Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

[Tool] top 10 online resources to encrypt and decrypt plain text message

Posted in Tools on March 10th, 2010 by Kent

image Encryption is complicated so it’s nice that someone out there already make some cool apps that can do all these complex work for us. Thanks to Technical Personal for compiling a nice list of web apps that does this dirty work. Very useful and handy when you need it.

1. Crypo – Crypo has

Migrated my blog from subText to WordPress

Posted in Internet, WordPress on March 4th, 2010 by Kent

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This blog had been running on subText, a .Net powered blog engine, since it’s first launched in 2004. I picked it because being a .Net developer I suppose to run my own blog on the same platform. But it turned out, WordPress won the war in the end, as I finally migrated it to WordPress a few months…

[Tool] sending large email attachments with Outlook and drop.io

Posted in Tools on March 3rd, 2010 by Kent

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Email isn’t a tool that’s designed for file-sharing, but probably is the one that gets used the most. Even though when an email with large attachment gets bounced back with the reason that the attachment is too big, people are still thinking of ways like compress, split, etc to get around it.

Drop.io is one of those web services…

[Firefox] After the Deadline released Firefox add-on that makes spell checking even easier

Posted in Tools on February 5th, 2010 by Kent

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After the deadline is a neat web app that helps you write better by checking your spellings, detecting misused words, checking styles and grammars using its own artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology. It has helped me quite a lot.

Now they released a Firefox add-on that makes life a lot easier to…

[Fun] MJ, the King of Pop, without the crown

Posted in Fun stuff on February 3rd, 2010 by Kent

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Sammy (my 5-year-old daughter) and I were in the superstore last night. The TV in the store usually plays the kids movie most of the time. But it was playing MJ’s latest movie, This is It, yesterday. It was fun to watch actually, so I called up Sammy since she’s quite crazy about dancing lately.…

[Fun] don’t take life so seriously

Posted in Fun stuff on February 1st, 2010 by Kent

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A friend of mine forwarded an email to me this morning with this cute picture and the nice quote in it, which made me laugh pretty hard. Thought to share it out with all of you who come across this site.

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret

[Google Reader] added a new feature that allows you to track changes to any website

Posted in Stuff in General, Tips & Tricks on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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Most of the websites I follow have the RSS feeds that make me quite easy to subscribe but every so often there are sites and pages I came across that just don’t have the feeds for me to easily follow up. I would have to bookmark them in my Google Bookmark and remember to come back and check…

[Stupidity] re-enable a disabled local administrator account in Windows

Posted in Information Technology, Tips & Tricks on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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I was stuck when I was setting up a Windows server 2003 machine this afternoon. After I loaded pretty everything on the machine, I created another user account named support and disabled local administrator account, and log off. Ooops, did you see anything missing here?

Yes, I forgot to add the support account to the local administrators user…

[VMware] vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide Released

Posted in Information Technology on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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Here comes more reading for you if you are planning upgrade your VMware infrastructure to vSphere 4 (now with update 1) near in the feature. If you are a VMware administrator, you are highly encouraged to download and check it out.

The guild is currently in public draft, called Rev B, and contains 6 sections…

Tools for troubleshooting WSUS weirdness

Posted in Information Technology, Tools on January 22nd, 2010 by Kent

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It should work but doesn’t always. Sometimes you just scratch your head wondering why this computer didn’t get update automatically from the WSUS server as you configured. Now, there is a tool set from Microsoft TechNet that makes you troubleshoot the WSUS weirdness a bit easier.

There are 6 tools for 6 purposes in this…