Kenneth Chu - A Programmer In Training

Jeremiah Owyang - Streaming Live from Web 2.0

2007-04-15T12:20:00.001-04:00

Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist and also Director of Corporate Media Strategy at PodTech.net is streaming live from the web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, California.

Its amazing how this can be done with minimal infrastructure. Here is the equipment Jeremiah is using to stream live,

1) Webcam (we’re using a 100 dollar logitech)

2) Hat, and put some duct tape on it so it can clip on

3) Laptop (you can change power settings so when you close the laptop it does not hibernate) and power cables and batteries as needed

4) Wireless signal (we’re using EVDO, or 3G)

5) Ustream account (free)

This is a very interesting concept and i predict it will be a phenomenon very soon. To view the live broadcast by Jeremiah, visit his blog.

Best Of Web Roundup

2007-03-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

10 Tips to Help Keep Your Desk Clean

Keep nothing on your desk unless you absolutely need them
Sort your mail and toss junk as it arrives
Get rid of sticky notes and scraps of paper.

Yedda - Questions and Answer about a wide range of topics, answered by the community. Preety neat.

How to Leave Work at Work

Change your route
Get up earlier
The boss at work does not equal the boss at home

Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Using Gmail as a Massive Database
How to get real-time news updates in Gmail
How to automatically store your bookmarks in Gmail
How to blog from Gmail

Create a Perfect Picture for your Profile Using MyPictr

Empowering Links: Week of 25th February - Bunch of great personal development articles.

Best Of Web Roundup

2007-02-23T23:09:00.000-05:00

Comeeko - Many of you probably have a dream of becoming a cartoonist and this web application will definitely help you reach that goal. It allows u to create comic strips using your own pictures, has multiple layouts and also allow you to add comments using bubbles and text box.

How to Burn Youtube Videos to DVD - ".. create a DVD movie of video downloaded from Google Video, Youtube or Myspace so that these videos can be watched on the TV screen"

Declutter Your Desk - Who doesn't like extra space?

Top 10 Worst Company URLs - Its hilarious, just check them out.

Seven steps to remarkable customer service - Great article written by Joel Spolsky on how to give great customer service. Some of the suggested ways is to :

Fix everything
Blowing off dust
Accept blame
Dont be greedy among others.

All About Hard Drive : From Backup To Extending Its Life

2007-02-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

Automatically back up your hard drive - "When was the last time you backed up the important files on your computer? Last year when your best friend called in tears after the Blue Screen of Death ate her thesis?"

A detailed guide to Mac backup - ".. details the entire process of backing up a Mac, from planning a backup strategy to getting things back to normal after disaster strikes your primary drive."

The self-repairing hard drive - "..a batch script that takes disk maintenance to the next level by checking all your hard drives for errors, repairing any it finds, and then defragmenting."

How To Maximize Hard Drive Life - Defrag, use UPS and also make sure you have a backup of all your important stuffs.

How to recover lost files after you accidentally wipe your hard drive

Recover the files to a separate hard drive.
Recover the files to a networked storage drive.
Recover the files to a separate partition on the same hard drive.
Image the hard drive using a tool like ddrescue and recover files using only one partition.

Rescue files with a boot CD - "Few moments in computing are as heartbreaking as when you turn on your trusty PC only to receive that bone-chilling message: "Boot sector corrupt. Config.sys missing. Disk cannot be read. In other words, "You're screwed."" Dont worry, here's a solution to that problem.

Note: The above picture of the hard drive is courtesy of enricopalombaro.

All About PC Power Supply

2007-02-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

How PC Power Supplies Work - "The power supply converts the alternating current (AC) line from your home to the direct current (DC) needed by the personal computer."

Power Consumption and Noise Level of Contemporary Graphics Cards - "Power consumption and the level of generated noise very often become other important criteria besides performance and image quality when one is shopping for a graphics accelerator."

Power Supply Calculator - Helps you estimate what size power supply you should purchase. "when it comes to power, having excess wattage on a power supply is never a bad thing!"

The cost of leaving your PC on - "Have you ever wondered how much it's costing you to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?" Save a few hundred dollars a year and in the process you help protect the environment.

Why estimate when you can measure? - "Estimating is only necessary when you can't easily measure. When you meet people like this, gently urge them to stop estimating and start measuring."

Improve your Life

2007-02-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

A Lesson from Earth’s Most Powerful Mammal - Teaches you to go past your fear and out of your comfort zone. This is what limits a person from reaching their full potential.

I think of the thousands of people whom I meet every day who are similary trapped by their limiting beliefs and habits that they can easily change but do not even attempt to.

Three Choices that Make You Who You Are

The People You Choose to Spend Time With
What You Choose to Put into Your Mind
The Dreams You Choose to Have

Wake Up Feeling Great With These 22 Tips for High Self-Esteem

Stop comparing yourself with other people.
Stop the critic inside of you.
Associate with positive, supportive people.
Get involved in work and activities you love.
Get some exercise.

P.S. Image above courtesy of juicystyle.

Best of Web Roundup

2007-02-16T16:00:00.000-05:00

How To Give a Good Compliment - Be specific, back up your compliment and ask a question with your compliment. Something like, “that necklace looks really good on you because it matches your eyes. Where did you find it?”.

Decrease Brain Age - Improve Mental Fitness - Playing games, meditation, eating well and reading.

Top Web Tools for College Students - How to save on books, keep track of homework and deadlines, creating powerpoint slides without using powerpoint and much much more. Great list of tools.

5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes - Playlist images, Related stories, news in English.

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder - Helps retrieve windows installation key.

Top 5 ways to hustle free drinks - Perfect timing considering its Friday.

Hope u have a great weekend.

Note: Image above courtesy of CDrewing.

Wireless Router - Static and Dynamic IP Rev. 2

2007-02-09T13:02:00.000-05:00

Note: This is a revision of an article that i have written before. It seems to be a pretty popular article. I would really like for people to comment on whether they liked it or didn't like it. Any recommendations on how to make it better.

So i am pretty sure many of you have encountered this problem before. You have multiple computers in your house and you want all the computers to be able to access the internet at the same time without signing up for additional internet service. The answer to this problem is to get a router.

A router basically takes one ip address and then it lets you share that one address among multiple computers.

This way instead of just one computer been able to connect to the internet, multiple computers can share that one internet connection. To help you understand what a router is, let's say that the one ip address given to you by your provider is similar to your university mailing address. But the university has different building within it. So once a mail arrives at the university, the mail sorter has to sort out the mail by the building name and then deliver it to the proper recipient. This is exactly what the router does, it sorts the traffic for the different computers and delivers them to the correct computer.

This setup works fine for a regular user. But you might encounter a problem if you want to run a server or if you wanna be able to use bit torrent. The reason you would encounter a problem is because these services(such as webserver) works by an outside user trying to access your system without specifying who they are trying to communicate with. This would relate to the case where someone sends a letter which does not contain the building name. This would make it impossible for the mail sorter to decide who this mail is addressed to. The way to work around this problem is by specifically asking the router to forward any requests that comes from X to a particular computer. In the analogy case, it means you would tell the mail sorter that any mail from this person should always be delivered to me even when its missing the building name.

The only problem with the above case is that with most routers, the addresses are handed out dynamically.What this means is whenever a computer is turned on, it requests for a new address from the router. So whats wrong with that? Well, the computers on the network would not be guaranteed to have the same address each and every time. Imagine the university changing the name of the buildings on campus each day, this would make it impossible for the mail sorter to know which building to deliver the mail.

In order to avoid any confusion, we will configure it so that each computer will always get the same address. This can be achieved by configuring the router so that some of them have static addresses while other computers have dynamic address(different address each time it requests for one). I am pretty sure you are asking yourself, so what is static ip?

Static ip means that a particular computer will always get the same ip address. In the case of static ip, whenever you turn on the computer, the computer will inform the router what its address is.

So how would you go about achieving it?

For my explanation, i will be using the Linksys BEFW11S4 router. Most other routers should work in a similar manner. But the important thing is the idea behind it.

First, you must login to your router(for mine i enter 192.168.1.1 in my webbrowser address bar) and then a dialog box should pop up asking for your password.
After this is done, you will see a window similar to this.
Then click on the DHCP tab, which would bring up a screen that looks something like this.
The addresses handed out by the linksys router usually starts at 192.168.1.100. But if you want to manually set the addresses for some of the computers, you will want to change the starting ip address in order to avoid any conflicts. If we use the university analogy, once we name a building and that building name cannot be changed(static ip), that name should be off limits to others. In order to do that, we need to set the "Starting IP Address" so that the router does not hand out those addresses that have already been taken. Depending on how many static ip u have setup, the "Starting IP Address" should be set accordingly. So if u have 3 computers and 2 of them have static ip, you can put in 192.168.1.102 under the "Starting Ip Address" field(or higher if you want but i am assuming you have as static ip 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.101 for those 2 computers). So when the other computers dynamically asks for an ip from the router, it will only hand out ip address that is 192.168.1.102 or higher. It should look something like this.

In general, if u have setup X static ip then the "Starting IP Address" should be 192.168.1.(100+X).

This achieves our goal of having both static and dynamic ip addresses.

More Resources:

Difference between Static and Dynamic IP.
If you wanna know how to setup static ip, microsoft has an article on it.

Life in Seoul Korea

2007-02-09T01:08:00.000-05:00

A new podcast called SeoulGlow which shows us what life in Seoul Korea is like. Personally i think this is a fascinating podcast and its very interesting to know and learn about other cultures. This podcast is very well done. I really enjoyed it.

In the first episode, they go out on to the streets for new year and film a bunch of people who are telling us their new year resolutions.

In the second episode, they visit a street vendor and talk about the food. Now i gotta go get something to eat...

Firefox - Tab Switching Using Your Keyboard

2007-02-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

If you would like to decrease the amount of clicking you perform using your mouse, here's a tip that works in firefox. Isn't it annoying to switch between tabs in firefox by using the mouse constantly. Fear not, coz there is a way to do it using just your keyboard. This tip only works for the first 9 tabs.

To switch between tabs, just press Ctrl + # where # should be between 1 and 9 and + means press Ctrl and # at the same time. So if you wanna switch to the first tab, press Ctrl + 1. Preety neat tip.

Stay tuned for more firefox tips in the future.

How to Be as Productive as a CEO

2007-02-04T01:11:00.000-05:00

Photo courtesy of Desiree's

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health,wealth, and wisdom.- Aristotle

Hmmm, doesn't the thought of sleeping in give you that feeling of joy, happiness? But in order to be a more productive person and to increase your chances of success in life, you must start early.

From Steve Pavlina's article,

In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day until late afternoon. But after a while I couldn't ignore the high correlation between success and rising early, even in my own life.

To help you become an early riser, Steve Pavlina has written two articles on what worked for him.

But to further illustrate this point, Jim Citrin from Yahoo Finance contacted 20 Ceo's about their daily routine, and surprisingly got reply from 17 out of 20. There are some similarities between all these Ceo's and i am gonna highlight some of those.

Start early
Exercise every morning
Make family time
Be creative with your morning routine

To read the entire article, click here.

More Resources:
Personal Development Books - List of personal development books recommended by Steve Pavlina.

Productivity Boost: How to start your day at 5:00 AM

John Chow - Google’s #1 Dot Com Mogul.

2007-02-01T22:28:00.000-05:00

Update: Welcome John Chow Readers. I hope you would visit my main page and read some other interesting posts that i have there. Thanks for visiting.

Note: Ok before i go any further, let me make it clear at the top of this post. The following review is done in exchange for a link from John Chow. He put out an offer in this post.

Here's John Chow describing who he is,

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the “probably yo’ daddy” foundation.
Google’s #1 Dot Com Mogul. Master of The TechZone and TTZ Media Network. Creator of some of the fastest computers the world have ever seen.

On his blog he does reviews of cool tech stuffs and also knows his food. His style of writing is very easy to read and understand, and his blog contains a treasure trove of good articles. In order to give you a flavor of some of the interesting stuffs you might find in his blog, i will list some of the posts that i found to be very interesting.

Personally, i think you do become smarter after reading his blog. Not all the content on his site is of interest to me, but the good thing is his blog covers many different areas. If i were to give you an analogy to a real world example, his blog is like a buffet and the the variety of choices will satisfy anyone's taste. He gives you advice/tips on how to make money. Some of his tips are pretty creative. My recommendation is for you to bookmark or better yet add his blog to your favorite rss reader.

Smart Shopper and Academic Success

2007-02-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

10 Shopping Tricks That Stores Hate

Buying Loss Leaders and Leaving
Saying NO to the Extended Warranty
Shopping in the Store But Buying Online

13 Things I Wish I Learned In College

Making Proper Presentations
Working on a Team
Networking

Two Weeks to Academic Success

"Whether you’re currently in school, thinking of going back to school, or thinking of completing some industry-specific learning courses to help advance your career, it will be necessary for you to get your mindset back into “learning mode."

Link Mania

2007-01-31T19:37:00.000-05:00

MacInstruct - The place to learn about mac. They have a tutorial contest going on for the best mac tutorial submitted by its user.

How to Get Hired, What CS Students Need to Know -

Employers look for people who are Smart and Get Things Done
Employers look for people who Have Already Done Things

Pro guide to Google searches - It will turn you into a google power user.

Top 10 Magic Trick Tutorial Videos - From card tricks to tearing a phone book in half, its got all the amazing magic tricks.

Travel like a pro: 8 tips to make your journey easier -

Fly through the airport
Upgrade your airline seat
Get a free hotel room upgrade

Free Devon Note

2007-01-29T01:15:00.000-05:00

Complete this survey and at the end of the survey, you can request for a free copy of Devon Note.
From Devon Technologies blog,

Alexander Reppel, a German student, is conducting a online survey evaluating the two products announced at Macworld San Francisco this January. Every visitor who completes the survey gets a free copy of DEVONnote.

Devon Note only works for the Macinstosh. Sorry Windows user.

Firefox 2.0

2007-01-19T13:24:00.000-05:00

Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while. With it comes a number of improvements and new features.
Some of the new features are:
1) Built in phishing protection - Warns user about sites that are possibly not safe.
2) Resuming your browsing session - "The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. "By default, it only asks you if you want to restore session if firefox crashed.
To make it restore the previous session everytime you start Firefox,

click on Tools
Then click on Options
and then under the Main tab , you should see When Firefox starts: pick from the drop down box, Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time.

3) Inline spell checking - "A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms.."
These are just some of the new features. If you wanna read all about it, check out Firefox Release Notes.

With the release of Firefox 2.0, i figured a lot of new users would like to know what are some of the great extensions that can significantly enhance your firefox experience. According to wikipedia, "Extensions are installable enhancements to the Mozilla Foundation's projects (and compatible variants such as Portable Firefox), and add features to the application or allow existing features to be modified."

My Favorite Extensions

FireFTP - "It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers."
AdBlock - " Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers." It allows you to block ads based on rules set by you. So u could ask it to block all gif images or all banners. Your choices are endless. So give it a try.
GooglePedia - "Shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results." When you perform a google search, it shows the google search results and the wikipedia article for the same term side by side. I love this extension
Fast Video Download - This extension allows you to download videos from youtube, google video and much much more.

Hamachi - Best and Easiest VPN Solution

2007-01-06T02:10:00.000-05:00

So What is VPN?

According to wikipedia, "A virtual private network (VPN) is a private communications network often used within a company, or by several companies or organizations, to communicate confidentially over a non-private network. VPN traffic can be carried over a public networking infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) on top of standard protocols, or over a service provider's private network with a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider."

How can i create a VPN?
One of the easiest solution today is to use a software called Hamachi.

So What is Hamachi?
According to Hamachi's website, "Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application. ...Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable. "

To learn how to configure Hamachi, read the step by step tutorial from Lifehacker.
The basic (free version) of Hamachi does not allow you to run it as a service, but there is a way to get around this limitation. Here's how.
There is a gui version of Hamachi for the mac, which is called HamachiX.
If you are interested in remote desktop using VNC (for example, accessing your home computer from school, work etc), here is a step by step tutorial.

Update[Jan 8th,2007]: Guide on how to install Hamachi on the Mac.

Update[Jan 20th, 2007]: Lifehacker's Gina Trapani has written an article on Running VNC securely using Hamachi.

P.S The above screenshot of Hamachi was obtained from Hamachi's website.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-01T03:30:00.000-05:00

Happy new year everyone. Lets raise our glasses for an absolutely fantastic 2007. Hope this new year will lead you to make decisions that will help you achieve all your life goals.

What is the Meaning of Life? - Is Life like a bagel, grapefruit, banana, cooking or a jigsaw Puzzle?
Ways to Distinguish Yourself - " Not distinguishing yourself is to subject yourself to the risk of eroding your market value almost on a daily basis."
How to Find what You Love to do? - ".. the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Seven Ways to Start Your New Job Right - ".. getting off to a strong start establishes the foundation upon which long-term success is built."
Six easy Steps for beating Procrastination - ".. people avoid doing things that hurt."

A Very Sad Day

2006-12-06T21:46:00.000-05:00

I am really sad to hear that James Kim did not make it. Rest in Peace James. My deepest Condolences to James and Kati's Family. To contribute, you can visit the website setup by his friends and family.
.

Never Underestimate the Power of Duct Tape

2006-11-29T21:48:00.000-05:00

Found it from Digital Journal

Funny Facial Expression of Patrick Norton

2006-11-24T22:10:00.000-05:00

Static And Dynamic Using Linksys Router

2006-10-26T20:07:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: A rewrite of this guide is up. The new guide explains it in more detail.

So i am pretty sure many of you have encountered this problem before. You are using a router to share internet connection amongst the various computers in your home/office and you want to configure it such that some of them have static ip while other computers have dynamic ip address. You might need static ip because you want to run a bit torrent client or a server application(vnc server, webserver etc). So how would you go about achieving it. For my explanation, i will be using the Linksys BEFW11S4. Most other routers should work in a similar manner. But the important thing is the idea behind it.

First, you must login to your router(for mine i enter 192.168.1.1 in my webbrowser address bar) and then a dialog box should pop up asking for your password. After this is done, you will see a window similar to this
Then click on the DHCP tab, which would bring up a screen that looks something like this
Since local ip address usually starts at 100(i.e it starts at 192.168.1.100 for mine), you will change the starting ip address depending on how many static ip u have setup. So if u have 3 computers and 2 of them have static ip, you can put in 192.168.1.102 under the "Starting Ip Address" field(or higher if you want but i am assuming you have as static ip 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.101 for those 2 computers). So when the other computers dynamically asks for an ip from the router, it will only hand out ip address that is 192.168.1.102 or higher. This achieves our goal of having both static and dynamic ip addresses.

Note:

Difference between Static and Dynamic IP.
If you wanna know how to setup static ip, microsoft has an article on it.

Mac News RoundUp

2006-10-26T19:03:00.000-04:00

Apple updates the Macbook Pro to Core 2 Duo - Along with a new processor they have added more memory(1 gb on the low end and 2 gb on the higher end with max ram bumped up to 3 gb), bigger hard drive and firewire 800. Apple claims that it runs 39% faster than its previous core duo
version.

MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.1 - " The SMC Update improves the MacBook’s internal monitoring system and addresses issues with unexpected shutdowns." Hopefully this will resolve the random shutdown syndrome(rss).

Optimized Firefox 2.0 for G4, G5 and intel mac

PicLens - "PicLens delivers an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web." Some sites it works with are

Flickr
Photobucket
Facebook
Google Image Search
Yahoo Image Search
Ask.com Image Search

Skype For Mac 2.0 - Skype version 2 just came out of beta and it has added video calls capability.

Cool Outage Message

2006-10-26T02:38:00.000-04:00

Spaceless Email!

2006-10-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

Apparently it seems all my email does not occupy any space in Google's vast/limitless webserver. I logged onto my gmail account to see if there are any emails in there, and this is what i see

You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 2774 MB.

And you would think that my inbox is empty, but this is not the case, i have just over a hundred email messages. Huh. Thats exactly my reaction. I am in no way complaining, just curious.