Starforce Must Die

October 9th, 2008

If something is evil to be tough, then this thing is doomed to be destroyed. Why? Because this is what happened to the rogue CD protection software — Starforce.

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A Debian/Lenny User Experience — A Glass Half Full

October 5th, 2008

As far as I could recall, I did not use Linux/Debian for about two years. Last week, I  had an open time slot and I decided to installed my favorite Distro Debian/Lenny on my aging desktop to play around a little.

My experience so far is mixed. I would say the general user experience has enhanced so much that I actually spent less time fixing the system for a better environment. On the other hand, numerous details of the Desktop environment have much to be desired, and if fixed properly, could contribute so much to the user experience, to the degree that one can term Linux Desktop as “just works”.

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How to fix the Segmentation Fault of Compiz under Lenny

September 28th, 2008

I followed Debian Wiki’s instruction on how to install Compiz Fusion (was Beryl) under Lenny. But after walking through the tutorial, I got this error message when I tired to launch Compiz under Gnome with the command: compiz –replace

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A Brief Review of You don’t mess with the Zohan

September 25th, 2008

If you are a political liberal, a democrat, or an Adam Sandler fan, you are probably going to enjoy this movie, but probably hate the strongly accented English.

What you will see is a few superman-like, Hong Kong kungfu movies styles stunts, and the rosy wish of Peace and Brotherhood between Israel and Palestine. Although the matters in mid-east are not really that simple and easy, not like Zohan’s bloated masculinity and fighting skills.

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AVG Free 8.0 and NOD32 3.0, which one uses less resources?

September 25th, 2008

I don’t want to argue which one is better. For me, AVG Free is trustworthy, and it does detect viruses better than another free AV — AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic. For Nod32, well, it is not free, and keeping it in ‘free’ mode for a long period requires a lot of extra work. Kaspersky’s invincible key file is annoying, and so is Nod32’s usename/password mechanism. Yes, you can find the ‘free’ Kaspersky keys, or subscribe to a daily feed of Nod32’s login information or use a trial time stopper. But why do that when you have AVG free which does a very respectable job in virus-detection?

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A Brief Review of the Incredible Hulk and the War Inc.

September 24th, 2008

For me Edward Norton and John Cusack look quite alike, and it is not until I watched the movie the Incredible Hulk did I realize they are different individuals. Edward Norton appears to be a right fit for dark and sad characters, while Cusack has a sunnier face. If you ask me which movie I like better, the Hulk or the War Inc., I would pick the latter.

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“Why I love Debian”

September 22nd, 2008

My frequent inquiry into Google Blog Search with the key word “Debian” reveals me this intriguing post, which is titled “Why I love Debian“. Unfortunately, I could not access the page and view its contents for some obviously guessable reasons ( /me casting a wary eye at G.F.W).  Persistent as I am, I used a online proxy and read the post any way. The following is the entire post I copied, and salute to its author. Cheers to all Debian fans.

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How to publish posts to WordPress blog via Email

September 22nd, 2008

I am actually writing this post in my Gmail account. Here is what you
need to do when you want to publish a post to your Wordpress blog by
sending email messages: Read more...

Robots.txt made simple

September 8th, 2008

For beginner WordPress bloggers, creating a search bot friendly robots.txt is a headache sometimes. This is particularly true for me: I first blindly copied a robots.txt from some site, which resulted in the blocking of all my posts from the search engines. I later found out the robots.txt I copied deliberately blocked all posts with a ? in the default permlink format.

Learning a hard lesson, I found a simple robots.txt will just do the job. Don’t copy robots.txt from sites that claim their robots.txt can do magic to SEO.

So how to create a simple and easy robots.txt for your new WordPress blog?

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History rpeating: the similarity between the 1997 asian financial crisis and China’s economic situation at present

September 3rd, 2008

Recently I have been reading about the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, IMF bailout and the repercussions of the crisis. The more I read, the more I am struck with the similarities between the 1997 crisis and the current economic situation of China. After all, the symptoms are almost the same:

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