By George Ou on 6/30/2009 1:09 AM

$18 (after $20 rebate) NVIDIA 8600GT graphics card with dual DVI
http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx

I don't think this blog entry requires much explanation.  Even without the rebate, it's a great deal.  You can order up to 3 of these and get a maximum of $60 rebate.  For anyone with an older graphics card, this will breath new life into the computer with a reasonably fast, quiet, and cool temperature graphics card.

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By George Ou on 6/29/2009 2:51 AM

23" LCDs are getting real cheap, but holding weird resolutions. I thought it was odd when they started doing 1920x1080 rather than 1920x1200, but take this Samsung 23" for $200 with an odd ball 16:9 resolution of 2048x1152.

While that extra resolution may be welcome for productivity work, it is suboptimal for 1080p video content. A lot of games won't support that resolution either.

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By George Ou on 6/14/2009 10:20 PM

Update 6-22-2009 - Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content.  Ironically, that's the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.

With skyrocketing bandwidth costs due to 640 Kbps "HQ" video and 2.25 Mbps 720P "HD" video, Google is getting a massive bandwidth bill every day to deliver all those YouTube videos.  To alleviate their bandwidth load (and your's), they now cache all the video content on your hard drive.  Not only does this perform better, but it also makes it easier to snag c Read More »

By Justin James on 6/11/2009 1:21 PM

I recently tried to change work item "created by" in TFS. TFS blocks you from doing this, so I tried the backdoor method: direct database updates. However, I found that just modifying the "Created By" column in WorkItemsLatest causes the work items to not allow themselves to be edited afterwards. The trick is to also update the "Created By" column in WorkItemsAre and WorkItemsLatest. As long as there is agreement for the item in all three tables, this will work just fine.

J.Ja

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By George Ou on 6/6/2009 5:06 PM

Just got my hands on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA clamshell yesterday afternoon.  So far, this thing is very much impressing me with its form factor.  The 1008HA looks like a miniature MacBook Air at 1.1 kilogram (2.4 pounds) and no more than 1 inch thick.  There are no breaks in the contour of the chassis and the unit looks very nice.  I put the unit in my wife's purse and it barely feels like there's a netbook inside.  The ladies will definitely care for the pink, red, blue, or white 1008HA.

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By Justin James on 6/2/2009 10:00 PM

I finally put my finger on what drives me nuts about KDE. It's so petty and trivial: all of the applications insist on starting with the letter "K". Not only is it absolutely ridiculous, but it makes finding anything impossible. "KEdit", "KMail", etc. It reminds me of the "Mortal Kombat" games. KSeriously.

J.Ja 

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By Justin James on 5/19/2009 3:35 PM

I had a problem where SharePoint was set to send alerts to users (in this case, when tasks were assigned to them), but it was not sending the alerts to everyone. It turns out, that if a user is not explicitly a member of any SharePoint groups, they won't get the email. I had put "DOMAIN\Domain Users" into the "Contribute" group (easy permissions that way), but adding the users to a group is what I needed to do for those alerts to get sent out. Hope this helps someone else out!

J.Ja

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By George Ou on 5/13/2009 6:43 AM

As I've previously explained, an Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L "Celeron" processor makes the ideal computer system as oppose to an NVIDIA Ion system.  Now I'll give you the full configuration list of parts for building a great HTPC system for under $600.

 

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By George Ou on 5/13/2009 6:40 AM

TechReport just reviewed one of the first mini-ITX NVIDIA Ion platform solutions from Zotac which involves an NVIDIA 9300 graphics adapter and Intel Atom 330 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU.  The problem is that its MSRP is priced at $179 and at that price, one can buy a far better integrated graphics Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L 1.8 GHz CPU for less money.

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By Justin James on 5/12/2009 12:00 AM

Tonight I went ahead and tried to install SP2 for Vista is the hopes that it would cure my Windows Media Player problem. No dice. Apparently, I need one that supports the 34 languages that I don't have installed. Why? Because at one point I did install them, then uninstalled them, and now, SP2 thinks they are still installed. Huh?

J.Ja

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By Justin James on 5/11/2009 12:13 AM

Despite what people say about Vista, I have had nothing but good experiences with it, until relatively recently. The first sign of trouble I had, was when I upgraded the Live Meeting client, and it treated every launch as if it had just been installed, and it wouldn't associate itself to the Live Meeting links right. More upsetting, Windows Media Player will no longer start unless I do "Run as Administrator", and it won't minimize itself to be the mini player in my taskbar. Good timing, since W7 is right around the corner. Since I've had this Vista install since the week it RTM'ed, I can't complain. Well over 2 years before bit rot sets in is a great run for an OS.

J.Ja

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By George Ou on 5/5/2009 11:05 PM

F-Secure is getting some news coverage because one of their bloggers claim that they have identified a security failure in Windows 7 Release Candidate.  Their blogger Mikko writes that Windows 7 still hides file extensions which allows virus writers to easily trick users in to launching executable files that were disguised as ordinary Read More »

By George Ou on 4/29/2009 4:30 AM

For anyone who has more than one computer running Office 2007 or if you may need to run the update on a future reinstall, I would suggest that you download the Office 2007 SP2 update here rather than use Windows Update.  That's because the file is just shy of 300 MB and it's a big hassle to have to download the file more than once.

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By Justin James on 4/24/2009 12:14 AM

I first heard about this experiment about a year ago. Now, it looks like Microsoft is taking it a step further, and making it a full-fledged initiative. Good for them! I think that anything that helps people learn PC skills (even if it's mostly Hotmail and YouTube) in a way that they are comfortable with is a good thing.

J.Ja

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By George Ou on 4/21/2009 4:14 AM

It appears to be a happy ending for Sun Microsystems after all.  Not only did they get avoid being abandoned and ravaged by the market like Yahoo, they even got a slightly higher bid with a better matching company.  Oracle and Sun were always joined at the hip when it came to Java and Middleware and Oracle database and SPARC/Solaris.  The vast majority of Oracle database administrator I knew consider SPARC/Solaris the only serious Oracle platform in the world (though I don't personally agree with this viewpoint).

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