Tag Archives: technology

Which smartphone should I get?

Before the the first ever iPhone was released on June 29, 2007, the only two clear choice was available in the market when it comes to PDAs. They were Palm Pilot(1992) and the second choice was RIM’s Blackberry(1999). Although there were Japanese companies such as NEC tried their best to invent smarter super phones, it was the RIM’s Blackberry that was able to penetrate the market specially through their cooperate users. The fist device that RIM manufactured was a two way pager known as RIM 850, which was targeted towards business and health care professionals. But in 2003 RIM revolutionized the smart phone market with their successful BlackBerry devices. Again, RIM largely focused on the cooperate market. With the partnership of Microsoft, RIM introduced the state of the art secure private Blackberry Enterprise Server, a software driven system that can be install on Windows server to push IT policies allowing companies to control the flow of information to their employees smartphone. In 2007, Apple Inc released the iPhone by modifying their iPod (2001) digital music player in to a smartphone. With the addition of third party software to the iOS operating system, Apple Inc unleashed a new wave of mobile phone market. Today in 2010 with the new players like Android OS by Google, it is getting more harder to choose which is the best phone for your needs. Continue reading Which smartphone should I get?

Thank you Google for all the free stuff

When I first started working with HTML, one problem I run in to was in order to create a great user experience I had to import scripts from several different third party service providers. For example, the site visitor data was kept by a one company and the contact form from another. The problem is that these companies that provide such services are asking too much in return from web developers. Not only they forcefully post pop-up ads and other useless materials, but also referral URLs to back to their sites are often open in the same window causing the visitor to exit the site itself. I managed to avoid some of these issues by loading PHP, SQL and Java databases to the server and facilitating packages such as WordPress. For items such as Contact forms now I use my own PHP script that save data on my own server. For visitor logging I created the ip log file code, but it is time consuming to go over millions of IP addresses to analyzing treads and traffic flow to this site. Continue reading Thank you Google for all the free stuff

Why I love Blackberry over others

A lot of my friends asked me why the hell I love my Berry while most people are going for the iPhone and Android based phones with much better hardware and software integration. The reason is simple; I love the RIM’s iconic physical keyboard where I can type at a faster rate than on a virtual keyboard. But, the fact my very first cell phone happen to be a Blackberry have played a major role in how I choose my cell phones now days. With the faster and better integration of social media and web browsing by other companies have pushed the RIM against a wall. However, there are features that Blackberries offer that no other smartphone can. Continue reading Why I love Blackberry over others

How to delete a Remote Desktop Connection entry

There is no option in the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) application to delete/remove successful previous RDP connection IP or hostnames from its “Computer” box. I believe this is an omission by the Microsoft development teams that has yet to be “fixed”. In fact, I had no clue how to do this up until recently I had to log in to my server from a public school computer to modify some files. Even after you log out and select delete profile from the RDC, it will still show up in the Connections drop down next time someone open it. This is a problem because if a user with wrong intent to attack your computer or server open the RDC, it will provide them with half of the solution to hack your system, the IP or domain name!

If you try Google search to find an answer to this issue, you will quickly come across Microsoft KB article here, which is more complicated than useful to most users. I have no idea why a great user friendly software company like Microsoft doesn’t explain well on their help sites on registry editing for intermediate to advance users. May be because they don’t want novice users to pick up that information from their site and damage the OS in the process of regedit. Would you rather have a video tutorial? Please watch the YouTube video here.

The following method is the easiest way to delete an entry from Remote Continue reading How to delete a Remote Desktop Connection entry

Server RAID rebuilt…

This is actually the continuation my previous update on the server. As I noted in that previous post setting up a RAID 5 with six 146 GB drives and two 72 GB drives was very stupid. But I never explained why this is a stupid idea on my first post. Today we will look at the best way to mix and match different types of harddrives on a RAID system for optimum performance and the highest storage output.

The the RAID 5 system works by taking all the hard drives with even different sizes and strip the data on all of them to provide one drive fail backup support for the system. In other words, on a RAID 5 system, you an tolerate one drive failure without loosing data. In this method, the RAID controller will take the lowest capacity of all the drives on the array and multiply that lowest capacity by the number for drives regardless of the capacities of the larger drives. For example, if we have two 72 GB drives and six 146 GB drives, the RAID controller will see all the eight drives as 72 GB drives. By doing the math for the RAID 5 system: (72 GB * 8)-72GB = 567 GB in total. Considering 146 GB *6 itself is 876 GB, this creates a a lot of wasted space. In addition to this reduced space, the 72 GB HDs are running at 15K RPM while the 146 GB HDs are running at 10 K causing the RAID to operate at the lowest RPM value of 10 K even with the six 15 K drives have the capability to Continue reading Server RAID rebuilt…