The fact that Amare theme does not go well with IE keep bugging me. To my illiteracy of CSS, I blindly twitch some value, turning a knob of some attribute, but, to my unsurprising, the situation is not going anyway better than chaos.

As low-ended user as myself, only thing I could do is to simply googling around and found out that some ppl have the same problem as me. What they do is, simply put, to switch to another theme, the action I gracefully follow. And here is the new theme, Barlow.

OK, this new theme does not support IE7. I no longer have IE6 to test with. Anyway, I don't know how to fix, (will ask Wood to do that later, if he would be so kind).

In the meantime, IE Destroyer would do the job. Showing a banner only when the site is viewed by IE. Try it :D

Got bored of the "meta" template. After scavenging in the archive of theme and found no one that suit my need, because of some irritating thing in the CSS. Well, wood came to save the day. I personally refuse to edit any html let alone the CSS. Mr. wood simply installed a new extension and was just like a genie, asking my wish which was almost immediately granted. Font changed, bg changed, width changed, spacing changed, color changed, etc., you name it.

He also recommend this font. At first, I wished to use "times" but he said that "Georgia" is more gorgeous. After a first glimpse of these numbers, "0123456789", in Georgia, I suddenly fall in love with it.

Thumbs up for ป๋าหวูด.

From [Kong's entry] recommending the [TLB extension](Thai Line-breaking Extension ), I finally tried it out. Look very promising. Ain't suffer any weird behavior like the the recompiled version.

Drupal comes with a default archive module which shows calendar and highlights the day with entries. Unlike wordpress or blogger whose archive looks more suitable. With the update to the new archive module. Now I have something, almost, but not quite, entirely resembles it.

Have been tagged by pit so I have to drop my intention to update my blog with something more serious and follow the game. Rules are simple: 1) write down five things 'bout yourself that is known only amongst few (if not only you) and 2) tag other five ppl to do the same.

Ok, here we go.

Item 1

Everybody starts with a name. A name is the most obvious thing such that other ppl hardly believe that there would be something behind it. Strangely, a name tends to have a long story. For mine, the actual nickname given by my mom and dad is Ton (ต้น) which had been honoured to be my real name for about 6-7 years. At that time, I have a close friend (already forgotten by me :p) whose real name is Nat-something. I cannot remember my actual state of mind back then but I felt that a name starting with Nat sounds pretty cool. So, I asked my mom whether I could have a name with Nat. She helped me think of some names and we ended up with Nattee (นัทที). Since then, Ton is demoted (or promoted?) to a nickname.

Ton is my nickname for about 8 or 9 years. At around my first year in a high-school, there was a news of Cocoon baby (เด็กดัก__แด้__, a baby borned with distorted skin looking like a cocoon. Sorry, I could not find a pic). A (bad?) friend of mine started saying that I looked like one. Honestly, I didn't think so but we were young and teasing ppl is something we like so someone started calling me Dae (แด้). In fact, naming other students in a class was a trend at that time. I got myself around four or five nicknames including more weird one such as หลอดแก้ว, etc, I can't remember. However, only Dae remains while others simply cease and desist. Naturally, I rejected that name in the beginning, but, over time, I got familiar with the name and my family recognised that my nickname has changed in the circle of my friend. The nickname Ton is used only with my family.

When I went to the university for the first year, I tried to change my nickname back to Ton once, but it lasted only less than an hour since my friends from the same high school immediately rejected it. So, here is the not-so-short story of my nickname.

Item 2

This item is still about my name, a screen name, Ouroboros. I started using this one since I start playing Counter-Strike. I got it from a chapter name in Gunnm. It is originally spelled as Oroboros but later, when I was googling around, I found out that Ouroboros is a more precise way to spell this. Ouroborus is yet another spelling and it is used as a url of my web.

Item 3

I am a colour blind, of type protanomaly which means that I have a problem discriminating red and green. For me, the problem is about red. It seems like that my perception of red is of lower resolution than other. Result? Sometime I cannot distinguish green and yellow, if their red component is different only in a minuscule scale. Hardly to believe, I just noticed that I am colour blind only recently when I and my friend were making a game that includes a puzzle using blocks with several colours. In the game, I have to distinguish yellow and green blocks which I cannot efficiently do. I already noticed this since I played street fighter puzzle a long time ago but I blamed the monitor at that time, unaware that it is my anomaly. Making a game gave me a liberty to change colour at will but my friend told me that the colour I chose to maximize my distinguishing performance is not the same with others. Then, I start to realised that my perception of colour is different from other and that lead to my discovery that I am colour blind.

I cannot remember how I pass the driving test???

Item 4

I am nowhere near the "ideal student" when I was in the high school or junior high. However, I was once entitled a "Good Student, in the field of reading". I was selected because I am a frequent visitor of the school library. My school's library is divided into sections and my favorite section is Novel. I read one novel for approximately three or four days and I kept doing this for all my high school. Almost all entries in the entire shelf of Sci-Fi are consumed by me in about a semester. Don't be surprised, our shelf is very small. That was where I start to be fascinated by the work of the grand master. However, this was noticed by the head librarian and she sent my name as a good student to the committee (if they had one) and I got selected.

Item 5

I once was forced to take a piano course. Only a knowledge about reading a score remains. The rest have already gone to their belonged place.

I feel so tired. That's why the fifth item is so short.

Tagging will be passed to the frequent bloggers of [CP24], nont,pam and nong and two of my lab mates, peam and tunococ and . Hope they read my entry :p.

Before I went to bed, I checked the planet to see if anyone post a new entry and I found just a simple url on Nong's blog, saying <www.bedbooks.net>. Out of curiosity, I immediately copy and past it on the address bar. It turns out to be a book printed for reading on a bed!!! Damn good!!! every book in the world should be printed as that!!!

So sad that they have only 24 titles.

My (for the living) work extensively use MySQL. I am not fond of it but it is the easiest choice of RDBMS out there. I used it together with delphi. Surely, many problem arise especially when Thai language is required.

A good delphi component for MySQL connection is DAC for MySQL. I have tried other connection, such as BDE, ADO, but DAC works best, in term of speed.

One of my major problems is about character set. The default character set for MySQL is latin1, which considers À, Á, Â, Ã to be the same. In traditional Thai encoding, À is equal to ภ while Á is equal to ม. Hence, these two thai characters are considered the same. If I force a Unique Key for a field, i can't have two rows with 'ภา' and 'มา' in that field, since MySQL will consider it to be a duplicated key.

An easy way to fix the problem is to use a special collation. The default collation is latin1_swedish_ci, simply change it to latin1_general_cs would be enough. I don't know why the default is swedish, though.

This can be done by following syntax

CREATE TABLE asdf {
  blah blah blah  <<---- field description
  blah blah blah  <<---- field description
  blah blah blah  <<---- field description
  blah blah blah  <<---- field description
} DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_cs;

That's all.

From my last entry about Thai ICT minister smack the open source, I said I lost faith in him. OK, to be honest, I am too prejudice. A man can err and the minister seems to be a grown up enough to admit his misunderstanding. Yesterday, a group consisting of key persons (?) in Thailand open source community met the minister (in Thai) to clarify the open source to the minister and he admitted that he made his statement without proper knowledges. He also added that abandonment of OLPC is necessary from the standpoint of financial procedure.

A grown up man indeed, admitting his fault. Just like the one who put the note on my car few days ago.

Today, I parked my car inside our faculty parking lot, the one next to the canteen. When I went back to my car in the evening, I found a note sticking on my windscreen ,saying, "I drove my car and accidentally scratched yours. Please contact me at 08x-xxx-xxxx. I am sorry, the lane was too tight.", and on my front bumper found a foot long damage, a permanent and prominent one.

Well, I don't blame him. I don't even called him. I don't know who scratched my car but I believe that he must be one of our juniors and if he has enough gut to admit his own fault, that is the compensation enough for me in this case. The damage is minuscule. Parking within CU means that you are bounded to be scratched one day or another. In fact, I have got several scratches, without anybody claiming responsibilities. This one is quite a bonus to me, though.

Ironically, this very same situation had happened to me before, but in an inversed role. I was the one who cause the damage and I wrote the same kind of letter -not include "the lane was too tight", that is a bad excuse. At that time, no one called me. Later, I found out that the owner of the car is a good friend of mine, Mr. Kang (CE 81). But it took almost a year before I know that.

I would say, keep up a good moral, boy. You are doing great.

For me, well, it's karma. That explains everything.