It’s too bad that NBC decided that badminton isn’t exciting enough to get much TV coverage but at least they have the games available online.
I was watching a Women’s Doubles semi-finals match between KOR and JPN and had to capture this rally. Having played the game, I know I’ll never be able to keep up with a rally this long… and it shows how tired the players were at the end.

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I use WebDAV to manage some things on my website and it’s been working nicely with Windows XP’s Web Folders support. Recently, I started using my Vista machine more and more and finally decided to upload something directly from my Vista machine and lo and behold Vista refuses to connect to my folder.

Turns out that my web host, dreamhost, like most other hosting providers, only support Basic Authentication and Microsoft conveniently decided that it was unsafe to send passwords in plain text and turned off Web Folder for Basic Authentication mode connections. Well.. it’d been nice if this information was readily provided to us.

Anyway.. much googling around led me to this quick registry hack. (don’t even attempt this if you don’t know how to muck with registries.)

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters “BasicAuthLevel” (REG_DWORD)

the default value of this key is 1. Changing it to 2 and reboot.

Now.. this solution only applies if you can’t connect to your WebDAV folder via HTTP and BasicAuth. HTTPS and BasicAuth still works without the above hack.

My machine of 4 years was showing of signs of death. It’s been a good machine. I built it myself. It ran Windows XP SP2 and all the programs I needed… but it was time for a replacement.

After much soul searching, I decided that I don’t want the hassle of building my own machine on a fixed budget and ended up with a Dell E521 system. Configured with AMD X2 5000+ cpu and 4GB ram, it was going to be much better than my current machine. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium to boot. All was good… until I got the machine.

First thing I noticed was that, my original plan of adding an ATI X1900 XTX 512mb card that was sitting on my desk for the past 3 months wasn’t going to work. It didn’t fit into the case!!! Well.. that wasn’t going to stop me. I pulled out my Dremel and made the card fit.

Next thing I didn’t count on was that E521 didn’t come with enough power. 350W power supply wasn’t going to cut it. First thing I noticed was that it didn’t come with a PCI Express power cable (the 6-pin kind for the graphics cards). No problem I said.. I’ll just get an adapter, I said. No go.. 350W PS wasn’t going to provide enough juice.

Now, I was looking at the prospect of replacing the power supply of the brand new Dell machine and probably voiding my warranty. While browsing for a PS, I stumbled on a Thermaltake Purepower Power Express 250W. It fits in your spare 5.25″ drive bay and provide enough power to drive two video cards. It was specifically designed for SLI systems. That would do just fine for me and it works perfectly on my machine now. The added fan noise isn’t too bad.

Did you know that Dell ships their 64-bit processor machines with 32-bit Vista? Yes. That’s true. To top it off, I just happened to have ratail copies Vista Premium and Ultimate. The product key for Dell’s Vista Premium 32-bit does NOT work on the 64-bit install? I tried and it doesn’t work. Dell will get an earful from me soon enough.

Now, I wanted a 64-bit machine so I was going to install a 64-bit OS. 4GB RAM for which I used my hard earned money is worthless with a 32-bit OS since the 4GB cannot be physically addressed.

Guess what? Do not install 64-bit Vista on a machine with >3GB RAM. It will most likely crash during install. If you are lucky enough to get past the install, it will crash on the first reboot. If you are lucky enough to get past that.. it will crash on a reboot. Get the point?

It took me two days of searching and trial and error to figure it out.

REMOVE your RAM to 2GB or less and install Vista x64 editions.
Then apply the patch (KB929777).
Then add as much RAM as your Vista can handle. (Premium=16GB, Ultimate=128GB)

All is good.

Doing the above also fixed another nasty thing with E521. Before all this debacle, even with the 32 bit Vista, doing a Restart from the OS will hang the system during POST. Not sure why.

Just got one of these babies. Nice compact unit, takes 2 AA batteries and SD memory card. It’s designed to be a helmet cam and the video quality of somewhat similar to what you might get with a camera phone.
The video it produces is an AVI file using M-JPEG codec. Since not everyone has MJPEG codec installed on their machines it’s a bitch if you don’t know where to get a free version. If you already have a digicams with video capabilities and installed one of their software then you might be golden. But ATC2K doesn’t come with any software. Here‘s a free one that allows you to play MJPEG files.

I’m using Firefox 2.0 and I noticed that I couldn’t see any Flash contents. I tried upgrading/reinstalling the Adobe Flash plugin to no avail. Turns out it was a conflict with AdBlock extension. So, if you have the same problem, uninstall Adblock and use AdBlock Plus extension instead.

I’ve been messing with DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) for stuff at work and it’s an interesting stuff. But the documentation for DITA is quite lacking and being a programmer makes it even worse when there isn’t a clear “api”-like documentation because I don’t want to read the DTD. Hence my searches found gotAPI.com. It’s almost as if I’ve thought of it first..

I use Dreamhost as my web host for all things web related because they give me waddle of storage space and bandwidth. But their email system kinda sucks when it comes to spam. So I’ve been supplementing it with ESVA.

First of all, a Virtual Appliance is basically a VMWare virtual machine image designed to run out of the box to perform a specific application function(s). These appliances can be run using the free to download VMWare Player or VMWare Server.

ESVA acts as a mail relay for all my domains. It uses variety of tools (virus scanning, spamassassin, greylisting, black/white listing, etc) to filter out unwanted mail. It has reduced the number of email actually delivered to my mail systems by 90% and successfully identified spam about 95% while only having 2 emails falsely identified as spam in the past 2 months (approximately 20000 emails).

New version of ESVA was released today. Version 1.6 includes MailWatch, a much requested addition, to help with monitoring and managing quarantined messages.

Official site: http://www.global-domination.org/ESVA/16/

Download Mirror: http://esva.extraneus.com/ESVA1.6.4.zip

VMWare Applicance Listing: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/542

VMWare Forum Discussion: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=60005

Speaking of upgrading my browsers, on top of going to IE7, I’ve upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0. All these are nice but I still like IE because most websites are designed for the masses who are still using IE. But I’ve been to a few of those not so well designed sites with endless popups and there’s that whole security thing. So I use Maxthon as my primary browser. It’s a browser written with IE rendering engine. It supports tabbed browsing, plugins, extensions, ad block, etc. And of course mouse gestures which I think works better than Opera’s implementation even if Opera invented gestures. There are gesture extensions for IE and Firefox but they don’t work as well as the browser natively supporting it.

Anyway, if you like IE and all those sites that still use ActiveX stuff, give Maxthon a whirl and find out IE isn’t all that bad.

I decided to upgrade to IE7 the other day because I figured it couldn’t be any worse than IE6. The upgrade went smoothly and immediately I noticed a few things.

1. I like the minimal UI. It’s clean and uncluttered.
2. It’s got tabs but it doesn’t do mouse gestures.

3. For some strange reason, Google was the default search engine.

After doing a few searches I began to notice that something just wasn’t right… There are no “cached” and “similar pages” links in the search results. My first thought was “Why would google remove that?”. Why indeed? So I fired up my firefox and did the same search and the links are there. This makes me wonder who’s playing the devil here? Is it Google purposely not giving the links or is it IE7 removing them so we’ll use Microsoft Live Search (which happen to have “cached” links). Or maybe it’s something I’ve completely missed. If anyone knows the answer shoot me a note.

I turned on WP-Cache plugin for my wordpress blog and lo and behold I end up with a blank page until I hit Refresh. Seems like it’s a bug in WP-Cache code which was written in PHP4 and I’m running PHP5.

Here’s the fix:

Edit wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php.
Replace ob_end_clean() with ob_end_flush().