The Olympics

August 20th, 2008

The Olympics in Beijing is arguably the biggest of its kind, funded by a staggering $40 Billion budget from the Beijing/Chinese government. It is the first time for China to host this historical event. Of course it is the most important thing for China on so many levels. So much so, the Chinese attendees of the games are instructed/encouraged to cheer for foreign athletes, even if they are playing against the host team. This is even more evident when the foreign team is one of the powerful nations such as the USA.

For example, I was watching the final between China and USA in women’s beach volleyball game. The chanting of “USA” from the energized Chinese DJ is unbelievable! US teams throughout the games have admitted that they feel like host nation in this Beijing Olympics games. And this beach volleyball game is no exception, the #2 seeded team from US beat the #1 seeded Chinese team in two closely fought games, thanking partially I’m sure to their “homefield” advantage.

Now you may ask, as a gold medal crazed host nation, why would the Chinese do that??? The answer in my mind is that there are things more important than gold medals. After learning from previous diplomatic PR stumbles, and most recently happened in the Olympics torch relay around the world, the Beijing government is becoming smarter. The cost of a few medals are nothing compared to the improved xoxo relationships with the most powerful nations in the world. The gushing praise from the NBC broadcasters alone is worthy of a gold medal!

As for the beach volleyball match, I shouted my voice out and cursed “traitors” throughout the game. But in the end, I have to salute the Beijing government for an attempt to get the ultimate PR gold medal. Very well done indeed.

Posted in News, Personal, Sports | No Comments »

Extend a VMware disk

July 19th, 2008

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.

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ScanPST and ScanOST

June 26th, 2008

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.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Now you can read this on iPhone

May 8th, 2008

reader.google.com does a good job of adding RSS feeds to your browser friendly iPhone.

So now you can read many news feed on your iPhone.

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Yahoo! mail defeats Adblock

April 9th, 2008

Adblock is an optional plug-in feature for Firefox users who don’t want to see online ads. However, because of that technology websites may lose advertising revenue. Yahoo! Mail seems to have figured out a way to defeat Adblock. I noticed that lately whenever I want to send an email in Y! Mail, it waits until the large ad unit is loaded before it finalizes the delivery of the mail. If for some reason the ads is not successfully loaded, you’ll get an error message that your mail has not been delivered.

This tactic is similar to other advertising websites where an intermediate advertising step must be completed before the process user is engaged in can continue. For example you must view a short video ad clip before the online streaming TV show can move on to the next segment; or before your search results can display, you must click or skip a page dedicated to advertising. While slower and annoying to some users, this tactic proved to be very effective in advertising as for that moment the ad gets people’s attention like a car crash right in front of your eyes.

Once again, Internet proves nothing is really for free. Well, for now Wikipedia and Craigslist still are, but for how long.

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Hiatus

March 2nd, 2008

This blog has gone hiatus for a while. I lost and regained the domain name in the process. After some headaches and trial and errors with two domain registrars, I finally got the domain back.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Office 2007 Rant

November 16th, 2007

I tried to use superscript/subscript in my Powerpoint presentation with Powerpoint 2007 – you need that often for any technical presentations. The keyboard shortcut for superscript(Ctrl+Shift+=) and subscript(Ctrl+=) still work, however pressing the shortcut key combo again doesn’t cancel the super/subscript as they do in Word 2000, 2003 or any older versions.

This is deeply inconvenient as all subsequent lines of typing all turned into subscript until you reformat them with slow menu-driven commands. Searching Microsoft help leads me to the training on “Ribbon” – the new name Microsoft dreamed up for very (in)flexible toolbars.

The problem becomes worse here. Microsoft stated clearly upfront in FAQ, the first thing you couldn’t do is customizing those ribbons like adding, removing or rearranging buttons. So you are stuck with what Microsoft thinks you should use. Superscript/subscript buttons are only available in Word 2007, not in the same ribbon in Powerpoint. And there’s no way to add them in place of the Bold/Italic/Underline (which I can live without since Ctrl+B/I/U easily takes care those) buttons for example.

So to recap,

  1. Microsoft removed some really useful keyboard shortcut capabilities for no good reason (it’s on the same keys) .
  2. It forces you to use the slower ribbon driven commands.
  3. When your favorite commands are not on the ribbon, you’re screwed since you can’t change anything about the ribbons.

So, why is this a better UI? It feels like the Republicans are running Microsoft these days.

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DIY memory upgrade

October 27th, 2007

Hey I just got a new shiny aluminum iMac 24inch. Now my desk has become the picture of Apple commercial: space-age quality aluminum/glass iMac with no extra box, almost no wire next to the PC with a dozen wire hanging out from the back of the ugly black box to underneath the monitor. In fact, the entire iMac looks thinner than the 24 inch Dell monitor.

Well, you pay a high price for such beauty, unless you know a few tricks. For example, the base system is actually priced very competitively against similarly equipped PC systems. However, Apple charge a huge premium for any upgrade especially memory upgrade. For example to go from 1GB to 2GB costs $150 extra and to 4GB costs an additional $850. I bought a 2GB memory stick and put it in the bottom of the iMac. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes:

1. Disconnect iMac (3 wires) – 10 seconds;

2. Flip it around on my bed – 10 seconds,

3. Unscrew the bottom panel with one screw (last year’s iMac has 2 screws) – 15 seconds;

4. Put in the memory stick next to the original 1GB stick – 15 seconds;

5. Put everything back in and reconnect – 25 seconds;

Boot it up, it shows 3GB of memory, very happy. The total cost: $75.

DIY not only is satisfying, it also saves money.

Posted in Money, Personal, Technology, Toy | No Comments »

Adaptability

September 11th, 2007

I recently started a new job in a new city. So I have gone through this process of gradually relocating myself and eventually my family to a brand-new environment. One of the things we decided to do is to move from the house we have lived for many years into an apartment in the new city.

Obviously this is not very ideal. Once you get used to have your own house – in our case a brand new house – to an much smaller, much more restrictive apartment – in this case also a much older apartment, you would feel a little shock and disappointment. I remembered many many years ago when we were still students living in small apartment, some visitor made a comment that he would go crazy living in such a small apartment. We laughed about that comment and that person for years. Now, today, I suddenly felt that I can somewhat relate to that comment now.

Obviously I can do better than that. Being adaptive to new environment has always been a strength and an advantage. If I pride myself in being able to adapt to bigger, better environment, then I should be able to adapt to smaller, sometimes worse situations equally well. When I put myself into that right mindset, I can now view the new environment as a set of interesting challenges instead of the “what did I get myself into?” type of negative thoughts.

OK, I’m ready. After the initial shock, things can only turn better from here.

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Mac Envy

August 17th, 2007

More and more PC users have developed Mac envy. I’m one of them. Apple simply designs more beautiful looking machines. Case in point is the latest upgrade to the popular iMac line. Side-by-side, the whole iMac machine looks thinner than a normal LCD monitor and not a lot bigger (the bottom portion is longer in order to hold the guts of a powerful desktop computer).

Posted in Technology, Toy | No Comments »

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