Yesterday I spent all day to attend opening ceremony of TEIN2. TEIN2 stands for the second generation of Trans-Eurasia Information Network. In other words, it is a dedicated research and education network directly linked Asia and Europe. There are only a few direct link between Asia and Europe. Most of available links in the past are between Asia and America because America is the origin and there are so many contents there. In this event, there are a few demonstration to show the power of TEIN2. In fact, it is just 155 Mbps link between Bangkok and Singapore. TEIN2 is currently connected to ThaiREN, the integration of UniNet and ThaiSarn. I saw two interesting demonstration. The first one is Tele-Medicine. The key tool of this demonstration is DVTS aka Digital Video over IP. It constantly consumes 36 Mbps for 2-way high definition video conference. The next one is again DVTS but customized to reduce frame rate and bandwidth consumption to 6 Mbps for low speed network in developing country.

I encountered a bandwidth problem. It seems international bandwidth was quite low so I can't run even "apt-get update" successfully in reason time. Anyway, I really want to update package repositories to make everything up-to-date. So I looked for interim solution like proxy server to help me pass through this obstacle as quick as possible. I have other hosts with fast access to international sites and this host also is accessible so fast from my host. It should be possible to run a kind of web proxy there.

Today I managed to temporarily solve sound driver problem in Ubuntu by just plugging a new USB sound device. It is Comodow PD552. It is very small and so cheap even for me, 450 THB or approximately 11 USD. It works on my Ubuntu's laptop just fine. Whenever I plugged it, Ubuntu notified me immediately about the new audio playback device and let me configure it at the same time.

Since I have switched my laptop to Ubuntu and I managed to hear redirected sound from remote machine, I would like to utilize that remote machine to make it more useful instead of just expensive speaker. Anyway, the remote machine is an eMac. Eventually, I found Synergy. I also found that it is not easy to explain the use of Synergy. Imagine that you have two machines on your desk; a laptop and a desktop. I don't know which one you like the most. In my case, I do like to work on my laptop so I just use desktop for playing sound and browsing another web page at the same time. To make it real, I have to turn around to move another mouse device and keyboard connected to the desktop machine. Synergy simplifies my living style by letting me to use my laptop's keyboard and mouse device to control the desktop just like the ones connected physically. For more detail, my desktop machine is placed on a raised wood so it approximately next to the top of my laptop. Synergy makes it possible to move mouse pointer from my laptop virtually off-screen to the top edge and suddenly appear on the very bottom of desktop screen. Cool! In other words, my mouse pointer is now able to move across screens connected to different machines.

After I switched my laptop to Ubuntu, I can only here silence. That's motivation to find interim solution until sound driver being improved. The first solution is to buy a USB sound card. Not too bad but I have to bring this new gadget everywhere I go. In addition, I have to paid for it. Luckily, it is Ubuntu. EsounD is a sound server software which is available on many platform including Lnux, Mac OS X and Windows. Ubuntu does support EsounD and it is installed by default. So, I just need to redirect all sound sent to EsounD to other EsounD on remote server. Sound good! How to do it?

Since I'm a Ph.D. student and a researcher at the same time, I often present my works through LCD projector. Now my laptop is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake. I have to configure it for easily presenting. One thing I like the most of laptops and recent video drivers is dual monitor aka dual head. In particular, you are able to extend your laptop screen to external monitor via standard VGA out port. This is not a complex capability. Most laptops support this scheme out of box. In Ubuntu, we are not able to configure dual head via GUI. In fact, we can but need some modification to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.