Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

[Firefox] After the Deadline released Firefox add-on that makes spell checking even easier

Posted in Tools on February 5th, 2010 by Kent

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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…

[Fun] MJ, the King of Pop, without the crown

Posted in Fun stuff on February 3rd, 2010 by Kent

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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.…

[Fun] don’t take life so seriously

Posted in Fun stuff on February 1st, 2010 by Kent

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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

[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…

[VMware] vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide Released

Posted in Information Technology on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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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…

Tools for troubleshooting WSUS weirdness

Posted in Information Technology, Tools on January 22nd, 2010 by Kent

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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…

Install Ubuntu Linux inside Windows without partitioning the hard drive

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

image 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

Fixing HTTP Error 500.19 when setting up IIS in Windows 7

Posted in ASP.net, Information Technology on January 19th, 2010 by Kent

I was preparing my development environment on my Windows 7 yesterday. I loaded Visual Studio 2008, enabled IIS, and pointed it to my apps directory. All look good until I converted one app I coded before to application and tested it through my web browser.

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Zoom it out to see the detail errors if you can’t read it…

A type of Out-Of-Office Auto-Response style I would like to use

Posted in Fun stuff on January 13th, 2010 by Kent

I am not a fan of auto-response. In fact, I hate to use it for a few reasons, one of which is I am telling spamers that I am real. But this really makes me to use it now, or even more.

Hi – thank you for emailing me.

When your email arrived, I was doing one of the following: