Bombs in Bangkok ruined new year parties

People here in Bangkok got their new year celebration parties ruined by six or more bombs that went off in the city earlier tonight (Dec 31st). There are 2 people dead already and the mayor cancelled 2 celebration parties in the city for precaution. From BBC:

At least six blasts at widely-scattered places occurred within an hour or so as streets were filling up with people ahead of New Year’s Eve celebrations.

From a Thai perspective, we know the militants in the south has the least bit to do with the bombing. They have never gone beyond the near-border provinces. This kind of terrors have never happened in Bangkok before — or at least I have never heard of such in my few decades of livining here. We have seen undercover police beating up 70 year old man who was protesting the Thaksin regime a few months ago (before Thaksin was ousted). Hence the suspect (from The Nation):

A security source said the Council for National Security may order the seizure of assets of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra to cut money supply for financing disturbance in the country.

The source said the CNS believed Thaksin was behind the series of seven bomb attacks in Bangkok Sunday evening.

The source said the CNS noted many bombs were launched at police booths but none of police officers were injured.

Makes sense to me because Thaksin is about to lose neary everything he’s got (stolen) since the current government took over and open series of investigations and lawsuits against all that invoived in (possible?) mega corruptions.

See picture here.

Picasa’s bad translation

I’m a Picasa fan. Great image organizer, snappy photo editing. Lately, I downloaded a new version and it got Thai interface. All the menus and buttons are in Thai instead of English.

Most of the time, a Thai language interface is very confusing and not very useful. I can start the list from Microsoft Windows XP’s down to Thai breeded softwares. (A lot of what’s in the TV’s and electronic appliances just look really bad.) Bad use of language and just pain in the ass to use. I can understand the limitations of most translators that they may not have much awareness in terms of usability. But this time in Picasa, Google took it to the next level.

In place of the buttons and everywhere “I’m Feeling Lucky,” they use Thai phrase “ดีใจจัง ค้นแล้วเจอเลย” which in English means “I’m so happy I search and got the results.” Well, the button is supposed to automatically enhance/edit the photo for me. Nothing to do with search here.

Despite the excessive “I’m so happy” part (I don’t think users look for happiness here.. they just want to search and got a result right away) this phrase “I’m so happy I search and got the results” does not represent the functionality of this button in Picasa at all. It’s OK if use in Google search (although, still quite awkward and sounds really stupid). But to use in Picasa for automatic photo enhancing, is just embarrassment for Google.

I wonder who Google hires for Thai language extension/ interface translation. Is he/she/it a human at all? Could it be the computer that does all this work for Google all along?

Firefox quitting on me but not Opera

I’m tired of Firefox freezing on me and lose all I was typing on my wordpress blog.

Firefox has this nice feature that if you close your browser while opening a bunch of web pages, the pages will be back the next time you open firefox. So when something happens and the browser needs to say bye bye because of some reasons it just can’t take you any more (which happens to me very often), you will get to continue whereever (web pages) you were looking at.

But if you were writing on your WordPress blog and Firefox crashed and you hadn’t hit a save button yet, you lose all you just typed.

Opera (web browser) does the automatic restore the browsing experince the same Firefox does, but that piece of writing on WordPress post page you didn’t save will be restored as well. Now this is cool.

Unplugged in Thailand (The Asia-Wide Internet Down Time)

There was an earthquake in Taiwan yesterday. Internet here in Thailand was almost disconnected from the rest of the world. Google was unreachable (except a few sub domains like image.google.com, news.google.com). Technorati and a whole horde of sites were also unreachable. CNN has an update on the news:

Nearly all Asia’s earthquake-disrupted Internet service and 80 percent of its phone service should be restored by noon (0400 GMT) Thursday, a Taiwanese official said following one of the largest telecommunications outages in years to hit Asia.

…

The 6.7-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks on Tuesday night and Wednesday caused disruptions for major telecommunications operators from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea — with ripple effects spreading beyond Asia.

Add that tiny litle Kngdom of Thailand in that list too. No time to check news on what happened in neighbour countries like Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar .. (List goes on.. sorry friends if I forgot to mention your country. Doesn’t mean we aren’t friends