Kent J. Chen's WebLog

I am not a huge fan of these portable keyboard but it’s nice to have it. Hocking up a keyboard to your iPhone wirelessly via Bluetooth should make more convenient for you.

However, it requires you to jailbreak your iPhone first.

The Bluetooth Keyboard Driver, just released in Cydia, fills this void for jailbroken iPhone users. The App is based on the open-source BTstack project, which also brought us the Wii Mote to work with apps like emulators. This driver runs on all iDevices with Bluetooth support. It is unclear yet, if it works properly

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If you have a website that you constantly access on your iPhone, it would be nice to have a shortcut on the iPhone’s homepage that redirect you to the website. With the new firmware 3.0, you actually can do that, quite easily.

First, click Add button while you are in the webpage that you want to bookmark, which brings up 3 options for you to choose. Pick Add to Home Screen, the one in blue.

And type in the description in the next window,

Once you click Add button, you will see a new icon…

ManagePC is an open source .Net application that makes easy for you to manage your PC in your Windows environment. The tool inventories all aspects of PCs on your domain including:

• hardware
• services
• software
• hot-fixes
• processes
• local users and groups
• group policies
• etc.

What’s nice is that the tool also allows you to take control of PCs through familiar interfaces. Use remote desktop, VNC, reboot, start/stop service, uninstall software and more directly from the tool.

It’s definitely worth checking out.

[via 4sysops]

The new combination of Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 makes a lot of new things that are impossible to do in the previous versions possible. Offline domain join is one of them. It becomes possible because of the new command tool, djoin.exe, that comes with the system. Actually, what makes more interesting is that it doesn’t require Windows Server 2008 R2 as domain controller on your network. However, because the tool is made in Windows 7, it may not work in any previous windows.

Michael Pietroforte at 4sysops wrote two great posts, here and

I am not among those experienced DBAs. I am just a regular geek who knows basic skills of managing database server and a bit of database programming. I haven’t really got into Oracle world but have heard from many sources that Oracle database is way better than MS SQL because such, such reasons. And I have been wondering if that’s all true.

Here, Pinal Dave at SQLAuthority posted an article that outlines a number of reasons why people think that way and why they are not the case, and concluded that

I hope this article helps to debunk the myth

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If you have a blog and use FeedBurner burn your RSS feed, you may like this new approach FeedBurner recently added.

Log into your FeedBurner account and go to Publicize tab, you will notice a new category listed at the left sidebar named Socialize, just under the FeedCount. What this new thing does right now is that once it’s enabled FeedBurner will automatically post updates from your feed to your social media account, though Twitter is the only one supported at the moment.

Clicking Add a Twitter account will go through Twitter’s oauth authentication process to verify your…

Hyper-V or vSphere? For virtualization fans (me included) who are always wondering who’s better, here is a head-to-head unbiased mapping of Microsoft and VMware virtualization solutions offered by WindowsITPro, a free poster for you to download.

It’s a nice poster that provides a single source for IT decision makers and technologists to compare the two leading virtualization solutions providers.

The poster covers:

• the Platform Vision architectural model
• architectural comparison of Hyper-V and ESX 4.0
• product and positioning comparison of VMware and Microsoft
• a drilldown into server/hypervisor virtualization

This poster is in PDF format…

It happened lately in my office that emails sent to certain domains first got delayed and then failed with a SMTP error code 4.4.7 in the final NDR. Error code 4.4.7 usually indicates that the message in the queue has expired and usually the problem is on the receiving server. However, that is obviously not the case this time. Also on the server side, all queued messages all have one same warning message, “an SMTP protocol error occured”.

Dig it a little deeper by performing a MX lookup to all these domains that we had problem sending emails to and…

Permalink is very important. It’s one of the first things that you need to configure when you build up a website. Not only does it provide you a more comprehensive url but it also helps you in the search engine optimization (SEO).

WordPress has this feature with 4 options built in out of the box. What you want to choose is either “Day and name” and “Month and name” because they provide a better results.

But things will be getting complicated when you want a pretty permalink structure that does not have the annoying “index.php” in it,…

Scenario 1, one record is completely identical to another

Meaning that there is no way of identifying them who is who. Usually, it happens when the table doesn’t have a unique id field due to the poor database design. Because of that, there is no way in SQL to delete one of these duplications without deleting them all first.

You can copy the whole table into a new table first,

SELECT DISTINCT * INTO newTable FROM oldTable

And then, delete the old table and move all the records back but this time make sure you have the unique identifier…