Pirates of the Caribbean

Yesterday I had a fortune of watching the Pirates of the Caribbean:Dead Man's Chest. If you have a chance, it is stronly recommended. I love the movie, especially on its humor and Dialog. That give me a strong urge to rewatch the first of the series (Curse of the Black Perl) again. Amongst others, this dialogue verbally standouts.

. Elizabeth: "Captain Barbossa, I am here to negotiate the cessation of hostilities against Port Royal." Barbossa: "There be a lot of long words in there, Miss. We're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?" Elizabeth: "I want you to leave and never come back." Barbossa: "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request." Elizabeth: "..." Barbossa: "Means 'no'."

The Dead Man's Chest does not end properly. I anticipate for the third one, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. There are many rumors on the Title of the third film, besides "At World's End", for example, "World's End" or "Uncharted Water". I personally love Uncharted Water because it gives a nostalgia feeling to the Koei's Game, Uncharted Water and Uncharted Water: New Horizons. If I have a chance, they will be played again, burning a few days (or weeks). :D

Resident Evil

I also watched Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse that I rented last few days. The movie is so and so though Milla Jovovich brand has some effect on me. I am getting bored on Jovovich doing fighting. In fact, I just watched Ultra Violet on the same renting but cannot endure to watch it to the end. I poped the first disc out mid-disc, could not bear it. Very boring, the story is not attracting. That also remind me of No Good Deed, even though Samuel E. Jackson and Jovovich appeared in the movie, I don't think that I can bear watching it again. However, Joan of Arc and Fifth Element are ones amongst my favorite films.

I went too much out of the topic I want to speak. The point is Resident Evil and I have never play Resident Evil to the end. I played it once at a party on my friend's home but could not manage to finish it. I wish to play it again now. There is 4 (or 5?) installations on PC but I don't know where to get it. Must try to find it somewhere, somehow.

Civilization IV

Today, Peam told me that the theme song of Civilization IV is called Baba Yet (or baba yetu) LMAO. Try convert it to Thai and you will get it. Well, the song contains the phrase "Baba Yet". The song is composed by Christopher Tin, a genius from Stanford, Oxford and finally Royal College of Music. Chang had tried to find the lyric and here you are. The song is written in Swahili, a language widely spoken in East Africa. That reminds me of Swaziland, a country that also came to attend our King's 60 year celebration. I don't expect this song to be available in any karaoke box but I am practicing it now. :D

PS. Swahili is not the language of Swaziland, SiSwati, but is in the same family, Bantu Language.

Baba yetu, yetu (Yesu) uliye Mbinguni yetu, yetu (Yesu), amina! Baba yetu, yetu (Yesu), uliye (gu) Jina lako(e) litukuzwe. (x2)

Utupe leo chakula chetu Tunachohitaji utusamehe Makosa yetu, hey! Kama nasi tunavyowasamehe Waliotukosea usitutie Katika majaribu, lakini Utuokoe, na yule, milelea milele!

CHORUS

Ufalme wako ufike utakalo Lifanyike duniani kama mbinguni. (Amina)

CHORUS

Utupe leo chakula chetu Tunachohitaji utusamehe Makosa yetu, hey! Kama nasi tunavyowasamehe Waliotukosea usitutie Katika majaribu, lakini Utuokoe, na yule, simama mwehu

Baba yetu, yetu (Yesu), uliye Jina lako litukuzwe. (x2)

From my long ago entry, which gave very little information, I am facing the old problem again. My PDF file does not have all fonts embedded and subset, as required for submission to the IEEE. Well, I am using pdflatex, IPE and gnuplot.

IPE works just fine, it generate PDF that is compliant with the requirement, no problem. For most part, pdflatex and gnuplot works virtually in the same degree as IPE. But some problems still exists. Gnuplot usually uses Helvetica font which is not available in most WinXP and pdfLatex uses Times Roman which also faces the same problem. These two fonts are so general that it does not exist in WinXP (Huh?) Well, in fact, they exists under different name, Arial and Times New Roman.

The solution? I can't remember what I did last time. Maybe I compiled it in Fedora or something. But there are lots of solutions.

• For IEEE, a source file conversion is available at the IEEE PDF Express. I can submit my DVI (from latex) and EPS file to the site and then it will convert my file into PDF that is compliant.

• Gnuplot, if you still have the source, set the terminal to use other font, for example terminal postscript eps enhanced "NimbusSanL-Regu" fontfile "uhvr8a.pfb" This is for Linux, you can change the font to other under WinXP. If you does not have the source, you can edit the EPS file directly and change the font it use to something else. For example, just search and replace

  Helvetica --> ArialMT

I havn't try it, though. The info is taken from Matthew Miller's homepage

• pdflatex, Pawin, who is also submitting the paper to the same conference suggest that his method is to edit <TeX directory>/web2c/updmap.cfg and change the option of pdftexDownloadBase14 from false to true.
• The two above problems can be fixed by installing the appropriate font. Sun, being resourceful, again, send me the Font. Just Install it on your font folder and That's enough.

Recently I have been busy writing a journal paper about the latest technique in checking the force closure. Since the start of Ph.D. I know that I am very illiterate on the mathematic. I do not have sufficient knowledge on Linear Algebra. Moreover, I am too negligent on the math. The danger is when you think you know something but actually you don't. I feel overconfident in something I should not. It is backfiring on me right now.

Well, I werer not too overconfident. I have check my method with the experiment and the result leads me to believe that what I done is right. In fact, it might still right but it does not work the way I thought it is. My mathematical interpretation of the method is wrong, my math on the paper is wrong, even though the experiment says that the result is correct but everything I have written on the soon-to-be paper is wrong. I have to rewrite it again for the third time. The first two time is just to adjust the flow of the story but this time I might have to rewrite the entire section.

What a pain in the ass.

P.S. don't ask me what the heck is force closure. I spent most of my paper writing time answering this question I am too lazy to do it here. If you really want to know, check my paper and its reference. Sorry, pal.

The new project I am implementing is a content distribution system. The problem is that clients are deployed all over the country and the bandwidth is not a luxury we have, so remote desktop might not be possible. Moreover, maintenance of the project requires only editing of some text file, checking the log, etc. FTP would be enough but again, the network is inside a VPN that my very own machine cannot access directly. I must login to the main server first before I can access VPN. So the naive choice is sshd. I remembered that there was a microsoft implementation of telnet for windows but I would not depend my life on it. Cygwin is lots more viable for a peace of mind.

After installing the cygwin and installing the sshd package, I noticed that sshd is not actually running. A little bit googling tells me that to get the cygwin's sshd up and running as a windows service, I have to do as following:

(excerpt from the completed text at http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html, Thanks Nicholas Fong).

• Add environment variable CYGWIN=ntsec and add path to cygwin binaries to the PATH variable
• runs ssh-host-config on the cygwin windows to initialize sshd. Answer "yes" "yes" and "yes" on "privileges separation", "create local user sshd" and "install sshd as a service" question, when asked. The script will ask for "CYGWIN=", we must answer "ntsec".
• Start the sshd service by net start ssh
• security important Check that all user has a password protected in Control Panel --> User Account
• create a password and group file from windows data by mkpasswd --local > /etc/passwd mkgroup --local > /etc/group

Aha, done... sshd is up and running on my XP.

<span class="inline left"><img src="http://our.obor.us/files-dae/images/google_analytic.PNG" alt="Planet cp24's analytic 1" title="Planet cp24's analytic 1" class="image thumbnail" height="523" width="725"><span class="caption" style="width: 723px;"> Planet's CP24 stats

A week has passed since my registration of Google Analytics and here is the snapshot of our Planet's report. We have got visitors from Denver, Stockholm, Rome and, with a hugh majority, Thailand. A link from cp24 webboard has served its propose well. Blog rings from dogpositive, bitslice and xanga also are accounted for around 7% visit.

For those who cannot see the entire snapshot, please click at the [<>] button on the top to expand the page. Oh I love drupal.

After struggling for a long time. Finally, I have managed to get the internationalization module works as I want. the only problem is that I use the wrong block for accessing the translated page. We have to use Translation bock, not the Language Swithcer block, even though they look the same in in the appearance but it works totally different. Language switcher is just a languaeg swithcer of course. It does nothing except that letting a user select his/her prefered language and then display a content of that language only.

With translation block, a user can access the translation of the displaying content immediately and that is what I want. For illustration example, if I have a page called "member" which is translated into two language, says Thai and Eng. When a user is viewing a Thai member page, the user can click the language in the translation block to access the english member page but with the language swithcer block, the user can do nothing. Much better...

The only problem remain is that the primary link. Well, there exists a work around. With the translation module, the link in every page is prefixed with the language code. For example, node with id 57 will be displayed in a link as th/node/57 when a user is viewing in thai and will be displayed as en/node/57 when viewing in english. The solution is simple, just allow url alias, and name the page with en/ or th/ prefix and we are solved. Check http://isl2.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/ for example.

After trying a lot of drupal access control module, the one that seems to suit my style is taxonomy access control lite (tac_lite), being able to set visibility for each vocabulary separately.

However, it does not support the entry that is already posted. I have to edit the database myself with

INSERT INTO drupal_node_access VALUES (xx,yy,'tac_lite',1,0,0);

where xx = node id and yy = group id (role id).

In fact, the feature of taxonomy access control (tac) impressed me more than tac_lite but the latest patch just released yesterday and I cannot manage it to work with forums. Will try it later.

This comes directly from slashdot. BusinessWeek runs an article on best designed products of the year which is sponsored by IDSA. A lots of cool looking stuff, my fav is DX1 Input System.

Why this is is published mid-year?

The result of [Cannes Lions Advertisity 2006] is out. This year there are seven Thai ad films that got gold medal. Sadly, my favorite ones, Siang Pure Oil and My Son (Thai Insurance) do not recieve any awards. Smart Purse and Black Up coffee did not submit to the festival.

If anyone got the entire archive of this year award winners, please let me know :D

After read Koh's Blog, I feel a strong surge to play FF IX (well, I havn't play it yet, even though it has been released for almost 6 years. I say I need time, but I usually eventually spend the time on other game T_T. In fact, I should concentrate on writing a journal paper. Stupid me....