Hacking Bangkok

U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds are in Bangkok Today!

2009-10-10T10:57:00.005+07:00

Just a quick post to let anyone know (who might read this i the next two hours, anyway!) that the United States Air Force's aerial demonstration team, the Thunderbirds, will be doing a show today at Bangkok's Don Muang airport (the old airport, in case you forgot!) at 1 pm. Gates open at 12:00 noon, and I'm sure there will be food and drinks, but the main thing is to see these amazing pilots and fighter planes doing acrobatics in the sky at about a thousand miles per hour!

You read additional details at the U.S. Embassy of Thailand's website. According to their site, "Public entrance will be at the Fire Lane 4 Gate on the AOT side of Don Muang airport." It's not often in Bangkok that, as an expat, I get to see stuff like this, so I'm going!

HTC Brings The Magic (literally!) to Bangkok and Chiang Mai

2009-07-31T13:36:00.006+07:00

Being a proud card-carrying member of the HTC e-Club, I get the occasional HTC promo announcement in my inbox. Okay, I lied about the card, I only signed up to the e-club thing to get updated ROMs for my Touch Diamond. I've been pretty closely following all the latest high-end smartphones, especially the Palm PRE (seen in GSM form in Vietnam!), the iPhone 3GS, and the slew of Android phones like the HTC 'Magic' and 'Hero', the Samsung i7500, and assorted rumors of a Motorola Android budget slider.

While I wish that HTC was popping the cork on the 'Hero' here in the land of smiles, at least we're getting some love: they're having a couple of shindigs here to get Thailand's techies interested in Android in general, and the HTC Magic in particular. AIS, a cellular carrier here, is co-sponsoring the event. You can register for either event at the HTC Thailand website (note - it's in Thai, but you can view a Google-translated version here).

Okay, details! According to the email (also in Thai, natch):

"HTC is pleased to invite you to experience the world-class Android mobile OS with the HTC Magic on August 1 - 2 from 1:00 pm until 6:00 pm at the Digital Arena (4th floor), in the "Digital Gateway @ Siam" center [Kirk's note: this is the building that looks like a giant coke-bottle when seen from the Siam BTS upper-platform], and on August 9th from 1:00 pm until 6:00 pm at the Century Tara Hotel ballroom in Chiang Mai."
*note - yes, that's a Vodafone Magic pictured.

Notorious gadget-lover 'Ice' on the cover of Maxim (Thai edition).

They're not being shy about their target demographic here - the email says that "beautiful, young, sexy star 'Ice' Apitsada Kruakongkah will be there to chat about her experiences with Android". Here's the Google Image search for her... For the Thai-literate, her name is อภิษฎา เครือคงคา (Thai people all have nicknames, her's is "Ice"). So it's a safe bet that the place will be crawling with young, male techies...

Moving on! The event will have workshops on Android, the Android Marketplace, and using the HTC Magic. Attendees will have a chance to win their very own Magic, or (for the rest of us) to buy one for the promo price of 21,900 Baht (about $644, unlocked, no contract required). To soften the blow, it comes with an AIS SIM card (from their pre-paid "One-2-Call" brand) with 30 hours of talk-time preloaded. To even further soften the blow, you can pay in interest-free (for 6 months) installments using your KTC, CitiBank, or Krung Sri GE card, if you're packing one. And yes - GE is that GE.... long-tentacled beast.

So if you're in Thailand, or needed a good reason to come (as if), come check out HTC's not-quite-latest Android smartphone. Or just come ogle Miss Apitsada. Either way!

Succumbing To The Gaming Bug: Half-Life 2 and My Sort-of Gaming PC

2009-07-16T11:45:00.009+07:00

Back in April, I was trawling the Gizmodo site to avoid doing actual work one weekend, and read about some "insane" deal on PC games from game-developer Valve (who I'd barely heard of). The deal was for a package of games, delivered via Valve's online-download service/gaming-community site/software, Steam. The package - called the Orange Box - was up for $10 (or 10€ if you're in Euroland!), and included Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2, a mini-episode called "The Lost Coast", plus "Portal", and Team Fortress 2 (a month-pass to the multi-player version).

Full disclaimer - before reading the Giz article, I had only vaguely heard of Valve and Steam, had never heard of Half-Life (or the sequal, HL2), or Portal. The last PC game I played was Unreal Tournament, back in 2001 or so. I was just never a gamer - other than UT (which I didn't play that much anyway), I really hadn't been into games since the days of Joust, and the original arcade vector-graphic Star Wars (and Battle Zone for that matter). And if you're too young to remember those, well, I played Star Wars in the arcades in the mid-80s. Heck, the last game I really loved was Missile Command, from the early 1980s. Doh!

So anyway - it was a boring weekend, and for 10 bucks, I figured I would bite. I bought the pack, and download "Half-Life 2" first. And then promptly forgot about it for two weeks.

Eventually, I fired it up on my two-year-old Thinkpad T60 (Core2Duo 2.0 GHz, ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 discrete graphics with 128 MB VRAM, 3 GB DDR RAM), and started playing on a Thursday night about 9 pm. And from the opening scene, on the train into City 17, I was pretty hooked.

I had no idea what the game was about - didn't bother to read up on it first - so it came as a bit of a shock to me when I noticed my bedroom getting lighter, and realized the friggin sun was coming up! It was after 5 am. Doh!!!

Over the next week, I spent waaay too many hours finally "winning" (if you can call the wierd ending "winning"). Some of the puzzles took a long time to solve, and I decided early on not to look up anything on the web, so I died a lot of stupid deaths figuring things out. Half-Life 2 is, bar none, the best computer-game I've ever played. Even on a laptop that was decidedly not made for gaming (lucky for me, HL2 is from 2004, so my circa-2007 Thinkpad and graphics card did a decent job of keeping the frame-rate high).

But for playing the episodes, and portal (and for watching downloaded movies & shows on the HDTV in my bedroom), something a little beefier was needed. There is a ton of info on the web on every component of a "gaming system". I read the excellent "$800 Killer Gaming PC" article on ExtremeTech, although I didn't go with their system. I wanted something that didn't look like a gaming PC (or a PC at all, really) that would fit in my bedroom, and pull double-duty as a Windows Media Center. Plus, it didn't need to be super-high-end: it's hooked up to a 720p HDTV, which has a mas resolution of 1366x768. And, like most techies, I have a box of old components and stuff I could salvage, to cut costs. So here's what I made:

The parts I scavenged from my box-o-junk (meaning, I didn't have to buy!):

2 x 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA-II drives out of an IBM x-series server.
LG DVD r/w drive, which spent some time in that same IBM server - and so had a black faceplate already slapped on it from last time I re-used it.
LinkSys WUSB11 WiFi adapter (which dates waaaay back!)
Very thin IR remote control + USB receiver (from some tuner-card I don't remember)
Cheap wireless keyboard with pointing stick, which has great range anyway (like, more than 10 feet)
Windows 7 Ultimate RC, which I had already downloaded. It's good until next April or something, and free until then!

Stuff I bought from Pantip Plaza, the nearby giant computer/gadgets mall:

Gigabyte EG45M motherboard
Intel Core2Duo 2.8 GHz dual-core CPU (45 nm lithography)
ATI Radeon HD4870 graphics card (512 MB version) from HIS
4 GB of DDR2 RAM
OCZ Silencer 500W power supply
SilverStone SST-SG01-F case

Total cost: 20,500 Thai Baht (about $595 at the time I bought it).

I almost opted for the all-aluminum version of the SilverStone case - it's lighter and allegedly dissipates heat better - but it was about $40 more than the steel one I got, and I'm not going to be moving this thing around much anyway. Another compromise was the Core2Duo, rather than a Core i7; the i7 chips are a lot more expensive, and (more importantly) the motherboards that support it are a lot pricier too. Instead, I put money into the graphics card.

The Radeon HD4870 is a pretty high-end card, but I got it for about 5,500 baht (~ $160 USD), probably because the newer HD4890 card is out. The 4890 was close to double the price, but maybe 20% faster in the reviews I read. And like I said - I'm generally playing at 128x720, or maybe 1680x1050 if I plug it into my "work" monitor, so at $160, it was a no-brainer. Plus it supports DirectX 10, Microsoft's new 3D video tech.

Probably the most interesting thing (or at least, surprising because it was interesting!) was the lowly power-supply. It had this high-end "feeling" (coating?), all the cables ran through mesh-tubing to keep them from getting tangled, and it provides power to the USB ports even when the computer itself is off. This is great for charging an iPhone or, say, my Touch Diamond overnight. Plus, it really is silent - from more than a foot away, you literally can't hear it (or the case-fans either - kudos to SilverStone for great ventilation design and silent fans).

I didn't take screen-caps, and photographing a TV with a digital camera leaves something to be desired, but Half-Life 2 (especially Episode 2, and the Lost Coast) and Portal look just amazing, with all settings cranked to "high" and anti-aliasing on. Later, I bought "Crysis" (again, using Steam's online store), and that also runs smoothly at 1280x720 with settings at "high". The Gigabyte micro-ATX board supports up to a quad-core "Core2Extreme" CPU, so there's some room for upgrading. The saddest thing is that Portal (while fun) and Crysis (beautiful) aren't nearly as fun as HL2. Later, I read that HL2 was one of the highest-rated games of all time, so maybe my expectations are high now. I'll check out "Left4Dead" at some point too (L4D 2 is coming out this fall also...).

This is a photo of HL2 Episode 2, in the beginning, with in-game "girlfriend" or whatever Alyx is supposed to be:

You'll just have to trust me that it looks much better in real life, especially moving with perfectly fluid motion (that BenQ TV only refreshes at 60 Hz, and HL is rendering faster than that).

For all the gamers out there (at least, any gamers that find my blog, hahah), this is probably old, old, OLD info - even Crysis isn't really a new game - but for me, being immersed in Half-Life 2 was really eye-opening. It's like starring in your own movie, with special effects that Lucas and Spielberg could only dream of when I was a kid. Now, if Valve would just hurry up and finish Half-Life Episode 3, (or even HL3?) then I'd have a chance to really feed my addiction again!

Some Phone-cam Shots From Turatao Park

2009-05-07T00:13:00.001+07:00

I'm sending this from my phone, with it's *very* sketchy EDGE connection, while sitting in an open-air reggae bar on a beach at Koh Lipe. So, I've got my fingers crossed that the pics will make it through at all.

My back is totally sunburnt, but the all-day snorkeling trip was great - went to two smaller islands, plus three other dive/snorkel spots. The fact that I can access email and (in limited, slow fashion) the web, while riding in a wooden longtail boat off the coast of Thailand still amazes me, when I stop complaining about the crappy bandwidth for a minute!

Last nite, I tried playing "Half Life 2: Episode 1", with the trackpoint (pointing stick) on Thinkpad - let's just say, for some things, you *really* need a mouse or trackball. I died about 11 times taking refugees to the train station.

There's some updated info on the never-ending 3G saga in Thailand (hint: delayed!!), I'll post an update when I have a real keyboard.

Breakfast on the Beach at Koh Lipe

2009-05-06T10:07:00.001+07:00

This was the view from my breakfast table, I'm at Koh Lipe (an island off the coast of southern Thailand)l I'm on that boat RIGHT NOW trying to send this before I lose EDGE connectivity. Going snorkeling today, diving tomorrow!

Thailand is just amazing.

Commercial Fusion Powerplants - Finally Less Than 30 Years Away?

2009-04-26T22:19:00.004+07:00

ITER - "Maybe in 2050"

For as long as I can remember (and a lot longer, actually), nuclear fusion as an energy source has been touted as "30 years away" from reality. Other than a very short few weeks twenty years ago, when two scientists (Pons and Fleischmann) announced they they had achieved room-temperature fusion - which turned out to be a dud - fusion for power has been pretty much an R&D effort only.

Heck - instead of getting closer, a working fusion reactor that puts out more power than it uses up has seemed to actually recede into the future; the global consortium of countries that finally decided to build a test reactor is planning to flip the switch on it sometime after 2018. The consortium, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), is building their beast (see the rendering above) in France. Their fast-track plan (meaning, "if all goes well"), would lead to the first commercial fusion plant starting to put out some juice around the year 2050. Yawn!

Full power to lasers, Scotty!

Not that I'm knocking their project - having fusion power in 2050 beats the crap out of "never", but yowza, this project was actually started back in 1985, and they just broke ground last year (in 2008). So I wouldn't hold your breath.

Slightly smaller in scale than ITER's tokamak is America's "National Ignition Facility" (seen posing as a Death Star under construction in photo), a DOE project.

While NIT is more aimed at modeling mini-explosions using boucoup lasers (192 world-beating lasers that all fire simultaneously), they also think they'll beat ITER to the "break-even" punch by years, possibly by 2012. Going from there to a commercial reactor is still a loongggg way, though. Call it 2030 or so.

Enter, private enterprise. Much like SpaceX and Scaled Composites have shaken up the space business, it seems there are a few companies working on commercial fusion power. And I'm not talking about complete frauds, like the infamous "Steorn Energy" (which put an ad in The Economist a few years ago declaring they'd invented a perpetual motion machine...). And some of these companies are raising millions in capital - no mean feat in the teeth of a global recession, if they can pull it off. Others raised millions over the past few years.

Just in the past few weeks, I've read about a few different companies all working on fusion. Helion Energy, which built the plasma fusion prototype shown in the photo at right (photo from Fast Company's website), is looking for $20 million right now. Granted, their prototype looks like it came straight out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab, but if the full-scale model they're hoping to build works, I'm guessing they plan to have something commercial before 2050!! (According to the Fast Company article, they hope to have a commercial plant running by 2022 or so).

Another company is the very secretive Tri Alpha Energy (their site is currently "under construction", although the internet archive shows it from last year with the simple message, "TRI ALPHA ENERGY, Inc. is a company dedicated to energy research". According to Wikepedia, Tri Alpha is working on a type of beam-collision fusion, also referred to in one article as a "plasma electric generator". They raised a cool $40 million in 2007, and haven't uttered a public peep about the fusion research since - although they did announce some sort of solar-powered electric-car charging station last year (so, I really have no idea if they're covering all bets or what?)

There are a few other companies out there - General Fusion and Electron Power Systems - which have also gotten some press. And finally - this year, on the 20th anniversary of the original conference where Pons & Fleischmann made their ill-fated announcement - a scientist at the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) announced - wait for it! - that she had, in fact, found strong evidence of cold fusion. Only, she was too clever to call it that - now it's "low energy nuclear reactions", since "cold fusion" has that "oh crap, this is bogus" ring to it.

So - we've got the long, longggg term international effort, the medium-term U.S. national effort, and some scrappy start-ups all either cutting metal, or getting ready to test out hardware. Is fusion's time finally here, or at least less than 30 years away?

I think it is. With global climate change providing part of the impetus, and a finite (if large) amount of oil that has spiked above $100/barrel in the past, there's definitely incentive like never before to pull it off. And I don't think we'll be waiting until 2050, honestly.

x86 Smartphones - Still Inevitable, and Almost Here!

2009-04-22T14:32:00.005+07:00

In a blog-post last November, I wrote about what I think is the inevitability of x86 (or x64) smartphones . I wanted to follow-up on that post with a quick look at what's happened in the five months since, and give a few more reasons why I still think that IA (Intel-architecture) chips will be the brains of most high-end smartphones within five years.

Right now, chips designed to run ARM's risc-based instruction set (usually just called "ARM" CPUs, even though they're made by a variety of companies) power every high-end smartphone that's in mass production: Apple's iPhone, the HTC Touch and Touch 2 series, Nokia's S60-based assorted models, the about-to-be-released Palm Pre, and the HTC Android handsets (G1 and G2, respectively) all use ARM CPUs. Companies like Marvell and Panasonic make the actual chips themselves. For a time, even Intel licensed ARM, for use in their "StrongARM" processors that powered early Windows Mobile PocketPCs like the Compaq iPaq.

In the past few months, Intel has shown off a prototype smartphone-like device, made by LG, which uses Intel's Moorestown platform. Moorestown (which uses a new "Atom" CPU) is one of many code-names for different chips and chipsets that Intel is working on, a lot of which are targeting the low-power market. While Intel talks a lot about "MIDs" (mobile internet device), these things haven't really taken off, and now Intel has put the circuitry for 3G wireless networks (e.g., cellphone communications) into new low-power system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs. They're showing off Atom processors that can "idle" at 0.65 watts (650 milliwatts), which is still a lot more than an ARM processor, but the next-gen of these chips will (according to Intel) idle at less than 100 milliwatts, which puts them in striking range of ARM chips. According to eWeek , LG will ship an x86 smartphone next year (2010).

So on the one hand, we've got x86 chips from Intel and Via (which makes the low-power-consumption "Nano" cpu) trending to lower and lower power-consumption, and on the other hand, we've got battery technology. Now, I know that batteries have been the dog of tech for a long time - the technological millstone around our mobile gadgets collective necks - but it is improving. The energy density (measured in Watt-hours per kilogram, or "Wh/Kg") of lithium-ion (Lion) batteries has roughly tripled since 1995. So for a same-weight battery, you get three times more juice. If you look at a graph of the average energy density over time - see the graph on page 4 of "Trends in energy and power supply of mobile phones" (PDF) - it's pretty clear that batteries are following their own very slow version of Moore's law.

There has been a rash of news over the past two or three years about dramatic improvements to the energy density of Lion batteries; most of these have involved changing the makeup of the cathode and anode, or using nanotechnology to change their microscopic "shape". Some of these improvements really qualify as breakthroughs - we're talking three to ten times the current energy density. It looks like lion batteries will, in about five years time, store at least triple the power they do now, and maybe a lot more.

And what's the biggest single advantage of the ARM chips used now? They're power-sippers, using half or less, of the power of even Intel's Moorestown CPU (which isn't even out yet). And the companies that make ARM chips will no doubt try to improve their performance. But we're rapidly approaching the point where a battery the same size as the ones used in smartphones today, will power an x86-based smartphone for just as long as they power ARM chips today, and maybe close to as long as the ARM chips they'll be competing with. Let's call it 2013 or so. So, what will be the advantage, then, of the x86 smartphone? Some of these I talked about in my other post - things like using existing device-drivers, not needing to re-compile existing desktop software, and the massive base of software developers who write apps for PCs, Macs, and the most popular Linux hardware (which is x86). When x86 is knocking on your market-segment, history has shown that "close" is "close enough".

Another advantage will come from what I think might be a new popular form-factor for computers: I think we'll start to see modular computers, where the CPU and a touch-screen (along with a few tens of GB of storage) are in your smartphone, and then you'll just pop that into a "docking bay" that has a full-sized keyboard, and a 15" monitor along with a bunch more storage (say, a TB or so), which you'll use as a laptop when you want that form factor. The GPU in the smartphone will probably be powerful enough for playing back HD movies, but for gaming, maybe your docking station has a discrete graphics card and another multi-core CPU to beef it up.

In other words - I think it's at least possible (not sure how probable!) that our mobile phones are going to become our computers, and that keyboards, screens, storage and 3D-graphics processing all become periphals. You won't need to "sync" your phone to your PC anymore, because your phone will be the PC. Plug it into your TV's HDMI port to watch movies you've downloaded, or even better, stream them via Bluetooth 3 (assuming you have some Bluetooth-to-HDMI plugged into your TV). If you're on a plane, or waiting in line at the post office (because some things never change), you can watch the same movie on the 3.5" touchscreen. Whatever OS you're running, my guess is it will have two totally different UI "modes", a mobile-centric one, and a "laptop" centric one. So when you're using it as a notebook, you can run Windows 8 (coming in 2012) or your favorite Mac OSX or Linux distro, and when you're out and about, you'll use something more like Android's UI.

Not everything I predicted is going to come to pass exactly like I've laid out here (how I wish I were that good!), but the overall trends of x86 chips needing ever less power, and batteries providing ever more power, are going to eventually mean we're all carrying around Intel or AMD computers and calling them "phones".

*Note - image via Flikr, taken at Intel's developer forum in 2008. My guess is, most of the developers are guys, based on what's on the screen!

Bar Camp Bangkok Returns: BarCamp Bangkok 3 (Rise of the Geeks!)

2009-04-22T11:06:00.005+07:00

For anyone who read the first few posts in this blog last year, you might remember that in August I wrote about the first BarCamp Bangkok. It was a two-day event, held on the (beautiful) campus of Chulalongkorn University. I actually posted a second blog entry from my phone, via email, where I gave a mini-wrap-up of my experiences on day one.

BarCamp is actually a user-generated content symposium, not a camp to learn how to make drinks, despite the name! Many of the people who show up come with a prepared presentation on their favorite I.T.-related topic, and at the beginning of the day, they post their topic on a wall. The topics with the most votes are get a room to present. There were upwards of eight or ten presentations going simultaneously last year, which sometimes meant choosing between hearing Google's team discuss Google Apps, or sitting in on the "How to date Japanese Girls - Tips from a Japanese Girl" (which was insanely popular with the Thai guys, natch!)

Oh - for anyone wondering about BarCamp 2, that was held in Vietnam. I would loved to have gone; Franz Nitz, the friend I went to BarCamp at Chula with, did go to the one in Vietnam - I'll have to find out from him how it stacked up! Since he has a Google news-alert set up on his name, I'm betting he'll find this post, and let me know ;-)

BarCamp Bangkok 3 (hit the link for the official site) will be held on May 23-24, 2009 at Sripatum University. The Sripatum website does have a map, but the entire site is in Thai (and completely in Flash), so I'm posting a Google Map of the location here:

View Larger Map

Or just view the map in another tab/browser.

I'm definitely planning on going again, this time for both days. A friend from the U.S. (but who is actually German) is hopefully visiting during that time, and since he's in I.T. also, we'll hopefully both go, and report back here on how it goes. Last year there were great presentations from both big shops, like Google and Mozilla (where I got a great Firefox sticker for my ThinkPad), as well as smaller companies and individuals. Even Franz gave a presentation on creating an Agoda affiliate website (which I'm betting he'll do again this year!)

Anyone else planning on attending? Leave a comment below if you've got a great topic to present, or a topic you're hoping to see.

Maybe There Is A God - Terminator 4 Is Almost Here

2009-04-04T23:18:00.003+07:00

This is a (somewhat blurry) pic of a 'Terminator 4: Salvation' display in front of the entrance to a theater I go to near my condo. I was really doubtful about another installment of the Terminator franchise after the mess of 'Rise of the Machines', but when I heard Christian Bale was playing John Connor, I suspended my doubts.

I'm sending this blog post out from my trusty Touch Diamond, which has served pretty well over the past 10 months. Still, I'm betting this will be a big year for android (and possibly the first viable x86 smartphone, given that "Moorestown"-based LG prototype Intel has been showing around).

Adventures With Linq-to-SQL: The Update Dilemma

2009-03-31T17:28:00.004+07:00

I haven't written a post that goes into much (any?) detail on what I am working on over here, so this is that post. Since December, I've been working on a set of applications for a recruiting company, to replace the apps that they're using now (which I also wrote, about three years ago mostly). The old version, while it works, has some design flaws (some of which I inherited by way of using the database that held the previous never-finished attempt to create the app, built by some local programmers), some of which were inherent in using Windows .Net forms, and some of which resulted in my (over-) reliance on DataSets for storing object data.

So the new version of the app is an almost-complete rewrite; it uses SQL 2008 (or SQL 2005) rather than SQL 2000, but the bigger changes are that I'm using WPF for the UI, and Linq-to-SQL for almost 100% of the data access layer. Linq is beguilingly easy to use. Instead of writing code along the lines of, "If Not IsDBNull(ContactDataSet.Tables(i).Rows(j).Item("Name"))", I can just write, "myContact.Name" and get a string value. Linq objects are strongly-typed (granted, you can create strongly-typed datasets as well), and once you lean the very simple to use Linq query syntax, you can fetch objects out of the database with very little code, and no t-sql at all. Inserting new objects into the database is equally easy, and I love that columns with default values in the database can be set to automatically-sync their values back to the object on inserts or updates.

It's only when you go to update an existing object that you start finding out why people have so much trouble with Linq: because if you fetched an object with one "DataContext", which you shoud promptly discard (the typical pattern of usage is, "Using myDC as New MyDataContextClassname() ... CRUD... End Using), and then update it, and then create a new instance of your DataContext, trying to save it becomes annoying. By default, for the new DataContext instance to save changes to your item, you need to attach it, with a call to the context's .Attach() method. And there the fun starts!

Trying to attach an object you loaded from a different context will, unless you do some extra work, throw an exception. You'll get an error along the likes of "Attempt to attach an object that is not new, or loaded by a different context." Now, my app uses a lot the "deferred loading" in Linq, which means that a linq object has properties that represent other linq objects, or collections of those objects, which aren't loaded until they're requested by something. So, a contact object like MyContact (an instance of Contact, which is pulled from a Contacts table, for example) might have properties called "Company_Id" (from FK column of the same name), and another property called "Company". The "Company" property is actually of type EntityRef(Of Company). Or, if the relationship from Contacts -> Companies in your database is one-to-many, then MyContact probably has a property called "Companies", which returns (natch!) a collection of the Company objects to which it's related via the PK-FK relationship. The "Companies" property of MyContact is actually of type EntitySet(Of Company) in this case. If you reference MyContact.Company, you will get a Company object if there is one, and so on, so you probably don't even see the EntityRef stuff until later. When you try to update your contact!

Either way, either in using WPF databinding or in code-behind, this design makes it really easy to get to related objects and collections of them. So in WPF, if I have a bunch of elements bound to MyContact, I might have an element whose content property (or whatever property) is set to "{Binding Path=Company.CompanyName}", or even "{Binding Path=Company.Country.CountryName}". During binding, the "Company" property is called automatically, which then loads (if it's not already loaded) the Company object, or for the second example there, it will actually fetch a Country object that's linked to the Company object that is in turn linked to MyContact. All with no code! See ma, no hands!!

The problem is that now, MyContact has its "Company" property set. If you dig a little, you'll see that in the .dbml file (the Linq-to-sql class and mapping file), that the Company property is, as I mentioned, of type EntityRef(Of Company), and that it's just a public property wrapper for the private member _Company. And variables of type EntityRef have a property called .HasLoadedOrAssignedValue, which is boolean, and .Entity, which essentially refers to some object (of type Company, for this example) in the same DataContext. You see, DataContext has one "object" for each table that you've added to your .dbml file, which represents a table of those objects. When my XAML (or code-behind) calls the .Company propert of MyContact, the DataContext that MyContact belongs to duly loads that company object into it's Companies table, and points the private member MyContact._Company.Entity so that it refers to that company.

Now - after binding is done, and I've disposed of my datacontext like a good boy - I still have access to that Company object, via MyContact. I can even create a new object, "MyCompany", and set it equal to MyContact.Company, and then have my way with it. But when I update MyContact, instantiate a new datacontext (again, "Using NewDc as New MyDataContextName().."), and call NewDc.Attach(MyContact), it will fail. MyContact has those EntityRefs that refer to objects (like Company) that are in a datacontext I already disposed of. Even though the object is there, and accessible. I'm going to confess that I'm not sure why, fundamentally, the Linq team couldn't have come up with a built-in solution, something like "MyContact.Detach" (to clear out it's entity-refs and entity-sets). But anyway.

There are multiple ways around the dilemma. First, keep in mind that, in order to perform concurrency checks (that is, to ensure one user isn't overwriting another user's changes), Linq will either check the old values against the current ones, or (if you're using a rowversion/timestamp column), it will just check that. For simplicity, I added rowversion columns to all my tables containing editable records.

Okay, I said there were ways to save your data.

(1) You can pass the .Attach method both the current state of your object, plus it's original state. Of course, that original state is only available from the already-disposed datacontext you used to load it (if it wasn't disposed, you could call, "myDC.Contacts.GetOriginalEntityState(MyContact)" which returns the Contact object with all the properties set to their original values, when you pulled it from the database). You could also just keep a copy of every object that you plan to change, so you have the old copy to pass to .Attach() - I did play around with this, and didn't have much success. Also, it's annoying (to me) to have to manually keep an extra copy of objects I'm about to change, just to update them.

(2) You could turn off DeferredLoading on your datacontext, thus killing one of the great benefits (in my opinion) using linq in the first place. I never really considered mucking with changing the deferred loading on the fly, but that might be viable for some people. You can also set ObjectTrackingEnabled to False, but you can read on Rick Strahl's blog why this is usually pointless (in short, you can't get to linked objects at all).

(3) You could do what I did when prototyping this project, which was to keep a single DataContext in an object, and open, insert and update every object using that datacontext (this turns out to be the opposite of what the MSDN documentation recommends, maybe because it's keeping a database connection open, I'm not sure). Anyway - the datacontext objects are meant to be used then disposed.

(4) You could use some elegant feature or method in Linq that I don't know of yet - and if you do know of it, please leave me a comment below!!!

Or (5), you can write you own .Detach methods, which is what I did.

This might not be an ideal solution for many people (possibly even for me!), but it has the advantage that (a) it works, and (b) I already did it. Linq's classes are all generated as partial classes, so you can extend them willy-nilly in another partial class (normally in the file that's created if you right-click the .dbml file in VS solution explorer, and choose "View Code"). I created a new public method, "Save()", for each of the types of objects that users will edit (i.e., Contact, Company, Appointment, and so on). I also wrote two private methods for each, "Detach()" and "RestoreContext()".

If the property is not an EntitySet, but just an singular EntityRef (so, one company, not a collection), you can just assign null/nothing to property's .Entity propety, like so: Me._Company.Entity = Nothing. Now, in a few places in my app, I might want to get at that object again without having to load it (again) from the database. In fact, if I call my .Save() method, which first calls my .Detach() , then any WPF fields that were bound to properties of the company (like in the binding examples I gave above) will suddenly go blank after the save. You could set the binding mode to one-time, but maybe I want the user to be able to actually see more properties of the company in a pop-up box or something. So my solution was pretty straight-forward: I added private variable declarations in my partial classes. I declare two kinds of things, depending on my object:

Private CompanyEntity As Company
Private HobbyEntitySet As EntitySet(Of Hobby)

Note that I don't really have a list of hobbies, just using it as an example. So anyway, in my Detach() method, I put:

If Me._Company.HasLoadedOrAssignedValue() Then CompanyEntity = Me._Company.Entity

And finally, the public .RestoreContext() method I wrote just reverses the process - it sets Me._Company = CompanyEntity, then sets CompanyEntity back to nothing/null. I don't always need to restore the context - if the user clicked, "Save & Close", for example, I just call the .Save method on my object. If I'm saving some changes, but keeping the object (MyContact) around, I just call .Save, and then .RestoreContext().

If the property IS an EntitySet, I use the same principle.
The auto-generated linq classes do already have (private) methods for these EntitySet(Of T) properties. These methods are in the main .rbml file, and are called "detach_xxxxx" and "attach_xxxxx" which are called whenever you do something like, "MyContact.Companies.Remove(SomeCompany)" or "MyContact.Companies.Add(SomeCompany)" (assuming a one-to-many with Companies, obviously). When you instantiate a new Company - which happens whenever you load one from the DB, or attach it to a context, or declare one (eg., "Dim c As New Contact) - the generated linq code assigns attach_xxxxx and detach_xxxxx as the functions called whenever you add or remove a Company, say, to or from the .Companies list. And so I've seen posts on the web where people wrote .Detach() methods in a partial class (which is where I got the idea!), and they loop through each attached object, calling .Remove on each, like so: "For each c As Company in Me.Companies.... Me.Remove(c)... Next", or the equivalent in C#. Maybe that's what I should have done, but....

Being a bit lazy, I went for the rather quicker and dirtier one-line solution:

Me._Hobbies = New EntitySet(Of Hobby)

You can optionally specify those attach_xxxxx and detach_xxxxx functions, like this:

Me._Hobbies = New EntitySet(Of Hobby)(AddressOf Me.attach_Hobbies, AddressOf Me.detach_Hobbies)

If you know you're about to dispose of the object, or if you know you won't be calling "MyContact.Hobbies.Add(SomeNewHobby)", then you don't really need to worry about specifying the callbacks. I only needed to do that for one object, the rest never have things added/removed like that.

And again, because I sometimes want to keep those collections of objects in the EntitySets around (maybe I have a ComboBox bound to it or something), I use private vars to hold the original values, and assign them back again in .RestoreContext.

So, for the Company and Hobbies example, the total code in the partial "Contact" class might look like this:

Private CompanyEntity As Company
Private HobbyEntitySet As EntitySet(Of Hobby)

Private Sub Detach()

If Me._Company.HasLoadedOrAssignedValue() Then CompanyEntity = Me._Company.Entity
Me._Company.Entity = Nothing
HobbyEntitySet = Me._Hobbies
Me._Hobbies = New EntitySet(Of Hobby)

End Sub

Public Sub Save(ByVal User As String)

Using db As New MyDataContext

Me.Detach()
If Me.ContactID = 0 Then

Me.CreatedBy = User
db.Contacts.InsertOnSubmit(Me)

Else

db.Contacts.Attach(Me, True)
Me.recmodifiedBy = User
Me.recmodifiedDate = Date.Now

End If Try

db.SubmitChanges()

Catch e As ChangeConflictException

'handle concurrency conflict here, and use .Refresh and .SubmitChanges() as needed.

End Try

End Using

End Sub

Public Sub RestoreContext()

Me._Hobbies = HobbyEntitySet
Me._Company.Entity = CompanyEntity
HobbyEntitySet = Nothing
CompanyEntity = Nothing

End Sub

For now, this is working for me, although if I run into any wierdness, I'll post about that later. Many thanks to all the great Linq-to-SQL blogs I've read, which led me to ultimately implement this hack-like solution. Like I said - if you know of a more elegent solution, let me know, thanks! Also, apologies for any typos in the code above that I've missed...

So hopefully most of my posts won't be this techie, unless I get a lot of positive feedback (which seems unlikely!!). Do people prefer the pictures of cows maybe?

Visiting the Chokchai Ranch & Farm

2009-03-22T15:08:00.001+07:00

This isn't exactly (or, say, remotely) tech-related unless you count "lack of". I'm sending this from my phone, at the Chokchai Farm, a sizeable dairy and beef cattle farm 90 minuyes outside Bangkok. Watching a sort of mini-rodeo right now, and the photo is Yui milking her first cow.

I'll write a real post - on WPF and linq-to-sql in a day or so, plus some updates on x86 smartphone developments (hint: LG is building one based on "Moorestown").

Until then, enjoy the cow photo!

True Move Taking iPhone Reservations: Delivery January 16

2009-01-05T19:56:00.002+07:00

Yes, the jesus-phone is finally, at long last, almost here.
True Move (a subsidiary of the behemoth that announced they were in talks w/Apple last November) is running TV ads on local Thai channels advertising the imminent arrival of the iPhone 3G.

Granted, as I've written a few posts about the sad state of 3G in the Kingdom - and what pitiful little 3G that AIS has going on is still more than True Move has. Either way - check out their page at: www.truemove.com/iphone for details. The model in the TV ad makes the iPhone 3G look even more beautiful and desirable than it already is. Or maybe that's just the model, ha ha.

Better Late Than Never Part 1: Christmas in Bangkok

2009-01-05T15:13:00.008+07:00

Merry Christmas Bangkok!

Okay, so this is definitely a late blog entry, considering Christmas was two weeks ago. But hey, quality takes time, right?

With minimal commentary, here are some images I snapped with my ever-trusty HTC Diamond's cam. Phone cams are getting ever better, but the shutter speed is still a bit slow -hence the blurriness in some of the shots (and no flash either, doh!) To the left is the decorated Christmas tree in front of Central World Mall.

Inside the mall, some of Santa's elves were milling around looking bored!

Actually, there were a bunch of different school groups and choirs that were singing assorted holiday songs and carols. The mall had a baby-grand piano, which was also used by the four-piece orchestra (not kidding) playing music during the holidays on the ground floor.

The faux-snow-globe with two actual people (dressed as a rather-skinny Santa and his rather-cute elf!) inside was at another mall, "Esplanade", in an area called Ratchada. See the next photo for the elf in close-up!

And now you know why Santa is so jolly, ha ha ha (or ho! ho! ho!). I have so many holiday-season photos that I don't have room for here, that I'll eventually post them on the main Hacking Bangkok website.

HTC Touch HD Fondled In Bangkok!

2008-12-12T09:47:00.004+07:00

Using her Jedi powers to make me want it...

HTC's new iPhone-sized phone, the Touch HD (for "High Definition") has finally shown up in stores in Bangkok. While not actually HD in the television-sense, it does boast a resolution of 800 x 480 on its monster 3.8" screen. That's both slightly larger than the iPhone's 3.5" screen, and 2.5 times the resolution! Yowza! While not quite as "pixel dense" as the Touch Diamond (which is 640 x 480 but only 2.8"), the Touch HD will let you watch a DVD rip in its full glory, with some horizontal space left over. It also uses the same 528 MHz ARM-based processor as the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.

The camera (on the back) is 5 megapixels, a nice bump from the 3.2 MP of my Touch Diamond. On the other hand, I end up chopping the size of most of my cam-shots by 50% for the web anyway.

At this particular store, called "Touch", in Central World mall, the Touch HD is selling for the full retail price of 37,400 baht. Then again, they've got the Touch Diamond selling for 27,000 baht, and I only paid 25,500 baht for mine last June (and you can pick one up for 20,000 baht if you wander around MBK for a bit). And, just for comparison, they've got unlocked iPhone 3Gs for 37,000 baht - a premium of 4,000 baht over the haggling-shops of MBK. This store is in a high-end mall, so everything is more expensive than elsewhere.

Speaking of the Touch Diamond - this store also has the new white-backed Touch Diamond version, which looks a lot cooler than I thought it would. But it's only the back that's white - the front is still black (??). I don't get that - but maybe they'll sell just the white back cover for it, so I can fashionably accessorize my phone (NOT!).

I Have 3G On My Diamond in Bangkok. Inside the Mall. Which Has WiFi Anway. Nevermind.

2008-12-11T14:49:00.008+07:00

I'm not sure what it was that ~~lured~~ convinced me to buy a pre-paid AIS 3G SIM card, but much like the old guy on the right in this photo, I couldn't seem to help myself. In any case, after the leather-clad sales-girls let me use a "demo" sim card in my phone to make sure it worked - including a video-call made to another booth-girl on a different floor - I plunked down my 110 baht, plus 300 baht for 1.5 GB of data (over either EDGE or HSPA) for a pre-paid sim. AIS's 3G service runs on their 900 MHz spectrum, so definitely check with them to make sure your handset will work before signing up (I can confirm that HTC Diamonds do work!).

AIS's prepaid brand is 1-2-call, and the sim-package was sporting a very happy-looking frog wearing a crown. No, I have no idea. Based on the frog's smile, he never leaves Central World though (more on that in a sec). After slipping the sim into my Touch Diamond, and booting up, WinMo helpfully told me that it needed to configure my phone for AIS (I normally use DTAC), after which (this IS Windows) it had to reboot. I had to manually change the "band" selection from "auto" to "WCDMA" for some reason - according to the AIS guy, their mini-cell-tower's software needs to be upgraded.

In keeping with the green animal motif, the plastic card has a picture of a green mouse riding a cheese-mobile. The so-called "Freedom sim" works on AIS's regular GSM network, with all its EDGE mediocrity, wherever 3G isn't up and running yet. That would be practically everywhere. The only 3G coverage is provided by some sort of pico-cells, or mini-cells, in Central World Mall, Siam Paragon (another giant mall), and MBK (the grand-daddy of Bangkok malls), in addition to their original test network in Chiang Mai.

Oh - and the new airport (Suvarnabhumi), which is once again running after recently being the subject of a sit-in by protestors.

The stupid thing about the current state of AIS's mini-cell locations is that all of them have WiFi coverage anyway - True Move offers WiFi (not free) in all of these places, which cost me 250 baht/month on a promotion. I wrote about True recently when checking out a new store/cafe they opened. An AIS employee assured me, though, that the first "real" cell-towers will be upgraded to 3G starting next month, so I'll post back when there's any new info. Until then, though, if your phone has WiFi, you're better off with that.

The low-down on pricing is this: Video calls are 1 baht/minute. Not that therei s anybody to call, except the AIS demo-booth girls. Whether you sign up for a normal post-paid account, or get a pre-paid sim, you need to pick a data plan (since it's a baht per MB if you don't!). All the below are for monthly usage:

100 baht for 500 MB
300 baht for 1.5 GB
500 baht for 2.5 GB
900 baht for 15 GB
1,500 baht for 30 GB

If you're sucking down 30 GB per month, you clearly have a bittorrent problem and should be running that on your DSL at home, but otherwise the prices are not bad! 500 baht (about $14) for 2.5 GB of data is enough for a lot of web-surfing, youtubing, emails and general syncing to Exchange/Zimbra/Gmail or whatever. Google maps is fabulous over 3G, as I discovered in Korea in September. I did a couple of speed-tests using DslReport's "iPhone browser Speed and Latency Test". Given that I'm in Thailand, and the server is likely in the U.S., I was pretty happy with the 491 Kbps and 467 Kbps results in my two tries. It's no 4G WiMax, but it beats EDGE.

So. I don't really want to change phone numbers (no mobile-number-portability-act here!), so sometime in February or March, I'll see what DTAC is up to - if there's less than a 90-day lag before they roll out their service, I'll wait. Otherwise, I'll be back to see the AIS girls!*

*Note - the girl who helped me with the demo admitted she was just hired part-time for this promotion. I asked her if she uses AIS, and she sheepishly admitted that no, she's using DTAC too. LOL.

Bangkok's 7-Story Spiral Stairs Using Escalators (take THAT Gizmodo!)

2008-12-05T14:35:00.004+07:00

I read Gizmodo ~~pretty often~~ obsessively, and about a week ago they had a brief story (with photos) of a building in Taipei. The 10-story faux "spiral" escalators in Taiwan apparently impressed the Gizmodo editors, so I thought I'd invite them to come check out Central World Plaza shopping mall in Bangkok.

The same basic effect - albeit seven stories instead of 10 - is at the heart of the Bangkok mall's architecture also, and has been for... um... I'm gonna say three years about. Ever since the mega-refurbishment that tripled the size of the already large shopping mecca. So, these are all some shots (taken with my phone-cam, again, sorry!) of my local architecural wonder.

Since it's Christmas time, and even Thailand is not immune from the ever-present Christmas trees, mind-numbing songs about Santa and snow, you can see a gi-normous (fake) tree in the center of the circular (tubular?) space in the middle of the spiral.

I'll post some pics in my next entry of more of Bangkok's wonderfully tacky holiday decorations. Even though I have to enter the mall to do it >>shudder<<.

View from the top - and yes, I should use a real camera for these shots. But a shout-out to Gizmodo for giving me an idea of how to show off some of Thailand's architectural/technological prowess!

Island Wedding - Koh Samui

2008-12-05T13:43:00.007+07:00

The weekend before the PAD protestors shut down the two major airports in Bangkok (which are now re-opened, yeah!!!), I flew down to a friend's wedding in Koh Samui. Me being me, I forgot to take a camera along, but luckily the cam in my phone (Touch Diamond) is not too bad in daylight - a "touch" blurry (okay, that was horrible) is all. The ceremony was partly inside, and partly outside (the rain miraculously stopped for the duration of the wedding!)

My friend (Rie) is actually not Thai, she's Japanese/Chinese, and lives in London with her new husband, Tim. So they and their families flew from all over the globe to have the wedding in Samui. Here's a photo of them at the reception, along with Rie's friend Xian (or Chien?), who must be the world's cutest bridesmaid):

And like every good reception, after the newlyweds ride off in a decorated... um.... elephant. Ha! You don't see this at your average wedding:

One of the things that I really love about Thailand is that you can go from being in your high-rise condo watching "Heroes" one day, to watching your newly-married friends trying to ride an elephant on the beach the next. Seriously, this is a great place to live!

The Inevitability Of X86/X64 Smartphones

2008-11-29T17:08:00.004+07:00

I've been watching the slow drip of news and details about Intel's upcoming low power-consumption mobile CPU, codenamed "Moorestown" more closely lately. Granted, details are few and Intel is still focused on promoting their Atom processor.

But in a previous post (Rise of Smarter Smartphones... ) I talked about the near-future of smartphones, and how they're morphing into general purpose mobile computers. I've also read the ongoing debate between people who think ARM (a RISC-architecture mobile CPU used in iPhones, T-Mobile's G1, the HTC Touch Diamond, and most other smartphones) is the future of mobile computers, and those who think the x86 architecture will eventually triumph.

Well, while I think ARM is great - my Touch Diamond runs on a 528 MHz ARM chip - the history of alternative architectures for widespread computing is pretty grim. The DEC/Compaq Alpha chip (also a RISC processor) was the first 64-bit CPU to run Windows. Most people never even knew there *was* 64-bit windows on non-x86. And the once-vaunted Alpha chip? It's design was eventually sold off to Intel, who put it to pasture as soon as they could.

The Alpha, Sun's Ultrasparc, Intel's own Itanium, the Motorola/IBM/Apple 68000-series, and so on are all now either dead or niche products. If Intel can't get people to adopt a new architecture - and they tried, but AMD read the tea-leaves right and offered 64-bit x86 - then it's hard to see how ARM will fare much better, when the two architectures start to compete in the same space. And that's not yet - but by 2011 or 2012, we're going to see the high-end smartphone market moving en masse to x86. Count on it.

Sun's Ultrasparc, and the Alpha chip both survived fine - until x86 started showing up in servers and competing with them. For now, Intel's Atom is still too power-hungry to compete with battery-loving ARM chips, but Moorestown allegedly draws 1/10th of Atom's wattage when "idle." If it's even close in power consumption to ARM chips (comparing watts/flop, or whatever - doing equivalent tasks) then building x86 smartphones becomes a no-brainer. OEMs won't have to re-write device-drivers, and software companies won't have to worry about hardware incompatibilies. Apple's OS X already runs on X86, so creating an x86 iPhone would be pretty straightforward. Ditto for Android (based on Linux).

Plus, we've already seen some interesting near-smartphone x86-based phone/devices... these are the "Newtons" of the x86 smartphone market - not ready for prime-time, but a demo of the concept.

So - that's my stake in the ground. Whether it's Moorestown, or some AMD mobile-ized chip, or the next-gen chip beyond those, eventually the x86/64 architecture is gonna be in your hands.

As Usual - I Find Out About Bangkok Protests on Google News

2008-11-25T21:37:00.005+07:00

As is often the case, I just found out the latest news about the seemingly never-ending protests and counter-protests that Thais are having by scrolling past the headline on Google News. Doh!

The city is so huge, that other than some newspaper reports I read about planned protests (by both pro- and anti-government protesters, who really disagree) while being rained on in Koh Samui island over the weekend, there just wasn't any evidence of anything big going on today. I even walked to the grocery store and bought a turkey, potatoes, bread cubes, etc. (I cook a big Thanksgiving dinner every year), and walked back, and nothing. Nada.

After catching the latest episode of "Heroes", I was checking out Gizmodo, and decided to check Google News - and the protesters have gathered at Bangkok's international airport, which the government proceeded to shut down. Okay, so I'm glad these losers didn't decide to "occupy" the airport yesterday (since I flew back from Samui last night), but ya know, they've just lost any sympathy they might have had from me. Don't mess with the airport - airports are a big enough pain the butt for everybody involved on the best of days. Get the *$$! out of Suvarnabhumi Airport already.

This post was slightly off-topic, although the fact I find out about almost anything going on here (the occasional bloodless coup, protests, etc.) via the internet is a source of some amusement (for me anyway - I'm obviously easily amused, lol). Thai politics are amusing for a whole HOST of other reasons that I'll save for an article on the main hackingbangkok.com site.

The HTC Roadmap for WinMo, and Android Answers

2008-11-21T14:48:00.008+07:00

I managed to attend a presentation by someone at HTC this week, and a (small) amount of light was shed on some of their future plans. I'm pretty sure that between Engadget Mobile and Gizmodo (and the dozens of gadget sites they troll for information), this information already exists at least as rumor, but here is what I learned. My last phone, and my current one, are both made my HTC, and both run versions of Windows Mobile (aka WinMO or WM).

One of the first slides of the presentation was an overall roadmap (see above) - unfortunately, the road on that map ended with 2008. Still - there was interesting info! There are three roads on the map: one for 3G phones, one for "Edge PDA" phones, and one for "Smart Phones". The last one - smart phones - only has two devices on it, and only one "new" one - the HTC S740 (code-named "Rose"), a oddish-looking mobile phone running WM6.1 Standard (e.g., non-touchscreen), and yet with a slide-out qwerty keyboard (plus a "normal" numeric keypad below the screen) and the same CPU as the Diamond. I guess some people really hate on-screen keypads.

The "Edge PDA" road has what looks like modestly updated versions of the original HTC Touch. Same OMAP 201 MHz processor, but with slightly better cameras, and running WM6.0. *yawn* These were codenamed "Opal". An un-codenamed device for Q4 of this year (that's now, for those keeping track) seemed to be the HTC P3470, another 201 MHz OMAP processor phone running TouchFLO 2D, but with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE instead of the tri-band in the Touch/Opal series. There's also a quad-band Touch with the same specs, but with the rounded Touch form-factor, giong by "Touch Viva". I don't know about you, but I'm so over the underpowered, 2.5G, low-rez screens of the entire pre-Diamond series of "Touch" phones.

Which is a nice segue to the top-row of the "roadmap" - the 3G phones. The Touch Diamond shows up around mid-year (and since I bought mine in June, that jives with reality), followed by the Raphael (aka Touch Pro), and then the Jade. The Touch Pro is pretty much a fatter Diamond, owing to its slide-out qwerty keyboard, and includes a TV-out and a micro-SD card slot. According to Slayo.com, the Jade combines 3G, and the same processor as the Diamond series (528 MHz Qualcomm) with the 240 x 320 screen of the 2.5G Touch phones. On a later slide, it's referred to as the "HTC Touch 3G", and confusingly labled as having "four times the resolution of most phones", which is the same line used on the Touch Diamond slide. So is it really 240 x 320, or is it 320 x 640? Hmm... Anyway, the form-factor is defintely more Touch than Diamond, though by no means ugly. It comes in a few different colors, including ivory and black.

After the Jade comes the Victor - another variant on the Touch Diamond, with the corners being more rounded, and a different back. This phone was passed around the presentation, but I didn't have a chance to take a photo (they're all over the web anyway). The G1 was nowhere on the roadmap, but the final phone in the 3G row was the HTC Blackstone. As revealed by Coolsmartphone.com, this is HTC Touch HD, which goes on sale here in Thailand next week (knocks on wood) with it's gorgeous 3.8" 480 x 800 screen - enough pixels to watch video ripped from DVDs in all their 1990s-rez glory.

The presentation had some charts, courtesy of IDC (and dated 2007.... doh!) that showed sales of "converged devices" growing at double-digit rates. Since HTC is one of the biggest (and fastest-growing) makers of these mobile communication devices (which is what I'm calling them - "smartphone" doesn't really do justice to what you can do with a good one), things look pretty good for them, at least in the world of bar-chart projections. They've got the largest WinMO R&D team on the planet (not sure if that includes Microsoft or not.... looking at how delayed WM7 is, though, I wouldn't be suprised if HTC has more WinMo developers than Microsoft), and with Android, they're covering their butts just in case!

HTC doesn't just make gadgets though - they offer enterprise solutions to carriers including putting in push-mail using either the CAMEO Enterprise Server (which can connect to Exchange, Lotus/Domino, and normal IMAP/POP3 servers) or by adding BlackBerry Connect software to their phones, so crackberry-addicts can get their fix from HTC hardware. Unbeknownst to me, HTC has enterprise software for vertical markets like mobile insurance, healthcare management, sales-force automation, and "mobile monitoring" for fleet management (read: keeping tabs on where your truck-drivers are). All of these other offerings explain part of why HTC is sticking with WinMo through thick and thin (lately, thin). These other software solutions were all designed to run on WinMo - hence, more WinMo h/w from HTC.

At the end of the presentation was Q&A time. I had about 50 questions in my head, but to be polite, I just asked two. The biggest one was, "Why is the G1/Dream hardware less impressive than the Touch HD and Touch Pro, which came out around the same time?" The answer was very, very interesting. I was told that "clearly, HTC wasn't responsible for the complete design" - and that given HTC's focus on making "stylish" phones, the sheer non-beauty of the G1 should make that obvious. Whether it was T-Mobile, or Google that was influencing the G1's less-than-Prada-level of style, I don't know. I do know that the G1 has a 320 x 480 screen, which is half that of the Touch Diamond, and even less than half of the almost-identical sized Touch HD's screen. The HTC rep told me that the "next generation" of Android phone, to be released next year, will bring the hardware up to parity with their WinMo sets, and will be more stylish.

Oh - for you guys over at the XDA-Developers.com forums, HTC is definitely keeping an eye on what you guys write about. I mentioned to the HTC rep that there were people working on getting Android to boot on Diamond/Touch Pro hardware, and was rewarded with a big smile, and the reply, "Oh, you mean the XDA Developer people? Yes, they've been playing with our hardware a lot" (or words to that effect).

2009 should see some new HTC Android hardware - to HTC, Android is more of a "consumer" mobile OS, while WinMo is more of an "Enterprise" OS, but as time goes on, I suspect Android is going to get a lot of "enterprise" features too. Oh - and thanks, HTC, for the free Touch Diamond slim-case and the gift-pack of car-charger/mobile-charger/retractable-sync-cable and screen protectors - that's exactly the kind of swag I needed!!!

True Move to Carry iPhone in Thailand - AIS Still Flapping Lips

2008-11-13T21:12:00.005+07:00

According to this news report from Reuters, those who lust for the Jesus Phone in Thailand will finally.... um... be able to get one "legitimately". Not that the gray-market-ness of the iPhones for sale in MBK, Pantip, and everywhere else has slowed anybody down - Reuters estimates there are 100,000 iPhones in use in Thailand. But still, at least there will be visual voicemail now (I guess?), and possibly lower prices (don't bet on that, but hey, maybe!)

The Reuter's article says:

True Move, said on Thursday it had signed a deal with Apple Inc to sell the 3G iPhone in Thailand.
The deal could make True Move, a subsidiary of True Corp TRUE.BK, the first operator to sell the new phone in the fast-growing Thai market. Bigger rival Advanced Info Service ADVA.BK says it is still talking with Apple about iPhone.
"True Move has signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone 3G to Thailand in the coming months," True Move said in a statement. It gave no precise date.

I recently wrote a blog post about True Move's opening of a new "flagship cafe/store/hangout" place. Looks like they're staying true to their name, and bustin' a move, finally, to bring the iPhone (3G version, no less) to Thailand. The big remaining issue is the lack of 3G coverage in the Kingdom.

So - with no 3G network yet, is the sheer desire of many Thai people to own the most status-showing phone of them all enough to help True Move continue their untrammeled rise? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
Update: 3GWeek - Asia's Mobile News is also covering this story.
Update 2: Due to a misconfiguration with my blog, it was unavailable for roughly the past four days. Doh!

When You Have To Visit a Hospital - Might As Well Be a Nice One!

2008-11-12T12:14:00.004+07:00

Two weeks ago, I caught some mutant, drug-resistant strain of strept throat that has been kicking my butt ever since. After two days of thinking (wrongly) that I would just fight off whatever it was like I do a cold, I gave up and went to the hospital. In Bangkok, most of the hospitals are probably okay, but most expats (and medical tourists) go to Bumrungrad Hospital. It was the first hospital in Asia to be accredited by JCI (the same group that accredits hospitals in the U.S.).

As an I.T. person, I've always had an interest in Bumrungrad - they've got a nearly paperless digital hospital system. Electronic medical records, multilingual support, every prescription is scanned in and saved in your file which your doctors can get to from anywhere, the works. The software package was originally developed by Global Care Solutions (GCS), and was built on the Microsoft .Net platform and SQL Server. GCS had a hellish reputation for burning out programmers (although they paid well!), and I've interviewed a few "ex-Global Care" people over the years for jobs in companies I've worked in here.

When Google started talking about electronic medical records a couple of years ago, it must have spooked Microsoft, though - they up and bought GCS lock, stock and stethoscope! I'm guessing (from my own experiences at Microsoft) that it's a much better place to work now.

When I was doing my MBA program here, I went on a tour given by a then employee (who was later fired - doh!). Because the hospital serves patients from all over the world speaking every language, non-English speakers are assignd a young woman wearing a small flag-pin to show what language she can speak (e.g., a visiting Japanese patient has a Japanese-speaking Thai girl following him around to translate). Their I.T. systems do the same - that same patient's prescription instructions come out in Japanese.

when you're waiting for your number to be called at the pharmacy, or the cashier (I have insurance, so luckily no charge), Arabs have their little info-slips in Arabic, Koreans in Korean, and so on.

In any case - they're growing a culture of whatever was eating my throat up, and I'll be back at Bumrungrad (gotta love that name) again Saturday. Did I mention the other reason it's my favorite hospital? There's a Starbucks in the lobby, and the nursing staff are... how to put this delicately... a bit more aesthetically pleasing than in any hospital I've been in back in the states. *cough*

Apple Comes to Thailand.... Sort Of.

2008-11-12T11:31:00.005+07:00

It looks like the mighty eye of Sauron....err... Apple, that is, has finally set its gaze on the Kingdom of Thailand. To the left (conveniently in Thai) is part of an email promo sent out by Apple to announce the new Official Apple Online Store for Thailand.

The large first line just says, "Sawadee meung Thai", which basically means, "Hello Thailand". If you click on the link above to the Apple Online Store, you'll see the same thing in English. No mention of the iPhone yet, just iPods and Macs - and a free purple T-shirt if you buy one before November 24th. *yawn* Of course, the country is literally swimming in iPhones, including the new 3G iPhones - despite they're all being gray-market items, and of course, the complete uncertainty over when, if ever, we'll see a 3G network rolled out!

Now if we could get a genuine, physical, bricks and mortar Apple Store, that would be something. Just sayin'.

Edit: Looks like True Move will be bringing the iPhone to Thailand too, so hopefully this is just a portent...

Rise of Smarter Smartphone: Mobility, Geo-Presence and Social Networking

2008-10-26T18:22:00.001+07:00

A lot of people have spilled a lot of digital ink over the past decade on the convergence of PDAs, mobile phones, and (to a lesser extent) computers. Over the past two years, I’ve watched a lot of the predictions from a decade ago finally coming true – and talked about future trends with other I.T. pros as well as non-techies. This article is an attempt to frame where it seems the convergence is headed, why it’s going to happen a lot sooner (and be a lot bigger) than many writers seem to acknowledge, and what some of the drivers are. In a nutshell, the evolution of content over the past millennium coupled with the rapid progress in hardware and basic human nature will lead to very widespread adoption of mobile communications devices (which I’m calling “MCDs” for this article) which will supplant the PC as the primary way we use the internet, plus allow most people to participate in scenarios that are just now becoming possible to a few tech elite.

The evolution of content:smaller, faster, cheaper

Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical printing press in the 15^th century kicked off real progress in the creation, distribution and consumption of content.Instead of scrolls written by hand, information could be mass-produced, making it faster and cheaper.The next 500 years saw the machines that did the printing get smaller, faster and cheaper as well.Modern postal systems allowed for a massive increase in regional newspapers, which combined printing presses with mail’s (relatively) fast and reliable delivery.You can probably see where this is going. Fast-forward to the late 20^th century.

The first “killer app” of the internet was (and for a lot of people, remains) email.Email has nearly killed off the handwritten letter, now affectionately referred to as “snail mail”, for personal and business correspondence both.IM and sms is supplanting email among a lot of younger people.The latency (time between sending and receipt of a message) has been decreasing, and the format has been moving towards shorter messages.When you can send a message, get a reply, and reply back to that all in a day or less, you don’t need to pack as much into each message.

Person to Person Communication – written personal communication has moved from paper to email already for most people in the developed world.New technologies continue to supplement it; by 2000, instant-messenger software was commonplace, and made real-time chat usable by the masses; it has even less latency than email, and even shorter messages. IM, along with short-message-service on mobile phones (SMS) are essentially the same thing, on different platforms.
One to Many Communication – (aka publishing) has followed a similar arc: We’ve gone from books and magazines to radio and TV, to e-Zines (anybody remember those?) which gave rise to blogs, to RSS feeds, twitter and your Facebook status.Just as snail-mail still exists, so do radio and TV – but even those are going digital and being podcasted, streamed, and viewed on mobile devices.

As the tech for publishing has gone down in cost to effectively nothing, there’s been a real shift from the one-to-many “broadcast” model of publishing, to a “many to many” paradigm.One hundred years ago, you could fit every writer of a book and a regular newspaper column on Earth into Giant’s Stadium.With some tens of millions of people now writing regular blogs, you’d have trouble fitting them in a mid-sized state. Some content companies have shifted from producing, to acting as aggregators and “trusted filterers” of content, which is essentially a whole new business model.

Proliferation of Mobile Communications Devices (MCDs)

Hardware makers started really segmenting consumer-oriented computers in the mid-1990s, about 15 years after the IBM PC kicked off the ‘revolution’. As sales of desktop PCs were passed by notebooks in the U.S. and Japan a few years ago, they started aggressively segmenting the mobile market into “desktop replacement”, “thin and light” and “ultra-portable” categories.In the past year, with Asus’s bringing out their Eee-PC (and about a dozen iterations of it), we’ve now got the “netbook” segment.Then there’s the red-headed step-child of notebooks, the tablet.

Whatever HP, Dell, Apple, and the rest call their segments, the notebook market is settling into performance machines that are the workhorses for developers and video-content editors, thinner and lighter full-fledged notebooks for business workers, and netbooks for casual web-surfing or writing.

That is set to change: touchscreen functionality is being built into the next-generation of display technology, and will rapidly start showing up in netbooks – there won’t be a really separate category for tablets; the hardware and software for it will be ubiquitous. And if netbooks have enough computing power today for a large slice of the population, then smartphones will have enough in a few more years.

The biggest problem with using a MCD that has a smartphone form-factor (something small enough to take with you everywhere) is that the display is too small. This problem is a lot like that faced by people who want a lightweight notebook for travel, but want a big screen when they’re home or in the office.A lot of those people use docking stations, or just plug their notebook into a big screen – that’s what I do too.As smartphones and netbooks “converge” into MCDs, somewhere around the size of an iPhone, the same thing will happen:people who use the MCD as their main computing device will pop it in a docking station, and use a keyboard and a large screen at home. When they go out, they pop their “phone” in their pocket and use an interface that’s designed for the smaller screen.

Google has really shown a preview of this, with mobile versions of their email, news, and search sites that show up if you’re using a mobile gadget – particularly the iPhone or the HTC’s G1 (based on Google’s Android OS).

In 2008, my smartphone has a 528 MHz processor, 4 GB of built-in flash memory, a 640 x 480 display, and both 3G and WiFi radios, along with basic GPS.My 2012 MCD is going to have a multi-core 1 GHz or better processor, 64 or maybe 128 GB of storage, an 800 x 480 (or better) OLED display on-board, with video-out through a docking that supports much higher resolutions.It’ll probably have 4G broadband of some variety (I’m guessing LTE), and the GPS will be integrated into many applications instead of being ‘stand alone’.The hardware won’t be the problem – getting the operating system really polished for both mobile use and desktop use will.Apple has a jump on this by using the same basic kernel (Mac OS X) for both their iPhone, Macbooks and desktop computers.

And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve heard about cloud computing.One of the founders of Sun Microsystems just left to focus on a startup involved with it.And as ever more of our content and raw computing power is hosted off in a datacenter somewhere, more of our applications will look like Google Docs, or Salesforce.com’s eponymous offerings, but with mobile and “large screen” versions.One big driver will be very fast wireless broadband, and distributed datacenters (to reduce latency).Both Google and Microsoft are investing heavily here, though Amazon has a big fat cloud of their own for rent.

So the next-generation mobile OS’es will need to handle multiple UI paradigms, be able to retrieve and store data in “the cloud”, and integrate location data with any application that has a use for it, while boasting enough horsepower to play full HD video streamed over the net.

Social Networking – Us, but online

Humans are social creatures – which is why websites like Facebook have exploded in growth.Users are (usually) extending their real-life social networks onto the web, where they can share photos, update their status so their friends know where and when they are, and reconnect. Whether Facebook survives in its present form, I have no idea, but in 2012 your friends will know where you are (if you want them to) because your MCD will update your location and “presence” (in a meeting, sleeping, etc) for you.So when you go to call someone (or IM them, or throw a sheep at them, whatever) you’ll know if they’re too busy to talk, sleeping, or ordering pizza.Or more importantly – if they’re nearby, and want a coffee, so you can walk over and meet up. Motorola is already designing an intentionally “social” smartphone based on Android.

While Facebook seems big now (it’s closing in on 100 million users, the last I checked), keep in mind that there are 300 million people in America, and 450 million in the EU, and a few billion in Asia.Most of these people don’t have much (or any) experience with computers, and don’t have a lot of legacy content.For them, the main point of contact with the internet is already their mobile phones.So the growth potential for social networking sites is huge, and for tens of millions of new users, their MCD/smartphone will be the natural tool to access those sites.

So – as Moore’s law relentlessly marches on, broadband speeds make cloud-computing indistinguishable from “local” computing, and with the drive to connect to access all of our information from anywhere, at any time, we have the perfect recipe for the ubiquity of mobile communication devices. Our notebooks aren’t going to just “complement” our smartphones, like Palm’s failed Folio; MCDs are going to be the computer for hundreds of millions of internet users.As we walk around the physical world, our MCDs (somebody will think of a better word) will know where we are, where we want to go (and offer directions), when we’re sleeping and don’t want to be bothered, where the nearest Starbucks is, or the nearest bar, and which of our friends is already there.

So if your website or application isn’t easily usable by mobile devices now, start making plans for it. There are going to be new giant companies born of this, just like the internet birthed Google and Facebook.

True Move’s (somewhat) New Flagship Store/Hangout

2008-10-20T17:53:00.012+07:00

In Thailand, the omnipresent TRUE technology company, which swallowed up the largest cable/satellite TV provider UBC before going on to offer mobile phone service, WiFi hotspots, ipTV, and high-tech coffee shops in addition to its core broadband internet service, has opened its “flagship store” under the true move brand.

This 4-story monster of a store/coffee-shop/internet-café/radio-station/video recording studio (yes, it has all of that) is across the street from Siam Discovery (near Siam Paragon, and the Siam BTS station). The first floor has a sort of museum-timeline of mobile telephony and data (see the photo above right), dating back to the luggable carphones of 1992, right up to the still non-existent 3G service, which is allegedly on-track for early 2009. You can read my earlier blog post to see how much faith I put in that!

There’s also a “Touch SIM Station”, for those lucky True Mobile customers with a touch-enabled SIM. I’m not sure quite what services are on offer if you touch your SIM to the 2001-esque black monolith of plastic, but nobody seemed to be using it anyway. There’s also a nice Starbucks-style café, much like the True Move store in Paragon, and tons of gadgets, toys, iPod-compatible neck-pillows (yes, really!), doggy-shaped speakers, and tons of phones. There’s tons of seating, especially if you don’t mind sitting next to gangs of 13-year old boys playing FPS games on large flat-screens.

If you’re just looking for a place to plop down with a notebook and work, they do sell internet access by the minute (in minimum 20-minute increments, for 20 baht – about 65 cents U.S. at today’s rates). You can also sign up for WiFi plans, ADSL, mobile service, etc. The 3rd floor has what the brochure calls a “See Through Fitting Room”, which I’m thinking sounds like a very bad idea, unless it’s not what it sounds like.

On the top floor, behind a gigantic and heavy door, are more tables, and a full-on video/TV studio, complete with gigantic ceiling-mounted lighting and a half-dozen very expensive-looking digital TV cameras, with that “1080p HD” logo on their sides. Downstairs, 99.5 FM is broadcasting from a glass-walled room, with the DJ surrounded by an audiophile’s dream’s worth of equipment, plus a half-dozen laptops.

This store is definitely far, far larger than the other True Move stores I’ve seen, as befits its “flagship” designation. A lot of the tables even have mobile phones there to play with, anchored to the tables with umbilical cords. Definitely a place to get some work done in a nice, air-conditioned place with a steady source of caffeine, power outlets and WiFi access. The actual address is:

232/5, 234 Siam Square soi 2
Patumwan, Bangkok 10330
Tel: 02-658-4449.