Thanks to drakeshe from piratebay.org, I am able to run the virtualization of Mac OS Leopoard 10.5.5 on VMWare workstation 6.5, and it should work fine in workstation 7.0 too! This stop me from scratching my head for few hours and found nothing even from the other discussion forums.

Here is the solution from drakeshe:

For those that get stuck on the gray screen, make sure you have at least VMWare Workstation 7, and then go into the menu and go VM->Settings…->Hardware Tab->Processors
then change ‘Virtualization engine’ ‘Preffered Mode’ to Binary Translation with ‘Disable Acceleration’ ticked, and ‘VMware Kernal Paravirtualization’ ticked also.

This way you won’t get stuck at the gray boot screen (Note that it will still take a while to boot)

Reference: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4798016/MAC_OS_X_Leopard_10.5.5_VMware_Image

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Here is the way on how to capture the screenshot from Ipod Touch / Iphone.

There are 2 buttons which will be used during this process:

1. The Home button and the bottom center of the device,
2. The power button and the top of the device.

Home & Power button

To capture a screenshot, simply hold down any button, and then press the another button simultaneously (It is just like holding down “Shift” key in the computer and press any letter for uppercase purpose in Windows). The screen will be flashing once indicate that the screenshot has been captured. The image captured can be found in the Iphone OS default Photos application: Photos > Saved Photos

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As an Ipod Touch 3rd generation user, I sadly verify that (25 Feb, 2010)

with Ipod Touch 3rd generation:

• Reset > Erase all content and settings does not help to reset the firmware version back to the factory default firmware. It might work for older model of Ipod, (pointed out from other blog) though. I didn’t try.
• there is no way to revert 3.1.3 (7E18) firmware back to 3.1.2 (7D11).
• You may jailbreak 3.1.3 or revert back to 3.1.2 if you have older version of Ipod Touch, but not with Ipod Touch 3g.

There is no choice as the jailbreak for 3.1.3 is still unavailable. Lets wait for someone even Genius to do that

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Google images search options

Google Images? No it can’t!

Google images is indeed a great website to find image. There are tons of images crawled by Google each day. You may search the image you want, via keywords, file type, image size, dimensions, etc. I am a web developer and it is useful to search the image template online as it is pretty hard to take care of programming and web design at the same time.

I am a big fan of Google, but there is something Google image is still lack of.  How do user search the image if he do not know how, or it is hard to describe the image in “words”?

TinEye

TinEye is probably the first website that lets users search images with an image. Let’s check out how did TinEye depicts themselves.

“TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.”

In TinEye, user will need to submit an existing image that they have, in order to search for the related image which is found from the TinEye database. There are 2 ways to provide TinEye regarding the image information: 1. Upload from your own computer, or 2. provide the URL link of the image.

You may see the samples of images submitted, and the image results found from tinEye from TinEye Cool Searches page.

Also, check out the demo below, which I used an image with IE & Firefox and the corresponding result returned to me.

By using TinEye, you may:

• identify the model of an electronic gadget which you do not know;
• find out who infringed the copyright of your art works;
• who are using your portrait for their own commercial purpose
• and a lot more…

I have heard rumuor that Google would come up the similar features. I am looking into how the services of TinEye can be improved over time, and of course how would Google images come up with the similar features in the future, for the sake of netizens.

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Back to few days ago, Liberty Reserve (LR) XML API is not working in my PHP script, when I try to retrieve the transaction history. If you do not know what is LR, it is one of the largest E-currency payment gateway.

I have been using CURL to retrieve the information for since few months ago. By using curl_error function, PHP output the following error:

SSL read: error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0), errno 104

It seem like is the SSL is causing the problem. Ignoring the CURL, I use file_get_contents to fetch the URL information without luck. However, the information can be retrieved if I paste the long XML encoded URL directly into the browser. By doing some research on Google on SSL with CURL, finally I fixed the problem with my own.

The solution is just to add another line of code curl_setopt if you have not done so:

// $ch - initialized CURL resource
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

Normally user agent is set if the site allow legit browser only. Not sure why LR is changing this all of sudden, but at least the fix is working for me.

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If you owned slow internet connection, it would be headache if you have large database to be imported in a remote server. Either you import the database through MySQL GUI or phpMyAdmin, the execution time is mostly will exceed the maximum execution time allowed, resulting in an script timeout problem. It would be same if you manually paste the queries and execute it in remote server. The server simply doesn’t have enough time to capture your bulk records of “INSERT”.

So is there another alternative?

Actually, it is. You can upload your sql file to your remote server, and then use the PHP script to parse the sql file and then run the query line by line.

Fortunately, there is an open source code which ease our job to write our own script. You may visit “BigDump“, and download its source code, bigdump.php, which is zipped as  archive sized at only 10KB zip archive.

Before using BigDump, you need to upload your sql file into your remote server. Be sure not to upload your file to somewhere people may access it, such as your /public_html folder. Normally, you would upload the file at the parent folder of /public_html, such as, /home/<username>/

Bigdump also allow import the records from CSV file. You may refer the following configuration source code, foundat the beginning of bigdump.php.

// Database configuration

$db_server   = 'localhost';
$db_name     = '';
$db_username = '';
$db_password = '';

// Other settings (optional)

$filename           = '';     // Specify the dump filename to suppress the file selection dialog
$csv_insert_table   = '';     // Destination table for CSV files
$csv_preempty_table = false;  // true: delete all entries from table specified in $csv_insert_table before processing
$ajax               = true;   // AJAX mode: import will be done without refreshing the website
$linespersession    = 3000;   // Lines to be executed per one import session
$delaypersession    = 0;      // You can specify a sleep time in milliseconds after each session
// Works only if JavaScript is activated. Use to reduce server overrun

// Allowed comment delimiters: lines starting with these strings will be dropped by BigDump

$comment[]='#';                       // Standard comment lines are dropped by default
$comment[]='-- ';
// $comment[]='---';                  // Uncomment this line if using proprietary dump created by outdated mysqldump
// $comment[]='CREATE DATABASE';      // Uncomment this line if your dump contains create database queries in order to ignore them
$comment[]='/*!';                  // Or add your own string to leave out other proprietary things
// Connection character set should be the same as the dump file character set (utf8, latin1, cp1251, koi8r etc.)
// See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-charsets.html for the full list

$db_connection_charset = '';

Visit BigDump Official Website!

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It has been a terrible week for me since the beginning 1st January.

The web hosting service I am using – HIVE, is having problem since 1st of January, when the website is frequently facing problem of database inaccessible. It took 2 days for HIVE to realise that the problem might be caused by part of the harddisk failure. They make an announcement saying that the server is estimated to be back online on the next day (4th January). However, the estimation is delayed for a few times, and the server is able to be back online until evening of 6th January. However, due to 2 hard disks of them are having problem at the same time, they can only retrieve the database backdated to 20th December. This means that more than 10 days of data is gone!

Furthermore, their support is unsatisfied as always. I was having hard time contacting them through e-mail, as when I replied them through e-mail, I could not get any replies. I have to go to their website to open ticket in order to reach them. I asked them for several times what is reason that I cannot reach them by replying their support mail, and the question was simply ignored. Furthermore, if you can get a reply from them in a few hours, that is considered as a fast response for them. Their technical support is always MIA.

My personal thought on HIVE is that, they have limited staffs and resources, possible a small organization with limited budget. This is the impression they imprinted on my mind, as a customer being 3 years with them.

Alternatively, I look for internet-webhosting again. They have a promotion with greater specification at lower price plan. As you know, internet-webhosting has great support team. Though not all the support personals have great knowledge, but they can response you in a short time. Mostly in less than 10-30 minutes. If you are in luck, you may reach their Level 3 technical assistant to solve the problem. I decided to subscribe to their Surfers Plan which allow me to host 15 domains at lower price and greater bandwidth (50GB/month). This is incomparable among the hosting packages  in Malaysia, base on my research.

Of course not all the things are perfect; internet-webhosting have to train their technical support to be more technical aware, or pass to a more capable person if they can’t solved the problem. I have bad experience as my IP was blocked from viewing my own website. They claimed that it is caused by the IP is connecting to FTP without port number. However, I never connect to FTP with the two IPs I am using last time.

I questioned them if the IPs are simply blocked. There is no reason for me to host my website on the server which simply block visitors. Unfortunately their level 2 technical support failed to give explanation for me.

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看来 PPSTREAM 也要被我列入流氓软件列表了。之前就觉得奇怪，为什么开ppstream 竟然比开迅雷还要吃带宽。如果内网有任何人看ppstream，其他人根本不用做东西了。

多亏 netlimiter , 我才发现原来ppstream是多么可恶的。。。

下载的速度 = 19.91 kB/s
上载的速度 = 72.50 kB/s

难快看ppstream不觉得很顺，但是整个上传的带宽却被它占用。如果只是刚开机的时候这么跑法还ok，但跑了20-30分钟还是这样，只好把ppstream关掉。

关掉就没事了吗？问题还没解决呢。还有一个 PPS 网络加速器，也在占用您的宽频，即使你关掉PPS！加速加速，听它放屁，把我的带宽变成龟速就有。都没看PPS了还要PPS加速来干什么？上传竟然搞到 22.37 kB/s！

PPStream 利用普通视窗用户不能测查流量的弱点，进行如此不道德的勾当，真是没天理。

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有一首你很喜欢的歌曲，偏偏这首歌并不是该原唱歌手的主打歌之一，不论有没有受其歌迷的注目，该歌曲的KTV 始终没被唱片公司考虑在内。这时候如何呢？

运气好的话，到网上搜一搜，可以找到歌曲的消音伴奏。但若没有好心人制作该伴奏，又应当如何？

这里提供一个简单容易上手制作消音伴奏的方法。开始前，请先准备以下的软件/插件：

1. 歌曲的mp3
2. 安装 Winamp - 音乐播放器的始祖
3. 安装 Winamp 插件 - DeFX 0.97

安装之后，打开 Winamp，从菜单中点选 Options > Preference 。相同地你也可用 Ctrl + P 。

在设定选项视窗中，点击 Plug-in >

在插件选项中，点选DeFX v0.97。

DeFX0.97

要消音，点选Karaoke的 【On】按钮，所播放的歌曲即刻就被消音了。你可以在 【level】、【filter】、【band】、【width】调整所适合的消音程度。

千千静听的使用者也可用类似上述的方法达到消音的效果。

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I have been using notepad++ for around 2 year and recently notepad++ with the latest version is having problem on my Windows 7 operating system. Whenever I start the program, and error message appears: “Load langs.xml failed”. With such problem, all the syntax colour are gone. If you wish to use show the syntax, you have to manually define the syntax on your own, on every documents that you opnened. It is so troublesome when you are a heavy developer!

There is some posts which ask user to change the langs.model.xml to replace the original file, langs.xml. The location of langs.xml is something similar to this:

C:/Program Files/Notepad++/

It works temporary for me, but after sometimes, the problem comes back again. Now I don’t even have the back up file for langs.xml, so I have to uninstall and install notepad++ back again.

Solution

I come across with another solution, which at least it works for a few days without any issues. Notice that the langs.xml file would become zero bytes in size after the problem. Now, before the problem happens, right click the langs.xml file and tick “Read Only”. With such option, the content of langs.xml will remain intact and therefore, notepad++ would have no problem in reading langs.xml for the correct colour to be used!

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