Blog: recent posts

BOI labels itself a spammer

Thailand's Board of Investment (http://www.boi.go.th/), a government agency charged with attracting foreign investment, sends out a monthly newsletter, the latest issue of which has just arrived (in the middle of February) with the subject:

[Probably SPAM] - BOI E-Newsletter - January 2007

Looking at the headers, it looks like their own mailserver (running Microsoft Exchange) is responsible for this...

Ubuntu, Xemacs and Thai

I recently installed Ubuntu (actually: Kubuntu) to replace an ancient, creaking SuSE installation. While SuSE has always had excellent multilingual support, its evolution into OpenSuse combined with a general tendency to bloat and the various machinations between Novell and Microsoft have led me to try my luck elsewhere, and Ubuntu seems to fit the bill pretty well. The language support is pretty good and it also does Thai fairly well, something which the previous SuSE didn't handle very gracefully.

The only major issue was that Xemacs (which is a bit of a law unto itself) seemed to have taken a disliking to Japanese and German, the other two languages which I work with on a regular basis. For German characters such as umlauted letters it displayed Thai characters, and while it would display freshly inputted Japanese, when loading a new file Japanese came out as random garbage. As I'm an Xemacs person (at least for development), this was a bit of a problem for files containing non-ASCII language strings, of which I seem to have more than I realized.

Of course I seem to be the only person in the world with this peculiar issue, and Google was unable to provide even a hint of an answer, and I've spend several fruitless hours poking away at configuration files (note to self: must learn LISP).

And today, finally, I was struck by a useful blob of inspiration: I uninstalled all the Thai fonts (those in "xfonts" packages), and suddenly Xemacs was back to its usual form, except it was unable to display Thai. Reinstalling the "xfonts-thai-etl" ("Emacs/Mule needs these fonts to display Thai") solved this without messing up the other languages.

So there we have it. On the offchance someone else has this problem and is searching for a solution.

Splatter Ad

Pure horror from the Krung Thai Bank (ธนาคารกรุงไทย)

Hot Bangkok Bitches

One of the things I do to pass the time while waiting for some seemingly interminable processing operation to terminate, is surf the web looking for hot pictures from Thailand. It's a hot country, so that's generally not a problem, but I was delighted to stumble across this site featuring pictures and short bios of many of Bangkok's street dogs (so-called soi dogs). They're a fixture of Bangkok life, and quite a surprise for the first-time visitor. Mostly they're pretty docile and even though not seldom in a fairly poor state of repair compared to the pampered pooches we have in the West, quite friendly and unlikely to sink their yellowing fangs into you unless you do something drastic such as accidently tread on one.

สวัสดีครับ

สวัสดีครับ ผมชื่อเอียน

Exotic Keyboards

Exotic languages call for exotic-looking keyboards. On the left, my somewhat dated iBook with a Japanese keyboard - although to be honest, Japanese can be input on virtually any keyboard. There are several input methods, the most common of which is via the Latin transcription of the Japanese words, which are automatically converted to the appropriate Japanese characters by a clever piece of software. It's actually a little more complex than that, but you don't actually need keys with any Japanese characters on them. The characters you do see on the keys are hiragana, one of Japan's two phonetic alphabets, and it is also possible to input Japanese using these - but most people stick to the Latin letters. The only real advantage to having a Japanese keyboard is that it has some extra utility keys for actions such as switching between input methods (the key with the Chinese characters next to the "Apple" key on the bottom row is one).

Thai, on the other hand... although a purely phonetic alphabet, it does not match well to the Latin letters, and thus has its very own keyboard layout (there are actually two different layouts in existence), and it is difficult to input Thai on a non-Thai keyboard (unless you have memorized the layout).

See this article for some more info on Thai keyboards.

Gwaa (กว่า) - than

Used in comparisions, e.g.:

"Bangkok is larger than Berlin" -> "กรุงเทพฯใหญ่กว่าเบอร์สิน"

Bombings in Context

While the New Year's Eve bombings in Bangkok are not to be taken likely, it's very sobering when the casualty figures (3 confirmed deaths and nearly 40 injuries) are contrasted with the traffic accident statistics over the end-of-year holiday period: on the last four days of 2006 there were nearly 300 deaths and thousands of injuries caused by traffic accidents nationwide.