อ่านข่าวอันนึงไปแล้วหมดแรง ขอเลิกเขียนภาษาอังกิดหนึ่งข้อความ เพราะจะบ่น

รมต. ict คนใหม่.... ตอนอ่าน spec สมัยพึ่งมาเป็น รมต. ฟังดูดี เป็นถึง IEEE fellow

วันนี้ตาหวูดเอา Bangkok Post มาให้อ่าน เจอ "meet the press" ของอีตาคนนี้ไป.... หมดแรงเลย

With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated

As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source

เฮ่อ... หมดแรง....

มีเรื่อง censorship อีก

blognone ก็มีลงไว้

ตาหวูดลง Digg ไว้แล้ว ช่วย ๆ ไป dig กันหน่อยละกัน

Writing a latex document differs much from any other word processing program. It is just like writing a program. I feel much better when there is an IDE for a particular language I am using. Agreed, many can go without IDE. Take Mr. Wood, for example, he always babbling teases me and said that emacs or vi is the best. Well, not for me. Those editors are nice but that is not enough. Though emacs is easily extensible, I don't want to spend my time there. EditPlus is also nice, I used it to write latex for my master thesis but that is also not enough.

So, I search amongst readily available latex editor. WinEdt is my long time favorite since I started my Ph.D. but it is not gratis (finger crossed). And there come many others. Latex Editor (LEd) is a good one, not open source but a freeware. However, the big problem is that, when you use pdflatex and the document is already open, it always complain, when you are compiling, that the document cannot be written. The problem is caused by Acrobat, since it lock the file. WinEdt solves this problem by closing the document in Acrobat before compile. WinEdt do so by a mean of DDE. but LEd can't do the same.

However, LEd support user command (just like edit plus), so, I have to write a program to close a specific document in Acrobat.

Adobe provides SDK for Acrobat and there is a very very easy way to communicate with Acrobat, via DDE.

Just send [DocClose("filename")], to the DDE server of acroview, and the document is closed... However, the document must be manipulable by DDE. If you simply open the document, the document is immanipulable. To rectify this problem, simply send [DocOpen("filename")] and the document will be added to the DDE manipulable list.

That's all.

Today, Dr. Rene Vestergaard, from JAIST, gave us a visit. In the morning, he presented an interesting yet easy to understand topic about Dynamic Nash Equilibrium.

The better part is that he ask us to present our work. Basically the same thing I wish my colleague would do. He also acted as a thesis committee, a very inquisitive one. That is very very good. He gave valuable advice. In summary, he concentrates on saying that you need to do what is in front of you. Don't look ahead but try very hard to know what you are doing.

Analyse everything sophisticatedly.

This is very simple recommendation which we usually forgot. Once we have some thing (FACT, in his words), we try to think whether it is good (ASSESSMENT). We stuck with writing the motivation for the work. But that is the two step ahead. What we should do is to understand completely our work (ANALYSIS).

For me, this is particularly true. I spent not enough time on analysis. I should spent at least three-forth of my effort on analysis but i spent around one-forth.

To put it simple, I know that I can but I worry whether it is worthwhile. He said I should say why in it interesting (ANALYSIS).

That's nice. And he did this to all of us that attend the meeting. He showed how to ask a question. A nice guy. A living example of a teacher in "How To Solve It". I must try to learn from him.

Mr. Peam thinks that taking a Dept. of Math Course "Modern Geometry" is a nice idea and he succeed in convincing me. Today we met the instructor, Dr. Nataphan. From browsing in the web, other two faculties in the Math Dept. that also do geometry are Dr. Wacharin & Dr. Phichet. Dr. Wacharin turns out to be a friend of our Master and Dr. Phichet is also an alumnus of UIUC. After browsing Dr. Phichet's page, there is a link to a mathematical genealogy.

Well, it simply a hierarchy bloodline of "teacher-student" in mathematic. Hmm. Quite interesting. It records who is a pupil of who.

Ok, its turn out that Dr. Wacharin is a 10th-order grand student of the famous Carl Frederick Gauss (maybe best known amongst us for Gaussian Distribution). That is not a surprise. There are around 100,000 ppl in the Math Genealogy and Gauss has around 30,000 great great grand students. There is approximately 30% chance that a mathematician you come across is in a direct bloodline of Gauss.

There also exists more interesting thing. For example. We all know Turing, Alan Turing. We also learned about Church theorem, saying, "Every 'function which would naturally be regarded as computable' can be computed by a Turing machine". At first, I believe that Church followed the work of Turing but no, it is the other way around. Turing is a student of Church. And so is Kleene (from Kleene star operator).

Talking about Turing also reminds me of John von Neumann who is a student of Fejér. I don't know this guy but he (Fejer) is an advisor of Polya (remember the famous "How to Solve It"?).

Another one was when I searched for Lagrange. He is a student of Euler (remember Euler path?) who is, in turn, a student of Jakob Bernoulli. No, Jakob is not the Bernoulli that we familiar with in Physics but he is an uncle of Daniel Bernoulli that introduced the Bernoulli principle of fluid (saying pressure and velocity is inversely proportional). Moreover, Lagrange has several promising students such as Poisson (Poisson distribution) and Fourier. Both Poisson and Fourier advised Dirichlet (the pigeon hole principle) who taught Kronecker (Kronecker Delta Function). This is a nice bloodline.

OK, let us take a look at AI field. Start with the famous Minski. From the Jargon File, we know that Sussman (the creator of Scheme) is his student. However, Minski also advised other great student such as B.K.P. Horn (the Robot Vision book) and Blum. Blum is a teacher of Micali and Goldwasser who, together with Rackoff propose the famous proof of knowledge. Micali is also a teacher of Phil Rogaway, once a visiting professor at our department. If my memory still serves, our dear Rattapon (CP24) should ever be in his class at UC Davis.

These things are never taught in the book. It is fun reading the history of these bloodline. Just like the fun reading the footnote of each name in the Discrete Math. textbook of Rosen that we all love.

This took almost 2 hour of my time today T_T.

OK, my last entry about the Kingston ram that does not works was not finished. On the next Monday, Mr. Mai went to Pantip to claim the bad Ram. What they did is that they return the very first RAM we have got, the bad one that we claimed on the buying day. That is totally unacceptable. Mr. Chang suddenly call the support center and they promised something. OK, that's fine. On the next day, we went to the shop to re-claim, for the third time the ram. The claiming process took fucking long time. Their technician tried so hard to make the ram usable. He even try to clean the contact of the ram. Don't work, of course. Finally, he brought two new ram modules saying that this is the new one. None of them worked anyway. He said he will try to show that the new ram is a working one and it is our M/B fault that the ram are unusable.

The problem is he did not have any CPU and he asked us to lend him ours. We say no. After a little bit arguing, we agreed, for the sake of our time. Anyway, even with the Asus P5B, the ram still refused to work. This suck, because he said that we must upgrade to a better ram that is guaranteed by Synnax. This is FUCK. Because the one with Synnax warranty cost 500 Baht more and it does not look alike the original module.

What does this mean? It means that the very first ram that they sold us (including every ram in the same lot, that he had tried and failed) is a FAKE ONE!!!

The technician said that it is not fake, he said, "you buy the cheap one (not Synnex warranty), so you got the cheap ram. We didn't cheat because you buy a thing that is already known to be inferior..."

Bullshit man, because before we bought, the saleperson, at the front of the shop said that the only different between the Synnex warranty and the local warranty that we bought is nothing. They use the same chip, produced from the same factory, only the distributor that is different.

This is definitely not true. Because the Synnex one HAS THE DIFFERENT CHIP on it.

We call the customer support again and finally get 200 Baht discount on the upgrade. That's fine, but I will no longer buy anything from this shop again.

We

Forgot to mention that the shop is World Business Computer.

Believe me or not, it is up to you. What I have said is just one bad example of the Shop.

I occasionally use a machine where VIM syntax hightlight is not turned on.

To turn it on. Try adding a .vimrc file which a following line

syntax on

That's all.

System-wide rc file for FreeBSD can be found at /usr/share/vim/vimrc

Thanks โบมุ โบมุ for this knowledge

Mr. Peam think that having a new machine is better for his life. I personally strongly agree with that since his current rig is almost five years old. We (I, Chang, Peam & Fu) went to Pantip and bought a new one. The spec is OK. He aimed for a Core 2 Duo machine. However, he insisted that everything should be as cheap as possible so he went for an MSI mainboard with Kingston Ram.

Remember my previous entry saying that Kingston Rules? OK, it's partly true since only some Kingston rules. The machine Mr. Peam just bought can't boot up even though Chang try almost everything. The villain this time is a Kingston Memory, 1GB at 667MHz.

We went back straight to Pantip and claimed a new one which turn out to be a malicious one also. We already test at the shop but the memory is OK. The bad point in the memory is beyond the first 256MB and it can be detected from Memory Test 86+.

Rules of Thumbs. When buying a new PC, try to have the shop assemble it for you. No need to install anything, just make it bootable and then use an Ubuntu disc to test the memory.

Oh, BTW, I went to DCOM to claim a HDD that is unable to install WinXP also. The claiming process took LESS THAN 5 minutes. Buying a cup of noodle at Pol. Sci. canteen takes more than that. The returned HDD is not a new one, though. I don't mind that.

Another Rules of Thumbs. Goes for DCOM, if possible. They never fail me.

Ok. It's time for celebration, even though somewhere deep inside me still said no. ICRA deadline has passed. You could guess so from my last entry. Today gonna be all day gaming frenzy. Moreover, ROBIO just announce its acceptance. My two papers got accepted. Good news. Hope that my ICRA pass the threshold also.

Anyway, today wc3 playlist are

Heroes Line War NOTD: Aftermath Jurassic Park Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Enough chatting, I am going to create the game. :D

UPDATED!!! More recent summarize and route setting can be found here.

The situation is that, our lab network is behind firewall, only a few ports/protocol are permitted. In fact, the entire network in CU has a firewall. Moreover, our network is sectioned such that ppl in the different rooms will be under different subnet. Hence, LAN game is not possible.

The problem: let me play DotA with my friend living not in our room. subproblem 1a: let me play DotA with my friend living not in our room but in CU. subproblem 1b: let me play DotA with my friend living outside CU.

Sol 1: Goes for public PvPGN Status: Failed... 1a is solved. Since battle.net is just a chat room and game browsing mechanism. Once the game is created, it is listed on the battle.net (PvPGN, in our case). After that, any connection is made directly to the creator machine. In this case, that machine is inside Chula where most faculty do not apply any special firewall. But there still exists some problems. Our network is so damn slow and it is very hard to login to any PvPGN.

This solution is not OK for 1b. Even though WCIII allows us to choose any arbitrary high port, The protocol itself required UDP communication, which is blocked.

Sol 2: Use our own PvPGN Status: Failed.... solve the sub problem of 1a. Since it is our own machine and it resides in the same network, we face no lag. However, 1b remains unsolved. Ppl outside CU can't even login to the PvPGN.

Sol 3: Zero Config VPN Status: Failed.... We choose Hamachi. Hoping that it will create a virtual LAN for us. However, Hamachi does not work inside CU. So, this one also failed.

Sol 4:OpenVPN Status: Very promising... but failed... OpenVPN is highly configurable. It allows us to use either TCP or UDP and any port of our choice. We can create VPN from everywhere. However, everybody has to use OpenVPN and OpenVPN is damn hard to config for those who ain't familiar with command line. This one is not so user friendly. It is best if we can require only the ppl outside CU to use OpenVPN while the rest should do anything they like.

Sol 5: OpenVPN + PvPGN Status: Failed... Instead of going for a LAN game over virtual network, this choice combine the previous solutions. However, it still ain't work. With OpenVPN running on the same machine of PvPGN, ppl outside CU can login to the PvPGN and see the list of the games. Unfortunately, they cannot join since the game traffic still travels in the public internet.

Sol 6:OpenVPN + PvPGN + NAT Status: Work!!! This one finally work. The solution is that we must redirect the traffic from ppl outside CU to the game creator machine to travel via VPN. So there are basically two things to do

• (1) Make the OpenVPN machine to become a NAT server
• (2) Change the rounting of the outside machine.

To do task (1), it is very simple. Just executing these commands (as root, of course).

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
http://openvpn.net/howto.html#examples

The problem (2) can be done also by using the route command in WinXP

route ADD x.x.x.x MASK y.y.y.y z.z.z.z 

where x.x.x.x is the creator machine (or network) and y.y.y.y is the subnet mask while z.z.z.z is the gateway. In our case, it is the OpenVPN gateway side. We can check this by running

route PRINT

Finally, (2) can be done directly from the config file of openVPN client, by adding a line

route x.x.x.x y.y.y.y

and OpenVPN will determine the rest for you.

A special care should be taken with this route command. Do not route the entire LAB network since it will route the connection to the OpenVPN machine via itself. In other words, you should not add any routing that covers the OpenVPN machine.

UPDATED!!! More recent summarize and route setting can be found here.

I had not had a visit to a cinema for almost two months because of series of both fortunate and unfortunate reasons. Yesterday is a good day for one visit but the entire box office does not display any interesting movie to me. I hate a scary movie, feel like I lost money for nothing. So the most viable choice is Season Change (in Thai: เพราะอากาศเปลี่ยนแปลงบ่อย). I normally dislike Thai movie. I had tried some long time ago but usually it turned out bad. Most comedy one ain't comedy enough and the other ain't worth mention. This made me feel bad about Thai movie such that I even refuse to see the recent ones which are definitely good, as told by lots of my friend. For example, แฟนฉัน, เพื่อนสนิท, ..... sorry .... I can remember only this two. Three Thai movies that I saw recently are The Overture (โหมโรง), Last Life in the Universe (เรื่องรัก น้อยนิด มหาศาล) and The Letter (จดหมายรัก). All of them ain't bad but do not suite me well. However, they pave a new road on me for a new Thai movie. I am more open to Thai movie.

Anyway, I went to see Season Change yesterday and I would like to say that the story and mood itself give me enough happiness. Music plays an important role in this one. I really wonder whether the actor/actress were actually perform the music or some stand in did instead. The story is OK but the most interesting thing is that I never know that such high school exists in Thailand!!!. Ok, I don't know a lots of thing but I never expect to have such high school in Thailand. That surprised me. I have to admit that I cannot distinquised between the two main actress until the half of the movie. They look very alike to me. Pardon me, but I have very low abilities in distinquising some class of human. I don't have any problem about choosing between "The First Love" and "Closest Friend", which is the main question of this movie, so this does not touch me in that aspect. However, the movie is still good. At least it made me laugh like mad a lot of times. Finally, ฤดูที่แตกต่าง in orchestra is exquisite, a nice nostalgia effect. Boyd Kosiyapong made a cameo appearance in the movie also. Strangely, I cannot find the entry about Boyd in wikipedia. However, some ppl already add a reference to season change in the Vivaldi's Four Season (the addition is marked yesterday!!!).

If you have a chance, give this movie a try. It is a romance movie, can't hurt anyone.

I am running out of time for ICRA07.....

PS. I believe that many personal blogs will have an entry about this movie....