This is the patent that made Microsoft lost half a billion dollar to an Aussie bloke. A very interesting patent, it shows a very similar mechanism of software registration system as the one that Microsoft has in place for many of its software products.

System For Software Registration Patent. [Link]

RWendi

Today is our last day in Osaka, tomorrow we will be leaving Osaka for Kyoto. In the morning we went to Himeji city to see the Himeji Castle. It is one of the most famous and most visited castle in Japan. It was built in year 1333, and had been used by many Japanese rulers, such as the Tokugawa shogun family. The castle has never been destroyed by warfare, but it has gone through a few refurbishment works, which is why the Himeji castle has kept its form intact for more than 400 years.

We went to Himeji by train from Osaka, and it took us around 1 hour to arrive at Himeji. The Himeji Castle is located 800m from the train station, which takes us 10/15 minutes to get there by walk. When we got there we were greeted by a marching band and a couple of well dressed Japanese women. The Himeji Castle is huge and beautiful. It is indeed a very good place to take photo shoots.

The castle is very big and filled with many high stairs. It can be quite an exercise for unfit people. My backpack was moderately heavy, and it feels like doing lunges exercise when climbing those stairs. At night I felt sore on my thighs, and I had to rub some oil to ease the soreness. I highly recommend you to have a light backpack when you go there.

The castle is planted with plenty of Sakura trees, which had not blossomed yet when I was there. Without the blossomed Sakura, the castle is already magnificent, I wander how it looks like during spring. Sakura trees start to blossom early spring in Japan which is mid April, really made me wished I was there one month late.

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After Himeji Castle, we took the train and went to Kobe. Kobe is famous for its Kobe beef steak, which is the reason why we went there. We decided to have Kobe beef Tepanyaki instead of a western style steak. We tried the highest grade of Kobe beef (grade A-5) and a cheaper mid-level grade (grade A-3). I have to say it was THE BEST beef I have ever tasted in my life. I can feel the juice coming out of the beef in each bite. This really makes Wagyu beef feels like nothing. After the meal we walked around to explore the city before heading back to Osaka to spend our last night shopping in Osaka’s Dotonbori district.

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RWendi

Many people say that building your own computer will give you the best bang of your buck. Is that really true? In this blog post I will be comparing a couple of intel based computer builds in comparison with Dell Australia’s current lineup. All the computer parts that I choose are based on my personal preferences and I will be using IJK online as a store choice. Please note that I’m not in any way affiliated with IJK or Dell.

Core i7 PC

Quad Core PC

Dual Core PC

As you can see that building your computer is indeed cheaper, but the price difference is not really that much. The extra price that you pay for the Dell machine is for better warranty policy and customer service. With Dell offering free upgrades every week, I think that the price difference has become negligible. For example, sometimes you can get a free upgrade to 23” LCD monitor. The price difference between a 21.5” monitor and a 23” monitor is about $125, which is the difference between the Dell Studio XPS with the Core i7 build.

One problem with building a system is that, there is a chance of incompatibilities between components. Does this memory module work for this motherboard? Does this PSU has enough power for the whole system? When you are getting a premade system you do not have to worry with those kind of questions. Getting a premade system means that it is guaranteed to work. You also get the convenience of plugging a couple of cables and your system is ready to use. No hassle of assembling your system and no skin cuts too.

Building your own system has its benefit too. You can mix and match any components and choose components of best quality. Building your own system means you will get better quality components. I’m not saying that Dell has a subpar quality, but most likely that the components you get from dell would be generic value oriented components (probably not the case for XPS pcs). For example, in Dell machine, You will not get RAMs with heat spreader, You will not get high speed HDDs (not on default configuration), and most likely you will not get good efficient PSU. With better hardware you can push your system further by overclocking it, and that is a big plus for building your PC. You can still overclock a Dell (on certain models), but doing that will probably void your warranty.

I think when it comes to choosing whether to get a premade system or build your own, you should not really be worry about cost, as both option will virtually cost the same. It all comes down to your personal preference. The convenience of a premade system or the better quality of a ”build your own” system.

RWendi

So I stumble upon this nerd test website from someone's blog. Decided to take it if I would be clasify as a nerd based on the test. Personally, although I love programming and computer stuffs, I wouldn't classify my self as a nerd. So How well did I do? Here you go

Based on the test, Im a Cool Light-Weight Nerd. Awesome!!

RWendi

I have an old laptop which had been running very slow, especially on startup. I could spend a good one to two minutes waiting from the login page until it becomes usable. It's that slow. Spec wise: Intel Pentium M 1.73 Ghz, 2Gb Ram, 5400 Rpm Hard disk drive. It's not the best spec but when I first got it, performance felt pretty good. Starting up the computer took roughly 45 seconds in total and everything runs smooth. The Good old time.

In general Windows XP startup time should take about 40 seconds on average. It should normaly take 30 seconds to get to the login page, and 10 seconds from the login page to ready state. I firmly believe there is not much you can do to improve load time to get to the login page, and it should remain virtually constant all the time. Now for login page to ready state load time is a different story. The more software and services you have installed in your PC, the more likely you'll add more time to the login page loading time. Especially software that is in your startup folder and software that has a monitor icon in the notification area, as those software will always get run on startup. Anyway, last night I finally got fed up and decided to do some investigation to find out why it takes ages for windows to start up. I know I could just re-format and do a clean windows install, but that would take too much time (considering that I have to re-install all of my programs too).

First of all I remove all the programs I found in the startup folder (only found witty there). Restarted my laptop, it’s a bit better but still takes a long time for my windows to start up. Then I need to find out which software/service that gets run on startup that bogs down my startup time. Thus on startup I quickly bring up the task manager to see which process is taking the most CPU load. I found the culprit, which is MsMpEng.exe taking up 30%-80% of the CPU and it lasted most of the startup time. So I googled it, and it turns out that the process belongs to Windows Defender. I disabled it, restarted my laptop and BAM. My login page start up time dramatically decreased to about 15-20 seconds. Fearing that this might be a one time thing, I restarted my laptop for a few more times and I still got the same result. Moreover, it feels like that my laptop runs a bit faster now.

I’m not sure why it takes a long time for Windows Defender to load up, but I assume that in addition to initialization logic, its probably doing some preliminary security scan. I wander if other security software is doing the same thing, although my AVG doesn’t seem to take that many resources on start up. Anyway, if you have Windows Defender installed and having Windows startup performance issue, I highly recommend you to disable it and opted for a better and more efficient security product.

RWendi

As per title says, Merry Christmas 2008!! I know its 3 days late, but hey its better late than nothing. I had been kinda busy the last few days. I went to a Christmas Dinner party on Christmas eve, went to a Christmas BBQ party at my friend's home on Christmas day, and lastly went on shopping frenzy on boxing day.

I had 3 items that I wanted to buy for Christmas, which are MSI Wind nettop, Oakley sunglasses, and Guitar Heroes: World Tour Complete Band Set. Out of the three the one that I wanted to buy so badly was the MSI Wind nettop. Appart from the standard nettop features, it has: 10 inch screen, Wireless N, 2 Gb of rams, and 6 cell batteries. Moreover, it was also on sale for $585. It is seriously a very good bargain for a nettop at the time, because with other nettops of the same specs, the price could go far to $800.

I have a tendency to be more conservative when it comes to spending money on non-necessaty tertiary item. So I give it some thinking before buying the MSI Wind. The main purpose that I would use a nettop is for superior mobility of browsing the internet and extra storage. Since the wind that i think of getting comes with 120 Gb harddrive, thus as an extra storage it wouldn't be a problem. However, as a superior mobility internet browser, that could be a problem. The problem is that the nettop doesn't come with built in 3G connectivity. This means you can't just browse internet anywhere and whenever you want, you need to find a wifi hotspot to browse the internet. I know you could use one of those 3G USB dongle, but its not nice to detach and re-attach the dongle everytime you need to connect to the internet. Some other things that it lacks of are CD drive and the latest generation of Intel Atom CPU. Bugger!!

To be honest one day I would still get a nettop, cause its a nice little gadget that makes sense to have. At the moment I think, I would rather wait for the next generation of nettop.

RWendi

Last week my site was attacked by spammer. On my How to create code snippet entry, some idiot decides to spam it. It had 147 of spam comments. Its funny I must say why someone/some bot decides to spam my site. Its not like my site is getting a huge number ammount of visitors. Well anyway, I thought the spams were a temporary thing, so I decided to just remove the comment XML file and not doing anything to prevent it from happening again. Boy I was wrong, it happened again!! This time is not as much (only 15 spam comments), but it shows how the spammer is still keen on spamming my site.

Having to know nothing about how to prevent spammer, I decided to prevent this in simplistic way, which is to change the comment settings to require approval. This means that the spammer's comment will only visible to me, unless if I approve his comments. I was thinking that maybe by doing so the spammer would just give up, since he's not able to see the result of his spams. I was wrong again!! The idiot still spamming me with useless comments filled in with links to mallicious sites.

I decided to have a look on dasBlog configuration settings, I thought that spammer must be a common problems to blog sites, and I assume that dasBlog should have implemented something to help fight spammer. Luckily, dasBlog does have a spammer settings. It has a couple of options, but one settings that caught my eye was "Enable refferal blacklist". I had it enable, and entered the spammer IP address to the list. I thought that would do the trick, but it didn't work.

Not able to have the blacklist working, I opted to another settings which is to enable Akismet. Akismet is a spam blocking service that's free for personal use. Akismet requires an API key which you'll get when you register an account with WordPress. So I created a WordPress account and use the API key for my blog site, and it works!! In dasBlog you get an option to automaticaly remove the spam or wait for my authorization before removing it. I just set it to automatic, and I've never seen that spammer spams my site anymore, awesome! If you had problem with spammer in your blogsite, I highly recommend the Akismet service. It works like a charm.

RWendi

It's been a very busy couple of weeks for me, and I literally had to stop doing what I usually do in my leisure time(including blogging). First up my Grand Mother died on the 6th of November 2008, I had to fly back to indonesia to attend her funeral. Her funeral was held in Bangka Island on Sunday 9th of November 2008. Bangka island is an insland on south end of Sumatra island, its a place where most of my family are from, including my parents. I spent about a week in Indonesia, because After her funeral, there were some post-funeral ceremonies I need to attend, such as: the 3 days after burial ceremony (or in chinesse term: Sam Cao), and the 7 days after death ceremony (this is the catholic one).

I flew back to Sydney on the 16th and arived on the 17th of November. Didn't spend that day to rest, because I had to accompany my girlfriend and her brother to walk around the circular quay area. Her brother had just been granted an Australian permanent resident visa, and had to enter Australia to obtain it. He stayed in Sydney for like 2 weeks and in that 2 weeks I spend most of my leisure time to show him sydney. We went to Sydney opera house, Bondi beach, The Gap @ Watson Bay, and Darling Harbour. On his last night, we had dinner @ Sydney Tower restaurant to celebrate my girlfriend's birthday. I have to say the restaurant is a bit overrated. It's expensive, the food was sub-par, and service was almost none to existent. The only good thing about the restaurant is the view, but it doesn't worth the $65 dollars fee though.

That's what I've been doing in the last couple of weeks. Looking forward to get back on my daily things to do.

RWendi

Got sick with the old theme, decided to change it. Im still using one of the default themes, the business theme in particular. Im in the process of creating my own dasBlog theme to get that more personalised feel, although Im not sure when I will have the time to do it. Until that happens, I think I can live with using the default themes. They don't look too bad anyway.

Im thinking of adding a wikipedia to this site for storing informations that I came across in the web. I found that I lost information ALOT. You browse the web, found something interesting and then completely forget about it in the next few days. I think its important if you store that information somewhere. That is where I think a wikipedia would be very usefull. ScrewturnWiki is the candidate for the wiki. It's free, opensource and preety damn solid wiki system. Going to install it next week, after im finished tweaking the css theme.

RWendi

"Every computing problem can be solved by adding another layer of interaction" - Scott Hanselman.

I just had to post this... Such an awesome quote... :)

Had this for lunch... God, I love this stuff... :)

After some tinkerings to the css files and the theme template files, I am finally satisfied with the look and feel of the website. Well, at least for now. Took me a while to grasp how this blog application hangs together, which made me realise how rusty is my web development skill. Maybe I should try to keep up more with the web development world, by developing small web-apps just for fun. I do like to read articles and stuffs, but never really attempted to try to code them. Anyway, can only hope that I would have the time for that. :)

Okay, just realised that there's a major issue with the template layout on the comment page. Despite of that, I think commenting should still be working fine. Going to have a look at it when I have the time.

Finally, I am able to get this website up and running again, after losing it to one of those company who buy and sell website. I am still in the progress of configuring and setting up the dasBlog, which is a pretty amazing blog software by the way. It is easy to deploy, and has so many amazing features in it. Highly recommended, you can get it here.