Kent J. Chen's WebLog

Let me know if you still do after you read this story.

One of my colleagues came to me yesterday asking if I know anyplace that can do the data restoring because he’s got loose connection on his Samsung 500G portable hard drive and he’s worried about all the photos he’s saved on it. I asked him to bring it over so I can take a quick look at it to see if I can help him.

Sure enough, the USB port which is the only connection on the case was so loose that I couldn’t make it firmly connected…

After being a happy user since 2004, I am finally saying good-bye to my web hosting provider, webhost4life. In fact, even though my account with them will still keep live till my annual service contract ends this November, all my websites have been moved to somewhere else. I just couldn’t afford my websites being interrupted or poorly handled any longer.

Changing webhosting is never easy and takes up your time to set it up. Depending on the setup, some of your websites may need to be altered to reflect the change as well. So that’s why the…

Microsoft Australia is running an interesting campaign promoting its latest web browser, IE 8. Thanks to LongZheng for finding it out. This time, it uses a bottle of milk dated in Aug 2001 as a metaphor asking if you don’t drink a 9-year-old milk why would you use a 9-year-old browser, IE6.

While people may be questioning why choosing milk it’s true that a 9-year-old browser can’t really keep up with all the modern web technologies without exposing enormous security breaches. We probably will never be able to find out what a…

The story of Google/China spat over Internet censorship doesn’t seem to go end any time soon, even though the ending that Google will get out of the Great Wall eventually seems inevitable. But a sound “After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?” is just too ridiculous and stupid to me. Yes, not only is it going too far, but it’s also going too stupid, especially it’s from an international trade lawyer. Just couldn’t believe it.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate the Internet being censored and manipulated. I admire what Google did in this case.…

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 them up periodically for any changes I may be interested. Too bad, I often forgot doing so.

Now my favorite RSS feed reader, Google Reader, has rolled out a new feature that allows me to follow any changes to any…

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…

• CIO: I would never talk to my CEO about the cloud [via itworldcanada]
  ”There’s no way I would talk to our CEO about the cloud. For one thing, it’s a bad metaphor. It’s hard to get your hands around, it’s unstable as a weather element…I think it’s a term that should just go away.”
• Bell, Telus launch HSPA wireless service [via itworldcanada]
  that means, pretty obviously, iPhone is coming to Telus and Bell. Rogers is no longer an exclusive iPhone provider in Canada. Good news to the consumers.
• Microsoft COFEE available to individuals too

…

Quote shared by CopyBlogger, about the relationship between any content creator and the people they hope to connect with:

When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons:

Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express.

When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason:

They’re moved by a desire to touch the audience.

~Robert McKee

Good touch.

Finally, it’s done. Being a long time fan of this glorious game, I have no doubt that this will be one of those movies that I am sure I won’t miss. Not sure if there will be episode II, III, or more but let’s just see how it goes this one first.

It was back to 1990 or 1991 when I first played this game on a computer that doesn’t even have Windows. Yes, the very first version of Price of Persia is on MS-Dos. I still remember it was a timer set to only 90 minutes…

Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly as its default URL shortening provider a few months back, which basically put TinyURL to a very difficult position to survive and throw tr.im out of the business. I had been wondering why Twitter made the change because all in all, it’s just a service that shortens the URL and redirect them to the right place. Why does it all matter? I just didn’t quite understand up until now after I have been using it quite extensively for a while.

It’s not like bit.ly has a shorter domain than TinyURL.com. Otherwise,…