Still no progress in Thailand

Today the new government in Thailand was supposed to deliver their policy for the new government. But it was blocked by demonstrations by UDD, the new opposition. When are the people in Thailand going to get a government that can govern the country to make the people prosper. Now nothing happens, and nobody win on this.

Tomorrow they will try again to deliver the policy. Hope the demonstrators and police keep their calm and let the people of parliament go to work and kick start the country.

I do not know what to think ...

... about the situation in Thailand. OK, they have chosen a new government. Which is not liked by the ones who was in power, since they lost it. And I can understand that when you look at how it happened. Did the court really look at any real facts or only there own wallet. And also, the strange change in side of some of the politicians. Looks very much like money.

And now the new PM tries to show that everybody is same to the law. But still no action to the high party members who lead the occupation of the airports. I guess, if you're in the same party as the PM you are not touchable by the law. Anyway, police seem to be 'quick' to arrest the new opposition, while not caring of any crimes done by the new rulers.

Lets hope the new PM can show any real action that he will give everybody in Thailand the same treatment. And keep the country stable.

Note: Bangkok Post have a completely new layout.

PAD make chaos in Thailand

I have not had time to write about what is happening in Thailand. But now I can not really hold back. Not that I have more time. I only feel the need to put as much light as possible on what is happening in Thailand.

PAD that has been occupying the government buildings in Bangkok for some time now, have gotten tired to only sit there and nothing happens. So they have become active again. They have tried to occupy some other government buildings and now also the new airport. And they are using quite allot of violation too. There seem to be more about this in new outside of Thailand then inside. But I can not really confirm this. In the links to different newspapers bellow there is allot more articles.

If you understand Swedish, you can follow the progress at Maleés blog. She is very actively reporting the progress.

Read more: CNN, BBC, Bangkok Post, The Nation

18 years since last time

It is about 18 years since I played nethack. And no, it was not really fun to play again. I guess it would be little bit fun if I really felt I had some time. Or at least it would feel nostalgic. But I felt I had do try now when it is the yearly November tournament.

It is said to be the oldest game still in development/maintenance. But I do not feel like it could be called active development/maintenance. Last release was in December 2003. But at least people are still playing it. So in some way it is active.

To many things to do

Not that I was planning to write here very often. At the moment there are to many things to do. And nothing has really come to some kind of milestone so it is worth writing about.

About BMC Remedy AR System 7.1 at boot of windows. I think it is all about AR System trying to start before RPC has been set up on the machine. I have tried to set up dependency on the AR System service to the RPC service. But on the windows machines I have available nothing happens. All tools I have to check if the dependency is set show it is set. But at boot it is still the same, AR System start before RPC. I have asked the people managing and setting up windows, but they can not give me an answer why. Maybe AR System install should add that dependency. The workaround at the moment is to set the service to manual start and then start it as a schedule at start up. It works.

Another thing I also tried about the start up of AR System. On a service you can set what to do if start up fails. But it does not do what I set it to do. So either windows does not detect the failure, or the setting is not read by windows.

More BMC. I kind of was surprised about how fast and how well they seemed to handle the reimbursement of my cost for the canceled conference. But now I am still waiting for the money. One part, the conference fee, they blame people quit work. So they have not had time to manage all reimbursements. And the cost for travel seem to have gotten stuck too. Yesterday, after I asked for more info, I got a new mail saying that they have accepted to pay my cost. And the again want my bank info.

I do not know if this is fun or sad. I know a person who reported a bug about BMC Remedy Usertool 7.1. It was already reported and BMC answered it was scheduled for release in 7.5.1. 7.5 does not even exist yet. OK, it is not a production critical bug. But for us users who use keyboard shortcuts it is really annoying. In some special situations pressing Ctrl-Enter does not save the record, it opens a new modify window.

Patch 5 problem update

The problem during boot does not seem to be only patch 5. And what I can see is that this start to happen when you add Microsoft KB958644. I have not been able to verify this 100%. But when I add this patch AR System fail to start during boot of windows.

Update: After looking at the event log to see what patches been installed I can not see any thing around when we started see this with patch 5. But patch 4 seem to have stopped working after Microsoft KB958644 was applied. It is the new very important security patch. Maybe this problem is some access right problem.

Patch 5 not only happy days

One thing we noticed with patch 5, looks like a user thing, is that if you have a selection field that is NULL and you make a push in an active link to another selection field, it will not set the other field to NULL but to 0(zero). It is not there in patch 4. BMC has accepted it as a bug, I think.

Another thing is that a AR System 7.1 patch 4 server installed on windows 2003 server had no problem to start on boot-up of windows when TCD-Specific-Port is set. But on an exactly same windows 2003 server system with AR System 7.1 patch 5 it can not bind to the port. It does not matter which one I choose, all ports I tried is over 10000. If you not specify TCD-Specific-Port it just works fine.

AR System 7.1 is still not as stable as you would like. I have not run so many tests on 7.5 yet. So I do not know if it is better, but I hope.

Taskbar Shuffle problem?

I downloaded Taskbar Shuffle 2.5. Main reason why I chose that over some other programs is that it supports Windows 2000. But after running it on an Windows XP machine I could se that Taskbar Shuffle used VERY much memory, 110MB. I wonder how it can be. On my Vista machine I have not seen this behavior at all. Normally stay around 2,5MB. I might have read the numbers in Process Explorer wrong on the XP machine. But I do not think so.

On the Windows XP machine I installed Taskix to see how that works. OK, it does not have all features. But it seems to stay at only using 1MB of memory. More like what I would expect a small utility like this.

xNeat also makes a program to shuffle the taskbar which looks nice. As do their clipboard program. But this is not freeware.

Update(2008-10-11): after monitoring Taskbar Shuffle on my vista machine I get the feeling I look wrong on the XP machine. So I guess I need to have a look again on the XP machine. But the XP machine was using very much memory and TS looked very big.

Update(2008-10-16): now I have been able do try Taskbar Shuffle on XP again. And it directly start using 110MB of memory. And it is REAL memory. I will use Taskix on XP for now.

Patch 5 for AR System 7.1 released

First fix I noticed in the release notes for the server was this about the version number for Java. I have not tried yet to see if it really works. But it is nice if it works.

Another thing we just noticed on a 7.1p4 server was that we get ARWARN 66 on push fields. And that is fixed in patch 5. And it looks like it is working.

Not only the server is patched. user/migrator/mid-tier/email/approval/flashboard are all updated. User include fix for not being able to sort on first column in result list.

Sometimes I wonder how they can have so many bugs in the system. And the reason now for so many fixes is that now people start using 7.1, and then report all the bugs.

Police use teargas

So now the police tries to clear the mob outside the parliament. I am new to Thai politics. But what I here the People Alliance for Democracy(PAD) want to take away the peoples right to vote. And now, to get their will, they occupying the Parliament. OK, the people who in the parliament now is maybe not the most democratic people. But they win the vote of the people. Stop fighting and start planning for the next election. It is OK to show that you do not like the government. But not like this. Gather you information and tell the people. Then win the next election.

Update: look at the pictures down to the left, is it a hand grenade. Who is holding it?

Read more: CNN, BBC, Bangkok Post, The Nation (pictures), Thairath

Note: I really would like to be better at Thai language, so I could understand the Thai news.

Rearrange the taskbar

This is one feature I have been waiting for MicroSoft to put into Windows for a long time. I just do not understand why it is not there. Especially now when tabs are so popular and all software use them and can rearrange the tabs. I have not used GUI that much in Linux. But now I have at least one desktop running Gnome 2.22 on Linux. And there it work great with moving the applications on the panel. And it probably have for a long time.

I have not really look for how to write my own program that do this. Or looked hard on the internet if somebody else have done it. But the other day when I read lifehacker I ran into this. It was linked to by some other entry. It mentions a program called Taskbar Shuffle. It looked like an active project so I downloaded and tried. It works fine, both in Windows 2000 and Vista.

I also search little bit on the internet. And found another program named Taskix. I have not tired it. It say it only support Windows XP or later. Taskbar Shuffle can move icons in the system tray, I see nothing about that in Taskix.

Fujitsu UMPCs

Things are moving to fast, and I do not have time writing.

I have been looking little bit more on computers that does not fit into the UMPC standard. And I got stuck with Fujitsu. Lifebook T5010 looks nice. But I guess that an 2kg laptop is to heavy to hold with one hand and writing with the other. And even if it is 13.3" screen it will only produce 1280x800 in resolution. Slightly smaller, 12.1" screen, and lighter is the Lenovo X200t. Same resolution.

I hope they soon can make higher resolution on a 12.1". Minimum of 1080 lines for HD-movies. Not that I would buy this for watch movies. But when travel, especially with the kids, it would be nice to be able to play something of your own choice.

On the upside of these machines to normal UMPCs is longer battery life and faster. And bigger screen is nice if you working longer times at the computer. There are probably tons of other brands that do the same. But the reason why looked extra at the Fujitsu is that I meet people who say that they always work, never any problem. But I guess you can find both ends on all brands.

Little bit funny is this jkkmobile review of a 5.6" screen Fujitsu.

Also, ubuntu mobile seem to be up to speed. Support of new hardware and specially tweaked GUI for small screens. Looks promising. I'm not sure I really would throw away the default on a Fujitsu/Lenovo if I'm going to use it for work. But it would be nice to use something lighter on a smaller device then Windows Vista.

BMC Userworld October 2008 will be October 2009

Now I received an e-mail from BMC stating that BMC Userworld October 2009 will happen. And I read it as BMC Userworld October 2008 will not happen, it is rescheduled for October 2009. Location for October 2009 was not released.

This was supposed to be my first BMC Userworld even though my main occupation has been related to BMC Remedy Action Request System for the last 12 years. And now it is rescheduled for next year.

The e-mail I received was mainly how to get reimbursed for the expenses you already have for the BMC Userworld 2008. Sounds like they are going to be generous. But I always get the feeling with American companies that they will ignore everybody from outside USA anyway. But lets not get ahead of the events. I will do everything requested and hope for the money back.

This is a really nice UMPC device

jkkmobile blog did a good review of the Kohjinsha SX3 UMPC. There are many things about this UMPC I like. Maybe should be little bit less of all the ports and things and instead do the 1.6GHz Intel Atom, and NOT run Vista. Being able to turn the screen so you can use it as tablet is good. If there just could be some good software to use it for taking notes I would be very happy. Organizing and searching among my own notes when on meetings, and making new notes with text and drawings. Just like paper but better organized.

Also I would like to see how linux would do on this UMPC. I do not know where linux dists are when it comes to touch screen and handwriting. I would really like to have an UMPC same size as Kohjinsha SX3 and at least 1280x768 in resolution, runing some linux dist. And be really fast and have long battery time.

Read more: UMPCportal, engadget, gizmodo

Will peace or chaos follow

Now the court have ruled that prime minister Samak Sundaravej is guilty of having other work when prime minister, which is not allowed. He cooked food on a TV-show. Samak himself say he do for free, so not really working. So now they have to choose a new prime minister. I am not sure if this also have to make new governing coalition, which can be the same as now. Or if it is only the prime minister.

Thai politics is far far away from what we are used to in Europe. You can not really call them a true democracy. One of the 'funny' things at the moment is that the party that call them self the democratic party is suggesting that only the elite can vote for government. This to stop the farmers from choosing what the democratic party think is the wrong rulers. Is that democracy??

I hope the events now will stabilize the situation so there can be some progress in the evolution of democracy in Thailand.
Read more: Bangkokpost, The Nation, Thairath

Another thing , when are the killings going to stop in south of Thailand? I reading in the news about some government official first shoot and the decapitated.
Read more: Bangkokpost The Nation Thairath

Looks like BMC UserWorld 2008 will happen

The talk among the customers have partly been about BMC UserWorld 2008 will be canceled since it would be hard to find a new venue in such a short notice. But the e-mail from BMC sent on Friday to already registered persons say that they already have a new venue and will come back shortly with the new time and place.

Also, this e-mail alse say "BMC will cover any airfare penalties you incur when switching your travel plans from Miami to the new location". I hope this will be true. I am not sure yet if I have to book a new ticket or if I can change mine.

Is Bangkok becoming a warzone?

At the moment it looks like there is big fights between the people in the oposition and people who support the current goverment. So far it is only police who try to stop the fighting. But military might move in. Hope not. The oposition want the military take the power again and put out new elections.

So far news in Sweden does not show much about this. And it might also be that media is being held up in Thailand too. Some normal channels of new are black at the moment.

BMC UserWorld 2008 in Miami is going to be rescheduled

Looks like there are some problem with the hotel where the conference was to be held. So the conference have to move. At the moment there is no information about new time and/or new location.

Damn. Lucky I have not booked hotel yet. But the plane ticket. Hope I can change it.

The updated patch 4

So now I have finally upgraded the 7.1 systems I have running to the updated patch 4. The version reported now is 7.1.00 Patch 004 200808100630. The original patch 4 reported the version like this, 7.1.00 Patch 004 200807081308. So keep that in mind, patch 4 should show 20080810 in the date part of the version string. Very important.

The updated patch fixed, “Out-of-the-box” reports were not available to standard users after
patch 004 was installed.

Urgent update to Total Commander

Only two days after 7.04 was released 7.04a was released. There was some serious bug about deleting files. It deleted the wrong files in certain situations. And I only noticed today. Slow again.

Also updated recently is KeePass, the program I use to remember my passwords. Available both in Windows and Linux. But the Linux version is behind in functionality. But they can read the same files. Great.

OK, have to mention the Olympics

I do not know what is happening with sports. Maybe it is media or maybe it is money. Or I do not know. But it is so much talk about corruption and unfair ruling. Especially in sports where referees judge your performance. And today a Swedish wrestler loose the semifinal after some very strange rulings from the referees. It would be nice to here the reason for the ruling and the pictures to support that.

The Olympics also brings some fun for us computer geeks. Most famous so far is the BSoD at the opening ceremony.

Remedy blunder

Now BMC have released an update of patch 4 of AR System 7.1. An update, why not a new patch. This only make chaos. Patch 4 contains updates to clients/server/email/approval/midtier. This new update to patch 4 is only the server. So now, how do you know you have the latest or not. You have to go look at the files. Very stupid.

Since it is the server that is updated it might show a new date in the version of the server. I have not looked yet. So I do not know. I will install the update soon, and report back.

EGC 2008 is over

Now the main tournament is over. Actually, the whole event is over. I don't know if Sweden did better then normal. Of curse there where more Swedish players in a European Go Congress then normal, but was the results better then normal. Looking only at how many games you win might only show you're ranked too low. But anyway, Peter Karlsson[1d] and Niclas Solin[2k] both win 8 out of 10 games. Congratulations. WeiYing Gu[5d] win 7 out 10 and ended as number 21 in the tournament and the best Swedish player. Fredrik Blomback[4d] was in the top group at the start and played stronger players then WeiYing Gu. Fredrik only won 5 games and ended as number 26.

Now I have to get the time to play some tournament in Stockholm soon.

Computer go landmark.

At the US Go Congress, played at the same time as the European Go Congress, they had a computer go event where a 8 dan professional lost to a computer program. OK, I think the program got a 9 stone handicap on a 19x19 board. The article in American Go Associations e-journal is a little bit cryptic. But anyway, it was a program based on the Monte Carlo algorithm, which would scale well with parallel processing. The program used 800 processors borrowed from a supercomputer. It was also featured on slashdot.

Monte Carlo and the brute force used for chess give strength to the programs. But I would not call it thinking. I wonder if soon we could study some new and strong moves made by programs like this to improve our thinking.

Now the tension grows ...

... as EGC 2008 is coming close to the end. 8 rounds out of 10 in the main tournament has been played. And not so surprising Catalin Taranu from Romania is the number one European player at number 6. Top Swedish player is Girlwing at number 20.

Yesterday computer go tournament did not end so well for GNU Go. I wonder why. I have not looked at the games. Maybe somebody will put some regression test from the games.

At the moment I very much feel like programming on some go program. I actually would like to get my own program up to speed. But it would also be interesting to get some good things into GNU Go. I'm on the mailing list and what I see the activity is low. But the activity list for next minor release, 3.8, is long.

I've missed a new release of Total Commander

I have totally missed that Total Commander have released a new version. OK, it is only a minor release. But anyway. It is a program I use every day and a program that I used to be active in beta testing. So now 7.04 of Total Commander is available.

Tomorrow the computers play in EGC 2008

7 rounds in the main tournament has been played. And tomorrow it will be a resting day for the main tournament. Instead there will be a computer go tournament. I wonder when my program will play in some tournament. Or when will I play in a tournament.

It would have been nice to be able to watch the games live on KGS tomorrow. But I have to work. No way to watch the games. I hope the games will be published after the tournament so I can look. It is kind of stupid to want to watch the computer games when I should look at strong human players instead.

My friends Boywing and Girlwing win their games today. And what is Girlwing writing in her blog, marry Boywing??

Some geek humor from China

You probably already read this in hundreds/thousands other blogs or news. slashdot.org had this as news this morning. Computer geek humor.

First time I went to Thailand, 15 years ago, I thought it very funny with all these bad translations. But those were probably not related to automated translation. And you still find them in Thailand. Next time maybe I will make a collection of pictures of stupid translations.

In Sweden we have for a long time had this site to find laughs about stupid translations. The site is not only about translations. And to understand the fun there, you should be good at Swedish language.

Little bit late

...but now the results for round 5 at EGC 2008 is up.

New patch for AR System 7.1

Today BMC released patch 4 of BMC Remedy AR System 7.1.

No note about liking the version numbers reported by Java 1.6.0_04 and later. I guess I should try to install and see. Thank god to virtual machines.

It looked like some really serious bugs were fixed on the server. None that I have experienced. Also some table field bug in Usertool. I do not like it. Every new version of Usertool have new behavior of tables.

Round 4 at EGC 2008 finished

OK, I really do not have any feeling for writing anything. But round 4 at EGC 2008 had been played and there is a new look to the result page. Enjoy.

Round 3 at EGC 2008

I wonder, are all players 1-9 professionals? In that case, top amateur European player is a Swedish player. OK, it is to early to make any assumptions about that, since player 5-23 have the same MMS. And it is only round 3 of 10.

Both Boywing and his girlfriend win today. Results from round 3 here.

Tomorrow there are no games in the main tournament. Only other activities. I am actually interested to see what happens in the computer tournament next Wednesday.

Microsoft PR-stunt, and Vista instability

You probably read about this already in all the IT-news. People who see a version of Vista that say it is something else thinks it is really good. It is just a PR-stunt. You do not see all the problems just from a demo. You need to use it.

Basically I think many of the new things in Vista is good. UAC is basically the same as using SUDO in Linux. And programs that have problems with UAC are mostly written wrong about where the program should put things.

But, the feeling about Vista is that it is very unstable. And it feels like it is degrading over time. The only Vista system I am using actively was installed 8 month ago. And I've done all upgrades from Microsoft. And I have double checked most of the drivers connected to hardware. And after getting the correct version of the network card driver installed, the system has run without any BSoD. But today, for the second time in one week the system just freeze. You can do nothing. It looks like the disk is somewhat active. Only thing to do is a hard reboot.

Today I have googled for this problem. But I get to many hits to get any real hint of the problem. Maybe I should run some kind of check of all the system files to see if it is the correct ones. I just wonder what tool is best for that? Should I run recover from the CD? Will it really check the files in the way I want?

I guess I let it be for the moment. But if it will start to happen often I have to do something.

More about EGC, second round

Yeah yeah, but EGC is now, so I write about EGC now.

EuroGoTV have live TV-feed of the top tables. I have not tried to watch. I have no access when the games are playing. KGS should also have live feed of the top games.

Results from round 2 is up. Today they show the nationality instead of club. Much more interesting. It would have been nice to have a more interactive scoreboard. Filter for country. And other nice things.

First round at EGC 2008 played

So, the first day of the main tournament is over. The results are posted here. First when I looked the list looked very strange. But now the sorting seem better. I wonder how the top-group was chosen.

I wonder if there is any publications of the games. Or is it only in the players private blogs. Would be fun to look at. I wonder if my friend Boywing sorted out his notes from the first game.

Tomorrow EGC 2008 starts

The European Go Congress 2008 starts tomorrow, the 26 of July, in Leksand, Sweden. I will miss it. When it finally comes to Sweden, I can still not go.