MBK Center, Bangkok

MBK Center (Centre to me – the Thais are inconsistent about using American or British English spelling) is still one of the largest shopping centres in Bangkok. Thai people usually refer to it as Mahboonkrong (มาบุญครอง).

It’s one of the older malls in Bangkok, being around since the mid-1980s. It is particularly famous for clothing and cell phones. But I find it confusing (I am never sure what floor I am on) and there are many places that sell the same or similar goods. Because the vendors see so many foreigners they tend to be less friendly and more mercenary than elsewhere. However, compared with Panthip Plaza it is extremely accomodating. I’ve never been scammed at MBK.

I took the photo above from Phaya Thai Road. They have already started their Xmas and New Year decorations. There are a lot of tourists around so I hope the tourist season this year will not be ruined as it was in 2008 by political strife.

Inside MBK is not great for photography as it is crowded. Photography is officially banned so a photographer has to be discreet. It is a great place for people-watching. Eventually everybody you know will go there.

 

MBK Center Interior

MBK connects to the National Stadium Skytrain station (Silom Line). The walkway from the Tokyu Department Store to the station is excellent for street photography.

 

MBK Center Map

Picapp Queen Elizabeth II

Pictures of and about my Queen.

Picapp has many good pictures of the Queen and Royal Family. I’ll publish more from time to time. They make me feel most patriotic living in this foreign land which wasn’t ever a part of the British Empire.

The official web site of the British Monarchy is here.

Singapore Vehicle License Plate Check Character Calculator & Validator

Here’s something extremely obscure!

A few years ago I spent a lot of time in Singapore and, as always, wanted to understand their system of vehicle registration places (license plates).

The basic system is easy to understand.Wikipedia has some basic documentation here.

Here’s an illustration from Wikipedia of a current private vehicle plate design (front and rear).

It’s British heritage is obvious but the Singapore Government made an enhancement that’s unusual. Almost every license plate (apart from military and diplomatic plates) has an alphabetic character at the end. It’s not a “year letter” like the old British system but a “check character”.

The check character is calculated from the values of the other characters in the plate and serves as a validator. If you make a mistake recording the plate the check character will be wrong.

As far as I know the Singapore Government does not document the check character generation algorithm for the public. I had a big database of Singapore license plates I’d observed and back in 2002 I tried to reverse-engineer the algorithm.

My mathematics isn’t the best so I got some help from somebody on the Internet. He quickly helped me understand the system and I wrote some Microsoft Visual Basic code to calculate check characters and to validate them.

I published a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with the code on my web site, but I closed it down in 2007 as an economy measure. When I discovered Scribd I decided to re-publish it as a service to anyone else who’s interested in the subject.

In the spirit of open-source I placed the code in the public domain under a GNU General Public License. I don’t know how many people are interested in this obscure subject but if you are, you’re welcome to the code.

After the break is an embedded form of the spreadsheet from Scribd. Don’t worry about the “VALUE” errors in the preview – Scribd rendered the preview incorrectly.

I am not a great Visual Basic coder so I’m sure many people can improve the code. I’ve tested it on hundreds of Singapore plates of all types including the new “SMB” bus plates and it works. But of course that isn’t a formal proof of correctness. As the license says – no warranty!

When I wrote the code I put lists of validated registration plates for the various classes of Singapore buses on the Singapore Buses Discussion Board on Yahoo Groups. They’re still there in the “Files” section over seven years later.

Crowdscience User Surveys

I’m frustrated! I found out about a free (the Bangkok Frugal Photographer likes free) service that can survey visitors to this site. I found it through a link in an article I was reading on Google Reader. I thought it would be good to learn more about my visitors. All I know is the gross number from my WordPress statistics and the city / country they are from. The latter comes from my Feedjit widget.

So I went to the Crowdscience web site and set up an account. It was pretty simple – the usual stuff including an email validation. Then I told it about this blog. You can have multiple sites under one Crowdscience account.

Finally Crowdscience gave me the code to embed in every page that I want to generate a random request to take their survey. BUT …

It was a reference to a JavaScript provided by Crowdscience. I knew at once that WordPress would have nothing to do with it “for security reasons”. Just like my Picasa Web embedded slide shows. And so it didn’t – and I could not find any workarounds on the Crowdscience web site.

Once again Crowdscience needs to work with WordPress to get a special embed code as Picapp and a few others did. I wasted a whole 15 minutes of my valuable time to find that out!

I feel another Mr. Fredrickson moment coming on.

Ayutthaya Trip

I went to Ayutthaya this weekend. Ayutthata (พระนครศรีอยุธยา) is the ancient capital of Thailand when it was known as Siam. Like Bangkok it is on the Chao Phraya River. I took an hour’s river cruise which was good for photography as well as enjoyable in the cooling breeze. The weather is excellent now. When the Thai people start to say it is cold (“now!”) then I know it’s just the right temperature for me.

There’s a bit more information about Ayutthaya on Wikipedia here. Ayutthaya is also the name of a province. There’s a lot of industry in Ayutthaya province so it is quite a diversified place. The city is an easy hour’s drive from Bangkok.

Here’s a link to a big slide show on my Google Site. It has pictures from Picasa Web.

Ayutthaya Trip 2009-11-21

Ayutthaya is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There’s some information about its status here. The Thai Government has invested in improving the city and its attractions to keep that status. Since I last visited in 2007 they built a large Visitors’ Centre. However it was deserted when I was there.

I saw few foreign tourists but many Thai people. That was good as the prices are reasonable for Thai people and the people are friendly. Immediately a tour bus pulls up the prices go up and the attitude goes down. Such is life.

There are four other UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Thailand:

 

Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns

Thungyai-Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuaries

Ban Chiang Archaeological Site

Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex

I confess I have not been to them. I should make the effort.

Still Away

Another clue about where I am …

Where is this? Picture from 2007

I’m Away for the Weekend

Guess where I am…

Where is this? Picture from 1987.

Note: I was able to find this 22 year old photo because I have all my pre-Lightroom photos indexed in one large Thumbs Plus database. I want to be able to do the same with Lightroom.

Lightroom Support for Canon EOS-7D

At last! Adobe have released “Release Candidates” for the software needed to support the Canon EOS-7D in Lightroom and Photoshop. That will be a relief to many photographers who have been waiting for it since they purchased their 7D.

Adobe are careful to describe a Release Candidate:

The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

That’s far better than using the “Beta” label. It’s interesting how these terms have changed over time. When I worked at HP we referred to what’s now called a Beta as an Alpha. For us Beta is what Adobe are calling a Release Candidate. I think the RC usage is consistent with the Microsoft terminology.

I don’t have a 7D and I have only just updated to Lightroom 2.6 so I think I’ll wait until Adobe release the software officially.

I have seen it written many times that Adobe does a better job of rendering Camera RAW data than Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional. I find this amazing given that the DPP engineers should have access to all the inside information and to the people who designed the sensor and firmware. Maybe it is that the best software engineers want to work for a software company rather than be second-class citizens in a hardware focused company like Canon.

Where have I heard that before?

Fruit Cake

I still enjoy British-style fruit cake. Note, it’s not the same as the American version which was the stuff of jokes when I lived there.

Suzuki Coffee has branches in many shopping malls in Bangkok. Their fruit cake is expensive at 60 Baht for a big slice. I treat myself occasionally. The workers at the Fortune Town Mall branch know me now and have the cake ready for me.

Very good.

Top 10 Things You Should Never Discuss Online

http://listverse.com/2009/11/18/top-10-things-you-should-never-discuss-online/

I agree. I’m keeping this blog un-controversial…

But of course merely by listing the subjects he’s discussing them – and he’s gathered 590 comments (when I looked) in two days.