Kent J. Chen's WebLog

This blog had been running on subText, a .Net powered blog engine, since it’s first launched in 2004. I picked it because being a .Net developer I suppose to run my own blog on the same platform. But it turned out, WordPress won the war in the end, as I finally migrated it to WordPress a few months back.

And here are the steps I took to make this happen.

Step 1, set up a new WordPress blog

This is probably the easiest part in the whole process. Simply follow up the instruction and everything…

Email isn’t a tool that’s designed for file-sharing, but probably is the one that gets used the most. Even though when an email with large attachment gets bounced back with the reason that the attachment is too big, people are still thinking of ways like compress, split, etc to get around it.

Drop.io is one of those web services out there that offers a platform for file-sharing and collaboration. What makes it quite unique is that it provides an Outlook plugin that allows you to attach large files and send them out right from your Outlook. That exactly overcomes…

After the deadline is a neat web app that helps you write better by checking your spellings, detecting misused words, checking styles and grammars using its own artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology. It has helped me quite a lot.

Now they released a Firefox add-on that makes life a lot easier to those who use Firefox. Check the demo video below to get an idea how it works.

Basically, this little addon hides itself in the background on Firefox until you are ready to use it. You will see…

Sammy (my 5-year-old daughter) and I were in the superstore last night. The TV in the store usually plays the kids movie most of the time. But it was playing MJ’s latest movie, This is It, yesterday. It was fun to watch actually, so I called up Sammy since she’s quite crazy about dancing lately.

Me: Hey, Sammy. Look, that’s Michael Jackson, the king of the pop, dancing in the TV. Watch.

Sammy: Oh, let me see, let me see…hmmm…but he doesn’t have the crown.

…2 minutes later,

Sammy: Dad, can we leave now? I…

A friend of mine forwarded an email to me this morning with this cute picture and the nice quote in it, which made me laugh pretty hard. Thought to share it out with all of you who come across this site.

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret anything that made you smile.

Thanks for visiting and hope you enjoy.

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…

Here comes more reading for you if you are planning upgrade your VMware infrastructure to vSphere 4 (now with update 1) near in the feature. If you are a VMware administrator, you are highly encouraged to download and check it out.

The guild is currently in public draft, called Rev B, and contains 6 sections including:

• Introduction
• Console OS
• vCenter
• vNetwork
• Host
• Virtual Machines

All sections can be downloaded in PDF separately here.

It should work but doesn’t always. Sometimes you just scratch your head wondering why this computer didn’t get update automatically from the WSUS server as you configured. Now, there is a tool set from Microsoft TechNet that makes you troubleshoot the WSUS weirdness a bit easier.

There are 6 tools for 6 purposes in this tool set but mostly you will just need 2 to troubleshoot your problem.

Server Diagnostic Tool

The tool is designed to help administrators gather WSUS server debugging logs and configuration information for further troubleshooting.

Client Diagnostics Tool

This tool is…

The How-To Geek had a how-to article about this, which looks quite interesting. It may be not new to those who already knew or use Ubuntu but to me, a windows-stubborner, it seems to be appealing.

Reading through the steps made me to think that it’s a lot like Windows 7 native VHD boot. You don’t need a separate partition to install another operating system. The only difference between this and native boot VHD is that the former has a folder that contains all necessary files to run the Linux while the latter…