Dr. Thiti Vacharasintopchai, ATSI-DX, CISA

It's been more than a year since I last blogged. I've been busy with work and also don't know what to blog. Here comes my new findings: Microsoft Office Outlook Connector 12.1 Beta 2 + Outlook 2007 + Thai Language Input = CRASH This has also been proven here . I downloaded the Outlook Connector the other night for improved supports to Windows Live Hotmail -- only to find that whenever I start typing e-mails in Thai, i.e., hit the "language switch" key Outlook simply crashes! I googled for " outlook 2007 crash language switch " this morning and find someone having the same Outlook Connector insta.led and the same problem as mine. So, Outlook Connector is most likely the cause of trouble. I uninstalled Outlook Connector this morning and, yes, typing in Thai doesn't crash Outlook 2007 anymore! Keywords: Outlook , Thailand , Troubleshooting

If you are annoyed by Windows Vista's new security feature that blocks startup programs that run in elevated administrator mode and want to authorize some programs to run, take a look at this workaround by Jimmy Brush. It works perfectly fine for me! Keywords: vista , security , tips

I have been having hard time modifying Blojsom's templates to get the Internal Aggregator plug-in to work. I wish there were a concrete example or a tutorial for me to follow. Today I googled again after a desperate fight with Blojsom and fortunately came across Todd Slater's posting . Mr. Slater posted his working copy of the template files. I downloaded, put it in to the template folder right away. And...it works! I'll be studying how he wrote the template very soon. But in the mean time, thank you very much Mr. Slater! Keywords: blojsom , aggregation , customization , examples Update: Jan 5, 07 Here's the difference between my asual-entry.vm and Mr. Slater's: Mine looks like this: #macro(multiBlogFriendlyPermalink $entry) macro definition at the top of the file. #macro(multiBlogFriendlyPermalink $entry)   #set ($categoryForEntry =     $entry.getBlogCategory().getCategory())   #if ($categoryForEntry == "/")     #set($catego...

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...

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...

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...