I tried installing OSX on desktop but ...I

It didn't work out. OSX doesn't like the NVidia graphic card in my desktop. It doesn't like the audio card, and it has problem recognizing the hard disks properly. So for my desktop, I just have to stick with XP. At first i thought I can boot the OSX by first booting up the OSX 10.5 installation disc, and then select the OSX parition in the harddisk, but that didn't work very well after I installed Acronis OS Selector.

Bottomline: I should forget about putting OSX on my desktop.

And maybe I should get very serious about getting a mac PRo.

Automatically detect and update BPM of your mp3s

I had a need to do some animation effect on the top of an audio track, and I search around to find a free application that allows me to detect bit per minute (BPM) of a song. As it turns out not only I found a software that does exactly what I want, but it's also free, and does more than I expected.

The software is called BPM Analyzer. To use it simply drag and drop all your MP3 files in it. You can even drop folder and the application will automatically scan all the mp3 files in it. It then detects the BPM, and SAVE the result in the ID3 Tag in your mp3 file.

Now that I have the BPM value of songs, I can create smart playlist that automatically plays all the fast songs for me! Totally awesome I have to say.

Redfly Mobile Companion ... a sad sad device

I was partly disappointed by the fact that Palm killed their Folio project. But then Ausus Eee PC released and all is well. While I am waiting for the 9 inch Eee release, I saw this product called Redfly Mobile Companion and told myself: man, for US$500, this device is a joke.

But then, it proves that there's a US$500 or under market for ultra portable device, a market that I am very much interested in.

Resolved a strange home network outage problem

Since 2 weeks ago, I have problem access my desktop PC from my laptop computer. I was pretty busy working on something else, so I put the issue aside, but today finally got some time, I am starting to look into the problem.

My hints are the two messages that I got when I tried to access the shared folder from my laptop.

"You might not have permission to use this network resource ....
Not enough server storage is available to process this command."

I tried turning off the Firewall on both machine but the problem still happened. But the most shocking fact was that I have problem access the folder even ON THE DEKSTOP itself when I access it throught network conenction. This is when I realized that something very fishy is happening.

Eventaully I found this message and followed the instruction by using regedit to open the system register key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters ,
Changed the value IRPStackSize from decimal 16 to the max value 50. And then reboot.

Since then, the problem goes away, and I can happily using my laptop to access my desktop again.

Finally I can view Silverlight content on my machine

I was having problem running Silverlight content on my browser until today. Ironically, I have to install this Silverlight 2.0 runtime in order to view Silverlight 1.0 content. Oh well, as long as it works.

Disappointed by not able to take advantage of 1907FPc

I got two DELL 1907FPc monitor today, and was pretty excited at first because I found that the monitor supported swift to Portrait mode. But then I also found out that the graphic card of my machine (Radeon X1300/X1550) does not have a Windows Server 2003 driver that supports Rotating the screen. This gives me a huge incentive consider switching to Windows Vista just so that I can enjoy all the bells and whistles on my desktop. Think.......

By the way, installing the XP driver at this site doesn't really help anything at all. sigh and Sigh.

A night and day of hunting comics

This story started yesterday when I was at Border reading some anime magazine, and found some attractive excerpt of a Japanese comics called "Dragon Sister". So when I get back home I did a search and found that the comics is actaully called 三國志 百花繚亂. I found a site that link to the online books, but that seems to lead to a dead end. More search and another deadend. And that stirred up my interest in actually spend time to find it.

And then I found a strange link called Zpoo. Basically it allows you to rip a whole album from http://photo.163.com/ by:

• Entering the username for the album.
• A link will be generated. That link will actually link to a page with all the hyperlinks of all photos in the album.
• You copy and paste that whole batch of link in FlashGet

And that's how to rip all the photos from a 163 photo album. The service is mainly for ripping comics posted on that site, and I haven't try it on other album.

This, at first glance, sounds like a great idea. I saw this page with comics like 三國志百花繚亂 and 鸚鵡. So I tried it and found a few problems:

• The comics page you ripped DOES NOT have proper page order, so reading the comics become ultra painful.
• The 163 site seems to have some protection, and I have to install the latest version of FlashGet in a VMWare environment (No way will I populate my main desktop) and set the download thread to be one at a time.
• And even with that sort of setting I still have to constantly monitor the downloading, and make sure that the thread was not stuck at certain spot.

And then I was thinking of trying my faithful Japanese comics source 閒人動漫, that did not work in my case for I couldn't find the comics that I was looking for.

But then I came cross ouou.com and found the 鸚鵡 comics that I was looking for, plus the site is reasonably Teleport friendly (meaning that I need to run it again after it stopped once in a while). Still it has the same problem: the pages are not properly ordered, so I need to rely on the web page as reference in order to read it.

The jackpot comes when I come across this page with tons of comics download, and I found both of the comics here, pack in nice way, host in some public hosting site.

Happy ending to me :> .

Nice eSATA card ... except the jumper

I brought a eSATA PCI Express card at BestBuy for about US$32. Installation was very straight forward, but the problem comes when I found out that the system didn't recognize the external eSATA driver that I plugged at the back. I was frustrated for 20 minutes, and then I realized that I need to set some jumper in order to enable the plugs. I figured that out after I accidentally opened the manual and saw some jumper setting.

But then I found out that the metal plate within the jumper plastic shell was kind of loose, and I spent quite some time to get them all straight up before I can have them all plugged in.

At least now I have a working a fast eSATA card connecting to a 500Gb harddisk. Sweet.

No iPhone yet ...

As much as I want to buy an iPhone now in order no develop software for it, I have to being reminding myself that this definitely not the right time. For instance:

- The final version of iPhone OS 2.0 has not been released yet. Thus you CANNOT bring the app you created with you on an iPhone.
- I still have contract with TMobile, and jailbreak an iPhone now can cause trouble developing with iPhone later.
- EDGE network is pathetic. Definitely need to wait for the 3G version.
- Hacking community may find a way to let me use My home Grown app on iPhone without activating with AT&T.

Beside,

- I rather spending more time on learning how to code Cocca app in the meantime.
- The UI trick I learned in iPhone sample app can be applied on WPF application. And spending time on WPF seems more rewarding from career perspective.
- I much rather spent time on the above tasks then getting another toy for myself to playwith.