Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

Microsoft TechNet Posters

Posted in Information Technology on August 18th, 2010 by Kent

For those who like to collect technical posters, here are a list of them from TechNet blog. Worth checking and saving, or even printing out ant putting them on the wall in your office. At least, I had done it before.

Enjoy.

How to improve iOS 4 performance on iPhone 3G with less sluggish

Posted in iPhone on July 29th, 2010 by Kent

Well, ever since I upgraded my iPhone 3G to iOS 4, I have been suffering the sluggish on almost all apps I am using on the phone. While Apple is aware of this and is currently investing this issue at the moment, both my colleague and neowin mentioned an easy fix that would quickly solve this issue. And the best part is, it actually works.

To remedy the sluggish performance (or at least one cause of it) go to “Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search-> deselect every option”. What it does is to stop all background indexing on…

Pushing emails to my iPhone drains the battery badly

Posted in iPhone on July 22nd, 2010 by Kent

With the new Google Sync that supports email push via Exchange ActiveSync and multiple Exchange account available on iOS4, I reset up all my email account on my iPhone with all of them push enabled. However, after a short while of enjoyment, I turned Push off because if I didn’t I would need basically to buy a battery extender to re-juice my iPhone on the road.

As it’s mentioned on Google Sync,

As with any service using push technology, Google Sync may cause increased usage of your devices’ battery.

It happens the same when using Microsoft…

Different types of VPN protocols

Posted in Information Technology on July 20th, 2010 by Kent

VPN has been widely used in all kinds organizations since it’s invented. I personally have been using this technology for almost 10 years but to be honest, I still haven’t touched some of areas in this technology. And it seems to get advanced quite a bit as time goes.

Thanks to Technically Personal for coming up an awesome post that not only explains how VPN works in a simple diagram but also lists number of types VPNs existed and what they are.

Here are the 7 types of VPN listed, some of which you may have…

[IT] 64-bit dominating, Windows 7 sp1 beta, Windows 8 rumors

Posted in Information Technology on July 16th, 2010 by Kent

[ASP.net] A free HTML Editor Control that works with AJAX

Posted in ASP.net on July 15th, 2010 by Kent

FreeTextBox used to be my favorite and I use it without second thought every time when I need it but not anymore because it doesn’t play nicely once you place it inside the <update> panel for Ajax. Without doing it, I can’t use the modern modal popup for data update form.

Luckily, ASP.net Ajax control toolkit already includes a HTMLEditor for you to use.  However, from the testing I have done, it doesn’t seem to be working properly in Chrome. Besides that, its lack of paragraph style format also made me not to use it at the…

My Top 5s on World Cup 2010

Posted in Fun stuff on July 12th, 2010 by Kent

The world cup is finally over so it’s time for me to back to work, mainly spiritually. But before I do and let it go, I have to get all my own feelings about this most popular event out first with my own top 5s.

Top 5 my favorite teams

  1. Spain – what can I say? It’s simply the best team on earth.
  2. Germany – a team that represents the future.
  3. Argentina – no one knows Football better than Maradona.
  4. Uruguay – all because of Forlan and Suarez. A team surprised me the most.

Do you trust those 2.5” portable external hard drives in terms of reliability?

Posted in Stuff in General on July 6th, 2010 by Kent

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…

[IT] VMware guy’s guide to Hyper-V, vSphere’s built-in monitoring tools, Windows 8 is coming, Top 5 windows desktop security tips

Posted in Information Technology on June 30th, 2010 by Kent

[VMware] how to add the existing storage back without formatting it

Posted in Information Technology on June 24th, 2010 by Kent

We had a couple of power outages lately which finally knocked my Drobo Pro box down badly. When the ESX servers booted up, they didn’t see those target LUNs they used to see. So no VMs that are stored on that box got booted up. More, they didn’t even show up in ESX.

I eventually got the replacement for the dead Drobo from the vendor and successfully brought all data back. But after I connected it back to network and got recognized in ESX, I got warning message telling me it’s going to destroy the storage when I was trying…