Awesome, a bootable Acronis TrueImage

I was a bit fustrated by the fact that I couldn't use TrueImage in my Asus Eee PC 900 to backup the bootup partition after I installed some stuff . I don't know what messing things up, as I used to be able to do that.

Out of fustration, I start reseraching on how create a bootable Flash drive using my SD Card thumbdrive enclosure. And man I finally got it working!

Here's what I use:

• Acronis TrueImage 10
• A SD Card Thumbdrive enclosure with a Toshiba 128Mb SD card (finally find a way to use it :-D )

Here's the steps on my Eee PC 900:

1. Get the "FAT32 125MB Image USB-HDD Format -- Based on PEtoUSB" file from the place.
2. Following the instruction by renaming the file extension to .tlb
3. Use Acronis TrueImage 10 to restore to .tlb image to the 128Mb thumb drive.
4. reboot.
5. Go to Disk Manager to provide this thumbdrive a drive letter (the drive letter gone in my case, and so I have to attach one)
6. Use TrueImage 10 rebootable media maker to fill the drive with proper files.
7. Now boot your EeePC, but press F2 to get to the boot pirority screen.
8. In BIOS, go to "Hard Disk Drives" to set the "USB Generic Drive" as 1st Drive.
9. Set that "USB Generic Drive" as the first boot media.
10. Reboot. Now you should got boot to this little thumbdrive.
11. Use TrueImage 10 to do your backup as usual.
12. Once done, reboot go back to BIOS, and change the Harddisk back to the SSD. And the rest ... you know.
13. Done.
    

Sweet. My next experiment would be trying to find a way to boot from a 4Gb SDHC Card.

Faster

Running VM on my WD MyBook is so much faster than on my 2.5 inch removable harddisk.

Why first time loading taking forever

I don't understand. Everytime I load up Firefox within my TrueCrypt on Eee PC 900, it always takes forever, like MINUTES. But once loaded once, loading any consecutive time will be much faster. Question is ... WHY?

Security is more important

After thinking through for a night, I decided that the cleaner and faster Pidgin and Firefox natively running on my Asus EeePC instead of using portable version sitting in TrueCrypt doesn't worth it. There's too much risk for my EeePC to be stolen, and there will be a huge lost for me since all my data and login are tight to the Firefox browser. By containing my security info in Truecrypt, I can be sure that no one can mess with my data even after it was being stolen.

Crashed

Amazing, by copying huge file from my USB Harddisk, which also hosting the VM of my development environment, the VM environment crashed.

Very very slow Firefox on Eee PC .... and why ...

I started to realize how slow Firefox startup is, and I think I found the reason: Truecrypt. The Firefox living TrueCrypt is WAY WAY Too slow on my Eee PC.

But then the Portable version is also slower than the regular version. I am now seriously thinking about getting rid of the Portable version.

Secure your file in a XP Workgroup network

To share your files in a XP Work group network with secure setting so that no everyone can access your shared files, do this:

• Turn OFF the Easy Sharing in the Folder Option
• In your permission list, REMOVE "Everyone"
• Add your local workgroup login account in the list, give it all permission
• In your client machine, reference to your server machine,, like "\\myway". A user name and password dialog box will show up. Enter the proper user and password ON the server machine. You don't need to add the machine qaulifier, just the user name and password would be fine. You can also check to checkbox to store the user name and password locally.
  
• If you screw up while you enter the user name and password, you may need to log out and log in account in order to trigger that username dialog box to show up again.

How to shrink parition in Eee PC 900

To my surprise, I found that I CANNOT use Disk Director 1o to shrink my one and the only one partition. Every time I tried it, the system rebooted, and then it will be back to normal.

Luckily, I have TrueImage 1o. So I use the partition I backuped a while ago, restore it WITH resizing of the partition, and finally I got a shrinked partition.

Continuous messing with Ausu Eee 900

• I found out that I CANNOT get to the safe mode by holding F8. However, if I interrupt the start up by shutting down the machine, the next time it boots up it will give me an option to choose Safe mode, just like pressing F8.
  
  
• To backup the machine usinbg TrueImage 10, I need to remove CacheSet from Startup folder and then reboot.
  
  
• I expressed crashing after plug in or unplug power chord. Turns out it;s because of the EeeCtl. Set it to full mode resolved the problem.

More on Asus Eee PC 900

I finally found out a safe way to:

• Safely enable webcam
• Have all the function key enabled
• Have the last mysterious driver updated
  

They all tide to one thing that I keep forgetting: the WinXP driver disk that comes with the EeePC. And all I need to do is install the ACPI driver the comes with the CDROM (in fact the disc will force you to install it before doing anything else). That's all.

I don't know if it's just my false impression, but it seems like after I defragmented my harddisk, the system runs faster. Or maybe it's because I set the system to optimize performance?

Freaking network suddenly not working

Somehow while I was trying to fine tune my Eee PC so that it runs slightly faster, the network suddenly stopped functioning. I found somebody else having the same problem, but there was no answer being provided. Out of fustration, I simply restoring the backup partition I created last night.

All shit seems to be happening AFTER I enabled the webcam. So I turned it off from the BIOS, but I still have problem.

So I Remove the battery for about 5 minutes, and then turn on, now at least I got the LAN back. And then I go to the BIOS and found that BOTH webcam and WiFI are off. So I turned on WiFi, and nowboth LAN and WiFi are working.

I am not going to touch that webcam shit anymore!

Harddisk slower than SD card

Interesting, when using my Asus Eee PC 900, I found that video files played from the SD card runs smoother than those running from the internal SSD harddisk.

Stuff I learned from TechFest 2009

I like to recap after attending a conference, a seminar, or whatever learning experience I've been through. So here's the recap of my TechFest 2009:

JQuery:

• Home Page
• Best way to debug JQuery: using Firebug
• A great way to do Unobtrusive JavaScript
  
• When design a page, try moving all JavaScript away from the page (move into an external file). This approach even helps performance (because of caching)
  
• Beware of problem between ASP.Net Ajax and JQuery (more...). The problem seems to be on the dollar sign namespace. There are tricks to resolve the problem.
• Someone used the "Noconflict()" call as work arourd but some said it doesn't work.
• QUnit makes it possible to unit test JQuery.

New Features in C# 3.0

• CodeRush and Resharper are both amazing refactoring tool
• People use Extension to create DSL (Domain Specfic Lanaguage)

Mock and Stub

• Difference between mock and stub
• Need to define test in more specific way: automated test (may call db or external stuff), unit test (no external call), integration test (calls all the shit to get real world result)
  
• We should strike for spending more time on Unit Test and less on integration test, cause Unit test is useless unless you got very fast feedback
• Darker Color scheme may help your productivity. Here's some schemes to choose from for VS 2008. Here's a nice dark color scheme. And here's why it's good.
• Speaker suggested Rhino Mocks
• Rhino Mocks relies on the fact that object are all using an interface
• When there's a block of logic you want to externalize, you can refactor that set of code into a class, with a correspsonding interface. And then for the constructor of the current code you require the interface being passed in in your constructor, but at the same time provide a default constructor that have the interface instance created for the user.
• ShouldEqual seems more expressive than Assert, but it seems to be a Microsoft Visual Studio thing.
• Speaker mentioned a book called "Legacy Cookbook". Could not find it, but I found this.
• specification pattern : Class represent logic that return True or False
  
• Assert method got called once only
• Stub : provide predeginded return value
• Spec.stub
• Static class not friendly to mock
• Try use generic mock, var, the C# 3.0 feature.
  
  
• For void , Use assertWasCalled, like need to check to make sure it is being called
• For others,(non void) predictable result, use stub
  

Static Test

• Findbugs. - java
• PMD - java
• FXCop - .Net
  
• Xssdetect. Cross site scripting
  
  Use these tools as preventive effort
  Owasp open review project
  Antisamy.net
  More info : Blogs.nsdn.com/fxcop

Entity Framework

• Still have problem when syncing databack. But maybe there's a soluition.
• Linq to Entity is the best way to use entity framework
• By default Entity Framework use Defer execution, but you can force it to do Immediate execution using keyword include
• EF is an example of ORM
• Great book by Juila Lerman called Programming Entity Framework
  

Installing Windows XP on Eee PC

I know, I am supposed to try to experience using Linux with this new Asus Eee PC 900 I got, but after finding that the apps on Linux doesn't do what I want to do, and also finding that I don't have much patient to figure out what app does the job I want, I finally give in :-<

So I used Aronis TrueImage 10 to back up my whole disc in case I want to roll back. Next I pressed F2 to go to the BIOS and change the bootup sequence to external CDRom first, removable media (SD card) second, and internal harddisk the third. I then used an external USB drive to bootup an XP installation disc, and started installation.

I experienced a small glitch when the Asus Eee PC didn't recognize my external CDRom, but it seemed to be the problem of the external CDRom itself. All I needed to do is reboot the machine and everything goes back to normal again.

Let me just say that the internal harddisk is SLOW ... ... Like VERY SLOW .... And it took freaking forever to install Windows XP Service Pack 3. I can tell you that I will be very pissed by the machine should I not getting it free... but .... how can I complain about a free computer?

Damn 3D Studio Max 9

I spent a night trying to install 3D STudio Max 9 and the activation page kept calling IE, and then kept telling me that the activation code is incorrect. Could it be some messed up installation on my machine before?

Anyway I am installing Winows 7 32 bit now and try to install Studio Max 9 again. Problem is Windows 7 has problem booting up from my machine. Sigh, probably more WTF time when I get back home :-< .

Adobe CS4 Tools Expired, but ... no big deal

My trial Dreamweaver CS4, Firework CS4, Photoshop CS4 were all expired today, but I didn't find it much a loss since the older 2004 versions actually works very well for me.

Oh, I heard that the .dll hack worked well though.

Stupid Affect Effect CS4 Forgetting OpenGL, and then, Premiere

Somehow when I opened After Effect CS4 today, the OpenGL setting was reset to no OpenGL support. I have to, once again, go to Photoshop CS4, check the OpenGL setting, and then go back to After Effect CS4, and now it's there again. Flicky.

Also I found out that Adobe Premiere CS4 does NOT support GPU acceleration, which is kind of a bad news to me consider that I use Cartoon effect in After Effect CS4 a LOT. Yet I want to take advantage of the tight intergration between After Effect and Premiere so taht I can take the strengeth of the both world. So my solution is NOT turning on those GPU intensive on After Effect until I got everything done. That seems to work OK so far.

Oh using the 9.0.1 update and DLL thing, now my Adobe Premiere CS4 does not crash the moment I open it. At least some improvement after spending tons of time today dealing with After Effect and Primere and trying to make them work.

VMWare : Choose Move, and not Copy

For such a long time I didn't understand why there's two options when starting up a duplicated VMWare OS: Copied it and Moved it. Now I know it, and it's extremely critical for Vista and Windows 7. If you choose "Copied it" then all the virtual hardware will be treat as new, and thus you have to REACTIVATE your Windows OS! So MAKE SURE you choose "Moved it" so that you can keep your OS activated.

Some other tidbits while testing Windows 7 in VMWare:

• VMWare Tool doesn't seem to provide a proper 64 bit video driver for Vista or Windows 7 64 bit, althought the primitive driver that comes with Windows 7 seems to work just fine. 32 bit has no driver problem.
  
• Sonar 7 comes with 64 bit version, and I am installing it on Windows 7 64 bit now just to see how good it works. (Result: very usable)
  
• I need saperate Product Key to activate 32 bit and 64 bit. Seems like Microsoft is very straight on the whole Windows activation thing.
• KMPlayer runs VERY SLUGGLISH on both the 32 bit and 64 bit enviornment even after I installed the lastest version.

Adobe After Effect CS4 was not recognize my ATI HD4850 Graphic ... but then problem solved

I was messing with the Cartoon plugin in Adobe After Effect CS4 which utility the GPU capability. It didn't work on my machine as the rendering was ultra slow. When I opened preference. it said that "OpenGL Not Found". But when I went to Adobe site, it stated clearly that my card (ATI HD4850) is one of the supported card.

So I updated my After Effect from 9.0 to 9.0.1. I also update the driver to ATI Catalyst version 8.12, which is far higher than the required 8.8 stated on the Adobe well page. Well, the After Effect perference still says OpenGL Not Found.

Being fustrated, I opened Photoshop CS4, as I remembered that Photoshop CS4 also support GPU. The perference in Photoshop CS4 found the GPU, stated the ATI 4850.

Here's the strange thing: I then opened Adobe After Effect CS4 again and BOOM! This time AFter Effect saw the GPU and allow me to check the OpenGL checkbox. Once checked, everything goes awesome. The render of Cartoon effect is now instantly. Pretty sweet.

Well ... at least it works now.

MorphVox Pro very quick review

I read some good review about using MorphVox Pro to convert male voice to female voice in real time. So I tried. Setup is flexible as I can use my Firewire mic as input and then my on board sound card as output, all in preference under Audio Source.

Problem is I am not that impressed by the result, and it's not really totally realtime. It's nice for use to have fun, but I won't use it in any of my real projects.

Stupid noise problem with composite cable

When I got my Wii Composite Cable, I was a bit anonyed by the noise I got one the screw once in a while. Now that I have the PSP Composite Cable, I got the exact same problem. After some experimentation, I realized that it's mostly because the audio stereo cable part. If the audio is not connected, I won't get those noise.

Guess I need to tolerent it then :-<