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I’ve been quietly annoyed by Yahoo’s inability to filter out junk mails for months now. Why couldn’t they do as good a job as Gmail? Maybe they should outsource their search to someone else…wait, in fact they did.

Anyway, now I’ve encountered another downside of Yahoo’s horrible junk mail filter. I’ve ordered several books from Apple via iPhoto but never got the confirmation emails. After a few days just before I wanted to order again, I smarted up and checked the Yahoo spam folder. Sure enough, buried down deep in junk mails are the Apple receipts. How could something as popular as Apple online store receipts get recognized as junk email? It blows my mind. Maybe Yahoo should allow me to search the “junk” mail folder so that I can uncover these buried treasure easily. Currently it doesn’t.

Product suggestion to Yahoo email: since your junk mail filter sucks, maybe you should have folders and search/index functions built into the junk mail.

The Gmail preview widget has been broken on Yahoo! page for a few days now. I’m sure it is Google who has caused this in order to wrestle more users to its own iGoogle platform. The spot where Gmail inbox preview is now shows a “coming soon” error message from Yahoo, quite sad.

On the other hand, entrepreneurial people never cease to capitalize on business opportunities on anything. If you search for Gmail module in Yahoo, one of the two things come up is cunningly named “Gmail Inbox”. It is actually someone’s blog.

Really? The new 24inch is 30% larger?

From PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, re leadership:
1. Do it now.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

3. Seek consensus, but recognize when to sacrifice unanimity for decisiveness.

4. Remember that, as a leader of a team, you are also a member of that team.

5. Take what you do seriously, but not yourself.

Apple made the latest version a public beta today. It is quite sleek especially with the cover-flow history. It also is the first browser to pass the acidtest 3, I noticed – which means it truly conforms to known standards.

The moral of this story – find out the panel type before you buy that cheap LCD monitor, and avoid TN type at all cost.

I tried out a new 24-inch Dell LCD monitor at work: the model name is S2409W. For some reason I just don’t like it as my eyes hurt. So I switched back to my old 20-inch 2005FPW. While the 2005FPW is smaller in size, it is much more expensive at new than the S2409W. Other than that, nothing else provided by Dell would indicate there’s something wrong with the S2409W. But,

Now I know the reason, thanks to these two wiki pages:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_monitors;
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD;

The first page identifies the panel types of various Dell LCD monitors. The S2409W uses the TN type, while the 2005FPW is of the S-IPS type.

The second page explains the difference between these and other LCD panel types. Apparently the TN type is the cheapo type. It stands for Twisted Nematic. It has limited viewing angle and only 6bit true color resolution. Because of the latter reason, it uses a dithering method to simulate true 24bit color used by most modern UI. This dithering method apparently produces bothersome viewing experience to some, myself included. The S-IPS panels are much more expensive and have much better viewing experience. Dell calls these LCD products the Ultrasharp series.

While my lovely 24inch iMac uses the latest greatest of IPS – the H-IPS panel, the 20inch version is being sued for the cheapo TN type panel it uses. H-IPS is the next evolution of S-IPS. From my experience using it, I have no complaints whatsoever. If you want to see the true colors of your family picture, this is the best. In fact, I was pretty shocked to see how much worse my digital pictures looked on the LCD screen of my Dell Latitude laptop – particularly the color range is atrocious.

Ever since I upgraded to V 2.0.1, I have experienced 3 times of complete system freeze of my OS X. I’m not 100% sure but VMWare is only program upgraded right before those system crashes. And it always happened in the Unity mode. Maybe the Unity mode is particularly unstable…

I run a WinXP virtual machine on OS X host. One day I figured the disk allocated for WinXP VM was too small. Here are the steps to grow that disk size simply and painlessly:

1. Shutdown VM;
2. Run “/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/diskTool -X 30GB myDisk.vmdk” where 30GB is the new desired size;
3. After diskTool is down growing the disk files, restart WinXP VM;
4. From WinXP run “Diskpart”
5. List volume
6. Select volume 2 (the desired volume name)
7. Extend

That’s it. I now have a newly expanded VM disk.

My outlook suddenly gave me the stern warning that I need to shutdown and scan my message boxes with ScanPST. I have a corrupted mailbox file, or files. It didn’t tell me which/where the mailbox file is and where the scanpst.exe or scanost.exe is located.

So to help me and others remember how to locate these files:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12″ is where ScanPst.exe and ScanOst.exe located. I think these two programs are merely links to some other core utilities. You can launch either one and it can scan both types of mailbox files (*.ost or *.pst).

“C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” is where all your mailbox files are located.

Wouldn’t it be great if Outlook simply launches this tool or provide this functionality as a right-click on the mailbox itself? We should ask Bill that question.