmin Que software installed. Yesterday, I wasted several hours wondering what's wrong with my Pocket PC -- why MapSource doesn't recognize my iPAQ h4150 running Garmin Que. After the long hours of Googling, I finally came across this thread which leads to the original thread on MalSingMaps.com . wsian , the original poster who found a solution, suggested adding the following registry key, using Windows regedit tools [see the picture from the MalSingMaps thread here ]: Add a new key QueRAPI to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Garmin\ Try to plug your Pocket PC in, launch the Garmin Que software, and then use MapSource's Transfer -> Receive From Device comman

I have been trying to fix an HP iPAQ h4150 Pocket PC, which runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, for not synchronizing the Inbox items properly after an intentional hard-reset. Every single email in Microsoft Outlook on the desktop computer does not sync to the handheld if it contains an attachment -- no matter wheter it is a TXT file, a JPEG file or a DOC file. Websites and newsgroups such as the followings Google Groups: 4150 inbox unresolved attachment Google Groups: unresolved inbox suggest us to delete the ActiveSync partnership or to delete the file C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application DataMicrosoft\ActiveSync\Profiles\HandheldName\repl.dat to reset the synchronization status of the handheld so that everything would be overwritten by the content from the desktop. Someone on the newsgroups mentioned about unplugging the handheld from the cradle, soft-reseting it, and putting it back to the cradle to start a clean ActiveSync session. Since I set Pocket Outlook on the iPAQ

According to this thread , if you, like me, are experiencing this error error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file on Ubuntu Linux 5.1, you need to install the libstdc++5 package by the command sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 Keywords: web-services , linux , ubuntu-linux , configuration

Today, January 25th, is my dad's birthday. To my dad: I wish you all the very best. You're always my hero and my model. I apologize you for any wrongful things I did that make you feel worried or make you feel sad. I wish you a very wonderful birthday, and good health for the years to come. Happy birthday to you! Keywords: birthdays , family

I was googling for a solution to my Java-C socket communication problem when I came across this thread on DevX.com: DevX.com Forums - Put me out of my missery.. Sockets and BufferedWriter This quote from the poster Graham really touches! Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, and if they get mad, you are a mile away and you have their shoes. Keywords: quotes , criticism

This is a follow-up to my earlier post: Question: How to Launch an MPI Parallel Program Programmatically An Iceberg Problem I've been stuck on my MPI-Java integration experiment for more than a week and so far haven't found a way out of this problem. My problem is quite similar to this posting on the comp.parallel.mpi newsgroup. Unfortunately, the thread was first posted in the year 2001 and, almost five years later, no one has answered the question. Let me explain my situation: I want to convert my parallel code, which is written in C and is based on the MPICH and PETSc parallel-computing libraries, into a Web service. From my point of view, three solutions are available: The first one is to use Apache Axis C++ Web Services library to extend the existing code into a Web service. The second one is to leave the parallel code as is and then develop a Java Web service that acts a proxy to execute the parallel code via a Java Runtime.exec() method call. The third one is to use t