Views of a Patzer!

HOT! Bangkok is really hot, I mean it literally. At 4am in the morning, the temperature was like 2pm in Chennai! Thankfully, all cabs have air conditioners. Because of the recent Tsunami, Bangkok has lost some of its tourists, I heard. It doesn't look like that. You find foreigners everywhere.

Though, I had no plans for buying any electronics items, I ended up buying a MP3 player and couple of DVDs. Pantip Plaza, the mecca for electronics, will surely tempt anyone in to buying things they never wanted to buy. It is a five storey mall, with umpteen shops selling the same things, at different prices. If you are lucky & patient, you will find the cheapest price in one of these stores, but still the highest price quoted will be lower than the lowest price outside :) I picked up a 512MB MP3 player for 3100 Bahts. This is Rs.3500 or so. I was pretty satisfied with the deal. Unfortunately, it was shortlived, as I soon found the same model being sold for 2900 Baht in the next shop!!

Software/Movies. Whatever you can think of, you will get it here. Starting from the complete Office 2003 suite to 7 DVD pack of "Training for RHCE", you will find everything. All the latest movie DVDs, totally cloned, no loss of quality, are available. Of course, these are not legal copies, but what can you expect for a 100 baht? Adult DVDs are a separate business here. Be prepared to be stopped by a vendor displaying a bunch of adult DVD covers every 10 steps!

For those in Bangalore, Pantip plaza is 50x National Market!

It is pretty difficult to shake off certain habits, downloading from Internet is one such thing. I am sure many will agree with this. It doesn't matter what you download, be it movies, documents or whatever... many people download stuff just for the sake of having/owning it. The knowledge that you have so much data at your disposal can make you verrrry happy & feel "knowledgeable"! The amount of information (or simply, stuff!) out there is so vast that what you can get is only limited by your pipe's capacity! In my country, that is the bottleneck. The broadband boom is yet to happen, so you can't get an unlimited 3Mbps or 6Mbps line, unless you are related to Ambani or Dhariwal. Unfortunately, I am not! I decided to check out the HTTP tunneling solutions out there. There are only a few programs available for tunneling through HTTP Proxies, like Socks2HTTP, HTTPort, GNU http tunnel (Here is an implementation in Java), McGyver's HTTP Tunnel & HTTPTunnel NG. If you are wondering what this tunneling stuff is, click here.

I tried out 3 of these and the only reliable solution, for me, was HTTPTunnel NG. HTTPort is a free software, running a free gateway. So, naturally you won't get that much of a download speed with this service. Also, many of the common ports are blocked, like nearly all P2P ports!! I tested IRC on this, it kept on dropping the connection. It is understandable, being free, they won't be able to or not ready to spend money on a fat pipe. Bottom line: Not reliable, but good piece of free software. Socks2HTTP doesn't provide a free gateway, they demand that you register for a 15 day demo period. They charge $4.99. Even after registering, my connection was not stable. The software hangs every 2 hrs or so and even if it stays connected, the local SOCKS interface keeps disconnecting the programs. I guess it is because their gateway shares a low bandwidth among too many users. It is certainly not worth $4.99 (that too, for only 15 days!). They also have a monthly scheme, which costs $9.99. The solution that worked perfectly for me was HTTPTunnel NG. This costs only $4.99 for a month, unlike Socks2HTTP where you need to cough up $9.99. There is a free gateway, which has a restriction of 5KB (this is what it showed in my machine, though they claim 15KB in their webpage), while the registration allows you to go atleast 5-10 times this basic speed. Initially, this program was crashing in my test machine, but registering seemed to solve the problem. After I gave the registration key to the program, it seemed to have switched to a rock-stable mode...I am happy with the download rate too. I dont know if I'd be getting the same service for ever, but I am pretty satisfied with what I am getting now.