Building a VMWare View infrastructure (Correction: I mean a very bare minimal type of setup, before storage design, persona management and other success factors come in place) was easier than I thought. I actually spent around 10 hours building it from scratch. Starting with the ESXi hypervisor one of my colleagues had customized for me so it runs on a Dell Optiplex workstation chassis. Building the domain at home was embarrassing because I had to take down the LAN for a few times when configuring DHCP.

I ran into a frustrating problem when setting up the SQL Native Client 10.0 in System DSN,  it kept on rejecting the Local SQL user and password. After a thousand tries later, I finally took a minute to check the server settings in the Management Studio. Then found the section to allow both kind of authentication modes.

When it comes to desktop deployment, performing the provisioning process and understanding how linked-cloning works in the back-end really amazes me. VMWare really made the configuration and deployment process very straight forward. The planning guide and administration documentation can be found here.

Issue: When trying to open *.DOCX documents in Internet Explorer, the file becomes *.ZIP.

Not sure if Windows update fixed this issue yet. But here’s the manual registry fix.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MIME_HANDLING

Change the value of iexplore.exe (NOT explorer.exe) to 0.

Restart IE, or bounce the machine.

Visited Maui this August, it wasn’t quiet as what I expected compared to my experience in Honolulu last year.

I may go back there again in my 40′s. But while I’m young, I might just stick with places that has a little bit more night life than Maui. Click on “Read More” to see the whole album.

Back to work, back to life again. But I’m tuned for my trip to China in November!

Read more »

Open Config.inc.php under the PHPMyAdmin folder in editor, try the commented options under lines 11 and 13 to achieve different password protect features.

$i = 0;
/* Server: localhost [1] */
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['verbose'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['port'] = '';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['socket'] = '';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
// $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';
// A browser based prompt
// $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';
// A web page prompt rendered in HTML
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '123abc'; // Hack me!
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = true;
/* End of servers configuration */
$cfg['DefaultLang'] = 'en-utf-8';
$cfg['ServerDefault'] = 1;
$cfg['UploadDir'] = '';
$cfg['SaveDir'] = '';

I wasn’t able to log onto Windows Live Messenger on my laptop today. Even though my other laptop works fine. Two of my computers are on the same wireless subnet behind the same’o router. After clicking retry button for the 256th time, I almost made the announcement that I’m not using WLM ever again on my Facebook page.

I tried all the troubleshooting guide from Windows Live Support Blog with no avail. When I was about to reset my router, I noticed the time was incorrectly displayed on the router status part. I then updated the NTP Server and time zone, waula! I logged on.

The point is, make sure not only the time on your PC is correct. Also, check the time settings on your router too. Use a NTP service is better than setting the time manually.

Got a pair of computer glasses from a local optometrist. What’s so “computer” about these glasses? Well, they come with yellow tint to ease your eyes while looking at bright monitors. And the prescription that it came with will make whatever you see a slight bigger.

After a few hours of experiment, I approve this product to my fellow Computer Dudes. For less than $300 bucks, you can get one too!

http://www.gunnars.com