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| New weblog |
| 01.10.05 (6:31 pm) [edit] |
My weblog had been relocated to rawitatpulam.blogspot.com. The tblog server is getting slow and becoming a bit problematic. So I figured it's time to move on.
Thank you tBlog team for your space and kindness for allowing me to share my thoughts, my nonsenses to the world.
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| Destination: India |
| 01.10.05 (5:31 pm) [edit] |
India is really on its way of becoming the real power of IT, especially for out-sourcing, as many big companies such as IBM are exporting more and more jobs to India. For example, see:
and the most recent one (today)
The world is getting pretty much smaller now. IT is the present, and future. Especially with one of the newest scientific ideas: Information as a new language of science, or when we look at reality with bits and computational feel.
With offshore outsourcing (or global outsourcing), becoming a really growing option, we can see this thing happening more and more frequence.
India is pretty strong on computer programming and IT, and therefore becoming (it not already) number one in offshore outsourcing for such kind of jobs. Russia is being outsourced for programming and R&D, Philippines for data entry and customer support (have a friend working with a company in Japan, where they do R&D and planning, and all supports are in Manila), and China for programming.
This happens so the country strong in something else, like advancing the technology, could focus more on the R (or R&D) and strategic planning and business.
Where are we (Thailand)?
We need help, a lot. Not from the outsiders, the help we need the most is from inside. We need to see the reality and realize where are we, find our identity, our strength, and represent it in the fashion the world want to listen, to the world.
I can see a lot of that, but seeing alone would not help. We need to get start, get our hands dirty working on it. We have a fast-moving world to catch. We were left behind in the last scientific and industrial revolution. Now the next revolution is upon us. It's our choice to make: join the revolution now, or being left behind in dust for another century.
No, it's not choice that can be made by government policies, words, idealism, or whatever. Nor it is anyone's choice. It's a choice we have to make together, by action.
Together is only way to move forward.
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| MacWorld Rumors roundup |
| 01.10.05 (2:31 am) [edit] |
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A Mac Rumors article+thread summarized all the rumors about the upcoming MacWorld Expo. Nicely done.
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| New PowerBook? |
| 01.10.05 (2:17 am) [edit] |
According to the rumor from macosXrumors, there will be a new line of Mac, called iHome and *new* PowerBook at MacWorld Expo!
Hold on before say anything ... I used the word new sarcastically. Because according to the rumor, it will be yet-another-speedbump update to the current PowerBook line, using new PowerPC MPC7447A from FreeScale with clock speed at 1.5Ghz and 1.66Ghz.
Disappointing! So this means there won't be any new PowerBook line for another half-a-year, and the first model is likely to have problems anyway, so revision-B (rev-B) will be another year away from now!
But, well, this also means I won't be buying a new machine until that time, or if I do, it is likely to be a shiny iMac G5 ;-)
My current PowerBook 15", 1.25 is turning out to the longest laptop I ever used ... and my best buy ever for computer (until the next powerbook coming out, maybe).
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| FBI warns about Tsunami-relief pleas |
| 01.10.05 (2:06 am) [edit] |
"Even in the face of terrible disasters such as the Tsunami that hit South East Asia and Africa in late December, many are finding ways to take advantage of it and make money off of it. An example is fake websites that claim to be non-profit charitable organizations that help out the victims when they really take all the money for themselves."
Quoted from Slashdot discussion thread about the recent Tsunami disaster that killed more than 150,000 people. Also see the original article at CNN-Money
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| 4AM |
| 01.09.05 (8:50 am) [edit] |
Just came back from a walk outside. Can't put myself to sleep. Can't work either. Don't know why. It had been like this for me for a couple of days, getting worse and worse. Today is the worst of them all.
Maybe I will go outside for another walk (yeah, it's zero degree outside, or a bit lower), maybe I will be sitting here trying to put together some ideas into the code or article, or book, but .. no, it won't work that way. If I write any, chance is that I have to rewrite them all again anyway. That is just the way it is now.
Trying to get some sense back to myself.
UPDATE: 10AM. I had some sleep after all. Worst in ages.
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| George E. Forsythe on Computer Science |
| 01.09.05 (12:36 am) [edit] |
Found this on Lambda the Ultimate weblog entry, about what George E. Forsythe (founder of Stanford's Computer Science Department) thought about Computer Science. This is originally written in Stanford technical report, number 26. Quote here:
I consider computer science to be the art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers, and of creating the technology necessary to understand their use. It deals with such related problems as the design of better machines using known components, the design and implementation of adequate software systems for communication between man and machine, and the design and analysis of methods of representing information by abstract symbols and of processes for manipulating these symbols. Computer science must also concern itself with such theoretical subjects supporting this technology as information theory, the logic of the finitely constructable, numerical mathematical analysis, and the psychology of problem solving. Naturally, these theoretical subjects are shared by computer science with such disciplines as philosophy, mathematics, and psychology.
I will translate this to Thai language sometime when I got myself out of all these things I busying with right now.
Later this year, I will be a lecturer at a university in Thailand anyway (will tell you the name later, when things are certain), so I think it would be nice to have this hang up on my door. I had so much of the current *wrong* stereotype about "Computer Science = Programming" in my country, and I had been denying and trying to explain it to people since.
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| MBTIBrowser version 0.1 |
| 01.07.05 (2:09 pm) [edit] |
It's one of many things I promised in my yesterday blog entry (Back to Reality). Even though it's not perfectly done now, it's working fine.
And since it is written in Java, it runs on multi-platform without recompiling. But for the sake of whatever, I recompiled it when I tested it on different machine anyway. The code was written entirely on Mac OS X.
Screenshots (click to see bigger images):
- Running on Mac OS X:
- Running on Windows XP:
- Running on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu distribution):
And in doing this, I learned something ... the performance of JVM on Mac is really bad, compared to JVM on Windows and Linux (on x86). Everything was noticably slower on my PowerBook. This is quite sad, actually, even I don't really program much in Java, or like Java that much. .. but there are still many apps, many useful apps that are written in Java out there, and the performance will be quite bad on the Mac.
But, well, I don't think many people will use Java for developing for the Mac anyway. Objective-C is by far the superior langauge (in my personal opinion, not necessary same as anyone else on this planet), and Cocoa is a nice framework, compared to Java's libraries. For IDE, nothing beats Xcode, really (again, personal preference here), even many things in it still need works, like code-completion. It would be nice if Xcode will be support more Java, though. Code-sensing for Java in Xcode 2.0 is a nice welcome, but it would be really great if it can do interface layout for Swing (I'm dreaming again).
Anyway, that's off-topic.
Since I pull version 0.1 out, so I will be stop working on it for a few days and finish those other things on my list. What? I said it will be open-sourced and available for free download? Well, yes, I did. However, not right now. Open for public eyes soon ;-) [personal reason]
Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I'm INTP, according to the MBTI.
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| Blue Screen of Death striked Bill Gates down at CES! |
| 01.07.05 (8:14 am) [edit] |
The legendary Windows crash, Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) striked again, and striked hard this time: on Bill Gates, during his keynote at CES 2005.
Read the full story at WhatPC and MacDailyNews's summary.
This is not the first time BSoD striked him, though. The other time was in 1998, when Gates gave demonstration of Windows 98 live on CNN. The video clip of that event can be found here: A BSOD pops up during a demo in front of Bill Gates [MethodShop.com].
Anyway, this time it's something different ... According to WhatPC, it happened with Windows Media Center Edition, which is based on Windows XP, which in turn based on NT-kernel.
According to WhatPC's article, the BSoD crash happened when Gates was giving a demo of integrating digital photography. Also, later a Microsoft product manager failed to access the internet with a Tablet PC.
So, is that the best Redmond can do?
With Longhorn (read Long-gone) ages away from completion, even with features after features being cut off, I don't really have any idea of faith left in Microsoft's Operating System (never really have one since I started using Linux 6 years ago, and even less after switched to Mac OS X anyway).
With new Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger coming out this year, 150+ features improvement from Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, with some of those are just killer and revolutionary, like Spotlight, Automator, CoreImage, and DashBoard ...
It seems like Redmond have a lot of works to do, and really need to get it done. After all, with the current iBook pricing, the iMac G5 (which named the best personal computer ever by many professional reviewers), along with the best consumer/desktop OS, the Mac OS X (admit it, you Linux zealots, GNU/Linux is great, and I love it, even have DebianPPC installed on my PowerBook. But I'm talking about OS for my mom and sisters, and my girlfriend, and many of my friends who are just another ordinary user, ok?).... There seems to be even less and less reasons to use Microsoft's OS and not just get a Mac.
This entry is getting pointless, by the way ;-)
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| iPod Flash coming? |
| 01.06.05 (11:02 pm) [edit] |
According to various sources, especially ThinkSecret recently (yeah, prior to Macworld Expo ... it's always like this), Apple computer will release one new members into the iPod family: iPod flash, which rumored to be in two capacity: 1GB and 2GB, pricing at $149 and $199, respectively.
Yeah, if Apple bump the iPod-mini up to 5GB for the same $249 pricing, then iPod-flash 1GB at $149 and 2GB $199 sounds pretty reasonable.
At least this year's rumor about new iPod sounds more accurate about target pricing than last year's rumor about ~$100 iPod mini, that turned out to be $150-off target.
Keeping my fingers crossed now, for iPod flash, iWork, new iLife, new headless Mac, and ..... well, new PowerBook, which is quite a bit overdue (not buying it until rev.B though).
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| IBM Dev: better programming through effective list handling |
| 01.06.05 (8:17 pm) [edit] |
From Jonathan Bartlett's article Better programming through effective list handling, from IBM's developerWorks.
Singly linked lists are a powerful abstraction that allow programmers to represent numerous types of data; extending those lists to handle arbitrary data types can offer effective tools for processing data. In this article, we look at these processes and examine the Lisp variation Scheme, an easy-to-use list-oriented language that delivers list-manipulation capabilities without the complexities of C.
Seeing C's linked list code made me sick. Seeing all the parentheses in Lisp (Scheme) code made me sick, too, even the expressions are simpler and (maybe) relatively easier to read and understand compared to C's. Also, since list processing is built-in, or rather, a native paradigm of the language, it is much harder to make mistakes and help avoiding much of complicating in dealing with memory allocations and pointer manipulations. (In Java, you still have to deal with imperative code ;-).
Anyway, for doing list-processing, I personally prefer Haskell, a purely functional programming langauge.
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| No Macworld Expo Live Broadcast! |
| 01.06.05 (8:03 pm) [edit] |
According to the brief report from MacInTouch and the take from MacDailyNews, there will be no live broadcast on the internet for Steve Jobs Macworld Expo Keynote.
The stream will be put on Apple Events afterward, as usual. No one no when, since precise time of posting the stream is not reported. So it might not be available immediately after the keynote.
In short: Sucks.
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| Back to Reality |
| 01.06.05 (6:26 pm) [edit] |
The "Dream" (Winter holidays) is the thing of past!
Well, I didn't really have winter holidays anyway, been busy with things even more than before the winter break. But now, it might become even worse ... or better. What am I talking about?
I figured I'm having too much free time to think and demand something non-sense. So, I will be putting more workloads onto myself, just to keep myself even more busy and more occupied with things. So I can (hopefully) stop thinking about those non-senses and my personal demand. I can be very demanding when I want something, and I know that "I am out of control" (recall what Merovingian said in Matrix Reloaded) for such kind of feeling.
Anyway, so, keep your fingers cross, in case you care, for in a few next days you will see the following:
- One Journal paper, and one conference paper about the research I'd been doing
- Update of my website, the long-overdue About Me and Research section
- A quick tutorial of GNUstep installation on Windows (it's not that difficult, but enough to give an average computer user a lot headache).
- A quick tutorial of Objective-C & Cocoa using Xcode and GNUstep (that's why I have to do the above first, so I can show how the same code can be used on Mac OS X, Linux (through GNUstep) and Windows (through GNUstep)).
- An Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) browser, written in Java. Will be open-sourced.
- Long-overdue article about science of complexity and the search for self (wrote the beginning part of it 3 years ago, haven't continue since).
from me.... And also one more thing:
Note to self: Keep the list growing and producing more output!
Reality can be cruel.
What can be more cruel than reality? Surprisingly, it's a good dream. It makes you hate waking up. It gives you hard time facing the world you used to. It makes reality look and feel more cruel than it actually is.
I hate dreaming a good dream. It make the reality a nightmare.
Who knows, we might be living in the computer simulation after all. In that case, I might want to wake up, and open my eyes (yeah, a movies ;-)
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| No new IE until 2006 |
| 12.31.04 (6:45 pm) [edit] |
According to OSNews.com article, there will be *NO* new Internet Explorer (IE) until 2006, when the next version of Windows, codename Longhorn (or, currently known as Long-gone) is out.
Behold 2005! Another year of malware! spyware! virus! crackers! security hazards! hoax! on your Windows!
Long Live Firefox!
Long Live Safari!
Long Live Linux!
Long Live FreeBSD!
Long Live Mac OS X!
Long Live [your favourite browser and/or OS here!]
In short, Long Live anything that's not IE and Windows!
[Being sarcastic here. There will be small minor updates, security patches, etc, from Microsoft anyway. It just won't be entirely new IE with features that already common and ubiquitous in other browsers].
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| New update on Tsunami Death Toll: 134,000 |
| 12.30.04 (5:51 pm) [edit] |
I wrote in yesterday's entry that the death toll was 80,000.
A single day passed, and the new number came. It is now 118,000, according to CNN news article.
Obviously the most deadly disaster mother nature had ever put to mankind.
Be kind to her. You can never know what she has next in hand.
#update@8:00PM (GMT+09:00): the dead toll is now 134,000 [CNN news article]
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| A little help... |
| 12.29.04 (7:43 pm) [edit] |
Following my previous blog entry (about amazon.com and apple.com), I made a little transaction through amazon.com's 1-click system payment to American Red Cross, a little amount of money that I could effort to do now (it would have been more .... if I have more money).
I wish I could goto Sounthern Thailand right now and see my fellow countrymen with my own eyes, maybe there are more things I could do if I'm there.
God bless them.
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| Death toll rising, now more than 80,000 |
| 12.29.04 (7:18 pm) [edit] |
The death toll of one of the biggest natural disasters the world had ever face still keep rising, with the latest number of 80,427.
See CNN news article for more details.
The death toll in my contry, Thailand, alone, while not as high as Sri Lanka, India, or the place nearest to the center of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, Indonesia (which alone acconts for more than a half of that 80k number) ... had reached almost two thousands. (May be because of population density, natural geography, and many things else). Thailand Prime Minister said it could be 3 or 4 thousands, as many people are still missing, with unconfirmable fate, of dead or alive.
If you can, please help others. There are people who had lost enough, as mother nature took away life of people they love, the place they used to called home, and many things dear to them, away from them and will never return.
Stop taking, start giving. Humanity to others.
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| amazon.com & apple.com take action on Asia disaster |
| 12.29.04 (6:59 pm) [edit] |
Following the tsunami disaster in Asia (see news: BBC, slashdot, Reuters), which my country is one of many victims, amazon.com and apple.com, two of the most visited websites on the net, had put the links to the organizations that will help you help people who were effected by the disaster. See the screenshots (click for the full image):
amazon.com
apple.com
While amazon.com has only link to American Red Cross, apple.com has links to several others (see the website or screenshot).
Time to help our fellow human. Humanity to others.
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| Website updated |
| 12.18.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
mostly new design ... to reflect my current emotion & feeling (read two entries below to see more):
my website
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| don't bite more than you can chew .. |
| 12.18.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[continue from the entry below]
I had been telling people this for a while ... it seems that I forgot to tell the most important person in the world: myself. I'd been asking for something, more than I deserved to have, and more than I should. Now I'm paying the price. Not gonna say what it is though. Anyway, it's not a physical thing or thing that can be bought (too much hint already?)
Note to self: next time if you're asking for something, don't ask more than what you're allowed to have.
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| emotional breakdown |
| 12.18.04 (2:59 am) [edit] |
Where should I begin?
Nevermind, everything that has the beginning has the end anyway.
What did I just say? Oh, well, forget it, it has no relation, just wanted to quote The Matrix Revolutions for no reasonable reason.
What I wanted to say is, maybe it impossible to track down the beginning, the real cause of this emotional breakdown I'm haivng currently. no one can blame a single grain of sand to cause the entire sandpile to fall anyway. it's the state of the sandpile itself, the critical state. anything that happens, any drop of sand, could tricker the same effect.
What I'm talking about? well, if you don't know sandpile model for the self-organization criticality, this won't make any sense for you probably, and i'm too lazy to explain it right now. Read the first chapter of Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity : The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think will help you understand it though. Or, if you were a Thai or read Thai, my article (written 3 years ago) is a bit more right to this point.
I would need a few days maybe, to get myself back to my previous self .. or I might never becoming my previous self again. It's like saying the world is never the same place after the WWII.
Yeah, I can never know.
Anyway, one thing I do know .... The Show Must Go On ....
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| White (iPod) Christmas... |
| 12.17.04 (7:32 pm) [edit] |
According to AppleInsider's article: Overall iPod sales surge, iPod photo demand mediocre:
According to a recent analysis of shipping data conducted by sources close to AppleInsider, Apple Computer's 20GB and 40GB iPod digital music players have been met with increasing demand in recent weeks.
Of the two offerings, the 20GB player appears to be the most sought after model, with backorders to the company's reseller and distribution channels listing wait times of up to 3 weeks.
On the other hand, the recently introduced 40GB and 60GB iPod photo models appear to be in ample supply, indicating a lesser demand for the higher priced players. Both models are available to ship to all channels within a 24-hour time period.
The iPod mini demand can be slightly depending on colors:
Data also reveals that iPod mini players are on the verge of scarcity, though Apple appears to have anticipated heightened demand for the blue-colored players. Shipping data indicates slightly better availability of the blue model when compared to the other minis, specifically when customers place orders directly from the company.
So, want an iPod for making a white christmas? (yeah, I'm making fun of the iPod's white color). Well, maybe you have to get the iPod photo since it might be the only thing available. For the mini, good luck finding the color you like.
I looked at the iPod photo, and I quite like it personally. If the price is a bit lower, I might have ordered one already. It's a bit expensive right now for my taste (and not so gentle to my bank account). Also, I think it's a bit thick...
Anyway, my poorly-taken photos should look nice on it :-)))
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| Energy research, or Dark future |
| 12.15.04 (10:13 pm) [edit] |
Nobel laureate Professor Richard Smalley of Rice University is calling on the U.S. government to fund the research on alternative energy, or else face the consequence:
"It may be a greater challenge for us than the Cold War...to make it possible for 10 billion people to live the lifestyle you are used to in a way that doesn't cause unacceptable impacts on the environment," he told an audience of scientists at the International Electron Devices Meeting taking place in San Francisco this week. "There is no escaping the problem. The consequences will be terrorism, pestilence, famine."
Read more from CNET News Article: Nobel laureate rings energy alarm bell.
This make me wonder a bit about my home country. When we will begin to realize the truth, that we also overuse energy, much more than what we suppose to? I don't have any number that indicating anything with me now. But we have to become much more serious about energy, too.
Also, on another issue ... when (the hell) would we start doing serious basic research in Thailand? Research works that will make us understand things around us in our home country better, and eventually being able to make the optimal use of them. There's no way that manipulation and optimal (or even good) usage will come before understanding.
I also have heard of a disturbing rumor that research money is being pull off. Currently, Thailand already under-spending in academic and research. ... Well, I could go on, but will stop here.
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| Mac OS X Update: 10.3.7 |
| 12.15.04 (9:47 pm) [edit] |
Apple had released the new update to its Mac OS X operating, official version number 10.3.7, only weeks after the previous update, 10.3.6. Get it using your Software Update, or download it from Apple's Download page.
The details of this update can be found here
I have heard people having more trouble than usual Mac OS X updates with the 10.3.6 (the most common case is the slow booting), even though I had none myself. My own experience with Mac OS X updates has been a very good and pleasenting one, compare to my experience with Windows updates. The only one I had slight problem with, was 10.3.2, which could solved by fixing the boot cache. I hope there will be less this time, even though hoping for absolutely no problem is somewhat impossible.
I installed 10.3.7 hours ago, and had been running many things on it since, including MSN messenger, iTunes, Safari (of course), Xcode, etc. Updated my iPod-mini once and connecting right now from AirPort wireless network. I'd like to report no problem (at least, so far).
On the side note, I have yet to do the usual routine of verifying/fixing permission, which should be performed everytime you update the Mac OS X. I will do it later today.
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| Emergence (book review) |
| 12.15.04 (5:06 pm) [edit] |
One of my favorite books on one of my favorite subjects (complex systems, interacting agents, algorithmic/computational aspects of nature, etc), Emergence by Steven Johnson, got reviewed in SlashDot (/.)
I hope to write my own reviews for all books I have one day ... if that is still in the realm of possibility (and I don't think so).
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