Father’s New Dell

And so my father’s new Dell PC came in. It’s a Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 that came with 22″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor. Might be a little overkill for my father, but that was the best that I could get for him based on his budget. Since he’s purchasing a new computer, I might as well recommend him one that is rather future proof. Haha… The imperfections of owning a “PC” (a.k.a. non-Mac computers) hit me when the following occurred whilst I was setting up the computer. My parents were actually complaining and asking quite a lot of questions which highlighted several problems.

1. Massive mess of wires

Now I understand why Dell displays only a monitor and the CPU unit on their website. Because they know you’d not purchase the unit if they had shown you the number of wires and power cables that the whole set up will have. 😦 This is a huge difference compared to an iMac experience. Oh wait, Apple’s website has already spelt out the difference… Haha…

2. Vista problems

Other than the usual entries required during the setting up process of the computer, Vista actually hogs up to 10 minutes of your time to perform a benchmark test on your computer. Aim of this test is to give you a Windows Experience Index. I quote:

The Windows Experience Index is a new feature built into Windows Vista that is designed to help you better understand how well Windows Vista and other software will perform on your PC.

Wow… But do you seriously need so much time to understand the new PC? My parents who didn’t know what Windows Experience Index is asked why it takes the PC so long to boot up. “Why does the computer take longer even when it’s supose to be faster?” Good question Mr and Mrs Ng, I guess the answer is Dell/Microsoft don’t understand the general consumers. My suggestion to Dell: Perform the benchmarking in your factory before you ship it out. Just let my parents use the computer once it’s out of the box.

3. More problems

Dell so thoughtfully installed McAfee Security Center to “ensure your PC is protected from hackers, viruses, spyware and spam.”  Catch is, it’s only a 30 days trial. Way to go~! My recommendation: uninstall the crap software and replace it with a free alternative: AVG Free which provides basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows. My parents noticed that and wondered how a family without a person who knows such details can use a computer without hitting brick walls. I wonder too… Hmm…

Singapore’s Web 2.0 (Part 1)

WOW… I found 2 gems today that is Made In Singapore~! They got me excited enough to make me want to break away from my work and start to blog about them. 🙂

Widgeous

So it’s no secret that I maintain a Twitter microblog along side this main blog. The My idea of a microblog is to write about short snippets about my life and my daily observations. Usually these are just one-liner descriptions, not long enough to fill up an blog entry, but they are still considered important parts of me. But the urge to write a Twitter entry is usually spontaneous. I couldn’t possibly be booting my laptop on the train to blog about observing a office lady struggling with her white iPhone. I am not willing to be charged the cost of sending an overseas SMS to +447624801423 (this is the official Twitter SMS number). And by the time I am seated in front of my MacBook Pro, I have already forgotten what I wanted to write about.

Widgeous to the rescue.

Widgeous is a typical Web 2.0 platform which meshes up several online services for the convenience of the user. One function of Widgeous that attrated me is that it allows one to update one’s Twitter by simply sending a SMS to a local number (+6592721192). One can even receive updates from the people one follows in Twitter via SMS too~! 🙂 Other than accessing Widgeous via SMS, Widgeous also allows Windows Live Messenger, email, Google Talk and others. Twitter is not the only service that it provides too. Widgeous enables checking of weather, dictionary and navigation guide. A very cool platform developed by our fellow Singaporeans. 🙂

Office 2008 for Mac SP1 Issues

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has just released a Service Pack update this Tuesday (download here). It contains several changes that improve security, stability, and performance. This includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory by using malicious code.

However, after completing the installation, some users may experience a problem where the Setup Assistant starts up every time they try to launch any Office application. According to The Entourage Help Blog, [t]his situation is a result of when the Office Setup Assistant detects that an invalid Product Key was used to install Office 2008.

To resolve this issue, please move the following files to the Trash:

• /Users/username/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 settings.plist
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

After you complete these steps, open any Office application, and then use the product key that is included with your original installation disk to complete the installation. The product key is located on the back of the Office 2008 for Mac DVD sleeve or on the back of the Install Guide.

Maintain Freshness of Chips

If you are like me, mugging in your room eating a huge bag of Ruffles Authentic Barbeque Flavored Potato Chips (made with 100% sunflower oil) and feel fat suddenly, what can you do to store the remaining chips? What if you don’t have any air-tight container to seal the chips in? Leave the chips in the open? 漏风/Laohong/Stale chips are distasteful you know…

Youtube to the rescue! If you had opened the packaging as carefully as I always do, you can actually store the leftovers by folding the packaging in a specific way. Cool~!

Add a WordPress Tagboard/Shoutbox

WordPress is a great blogging platform. It’s flexible, allows you to add different modules or plug-ins to it to add functionalities, and it’s free… As long as you have a personal web server. And there’s the totally free alternative at WordPress.com. However it has several limitations such as a restriction in the variety of templates and modules that you can use. One specific limitation is the inability to add a tagboard/shoutbox that allows visitors to quickly leave messages.

Currently, there’s a functionality to display recent comments in the sidebar, but only the title of the posts are displayed. This adds an additional layer of obstruction for the visitors as they have to click on the links in order to read the latest comments. See below for a side-by-side comparison.

To sort of bypass this limitation, I have created a Yahoo Pipes. It is relatively simple to implement.

1. Create the page/post that you want to designate for the purpose of general conversations.
2. Get the URL of the feed that contains the comments for the post. For WordPress users, you only need to add “feed/” to the original URL of the page/post. For example, the feed for

   .
   https://antemeridiem.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/april-random-ness/

   is

   https://antemeridiem.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/april-random-ness/feed/
   .

3. Visit the Yahoo Pipes page and enter the necessary information.
4. Notice that you can limit the amount of characters to display. This is highly recommended as it prevents your sidebar from being flooded by extremely long comments.
5. Regardless of the length of the comments, you may choose to append any characters at the end of each comment. This is to ensure that long comments truncated by the character limit does not seem chopped off to other visitors.
6. Click Run Pipe to see the results.
7. Once you are satisfied with the results, click on More Options, and click on Get as RSS. You may right click Get as RSS to obtain the URL of the RSS itself too.
8. In your WordPress Widgets page, add a RSS widget and paste the URL of your customized RSS. Check “Display item content?” to ensure that the comments are being displayed.

So do take some time to experiment and try this out. Leave me any comments or suggestions and I’d try my best to implement them. Better still, clone my workflow, modify it and better my implementation~! 😀

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes was introduced to the world as public beta on February 2007. Functionality of Yahoo Pipes is as follows (from Wikipedia):

Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building applications that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The site works by letting users “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (e.g. filtering).

This empowers users to create mesh-ups of several information on the Internet through a visual interface, and output the information in several standard formats. And with almost every website having a RSS feed of the latest posts and comments, it means that it is now effortless to integrate information from different sources (like WordPress and Twitter). For example, this is a pipe which allows you to aggregate news from Bloglines, Findory, Google Blog Search, Google News, IceRocket, Microsoft Live News, Technorati, and Yahoo! News base on a search term that you’ve chosen.

Other than creating your own pipes, Yahoo Pipes also lets you browse and search for pipes that other users have created. Therefore instead of building your pipes from ground up, you may see if similar pipes have been constructed, and clone and modify them for your own set up.

Types of E-Commerce

Interestingly, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) is listed as one of the major types of e-commerce in my recommended textbook for a module which introduces what e-commerce is. It states:

Since 1999, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have attempted to adapt various aspects of peer-to-peer technology into P2P e-commerce. To date there have been very few successful commercial applications of P2P e-commerce with the notable exception of illegal downloading of copyrighted music.

The text then continued to give Napster, a file sharing service created in 1999, as an example.

Strictly speaking, the text is not accurate in two counts:

• Firstly, although it’s true that Napster uses P2P technology, Napster was not created to perform e-commerce. The founder Shawn Fanning created Napster just to have an easier method of finding digital music. In fact, I would suggest that P2P e-commerce was non-existent at that period of time.
• Secondly, “to date” means 2006, which was the date that the textbook was published; and the P2P e-commerce scene has since then changed. This is why I never believe in buying technology related reference books. They are usually outdated by the time they are published.

Anyways, I’ve decided that I shall feature one of the commercial applications of P2P e-commerce.

Missing Spotlight Icon

Here are the weird symptoms I had last night on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1 installed:

• My Spotlight icon on the menu bar disappeared although Spotlight seems to be working still if I initiate a search in any Finder window
• Clipboard stopped working totally as I cannot paste any text using ⌘+V even though I was sure there should be content there as ⌘+X worked fine. The Paste command on the menu bar was disabled too.
• Adium didn’t allow me to drag the chat windows and merge or move their tabs.

After some searching, it seems that others were having the same issues too. I used Disk Utility to Repair Disk Permission on my Mac partition as suggested. True enough, there were files that had permissions problem. After everything was fixed, I rebooted my Mac and everything was back to normal~!