Windows XP Folder Icons Gone BLACK!!!

Prologue: Yes! I was once again on my annual holiday, hence the whole Nov has a result of '0'! So here's me trying to to squeeze in a few more posts before the 2009 year ends! : O

So it was last day before I left work for holiday, not sure what I did that caused it (promised I didn't install any viruses and I never go on dodgy websites!!!). In fact I think it was after remote desktop-ing to my own computer from one of my work mate's computer. When I went back to my computer and logged in, suddenly all the 'folder' icons when I open up Windows Explorer has turned BLACK!!! Seriously!!! The folder icon went BLACK....no cream yellow coloured folder at all..just purely BLACK with the shape of a folder! @.@ I seriously thought I got a virus attack or something. Ran a virus scan nothing showed up and computer is running at the same speed as before and no creepy stuffs popping out!

So it was after I was back from holiday....I got too 'annoyed' by the black looking folders. Not only is it ugly but 'freaky' looking (imagining opening up your system root folder and all you see are a list of BLACK folders!!!)

I did a Google search and SUPER THANKS to this post I was able to fix the problem and all the normal 'creamy yellow' looking folder icons came back alive! : D What happened (I believe) was that Windows actually cache your Windows icons. So somehow after I log back into my machine the cache file must've gone corrupted / munted such that all my folder icons went 'burnt'! The resolution is just to delete the 'IconCache.db' from your "Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data" directory and your icons will be revived! : D

How to get directory size in Unix shell?

It turns out that finding the size of a directory via shell / command line on a Unix based machine is not 'that' straight forward. Thanks to Dr. Google again...I was able to find the solution (by some kind person who posted the solution on their blog!).

 du -sh dir_name

The '-s' tells du to only return entries only from the specified directory
The '-h' makes du return something human readable

Very useful indeed! : D

Ref: http://stevejamesson.com/2008/06/18/unix-get-full-size-of-directory-folder

PC Magazine: Tips for Better Computing

Have been reading the June 2008 issue of PC Magazine and it featured an article on "501 Tips for Better Computing". Just wanted to share and bookmark this article as it is available online too:

http://go.pcmag.com/tipsuperguide

Interestingly the number of tips on the page have now grown to 529 (at 1st Sept 2008) : P

iGoogle - A centralised stop off point

I have been wanting to blog about iGoogle for 'quite' a while now (back a few months time when there were some news about the revived Google Homepage)!

So essentially iGoogle is your own customised Google Homepage (formerly called 'Google Personalised Homepage' hahaha).

Personally I found that it is 'similar' to netvibes, where I can subscribe to various sources of news by adding a 'Gadget' to my page (I have actually added them on another tab called 'News').

But what's more is that I can add 'other' gadgets...e.g. Horoscope, Garfield stripes, weather update.....as well as gadgets that sync with my other Google software, e.g. Google calendar and gmail. This is what my Home tab looks like (enjoy!):

My iGoogle Home page

Another thing I found that is very neat is that Google has allowed its users to pick a theme for their iGoogle page. For the theme that I've picked I noticed that it changes according to your local weather!!!!! @.@ hehee See the following:

Sunny day:

Rainy day:

Now I thought this was pretty neat of Google to add this in! It really does give their user a nice surprise! : )

So all-in-all, iGoogle have managed to create one centralised place for me where I can just stop off to check:

• If I have new emails
  
• Upcoming appointments
• To look at news around the world
• Or just to chill out for a minute or two (by looking at 'jokes of the day' or 'Garfield comic stripes' and other gadgets)! : P

I still don't use it constantly or perhaps as frequently as Google would expect for their average user. May be I'll use it more frequently now that I have add it onto my Firefox bookmark toolbars! : P Definitely worth a try!

MSN Message Censorship

I happened to read upon an article from Slashdot. I had no idea that MSN censors the messages (going down the memory hole) that we sent and blocks it if it contains certain words e.g.

• .info
• profile.php? (including ‘?’)
• download.php? (including ‘?’)
• gallery.php
• pics.php
• ListAllTopics.php
• .scr (source)

Microsoft said that the reason behind this is "because they may be URLs to exploit Windows or Microsoft Windows Live Messenger security holes." (-.-" So it's only due to Windows bugs!)

So the next time you see the text "Could not send; a connection error occurred", it could quite possibly mean your message has been censored and blocked! (Previously, it didn't alert the user at all and just block the message without notification! -.-" Bad usability!)

Reference article: MSN Censorship

Today's trend in selling software product

I read the following article today which is about how the sales reps try to sell a software product to potential customers. It talks about today's trend in the Software Industry in terms of how to sell a software and how the big $ are earned!!! Gave me quite a bit of information on how today's software industry trades.

(In particular it belongs to part of a series of articles that talk about how Oracle became so prominent!!!)

The pitch: Inside the pressure cooker

Enjoy! :P

ALZip: One Reason Why it is Better

Compression utility, a software that allow you to bundle multiple files together and compress the resultant file into a smaller size than the combined size of the original files. Great for transferring files between devices and for sending them across networks.

So I started off with using one of the original file archiver, Winzip. Then I opted for WinRar due to its light weight and have been using it ever since....until yesterday!

You see I was having this problem of opening an archive that hold files with Chinese characters as its file names. Windows nor the compression program itself can recognise the file name and hence, there was no way I could extract the needed files.

But then comes, AlZip, which saved the archive!!!! : ) ALZip allows you to rename the files inside the archive. So I was able to rename the badly named files and I was able to extract the files out afterwards! Although it takes up more space than WinRar, but it has a more modern look to the application including some 'cute' looking icons.

A screen shot of ALZip (taken from ALZIp website, in reality actually no 'picture' of the thing in the bottom right corner at all)

So if you are experiencing similar problems as me, I would recommend you to try to use ALZip to resolve your problems (and I have actually uninstalled WinRar off my computer now!) Enjoy!!! : P