Intermediate

It is an easy thing to get into a false sense of security when it comes to your computer. Even for a techie guy like myself. I have a well known antivirus software installed on my PC and have always kept the virus definition files up to date. That should keep me reasonably protected. I said "reasonably" because no computer is 100% safe or immune. That is until the dark force strikes.

This particular day I noticed my Windows PC was running somewhat slower than usual. That usually is a give away that your computer has picked up something undesirable. Then other strange thing started to happen. Browser windows started popping up with warning that I need this or that software. File browser windows closed suddenly when they were not meant to. And my Internet browser seem to freeze for a couple of minutes. This definitely calls for drastic action. The first thing I did was starting up my Spybot Search & Destroy software and did a scan on my computer files.

If you use Windows XP and have multiple user profile on the same computer, you may experience an issue whereby when a user logs off and the screen will go blank for a long time before it goes back to the welcome screen where you choose the user profile. During that time, there seems to be nothing you can do but stare at the blank screen. The usual Alt-Ctrl-Del combination does not respond either. If you are patient enough you can wait, for several minutes before it will finally return to the welcome screen.

Remote Access software has certainly come quite a way compared to a few years ago. I still remember using remote access software like PCAnywhere, and thought it was neat even then to be able to control another computer remotely as if you are there. One drawback of most of these software was that you had to install software on both ends. The problem with such approach is that often the computer you are using to access the remote computer does not even belong to you sometimes. You borrow it for a quick access to your remote computer. And this limitation of needing to install the client version of the software in order to access the remote host computer, makes it an inconvenient way to access your computer remotely.

After about a year in the making, Rails 2.0 was finally released in Dec 2007. It is supposedly stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish, although I must say I have yet to dive into it. As much as I welcome new features into Rails, I am still trying to learn the old features which are still 'new' features to me. Having started in Ruby on Rails about a year ago, developed an Intranet with it and a couple of small projects, I still find myself trying to get a grip on Rails. As such the old features are still being discovered by myself, as I started to get to be familiar with them in my projects.

Just this last couple of days, I noticed something that I haven't noted before when I started my Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). After IE was loaded, it just sits there blank, with the word connecting... while trying to load my homepage (which was www.yahoo.com). Eventually the homepage loaded but sure took a long time. Once the page is loaded, clicking any links within the page will load ok just like normal. The same thing happened when I open another tab window. I timed the whole process and it took around 90 seconds before the first page eventually gets loaded.

So you want to have your own company website? You are not alone in this. Without a doubt there are many good reasons for having one. Reasons like establishing a brand identity, providing product and service information, selling your product and services online, and providing a point of contact for your customers. A well planned and executed website can indeed benefit your business, regardless the size of your company.

Before you jump right into this project, it is important to connect your website to the company's business strategy. If you are going to invest money and resources into having a website, it is essential to be able to see it as a part of your existing overall business strategy.

Unless your profession is being a system administrator, it isn't very often that one would add new hard drives to one's PC. Even for a computer professional ike myself, I may upgrade to a new drive once a year at the most. And quite often I can't remember how to add or upgrade to a new hard drive. That was exactly what happened to me recently when I tried to add a new hard drive. This Christmas I received a new WD 1TB (WD10EACS-32ZJB0) drive. And I was pretty excited about getting this drive, that is almost 7 times larger than the one that I currently have (150GB). As I got down to installing the new drive, I came to the conclusion that I need to document the steps involved, so that in future when it is time again to upgrade or add a new drive, I have something to refer back to. I hope you too may find this useful.

Working with Ruby on Rails, I often have a hard time remembering most of the Rake commands. So I have decided to create a cheatsheet for my own reference that I know where to access. Hopefully it will be useful to others too.

Commands in red are only available in Rails 2.0

Having a software that reads PDF files is a must on any Operating System. Although the Evince Document Viewer comes with Ubuntu, and it can PDF files, however I found it a little slow to load up a PDF file for viewing. So I decided to install the Adobe Reader instead.

Installing Adobe Reader on Ubuntu is easy enough. However when running the Adobe Reader for the first time can be a little tricky. I got the error message that says:

My dream of finding a perfect Operating System (or a near perfect) in Ubuntu was dashed today. So far I have had a pretty good impression of the Ubuntu user interface, and have not used anything out of the ordinary but a regular user usage. Today I was running a Ruby on Rail program that was supposed to do some rather heavy duty processing such as parsing a flat file and creating an XML file. And that application just "ran away" and left me in a situation where I was unable to regain control of my OS. The application has not crashed because I could see the hard disk light blinking away non-stop. My mouse pointer is constantly at the`wait state. When I tried to move the move, it was like nothing happened, and then it will shoot in the direction I was moving and then I would lose control of the mouse again. After a while, the application window became greyed out.