Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

Tips & Tricks

A trick that checks if someone is selling your email address

Posted in Tips & Tricks on March 16th, 2010 by Kent

image 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…

[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…

This copy of Microsoft Office is not genuine, now what?

Posted in Information Technology, Tips & Tricks on December 1st, 2009 by Kent

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.

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Clicking Learn

Tips on buying legit software for less

Posted in Tips & Tricks on September 11th, 2009 by Kent

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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…

Another use of private browsing, aka incognito

Posted in Tips & Tricks on August 7th, 2009 by Kent

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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

A column named “comments” already belongs to this DataTable

Posted in ASP.net, Tips & Tricks on July 31st, 2009 by Kent

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…

Here is how the hosting company makes money

Posted in Tips & Tricks on July 22nd, 2009 by Kent

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…

Gmail Lab Added New Anti-Phishing Key Feature

Posted in Tips & Tricks on July 14th, 2009 by Kent

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

Add Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

Posted in Internet, Tips & Tricks on July 6th, 2009 by Kent

It’s not the sitemap that is meant to help users find the information they need. If you want to generate that type of sitemap, you may come to the wrong place. However, this WriteMaps web application may help generate the sitemap you are looking for.

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The sitemap I am talking about here in this post…