Open commend prompt at the current directory

In Windows XP, there is powertoy which lets you to open a command prompt window at the selected directory. However, there is none for Windows 7. After a bit of searching, it seems this is now an in built feature of Windows 7. You can simply open a command prompt at a selected directory by SHIFT+right click. This would bring up a more advanced pop-up menu which has the Open Command Window Here option.

Problems with Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was behaving very badly today. It crashes whenever I tries to use widgets linked to database. After a search with Google, it seems that this is caused by corrupted caches file used by DW

Dreamweaver creates a cache file called WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat inside your personal Dreamweaver configuration folder (the asterisks represent a series of letters and numbers that might differ from computer to computer). This occasionally gets corrupted causing instability, unpredictable error messages, and even crashes.

http://progresstechlabs.com/?p=666

Anyway, I followed the instructions as above, and now it back to behaves as it should be.

exim4

XAMPP is a great tool for quickly setup LAMP infrastructure for web application development.  However, getting the mail function to work under Linux can be a bit challenging.

After many hours of battle, I finally got it working.  The step I used on my Ubuntu setup are:

1. Running the dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config, and follow the onscreen instructions.
2. Editing the /etc/exim4/passwd.client file to setup the authentication details if your smtp server needs authentication (ref: http://www.lexspoon.org/linux/smtp-relay.html).
3. restarting exim4 by running /etc/init.d/exim4 restart
4. cross your figure and hope mail works!

Sound works!

I am only an average user of Linux, and hence I pick and use Ubuntu. There are few things I found troublesome in using Linux and they are:

• video - it is painful to use VESA driver as it makes every slow. It really hurts the first impression!
  
• sound - well, it works, but the sound control is a mess! For instance, there is a slider for main volume, but it doesn't work. You need to use the PCM slider to get things work.
• FLAC + CUE

I am happy to report that the last two has definitely be rectified in the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10. I now can use Audicious to listen to CUE+FLAC archive I have. It was a bit of a joke before, FLAC is a very popular format for audio, but the support for cue+flac is almost not existing. In fact, many has resorted to using foobar2k under WINE.

Also, sound control has finally got the polish it needed! There is a slider, and a slider works!

Just for these features alone, Ubuntu 9.10 is a worthy upgrade!

Migrate to Karmic Koala

Just finished all the upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic Koala, and all went without a problem. Though don't know if it is because the new version gets a better error reporting, I seem to get more "crashes" from application before. Other than that, things seems just work. I even took the risk of converting the file system from EXT3 to EXT4 and upgrade GRUB to GRUB2