What a harrowing day. No, it wasn’t Mother Nature, an illness, or anything like that. Rather, it was this blog, LMAO. It started off with me updating a plug-in in the morning. Somehow or other it just screwed things up. I couldn’t log out or in, and a string of cryptic error messages appeared on my browser—I am not a programmer, so those messages made as much sense to me as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Well at least I could still access my blog by typing in its URL address. Anyways, off I went to have lunch with a friend. Ate like a piglet, as usual.

Came back in the afternoon, and decided to be a smarty pants. Edited the wp-config file, thinking I could make things right—hmm, that wasn’t so clever after all. Now I can’t even access my blog, let alone log in or out. Surprisingly I didn’t perspire, but I did have one big serious headache. UGH, how do I get my beloved blog back? Fortunately I went to the WordPress.org site and they walked me through creating a new wp-config.php file. When that was done I was invited to click on the Log In button. Uh oh. I was really trembling.

Success! Things are back to normal now—I hate it when a plug-in does that to me, grr.

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Oh how I wish I had WLM (Windows Live Messenger) while studying in the States in the early eighties. I remember how I used snail mail to correspond with my parents. A letter would take about ten days (count them) to reach me from Malaysia. If I had something urgent I would have to use my land line to call them (no cellphones in those days) or send a cable through Western Union. Ugh, ugh, and ugh. It would have been nice to have WLM then or even email, at least. I’ve been using WLM for almost eight years and there’s absolutely no way I would give up on it now. So what is it that makes me feel at home with WLM? Plenty.

• It’s free. This is a no-brainer. All you have to do is download and install it in your computer, and it’s yours. Period. And while we’re on this, Hotmail—the wonderful program for email, is free too and so much more user-friendly and fast now. And look what comes with the rest of the Live Essentials suite: Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Live Mesh, Writer, Bing Bar, Mail, Family Safety, Outlook Connector Pack, Messenger Companion, and Microsoft Silverlight. You can customize what you wish to install, or install all of them. The choice is yours!
• It’s easy to use. Invite your contacts in your Hotmail or any other list to add you to their WLM. Choose your font (or use the default) and type away. If you’re an emoticon lover you’re in for a treat. WLM has a pretty cool bunch of emotes and you can add third-party ones as well.
• Video capability. All you need is a webcam and away you go. Talk to your friends and loved ones and see them in a flash. I’m using the Logitech C510 webcam which is a great HD webcam with a built-in microphone. If only I had this in the eighties!
• With WLM you have the best of everything. You can choose either to type, to make a voice call, or make a video call. Needless to say these three options aren’t mutually independent. For instance you can still type stuff in even though you’re having a video conversation with a friend .
• WLM gives you time to think. In a normal phone call we normally talk. And talk. And talk. Sometimes we do it without collecting our thoughts first. The thing I like about instant messaging is that you can type at your own pace; you don’t have to give an instant reply, and as long as you don’t hit the Enter key your message remains with you (of course once you do hit the Enter key your message is on its way)
• WLM allows you to put up a display message. Not only that, you can set your status to any one of these—Available, Busy, or Away. There is one great feature too. WLM now allows you to appear offline to all your contacts, or you can choose specific contacts (very handy when you don’t want a certain someone to know you’re online)
• Busy? On the go? Fear not, because you can do the WLM thing on your cellphones and other devices. Just download the Messenger App for your device and it’s easy as pie to chat on WLM when you’re moving around. You can download the mobile app for Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, Nokia, and Blackberry.
• What if I encounter problems? Help is just a click away at the Messenger Help Center. There are also plenty of websites that offer help free of charge, like BigBlueBall, of which I’m a staff member. Generally each new version of WLM gets better and more reliable, so much so that you might not require any help at all *wink*
• What if I get tired of chatting? Game time then. Choose from a plethora of games to play with your friends when you’re online. You can even indulge in a video call at the same time you’re playing games. Great for really getting visual!
• Get all your social updates in one place.WLM can directly connect to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Multiply, and a host of other sites. This is so useful if you’re into the social networking thing.

So there you have it. Windows Live Messenger is a godsend to me because it really is a jack of all trades. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to include in the next version!

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We tend to give our ISPs a lot more flak than compliments. Malaysia’s Streamyx has received more than its fair share of brickbats but their services have improved greatly. I’ve been using their 2MBps package for some time now and recently they called me up and gave me an incentive to upgrade to the 4MBps package for just an additional $10 a month. To top it off the technician came to my apartment the very next day and I received a D-Link modem/router combo absolutely free of charge (I’m keeping it as a backup since I already have my existing D-Link modem and Linksys router) I was a little disappointed when the guy said the 4MBps speed would only be activated in a few days. However, an hour after she left my fingers grew twitchy and I went to the Speedtest site. I expected the download speed to be hovering around 2MBps but was pleasantly surprised to see the results above. Thank you very much, Streamyx!

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I’ve been running the latest and greatest version of WLM (Windows Live Messenger) for close to nine months now. Although there are some things I can get used to, one thing has always irked me about this version (15.4.3508.1109)—the inability to change your name. Meaning that WLM forces you to have a first name and a last name properly filled in. I’ve just discovered a way to circumnavigate it, and it’s legal. It’s a useful utility called Character Map, and it’s found in all Windows versions. According to Wikipedia Character Map “is a utility included with Microsoft Windows operating systems and is used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input (Alt code) is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard in lieu of typing them. The tool is usually useful for entering special characters.”

Here’s what I did. I didn’t want my last name to appear in WLM, I just wanted Philip. In the WLM main window just below your display picture, click on your Name and a drop down menu will appear. Choose Edit your Name. A browser window will open up. Leave it in the background for now. Bring up Character Map by going to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. Or you can just type charmap.exe in the Run dialog box. Scroll down almost all the way until you find the U+202A: Left-To-Right Embedding symbol. It’s one of the blank symbols (see picture below) Then select it and click on Copy. That will copy it to the Windows clipboard. Don’t worry if you don’t see it in the Characters to copy window, it’s there.

Once this is done, I go back to my browser window where the Edit Name is displayed. I delete my last name and then paste the U+202A into the same box (Ctrl+V will do it) Click on Save and I’m done. I log out and then back in to WLM and voila! Only my first name appears. Simple, huh?

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Through the kindness of Microsoft Malaysia (and special thanks to Miss Ng Koh Ping) my MVP T-shirt arrived yesterday in the mail. No longer will people ask me what the initials stand for (Most Valuable Professional) and as an added bonus it even has my name imprinted on the sleeve! It was a very nice gesture on Microsoft Malaysia’s part, so thank you very much, guys.

I’ve had my MVP for two years now and God willing, there will be another year added (anyone from Microsoft reading this?) It’s only fair to mention that I’m married to Windows Live Messenger LOL. Every morning when I wake up I need to boot the computer up to see her, muahaha!! I think WLM is the coolest IM program available out there on the web. Grab it here and start IM’ing. Besides WLM there are other cool programs such as Windows Movie Maker, Live Writer (I use this to write my blog posts), Photo Gallery, and lots more. They’re all free.

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It seems that a lot of users on WordPress self-hosted blogs have seen their stats vanish on their admin dashboard pages. There hasn’t been any official word from WP Support, but I did find a solution to the problem. Installing the Jetpack plug-in enabled my stats to work again on both my blogs. I actually like the Jetpack stats display better than the former WP stats—I see them as a vertical graph now, and it loads much quicker. Hovering your mouse over any of the date bars will cause a window to pop up, informing you how many readers visited your blog on that particular day.

Besides stats, Jetpack offers a host of other features:

Bear in mind that for Jetpack to work, you need to upgrade your self-hosted WP blog to the latest version (3.1 as of now) The plug-in will only work with WP versions 3.0.5 and higher. Hope this helps those who have problems viewing their stats. Have a nice day.

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I’ve been having audio headaches with my desktop since upgrading my motherboard and processor a year ago. In a nutshell, my PC would suddenly turn deathly quiet. Raising or lowering the volume control in the taskbar would create no sound (I’m using Windows 7). If I went to Windows Media Player a message would pop up saying that the audio service was not running. Other audio programs also stopped working. The only remedy was to go to Services.msc to restart the Windows Audio service, but as you can guess this was quickly becoming a real pain in the buttocks. At that time I was using an older version of WLM (Windows Live Messenger) Build 14.x.xxxx.xxxx.

One glorious day I found out by accident that WLM was causing this audio anomaly in my system. During one session when my computer was in its quiet mode, I happened to sign off from WLM and move the volume mixer. Eureka! I heard sound! However, my happiness was short-lived because as long as I was signed on to WLM, my computer would be repossessed by the audio glitch and resign itself to reticence whenever it felt like doing so. This was beginning to irritate me mucho!

When the new Windows Live Messenger appeared together with the Windows Live Essentials suite, I hoped my audio problems would be solved. Guess what—nope. The audio problem continued to plague my desktop system. Ugh, what did I do to deserve this? My Dell lappy was running the newest WLM build together with Windows 7, and it never had this predicament.

Time for a little brainstorming. The next suspect was my VIA audio drivers. OK, let me grab the latest ones from the VIA website. I did the uninstallation of the old drivers and installed the newest drivers. I was crossing all my fingers and toes. My system behaved itself for a while—and then it went mute again.

If you’re wondering why I’m making such a big fuss out of this, here’s the reason. When I’m away from my desktop and someone IMs me, the new instant message sound is the only way I’d know. Sometimes I would miss messages because of this annoying problem. When I signed off from WLM the problem would go away, only to return at whim whenever I signed back on.

Ugh! It couldn’t be the newest VIA drivers. But—I also had the VIA HD Audio Deck running on Windows startup (I use this applet mainly to adjust the equalizer for my speakers) Hmmm, could this guy be the culprit? Only one way to find out. I disabled the said applet from starting up using Mike Lin’s excellent Startup CPL program. Guess what—it worked!!

Now I’m not faulting VIA’s HD Audio Deck, neither am I blaming WLM. However, there was obviously some audio issues when both these programs were on at the same time. I can live without the equalizer, but I can’t live without WLM—muahaha!!

Epilogue: I did search the web when I was tearing my hair out but couldn’t find any solutions online. Hope this will help anyone having similar issues.

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I was excitedly waiting for news about whether I would be awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award exactly one year ago (it’s all here) This year I wasn’t as optimistic, seeing that I had been going through a lot of stuff and before I knew it, my MVP award was up for renewal at the end of December 2010. One thing about the big M—they are very punctual when it comes to informing recipients about this.

So I came home from work last night, turned on the lappy as I’ve always done, and went to brush my teeth. I went into my room after that and checked my emails and oopsie, there was an email from Microsoft HQ—and the subject said it all: “Congratulations, 2011 Microsoft MVP!” Whoa, I was really taken by surprise. Anyway I am speechless—thanks again, Microsoft!

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My, it seems that I have a contest going with my good friend Crystal, seeing that we’re both geeks in the computing department. I’ve already blogged about both of us having the same Logitech C510 HD webcams, and recently I learnt that she had bought a Seagate 500GB external hard drive to backup her data. Dunno why, but something was already poking me and asking, “How come you don’t have one?” Resistance is futile (as I’ve always maintained) but such is my geeky nature that I always need to justify myself before I part with my hard-earned dollars.

To cut a long story short, I’ve been running my Windows 7 desktop for over a year, and have never had any trouble with the OS. It purrs really smoothly on my system with an Intel dual core processor and 3GB of RAM. It was only recently when Crystal told me about her latest Seagate purchase that I realized I had never backed up my data before! Umm, minor course correction there—of course I’ve occasionally stored some important files on a flash drive, that sort of thing. However, (and this is the scary part) I’d never ever backed up my whole C: drive. What if my OS goes belly-up tomorrow? It’s not a case of paranoia but it will and can happen. It happened to my previous Windows Vista OS. OKOKOKOK, that seals the deal. I had to get an external hard drive (so don’t say I’m a copycat, Crystal LOL)

The next question—what external HD should I get? I dislike Seagates; I’ve had problems with their hard drives in the past. Strike one. I’ve had pleasant experiences with Western Digital hard drives, in fact I have a WD 500GB internal HD churning away in my desktop. I finally settled on a WD 500GB Passport Essential external hard drive for $70. They’re available in a variety of colors and I chose red (can you guess why, my friend?) As the name implies, this baby is passport-sized and only 0.6 inches thick. It’s now found a place on top of my desktop and connected permanently to it.

Moreover I like the backup program that comes with the Passport; it’s WD Smartware and it’s very easy and intuitive to use. All I have to do is connect it to my desktop and it automatically handles the mundane backup chores. Every time you create a new file or modify one, Smartware automatically backs it up to the Passport, seamlessly. If you disconnect and connect the drive later it will resume from where it left off. Piece of cake.

Needless to say Smartware comes with a whole host of features, which I won’t elaborate on here. Oopsie, I feel I should state that it does not backup Windows system files and folders, only your data. If you intend to backup your whole hard drive you’d have to do a disk image and I’m not going to touch on that now (perhaps I’ll image my C: drive when I’m in the mood). In case of a system meltdown you’d still need to reinstall the OS and applicable programs. However, after that you just need to do a restore of your data and things should be fine. So there!

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I have to admit that I’ve been a Logitech fan for quite some time. I love their keyboards and mice, they’re stylish and have never let me down. When I hopped on the Windows Live Messenger bandwagon around four or five years ago, my first webcam was the Logitech Quick Cam Chat. It was cheap and made of plastic, but it did get the job done (the video quality was nothing to shout about though). When I moved on to Windows 7 the Quick Cam Chat unfortunately (or fortunately?) didn’t have drivers for it, so I decided to get a newer webcam, the Logitech C120. This was another basic cam with a 1.3 megapixel lens and no built-in microphone. The picture quality was slightly better than my old Quick Cam Chat and for a while, I was happy (read my review here on Amazon’s website. You can still get the C120 for around $25 new)

Fast forward to the present and…ahem, us geeks—we’re always trying to justify new purchases, aren’t we? I decided to up the ante one more time since I’d installed the latest Windows Live Messenger which enables users to have full-screen video chats using a high definition webcam (just remember that whoever you’re chatting with also has to have a HD webcam hooked up to their computer) More information is available here.

Moreover my good friend Crystal was also thinking of getting the same webcam so I said to myself, oh why not, let’s go for it. And then a week ago I discovered to my chagrin that the C510 still wasn’t available here! The computer guys at the Logitech store here didn’t have a clue when it would arrive so that left me disappointed, to say the least. However, a few days ago I happened to pass by the store so I went in and what do you know, it had just arrived! I was very tempted to grab the flagship C910 HD webcam with Carl Zeiss lens but at around $99 it wasn’t exactly cheap. The C510 was a step down and only cost me $41 so I bought one on the spot. It comes with a 2-year warranty so no worries there. The C510 retails for $54.82 on Amazon’s website.

Here are the specs of the C510:

• HD video calling (1280 x 720 pixels) with recommended systems
• Video capture: Up to 1280 x 720 pixels
• Logitech More HD technology
• Photos: Up to 8 megapixels (software enhanced)
• Built-in mic with Logitech RightSound™ technology
• Hi-Speed USB 2.0 certified (recommended)
• Universal clip fits laptops, LCD or CRT monitors

And here’s the Logitech webcam software included in the package:

• Logitech Vid™ HD
• Logitech RightLight™ 2 technology
• Video and photo capture
• Magix™ photo and video editing software
• 1-click Facebook™ and YouTube®  HD upload (registration required)
• Logitech Video Effects™: fun filters, avatars, face accessories, video masks and mask maker*
• Face-recognition auto-login (60-day trial)

The C510 comes with a generous 5-feet cable, user documentation, and a cute carrying case. Setup and installation is a breeze and I had it running in a matter of minutes. The Logitech Vid HD program is a very handy chat program and it works very well (good to have in case WLM decides to choke) Sound and picture quality is vastly superior to my old C120, even when viewing at full-screen. You can also have fun and go over the top with the video effects (yes, you, Crystal…heh heh) Taking 8 megapixel pictures with the C510 also resulted in sharp pictures. You can even record and post videos directly to Facebook and YouTube. I liked the Fast Access Facial Recognition program and so I bought a license ($24.99)

So there you have it. I’m a happy camper, at least for now. You can view the full range of Logitech HD webcams on their website. It goes without saying that their webcams work with any of the instant messaging programs. Now excuse me while I go play with my latest acquisition.

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