Kent J. Chen's WebLog

If you have touched DOS before, you might still remember what this old school command subst is all about. It’s a command used for substituting local paths on physical and logical drives, known as virtual drives. For example, if you want to have a logical drive P: mapped to a local folder on your computer, say c:\temp, you can simply use the following command to make it.

subst p: c:\temp

It’s very useful when you test out the application that uses a network mapped drive so you can have a complete test environment right on your local machine.

However,…

Email addresses are the gold to many Internet markets. Collecting your email addresses is the key to their success, which is why many of them offer some great stuff to you for free but asking your email address in return. Pretty every one of them are promising they will keep them with their life but the reality is, you really have no idea if they did. And that’s one of the annoyances that worry people every time when they see a form asking for their email addresses.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is and very simple too. You…

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…

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 group. So basically, I was screwed, and was stuck in a user account that has limited privilege to the machine because everything I tried just plainly gave me “access denied” popup.

Without any luck fooling around in the system, I…

My colleague came to me the other day asking why his laptop was telling him that his copy of Microsoft Office is not genuine. This was new to me, so I asked him to bring his laptop over so I can take close look. Sure enough, the following window pops up every time he opened Word.

Clicking Learn More opens a web page that explains a little bit more why it happens but offers no good. You basically only have two choices, either buy one from their online store or uninstall it from your computer. If you are…

No, I am not telling you buy those illegal copies from many kinds of spam emails. These are tips from digital inspiration for buying legit copies of software through the authorized channels. It saves you money but not likely will be over 70% off, like those ones from the spams. It’s impossible to beat them from cost perspective.

Tip 1, always do comparison shopping.

Tip 2, always remember to check extras like free shipping.

Tip 3, if there is a software program that you want to purchase, go to the manufacturer’s website and subscribe to

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I came across this article today that mentioned a new subscriptions business model that is used on FT.com, a model that:

I like the subscription model the FT has been using for some time now. I may get the exact details wrong but its the idea that’s important anyway. You can visit the ft.com domain something like nine times per month for free. They cookie you and when you stop by the tenth time in a month, they ask you to pay. And many do.

While I am not a typical marketing guy who…

I was trying to add a RSS feed in my sidebar on this blog the other day. And because this blog is powered by ASP.net I have to write a control page that pulls the feed in XML and render them to the page. I thought it was a simple task that only needs a few lines of code to make it work, until I get this message.

After googling a bit, this post seems to explain the reason why it happens when simply using ReadXml doesn’t work.

The problem is this:

An RSS

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I am cheap so I host all my websites on a shared hosting plan. It’s been working very well for quite a long time until lately. All my websites were up and down pretty much throughout the day without very clear reason what was causing it. The tech support guys were patient enough working through the options trying to figure the problem out. While I was waiting for the problem gets solved, I started wondering whether it’s because just too many websites sharing on the same server slowed everything down. frustrated enough seeing all my sites crawling like a snail.…

Gmail just added another awesome useful lab feature that adds another layer to protect you from phishing attacks. The new lab feature, Authentication icon for verified senders, displays a key icon next to senders that spammers attempt to fake. It currently only works for emails sent from Paypal and eBay.

We do that by looking at the “From” header, and when it says “ebay.com” for example, it means it really did come from ebay.com. Anything else is rejected; it won’t even appear in your spam folder because Gmail won’t accept it.

That’s extremely important and…