Just set up LDAP authentication. Now, anybody who has an account on CP department can authenticate to my website. All student are encouraged to log in before posting any comment in the forums.

For my ICE students, the slides of today class and the last week is available on the Data Structure page.

It turns out that Sky is based on Theme Setting API which is also used in several themes, though they are not as highly configurable as Sky. However, it seems that I prefer Twilight over Sky but I still have to manually edit the font to be as I like.

I Just change the theme to Sky. To my surprise, Sky is highly customizable. A user is allowed to change the default font, font size, alignment, width of the theme. That is exactly what I want from a theme. Now, the only problem is that I believe that the skin is a little bit sober. Will try to change that soon.

Once again I have to build up a machine for OpenVPN. I have previously wrote articles about this but when I follow those instruction it still does not work. But first, let us talk about what I want to achieved. I just simply want to set up a road warrior configuration, i.e., I would like to have a machine, from any place, to securely access all the resource within our laboratory. This is not possible via public interface because the firewall rules block most of the port. Besides, it is not secure.

Now, the generic howto of OpenVPN will lead you to the point that you have the VPN connection between the client and the server, but no other machine on the client side or the server side is accessible by both side. My previous article tells you how to set up the routing on the client such that when it wish to connect to the other machine in the office, it should be routed through OpenVPN. This seems to work so far for my last machine but actually it does not on the new machine.

The problem is that

1. I have to enable port forwarding on the server. This is already covered in OpenVPN howto here.

Specifically for ubuntu, you have to execute the following command.

$echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

This is to tell the kernel to allow routing, now. However, this does not survive a reboot. For ubuntu, you have to add the following file to /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

2. I also need to enable NAT on the server, for WinXP, this is not actually needed, but for my latest ubuntu machine, I have to execute the following command.

And that is enough.

One of my key requirements for a phone is that it must be able to set an alarm based on specific day of week. For example, I should be able to set up an alarm such that it reminds me at 15:50 on every workday (Mon. -- Fri.). The reason behind this is that in the period of last several years, I spent most of my time at Chulalongkorn University which forbid me to park a car inside the campus. This is understandable because the space is very limited. The alternative choice would be that I have to park at roadside. Now, officially, the parking is available only from 9:00 till 16:00 and the law enforcer are quite active and punctual in the recent years. The result is that I have to move my car away before 16:00. Now, university understand this quite well and permit non-faculty car to park inside the campus after 16:00. So, the job of almost all students at 16:00 are that they have to relocate their car to the campus. Due to the nature of the work, we, the Ph.D. student, are quite obsessed with the work such that we usually forgot to move the car. This result in a ticket with 200-400 baht fine.

That is why alarm clock is a must. However, on sat and sun, we can park the car inside the campus for the entire day because most faculty members are not there. Thus, I would like to turn the alarm off. This also applies to the wake up alarm.

It turns out that there day-customizable alarm feature is not available in a cheap phone I were trying to buy, thus I have to pay extra money for that.

Now, my need is gone. Since I was employed as a faculty member, I am entitled for a parking sticker. Today, I drove pass the security at the entrance and I finally realized I no longer need the alarm now. I simply turned it off and suddenly feel a satisfaction that, finally, after all these years, I no longer have to worry about my parking space at all.

Today is my first chance to lecture for an ICE students (the international course). It turned out to be a very good one!!! Much better than I expected, the students were very involved with the class. They responded to most of my questions. They were willing to come in front of the class and did some assignment I placed upon them. To the very most of my surprise, they even ask that I should keep teaching well beyond the end of the class.

These are more than I hoped for. Well, my dear students, if by any chance you are reading this article, I would like to share with you that I am very happy with this class and I am looking forward to any another chance that we might meet again.

Today I have just signed a contract with Dept. of Computer Engineering. Now, I am officially a full time lecturer at Chulalongkorn University. My former adviser came and said to me that he once heard a following quote.

You are considered being successful in your academic career when your grand student got her Ph.D.

And he said that he is going to email to his adviser (Jean Ponce) that, by the above standard, he should be happy now and once my first Ph.D. student graduates, my adviser will consider himself being a successful teacher. Well, it is a long way until my grand student got her Ph.D.

The HDD of our server is broken and I almost lost all my data. The failing drive is the OS drive, not the data drive and ,yes, I set up raid5 on my server but I forgot to put MySQL data directory (/var/lib/mysql) into the raid array (still keeping it on the OS Drive).

Hiren rescue disk saves the day, however, some table is fubar and I can't do anything about it. You can notices that all tags are gone. Anyway, everything is up and online. On a bright side, it is a chance to upgrade from Stentz (FC4) to Hardy Heron.

Currently, I am working on a Delphi project that requires movie playing in the application. Obviously, the direct approach is to use the Windows Media Player ActiveX. However, when I imported the active X and try to resizing it at runtime, strange behavior starts to happen: the control does not obey my command. After googling around, it is that I have to directly call the SetObjectRects method directly. This could be done by the following codes.

procedure TGraphicController.resize;
const
    IID_IOleInPlaceObject: TGUID = '{00000113-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}';
var
  IOIPObj: IOleInPlaceObject;
begin
  inherited;
  IDispatch(wmp.OleObject).QueryInterface(IID_IOleInPlaceObject, IOIPObj);
  IOIPObj.SetObjectRects(adjustedRect, adjustedRect);
end;

The wmp is the Wrapper class of windows media player which is automatically generated and adjustedRect is the TRect structure that describe the location that I wish the control to be located at. The GUID of the interface can be found in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb180708(VS.80).aspx.