I was attempted to set up Windows Live Writer for a friend recently, however he is behind a proxy using Windows authentication, therefore, we were able to run the downloader, Windows Live Writer was unable to connect to the blog and was therefore, we had this error message while trying to set up the blog service:

Error 407: Proxy Authentication Required

Fortunately, Windows Live Writer was developed within the .NET framework and the walk-around is fairly easy.

First, open up the directory where the Windows Live Installer was installed at, which, in my case, is C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer

If you are not sure about that, right-click and select Properties, that will give you the folder path where Windows Live Writer was installed to:

In that folder, look a file named WindowsLiveWriter.exe.config:

Right click and open the file in notepad and this should be what you see initially:

Now add the following lines right after the <configuration> tag:

If you are using Windows-integrated authentication, this is what you should add:

    <system.net>
<defaultProxy enabled=”true” useDefaultCredentials=”true”>    </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

So in the end, here is how your config file looks like:

Save it and restart Windows Live Writer and time to enjoy the power of Windows Live Writer:

The matter is a bit more complicated when you are using your own proxy address which is not default or you have your own proxy credentials which is not integrated with Windows. There is a solution here which I have not tried and therefore can not verify it. Basically you will need to compile your own DLL and add that to the configurations.

Yesterday, I came across this interesting article on TechCrunch where the author discussed the idea of gmail-lite, where we would write pretty much like Twitter-style emails.

Frankly speaking, I can understand the rationale of people writing short emails. After all, a not-so-busy person like me receives about, on average, perhaps 50 emails from work and another 20 or 30 emails in my personal email inbox. Imagine if every single emails is written in 3 lines and therefore, I can save, say, 20 seconds on average to read each of the emails, that is at least 70×20 = 1400 seconds, which is approximately 23 minutes, saved in a day!

However, as we all know, nothing in this world comes for free. So what did we sacrifice for those 23 minutes that we saved?

The answer is what I would like to call the interpersonal “warmth”.

Just imagine if one day you walk into a store, instead of being greeted by the salesgirls with words like “how are you doing?” or “what can I do for you?”, you are being asked directly with this:

“What do you want?”

or something like this:

“You can buy all your stuff here, cashier is over there, we accept Mastercard and Visa!”

Those words indeed save our time, aren’t they? After all, you walk into a store presumably you want to find something to buy and obviously in big departmental stores, knowing where the cashiers are or what credit cards they accept could save you quite some time.

However, would you like to visit this store again?

Now imagine everyone is talking to you like this.

Your boss will send a one line email to you:”progress report on project ABC please.”

Your colleagues will send a one line email to you:”conference call at 11am.”

Your friend will send a one line email to you:”party on saturday, reply yes to confirm attendence.”

Your loved ones will send a one line email to you:”dinner at home at 7, call if can’t come.”

…

Do you still want to live in such a world?

Obviously sometimes one line email is appropriate, such as the time if I am asking my colleague if he/she wants to go have lunch, I will perhaps just send a one line email like: “lunch downstairs?”, obviously sending something like “Dear Jim, how are you doing? Is everything good with your family?…” and so on would just be outright silly.

However, I want to be able to have the ability to write long emails when I need to, instead of confining myself to 160 words for every single email I write.

After all, we are human with emotions, which distinguishes us from the animals. If we are just able to use the most basic forms of communication, what is the difference between us and the computers that I am typing this blog post on?

There was little surprise when I got the email from Yahoo! informing me that they will be closing MyBlogLog in a few months.

I have been a Yahoo! fan for years, primarily because when I first started to learn and use Internet, Yahoo! was the only (the most efficient one at least) major search engine provider (Google did not came to business until many years after that). My first website was hosted on Geocities (and I actually typed in the HTML code line by line!), first email address was @yahoo.com and first paid online album was Flicker, which is now part of Yahoo! as well.
Oh, those old days…
I am not sure how Yahoo! manage to get itself into such a deplorable state, to the extend that it even has to beg Microsoft for a search engine partnership. I guess the primary reason was it failed to improve their own technology – the Yahoo! search engine was not as great as Google’s, Yahoo! mail is not as useful as GMail (and they actually started charging money for POP and SMTP services, which was a big mistake considering how many people are using POP and SMTP to send/receive emails on their PCs and mobile devices.
As a technology company, nothing is worse than living in the glorious past, which is a mistake that Google is trying really hard to avoid these days by constantly pushing out new product lines.
RIP MyBlogLog, and all the best, Yahoo!

Just received this email from the host of the very blog that you are reading on:

Guess a picture here is better than a thousand words:

Fortunately, Twitter has managed to keep update on the status.

Time for more servers Twitter, you just have too many people using it!

I logged into my blog today thinking of keeping my WordPress up-to-date, and surprisingly, there is one comment left on my blog.

Being a half-perished blog that has not been updated for years, I was naturally surprised to see someone decided to comment on my post, so I opened it up and here is what I see:

Christian Mullen
nationaltechmark.com
cmullen@nationaltechmark.com
65.8.39.214

Hello ****,

I am interested in buying an advertising spot on your website/blog. Please

email me to discuss this possibility further at your earliest convenience.

We are open to any idea that would allow us to capture interested readers.

Please let me know if you’d be open to discussing advertising possibilities

further. If not, I thank you for your time.

Regards,
Chris Mullen
National Techmark

A quick Google search turns out that I am not the only one getting this email:

http://datafox.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/national-techmark-bibomedia-and-spam-what-an-review/

And a quick IP search shows the following:

 

65.8.39.214 IP address location & more:
IP address [?]:     65.8.39.214 [Whois] [Reverse IP]
IP country code:     US
IP address country:     ip address flag United States
IP address state:     Florida
IP address city:     Fort Lauderdale
IP postcode:     33351
IP address latitude:     26.1807
IP address longitude:     -80.2753
ISP of this IP [?]:     BellSouth.net
Organization:     BellSouth.net
Host of this IP: [?]:     adsl-8-39-214.mia.bellsouth.net [Whois] [Trace]
Local time in United States:     2011-02-09 14:52

So I guess this is part of those spam that we get once a while that offer you a job to work at home and making whatever amount of cash promised?

Regardless of what, please be aware that this is a spam.

As for this one I got, obviously it went directly into the spam comment section.

Here is the proof that it is not:

This picture is not PSed by any means and is from the original test server from SpeedTest.net

And it seems that UW has the fastest network around!

I did the test again just now to make sure, and here is what I see:

Thanks for those IST guys, you people rock!

This is the third time in my less-than-a-year experience dealing with Servage.net as my host.

First time it was disk failure, second time was unknown, and this time, according to the customer service representative:

And that was more than 2 hours ago….

Ironically, I just saw this on Servage.net:

So I guess it is either me who is really unlucky, or this client is simply too lucky

A friend of mine just bought a refurbished Thinkpad X41, which I am trying it out as we speak.

The first impression I have on the unit is that it is really tiny with the 12 inch screen. However, as what my friend has already told me, the laptop is relatively slow and the boot up time to Windows XP takes about 20 seconds.

Furthermore, due to the size of the laptop, the keyboard feels a little crammed even though I am used to the keyboard layout on my T42 laptop.

The specification of the system is as following:

Product: ThinkPad X41 2526-WEY [change]

Operating system: Windows XP [change]

Original description: Based on 2526-CTO: P M 758(1.5GHz)LV, 512MB RAM, 40GB 4200rpm HDD, 12.1in 1024×768 LCD, Intel 900, DVD, 802.11abg wireless(MPCI), Modem(CDC), 1Gb Ethernet(LOM), Secure Chip, Fingerprint reader, 8 cell Li-Ion batt, WinXP Pro

As the specifications have shown, the model uses a Low-voltage 1.5GHz processor, which is a definite plus in extending the battery life. I’ve played the unit for about an hour now with less than 15% battery loss. The RAM is a little too small, however, my friend has obviously added in another 512MB RAM to make it to 1GB. The hard drive has a disappointing size of 40GB, and the hidden IBM Recovery Partition has simply compounded the problem by taking away another precious 5GB.

The graphics chipset is Intel 900, which is insufficient to run the Windows Vista, however, the ultraportable is built with the business users in mind and the laptop is obvious more than enough to cater the normal operating usage of the business users.

Finally, the price. My friend bought is on EBay and it costed her 700. Obviously, judging from the price today, half of that would give me a decent EEEPC to play around. However, EEEPC is still quite insufficient in even serving the relatively more CPU-demanding applications such as running Access queries.

Overall, the unit has definitely impressed me with it tiny size and therefore, portability. However, the unit is barely enough to serve for basic daily usage and not for hard-core gamers or professionals demanding high computing power.

Probably the biggest news in the IT industry is the recent takeover proposal of Microsoft to Yahoo!.

Yahoo!, not surprisingly, rejected the offer from Microsoft on Monday, and it seems that they have engaged in active discussions with News Group to prevent a hostile takeover from Microsoft.

It actually reminded me of a Chinese movie that I’ve just watched last weekend.

In the movie, a lady quarrelled with her husband and moved out, and she regretted later on. In order to win her husband back, she actually asked a colleague of her who have absolutely no interest in her, to pretend to be her new boyfriend and showed off in front of her husband. Eventually, her husband got jealous and they two become a happy family again.

I am pretty sure that is not the only movie that talked about a scenario like that, in fact, it is pretty typical in many movies that I’ve watched. And right now, this is analogous to the takeover battle between the largest IT enterprises in the world.

Yahoo! was once the best search engine in the world, and ten years ago, many Internet-savvy users (such as myself), dig stuff that we need from Yahoo!. Unfortunately, Yahoo! eventually lost its focus, and when it finally, after many acquisitions and attempts to figure out what this company should do, it it already far behind the new born Google.

As it was mentioned by many information sources, the largest problem with Yahoo! is on its corporate culture, where, just like many other MNCs, does not really foster a sense of creativity. Many wonderful ideas were buried in the bureaucracy, and the company itself has not realized the fact that putting eggs into too many baskets is just as bad as putting all eggs in one basket.

On the other hand, the reason why Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world is pretty much because of the fact the Microsoft enjoys a certain degree of monopoly (although everyone in Microsoft would deny that, but how about like 80% of all PCs sold worldwide have Windows in them?) in the operating system and productivity suite. For years, despite the rise of many companies whose unwritten ambition is to take down Microsoft, no one could done that.

Not until Google, who has a search engine algorithm that even other big players in the industry admit that it is at least “one decade ahead of us”, and who have been very successful in providing the GMail services, online productivity suite as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet and Google Presentation, and with the birth of the Android platform, it is directly putting itself into challenges with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

However, Yahoo! is still the second most used search engines in the world with five million Yahoo! accounts, and Microsoft still enjoys the de-facto monopoly in the operating systems.

And I do not think it takes too long for both Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang to figure that the only way to survive is to be able to combine their strength together.

However, no one wants to sell themselves cheap, and particularly for companies like Yahoo!, who still carries the memory of their glorious past. On the other hand, Microsoft is more like a 30-year-old man who is pursuing a 50-year-old woman, no disrespect, but I think Microsoft will still consider every single penny it pays on top of the 31 dollars per share it offered would be too much for the marriage.

News Group is by no means interested in Yahoo!, although it has acquired companies such as MySpace and so on, because it does not make any sense for Rupert Murdoch to step in the hot battle zone between Microsoft and Google at this point of time, when he does not have the expertise nor the experience after the purchasing Yahoo!.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced the big senior management shuffling to get ready to take over, and rumours is that Microsoft is ready to go again with another proposal of about 35 per share.

So, time for Micro-hoo? Or Ya-soft?