เบื่อ วินโดวส์

อ่าน Business Week เมื่อวาน ลงเกี่ยวกับเรื่อง อาชญากรรมบนไซเบอร์สเปซ ที่มากขึ้นเรื่อยๆ สองปีก่อน สถิติในอเมริกาเพิ่มขึ้นแปดเท่าตัว ปีที่แล้วเพิ่มอีกสี่เท่าตัว ดูแล้วน่ากลัวมาก ถ้าแก้ไม่ได้ อี-คอมเมอร์ซ เดี้ยงแน่ ไม่รู้ว่าเมืองไทยทำอะไรไปมั่ง แต่ที่แน่ๆ คนไทยส่วนมากไม่ค่อยรู้เรื่องการจัดการพีซีของตนเองเท่าไร ในโน้ตบุ้คของผมที่ใช้ วินโดวส์มี ต้องอัพเดทไวรัสเดฟฟินิชั่นทุกวัน และสแกนทุกวัน ทั้งหาไวรัส และลบ บ็อต และ สปายแวร์ เบื่อ นี่กำลังเตรียมจะเปลี่ยนแล้ว สักสองสามเดือนจะเปลี่ยนไปใช้ Mac PowerBook แทน ตอนนี้รอไปก่อน เพราะเมืองไทยยังไม่ "บันเดิล" ไทเกอร์ เข้ากับฮาร์ดแวร์ ถ้าซื้อตอนนี้เสียเงินสองต่อ เสียแสนนึงค่าโน้ตบุ้คแล้วยังจะต้องไปเสียเงินค่าอัพเกรดโอเอสเท็น จากแพนเธอร์เป็นไทเกอร์เองอีก ๕ พันบาท รอไปสักสองเดือนจะประหยัดไปหน่อย เผลอๆได้เครื่องรุ่นใหม่ที่อาจจะออกมาอีกต่างหาก
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บ่นกับตนเอง สมองเราแบลงก์ไปเหรอเปล่าเนี่ย

ไม่รู้ว่าเมื่อวานติ้งต๊องหรือเปล่า รู้สึกวุ่นวายมาก ทำเราท์เตอร์หล่นโครมไปสองรอบตอนขยับจัดโต๊ะ ขยับตู้ใหม่ สองสามรอบ และทาวเวอร์ซีพียูล้มโครมไปอีกหนึ่งตัว โชคดีมันยังไม่พัง เรายังว่าเราไม่ได้ถอดสายเราท์เตอร์ออกนี่นา ทำไม่มันสลับพอร์ทกันได้ ทำให้อินทราเน็ตแถวนี้มั่วไปหมด หรือว่า"เหมด"มาเสียบใหม่ตอนเข้ามาทำความสะอาดห้องและล้างเชื้อราจากผนังห้อง แต่ไม่น่านะ เราคงจะใจลอย ถอดสายเข้าออกแล้วสลับพอร์ทเองละมัง แย่จริงๆ วันนี้มาสลับพอร์ทเลยแก้ปัญหาได้ รู้สึก กิลท์ตี้กับน้องๆที่ให้บริการเน็ทเวอร์คมาตามแก้ปัญหา นึกขออภัย แต่ใจผมมันคงจะแบลงค์ไปจริงๆ สงสัย อัลไซม์เมอร์เตรียมถามหาเราแล้วละมัง ว้า สงสัยต้องเข้าสมาธินานขึ้นอีกแฮะ

Weekend shows in Bangkok

My family and the in-laws went out to see Guangzhou Acrobat yesterday. There were perhaps 5000 audiences packed in the 2 p.m. round. The show was great and we enjoyed very much. It 's worth the high cost we spent.
But the internal traffic inside the Suan Lum's night bazaar was terribly unmanaged.
On our way out, we lost 15 min time sitting packed, like canned Sardines, inside an ummoved taxi. Shame on the managements of BEC TERO Hall and the night bazaar.

I don't think our family members were much interested in the Miss Universe Pageants, currently being organized across the city at the Impact Hall. We don't even watch the globally televised program.
Looks like the Thai government has poured some half a billion Baht on co-sponsoring this event in the hope of promoting our beautify country and charming culture to the World.
However, seeing international pageants in a TV commercial doing a "Wai" in the Thai way made me felt uneasy about the unnatural expression showed by foreigners. I am curious of how the global viewers would feel.
In a slightly related agenda about the Pageants, a number of Thai people were criticizing about awarding the best costume to the Miss Thailand, thinking that the award was politically motivated to please the host country and felt ashamed of it.
That is after the unfavorably buzz when some Pageants naivedly posed in swim suits in front of some Bangkok landmark temples.
Althought they are "photographotropic" landmarks, Buddhist temples and the palaces, perhaps like those of other religions and countries, are places where people were trained to show respect, in the way they dress and behave.
We were trained to dress properly before entering them and take our shoes off before entering the Uposot (the main halls or areas) and restrain our manners and actions. Thus, wearing bikinis in front of them strike the Thai people emotionally
although we are also culturally trained well enought to not criticizing our unknowning international guests (the Pageants). However, the Thai organizers received the blame in full.
Glad that they did not publicizing those pictures too much, although some newspapers did. Those cases show our Thai sensitivity toward the management of the event.

New generation of Thai have bad manner

That must be a bad evening.
I went to Siam Square via Skytrain to try to see a movie Star Wars III. In the train, a big fat highschool guy in uniform, but the shirt hanging outside his black shorts, was loudly talking to his friend over a mobile phone while walking back and forth near a train's door. Another young office man next to me received his cell phone call and talk to his superior rather loud. Another lady across the aisle made another loud phone call, not even think of trying to put her hand over her mouth to keep some privacy. What a disturbing and annoying situation ! New generation have no manner. They have no one to tell them a good manner before, even in school ! I got out from the train at Siam Square and about to come down from the platform via the stairs, a guy run up the stairs and made an abrupt turn cut in front of me. He bumped into me slightly but did not stop to apologize and rushed away. I turned my face to look at him in dismay and saw that he peeked at me briefly. That 's another bad manner.
I found out that the show time at Discovery Center was too late for me to waste time wating, so I went home and dig up an Episode II CD to watch on my mini home theater set in my home office. Went to bed late for the day.

Thailish : evolution or decline of the Thai language ?

Few years ago I encountered a news about German people complaining of Deutsch usage by new generation in Germany. Deutsch have become more English-like and they were concerned and did not like it so they called the English-like syntax a Deutschlish. For Thai, I have not seen anyone mention of this problem although middle-age people like me complain among ourselves a lot about poor usage of Thai in the younger generation. Thai language grammar and sentence formats nowsday, even in the news, are more English-like. I would like to call this in the same way, and similar feeling, as Thailish. I believe those people in the news media, which cause the masses and the youths to follow their poor Thai usage, were poor in their Thai language studies and perhaps did not read much good (century) old books or peotry. Now their Thai grammar and sentences are like English, American English in particular.

I just hate that. I love the beauty of traditional (? ancient) Thai language.

Legal-centric Thailand and socio-political mindset

I have intended to not discuss Thai political issues in this blog. However, the current issues in the news are too big to miss out.

The current problems on Thailand's legistalive and administration entities (some of which might be considered as a crisis by some commentators) arose, in my view, mainly due to the unique socio-political mindset of people involved. Different constitutionally-established institutions, whether they be the Senate, the Counter-Corruption Commision, the Constitution Court, etc, have their own ways of interpreting different laws to suit their opinions or interest.

I think if they had paid more attention to Buddhist Dhamma they would not have so much problem about conflicting legal procedure / interpretations.

I also think scientists do not like the topic on behavior of people in the society since it is a "difficult" topic to experiment with.

No Bird Flu news in Thailand these days

I just found a news that scientists are coming out to warn about possible pandemic of Birdflu in the near future. The article mentioned of cases in the SE Asia, including Thailand. Amazing that I have not come across of news about it in Thailand in the past few months. I believe there is no attempt for a cover up but there might be a small chance that health officials do not worry too much about flu cases if they found some suspicious cases.
If there were Pandemic, Thailand economy, esp. the tourism industry would be in trouble.

Here is a link I found from Google :- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1628083,00.html

Remembering Ajarn Somsri Sukumolnand

It was late night on Tuesday 24 when I had a heavy supper and thus did not feel like going to bed early. I was in the kitchen when my wife was reading from the newspaper that we hadn't finished since the morning then she mentioned across the hall that Aj. Somsri Sukumolnand passed away. I stopped working in the kitchen and walked over to take a look at the cremation annoucement and a brief social news. What a pity ! Ajarn Somsri passed away age 86 and would be cremated on Thursday, May 26 2005. She 's great writer and a daughter of a famous Thai scholar known better in the royal bestowed title of Phraya Anumarnratchathon (Mr. Yong Sathienkoses). To think of her more, I went to one of my (almost 10) book cabinets and dig up some of her books I have. Those I have are all non-fiction. I don't know if she has written some novels or not. But I generally do not read novels anyway. I read a chapter from the book ลืมร้อน to remind myself of what I had read long time ago. Yes. Thailand just lost another great writer. I realized that my mind was slightly sad (a Vipasana meditation) and logged this note before going to bed. I wish then think "she" must be happier by now. Tonight (May 26), she would be cremated and I would send my mind to bid a farewell.

New Bangkok International Airport : "Suvarnabhumi" or Suwannaphum ?

The auspicious name of Suvarnabhumi was bestowed to the new Bangkok International Airport by H.M. The name resurrects the old name of this region, once called "Golden land" or Suwannaphum (pronounced "Suwan-na-poom") in Thai legends. Thousands of years ago, people of this region was believed to trade with the Roman Empire. It is no doubt that the name is very appropriate for the new gigantic international airport for Bangkok.

However, in romanization the word which Thai people pronounce Suwannaphum into the official spelling has caused a little problem. This resurrects the old problem of transcription system from Thai into English which has been formalized by King Rama VI, for almost a hundred years ago. With the official spelling, aimed to preserved the Pali root word, most westerners or foreigners would surely do not know how to pronounce the word correctly as Thai would do.

This is going to be the same old problem like pronouncing the word Phuket. Foreign travellers firstly arrived in Thailand would mostly do not know how to pronounce the name correctly and mostly they would call the city name as "Foo-ket" not "Poo-ket". Next year, perhaps millions of international travellers coming to the new airport would call this airport "Su-far-na-boo-mee", and a number of Thai people would smilingly scratch our heads with astonishment why the heck they do not call it "Su-wan-na-phoom".

I wished they would use the transcription system that the Royal Institute of Thailand has used, and that the Roman letter for the new airport would better be "Suwannaphum". Bingo. Thai people might then understand it better.

Sigh.

One small step toward 5 millenia of Buddhism

Last week, there was a consensus outcome from the international conference of Buddhist monks in Bangkok essentially stating that Phutthamonthon (or Buddhamonthon, i.e Buddha's territory) in the suburb of Bangkok would serve as international center for Buddhism.
I think that is a remarkable milestone toward the prosperity of Buddhism. According to some old Thai legends, Buddha had predicted that Buddhism would be established in the Suwannaphum area (i.e. the present-day Thailand) and would last for 5 millenia before it ends. Here we are about 2.6 millenia, slightly more than half a way to go.
In the current international conflicts and wars, if people of different countries could adopt the Buddhist thinking, the World would be a peaceful place.

Buddhism 's core principle โพสต์เนื่องในวันวิสาขบูชา

On the auspicious occasion of Visakha Bucha day, on the full moon (15th waxing moon) night of the 6th lunar month, which this year coincides with Sunday, May 22, 2005, I think it is appropriate to post something in advance before I will be off-lined for few days.

Visakha Bucha day is the commemoration day, in which the birthday of Lord Buddha, the day of his enlighthenment, and the day he entered nirvana all surprisingly occured on the same lunar day (albeit different years).

I hope my memory still correctly remember the Pali verse, chanted by Phra Assachi, about the core principle of Buddhism, as followed :-

เย ธัมมา เหตุปภวา
เตสัง เหตุง ตถาคโต
เตสัญจโย นิโรโธ จ
เอวัง วาที มหาสมโณ

Roughly translated into my poor English like so :-

"All natural things have their causes. (This context includes emotional suffering as well.)
Lord Buddha taught of the causes.
If one is to eliminate the suffering, one must first eliminate the causes.
Thus ends what the Great Monk said."

Let's concentrate our mind so that one becomes self-awared.
Dhamma preserves those who preserve Dhamma.

โพสต์ภาษาไทย กับภาษาฝรั่ง อย่างไหนดี

ผมว่าผมเขียนได้ทั้งสองแบบนั่นแหละ ในบางเรื่องใช้ภาษาอังกฤษน่าจะใช้ศัพท์ได้กระชับกว่า และ การทำดัชนีบนเว็บก็น่าจะดีกว่า
ผมเขียนบันทึกไว้อ่านเองคนเดียวเป็นส่วนมาก ก็ต้องเลือกตามอารมณ์คนเขียนเป็นธรรมดา

อ้อ ฉบับนี้ลองโพสต์ภาษาไทยจาก ลินุกส์ ทะเล ๗.๐ ดู คิดว่าน่าจะอ่านได้ไม่มีปัญหา

Young generation of Thai might no longer be behaviorally charming ?

Anyone with some kids (up to teenagers) in the family frequently said the same thing that the young generation of Thai are behaviorally more aggressive than elder generation, like mine.

I 'd like to draw a concept of genetic drift into this cultural / behavioral context. I think it is caused mainly by small number of people, yet they are so well exposed to the entire country's TV viewing population. I am talking of soap opera drama producers that populate the prime-time TV programs in Thailand.

Those drama tend to be produced by the people who love to show excessive behavioral extremes, emotional extremes, untrolled manners, including bad verbal assaults to elders, even curses. Children are more vulnerable to these programs' excessive behaviors than adults. I think if we do not try to curb on these, in the next decade, Thailand wil no longer be characterised with nice people.

Thailand's Information & Computer Telecommunication laws

I just found a link, pointed by Linux Thai group, about the various Thai laws in ICT, some of which are under development (i.e. not passed the parliament yet).

http://www.ictlaw.thaigov.net/ictlaws.html

Few days ago, newspapers raised some concerns about possible setback to hosting service industry in Thailand, that some articles in the laws might cause a number of Thai webmasters to move their hosts to overseas to escape from the law.

Thai Education Reform

Today I found a small news about our Thai Minister of Education mentioning again about the need for modernization of science education in Thailand and asked a Thai agency (Sor Sor Wor Tor) to do it.

We have been talking about this a lot in the past 10 years. And few years have passed since the education reform bill took effect, apart from some ministrial consolidation and establishment of some agencies, and the new curricula of primary and secondary schools took effect, a lot of things still need to be done.

A few days ago, I read of one complaint about various jobs that a school teacher has to do, as a government official. As Thai government officials practically have no job description, whatever are assigned to them they have to do all, including procurement and running around to care-taking visiting VIP to their district. And imagine that they all have the same 24 hr per day and some have to work on a supplementary job to feed their families. The complaint is valid.

Undervalued stocks in SET and superstitious Thai

Now is the period of the year when holders of some good quality Thai stocks get their dividends. For the Stock Exchange of Thailand, there are hundreds of those dividend paying stocks, which served as good earning alternative than saving money in a bank account with the interest rate as low as 0.75 %, much lower than the annual inflation rate.

In the past 2 yr, however, to the dismay of thousands of long-term investors in Thailand, the SET has not performed well. For me, I have lost "book value" of my stock investment, much more than the divendend gain from them (and the dividend is also taxable). Were I in need of cash and need to dump those, I would really lose money. Foreigners might not know that a good proportion (I don't want to say most) of Thai people are superstitious. Few months ago, the Secretary of the Cabinet even came out to criticize a number of astrologers who predicted on this year's horoscope for the country. He later had a hot debate on TV with the Thai Astrology Association chairman about the guy's "prediction" on the country's economic outlook for this year.

Come to think of it, perhaps most of the Thai investors believe the "forecast" of the country's horoscope, that this year (2005) is going to be a bad year for stocks, so they keep their distance and withdrew money from the stock market. The result is the low market mood, or the bearish market : a self-fulfiling prophecy indeed. This leave a small investor like me helpless : I can not do anything except to comfort myself that at least I am a proud stockholder and fractional owner of some good Thai companies. Sigh !

Found my old friend after 35 years

Recently, while I went to my favoriate branch of SE-ED bookstores, I stumbled upon a book translated into Thai by a guy whose name I recognized as a good primary school friend of mine.
We had not met each other for some 35 years. The topic of the book is also interesting. It is translated from the "Unstoppable" written by Cynthia Kersey and
the Thai title is หยุดไม่ได้ถ้าหัวใจไม่ยอมแพ้ .
I thus bought a copy for my reading. Back home in the evening I "swollowed" 2 chapters within just a few minutes reading and I found it quite enjoyable.
Although I must have hoarded hundreds of how-to's books, productivity enhancing or administration books, this one seemed to be very good. Starting to feel drowsy, I paused the reading and started to quickly browse thru the end of the book.
Luckily, the translater and my lost friend also gave out his e-mails at the back. I thus put down the pocketbook and quickly tapped out a late night e-mail to him.
Next morning he replied my e-mail (from Chiang Mai, which I did not know at the time) and within 2 days he came to Bangkok for a business.
After we exchanged calls in early Saturday morning to make a quick appointment on a rendezvous, within a few minutes I hopped the Skytrain to meet him at Siam Square's CU bookstore, the largest bookstore in Bangkok.
From there, I bought more of his own written and translation works and asked for his autographs.
We had a good chat over a lunch. This is a miracle of a modern communication !
I have used e-mail for almost 20 yr mainly on academic communications, but this is the first time I could reach out to my lost friend via the Internet.
My friend also prodded me into writing books, reminding me that I used to produce mini classroom magazines when I was a 10 yr old school boy.
He mentioned that our meeting could be the turning point for my life, into a book writer. Sounds good. Althought I had wished to write some non-fiction books, I have excused myself a lot in the past due to the lack of time.
I even stopped blogging once before. Well, after this I want to see how things will develop with me in the next few months. But my boss still want me to write papers, not books. Perhaps I 'd need to split the time at home carefully.

Seminar on a bacterial genomes initiated in Thailand

I just attended a local seminar on the 3 bacterial genomes, the Burkholderia, some species of which caused a lethal disease called melioidosis, that have been sequenced and published, namely B. pseudomallei, B. thailandensis
and B. mallei. B. thailandensis does not cause the disease though. (Gee. I had a hard time spelling these words since most Thai fellows never pronounced them correctly.) Interesting parts of many labs are the regions called pathogenicity islands.

A sequencing project was initiated at Siriraj hospital few years ago, seeded with few million Baht, before collaborating later with many international labs, including Sanger Institute and funded in large chunk to finish it by Wellcome Trust. A paper from this effort was published in PNAS last year. The small seminar room at Biotec was packed with some 40 scientists, mostly Ph.D. and M.Sc., with some international scholars. So the seminar was switched over from Thai to English. Interesting talk and a lot more questions to answer. As ones know, a lot more to be done in wet lab even after genomes were sequenced.

Thai University curriculum improvement

I went to give a talk at Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, yesterday, about my idea of improving life science curriculum, esp. undergrad ones. Now the organizer gave a letter to me asking to broadcast mine and others' lectures over a radio. Oh oh ! I did gave some uncanny remarks in the lecture since I didn't expect it. Nevermind that I did not name any names but it 's stillk an awkward feeling, esp. in Thai culture, to mention of third parties, no matter that my intention was just to examplify and not really criticising anyone.

Essentially, I proposed that life science undergrad programs should adjust their curriculum to have at least 3 more math subjects and 3 computer subjects (programming, database, alrogirhtm) not to mention intro to programming class. I also talked on problems and admin aspects in university education. I also propose that they hold a 7 day long camp on Buddhist concentration (meditation), but not as part of the curriculum but just extraculicular activity, among others. I don't know if they would bite it : I had proposed my ideas anyway.

Now coming back to work in my office again. My assistant just came back from attending a bioinformatics workshop at Kasetsart for 4 days. Luckily, he is among few life science M.Sc. graduates in Thailand who knows enought to use Linux and Unix so he seemed to gain some experience from the workshop. I did not bother to go to it althought it's free (sponsored by the Thai government) since I have had a lot of reading in the queue already ( I mean 100s of papers in PDF). Now I prefer to view the papers, not printing out on papers, on my "new" Linux machine at home.

Although I bought it over 10 months ago, my Linux box has been a relatively rarely-used machine until recently. It 's a Pentium IV 3.0E, with 1 GB of RAM and installed with TLE 7.0 Linux, with a 1280x1024 pixel 17" flat screen monitor. It 's fast enought, and much faster than the rest of my older computers at home. I think I start to lose count on how many PC's (and Mac) I have at home. I plan to buy a new laptop Mac soon, but a guy from a local dealter just suggested that I wait for a couple of months since a dual core G5 laptop was rumoured to come out. Also I'd rather wait until more of the Tiger's bugs are cleansed out for a month or so. Now, a new version 10.4.1 is heard over the Internet news to come out in a week from now. Good news for all Mac enthusiasts around the World.

It looks to me like I am a rare Thai user who uses numerous OSes interchangeably, from Windows, Linux, Sun's Solaris, and soon will go back to Mac's OS-X again. After my long departure from Mac OS 6 a few years back.

First post on Academic Thai

Well, after loitering for over a year about creating a weblog at blogspot, I opened up an account today. After the Blog booming a year ago, I have opened a blog at Manager dot co dot th for a while and looks like now it is inactivated after I was busy and did not post there for few months. Now I started anew. My posting would be either in Thai or English.

This is going to be an alternative place for my online digital diary. More private messages won't appear here but retained in my personal notebook. Only the stuff that deems possibly useful for the public eyes would go here. The content should be about Thai academic stuff, including scientific issues, education, literature, books, programming, etc.

ต่อไปนี้ผมจะทดสอบการโพสต์ภาษาไทยดูบ้าง

Looks O.K. in Thai fonts. I think I might mainy type in English since I would write mainly on academic or scientific issues. Thai scholars should have no problem reading this blog in English, if they stumble on this somehow that is.