WoW is now available in Thailand, via AsiaSoft. The price for the original WoW is 990 Baht while Burning Crusade costs 1690 Baht. The cost of the Air Time is 1290 per 60 days. Detail about the price and where to buy can be found here.

will I have free time to play?

There exists many web stat tools but the one I used is Google Analytic. It gives nice interesting stat for me. I get the rough idea on who has read my blog, and from where. Recently, my friends start using MyBlogLog. It is more specific, I can pin-point recent readers. For blogging, I don't write much and most of them are just my note to keep my memory intact, thus, not many visit my blog regularly. The faces on the mybloglog widget rarely change.

However, many new readers appear today. Out of my curiosity, I try to see where they came from. After reading from our planet, I noticed that Kong referred to me in his blog, about Google App. I wrote just only two or three lines in the referred entry. But since Kong's is frequently visited by several ppl, it is inevitable that some drop to my blog.

What make me surprised is that Google Analytics --whose data lags one day behind, so it just reflects the on-going stat of the current event-- reports that one of the referring page is from blog of คุณลิ่ว. I visited his page but could not see anything linking to me. My best guess is that he is running an on-site feed aggregator, for personal use I presumed, which obviously must includes blog of Kong.

However, I will never know the truth.

PS. Another interesting fact is that mybloglog reporting that search query that hits my page is "howto dota lan". I once wrote about setting up OpenVPN so that I could play dota with my friend inside firewall but it has nothing to do with setting and making dota works. It merely reports what technique I used and how I set up OpenVPN. It is tagged with "howto", though.

Isn't it? A nice satire is (again) from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

BTW, I have just found this in Prof. Rogaway's homepage.

Here's some advice you really should pay attention to (but no one does): make sure you learn to speak and write English not just adequately, but well. Your ability to communicate well in English will be your single most important skill for future professional success. Ultimately more important than the technical information and skills you get from the courses in our department.

Good people in industry understand this. A couple months ago I was speaking to a top manager at a major electronics company. I asked him from what undergraduate major he prefers to hire. His answer? English. His least favorite major? Engineering. "English majors can communicate," he claimed. "Engineering majors can't."

OK, my English sucks. The last paper submitted to ICRA is a good example. However, it managed to got accepted and the camera ready was submitted at the end of last month. I have to rewrite almost half of the paper, noticing that there are lots of nonsensical babbling in it. Really feel sorry for ones who have to review my paper and big thanks to them that they could justify my paper from my broken English.

Just watched Planet Earth, a BBC's HD TV program. The film is nice, at least in terms of picture quality. The first episode features, amongst other things, the journey of elephants in the middle Africa where rain causes lots of flood. The elephant has to walk pass the uprising lake and they took the camera under the water to record elephants in the water.

It is my first time knowing that an elephant can swim. Just like a hippo, it seems that the elephant itself floats in the water. They can do something like walking in the water and they actually move. It is amazing to see such a big land creature floating in the water.

Try it if you have a chance.

Trying to revive the webboard of CP24, I copied the idea from other CPs. If all your CP24 have any spare time, give the forum a visit and post something there :D.

Chang gave me this link, comparing models from three versions of Unreal Engine, namely, Unreal Tournament, Unreal 2004, Unreal 2007.

In the past few days, while my mind took a break and wander around, it stumbled upon the literal meaning of the term "State-of-the-art". Since the first time I have heard the phrase, I naively think that it means that the subject is at the highest or latest state, which comparable to being the "Art". This is because I consider everything to be an "Art" when it reach its peak. Anything below that would be called something else but not "art".

It turns out that I am wrong. "State-of-the-art" literally means, "state of the topic" or "state of the field". If something is at the "state of the field", then, it is the best it could be. It is the latest and the like. This assuming that any field or topic never decline, the knowledge can only advance but not degenerate.

This happens to me because I was reading the Wikipedia entry about "person having ordinary skill in the art".

I feel like I need a re-read of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but don't have enough time. I ain't finish the last two books of the series.

Oh, I miss his writing style.

Another product from google, Google App. Now we have mail server (and web client) for our domain! Just for free, with google standard o_O. Try nattee [at] nattee [dot] com.

Today I cannot access my blog site from my home because of the [bad behavior] module that block malicious request. It is blocked because my home IP (dynamically determined) is listed in CBL(Composite Blocking List) because someone who used this IP a week ago seems to have lots of trojan and spam bot installed in his/her machine.

My solution is that I need another proxy and the best one out there is my own. I Installed squid in my server. However, I don't want to share this proxy with anyone else. So, this are what I have to do.

1. setup a secure channel from my home to my server
2. setup squid to accept only the connection from my server (itself).

The first task can be done very easily by my good old tools, OpenVPN.

1. Install openvpn on the server and the client

2. Setup the config file for the server, modifying the following value

    port [put port number here]
    ca easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt
    cert easy-rsa/keys/server.crt
    key easy-rsa/keys/server.key  
    dh easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem
   

3. run the following command in the server (in directory /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa).

    . ./vars
    ./clean-all
    ./build-ca
    ./build-key-server server
   

   The final step will build the certificate key for openvpn. It will request some information where default value would do nicely. When the script asks for a passphrase, I simply use blank. The Yes/No questions are positive. After that, I have to build a certificate for the client by

    ./build-key client1
   

   With the same information used in the server. Finally, build the Diffie-Hellman parameters.

    ./build-dh
   

4. After that, I take the following files to my home PC.

    ca.crt
    client1.crt
    client1.key
   

5. Set up the config file for the client (home PC), modifying the following values

    remote [my.server.ip.address] [my port]
   

That's all.

Now, the next step is to config the squid, setting up the acl (access control list) of the squid as follows.

acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
acl manager proto cache_object
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255     10.8.0.0/255.255.255.0
acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8
acl SSL_ports port 443 563
acl Safe_ports port 80 21 443 563 70 210 1025-65535 280 488 591 777
acl CONNECT method CONNECT

http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny manager
http_access deny !Safe_ports
http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports
http_access allow localhost
http_access deny all

These acl simply allow only http access from the localhost (which include openvpn server at 10.8.0.1) and deny the rest.