Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

[WordPress] adding 2 more useful plugins to my resource box

Posted in WordPress on May 17th, 2010 by Kent

Here are two WordPress plugins that may potentially increase your blog’s pageview in some way. At least, I believe it will.

Global Translator

It’s fairly obvious that if your blog is written in English having a live translation service in the sidebar would help to get visitors that use the different language to stay. So I finally got my hands on it to this blog today.

I picked this plugin just because this appears as #1 in Google when I searched for WordPress Translator Plugin. And it turns out it works pretty slick too.

Download Link:

How to add <br /> into text from multiline of textbox

Posted in ASP.net on May 14th, 2010 by Kent

So here I go again having to face the challenge saving the text from a multiline textbox in ASP.net without missing the line break. Last time when I did it, I only made it work in Internet Explorer so this time I am trying something different and easier.

I could throw in some free add-ons like FreeTextBox that would make things actually fairly easy but since all I need this time is just replacing the line breaks with HTML tag <br /> so the text can be rendered properly in email and web page.

It’s actually…

Would you drink a 9-year-old milk?

Posted in Stuff in General on May 13th, 2010 by Kent

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…

[Reading] deploying virtual desktop guides

Posted in Information Technology on April 22nd, 2010 by Kent

Here are 3 new step-by-step guide for deploying virtual desktops that relates to Remote Desktop or RemoteApp. There are something I have wanted to get my hands on for quite a while.

More reading and more testing are on the way.

[via Bink.nu]

How to make an old school SUBST virtual drive persistent

Posted in Tips & Tricks on April 18th, 2010 by Kent

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,…

[Fun] amazing pictures of earth from a canon point-and-shoot camera

Posted in Fun stuff on March 26th, 2010 by Kent

This is amazing. Guess how much it cost for taking this amazing picture of earth from the sky?

£500! That’s all it cost. Who needs a space shuttle anymore for having amazing pictures of earth captured? A British genius used a standard Canon point-and-shoot camera which is taped to a helium balloon and a location device, and float into the sky. And here is how exactly it worked.

Again, that’s amazing. See more details how he archived here.

[Fun] Learning how Curling works

Posted in Fun stuff on March 18th, 2010 by Kent

If you are like me who didn’t know a thing about curling and just got into it during the latest Winter Olympics 2010, held in Vancouver, this awesome graphic produced by Ciaran Hughes definitely explains this game in great detail. You should check it out.

And if you still haven’t looked this game you should start now. This game is tough and fun to watch too. Not only does it game require a very good skill to slide the stone, but it also needs a lot of athletes’ brain and intelligent as well.…

[Thoughts] Don’t forget to obey the law, stupid

Posted in Stuff in General on March 18th, 2010 by Kent

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.…

A trick that checks if someone is selling your email address

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

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…

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

Posted in Tools on March 10th, 2010 by Kent

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 a huge collection of online tools like Hash generator, one pass generator, pass phrase generator etc. For encrypting email messages, you can use AER-256+ or other related tool.

2. Encrypt Easy – Encrypt