Virtualbox 3.1.2

VirtualBox is great utility, however, it isn't perfect. One of the annoying problems is its networking. If you are using desktop, it isn't much a problem. However, if you are using laptop, VirtualBox's NAT implementation seems to fail if you switch between networking connectors, which is very common in laptop. For instance, I may move from my WiFi connection to cable connection. This would result lost connection to my Guest System.

With the new version, I can at least regain the connection by change the connection from NAT -> Bridge and back to NAT again as I can dynamically change my connectiont type in the new version. It isn't perfect, but it gets the job done.

I have tried various virtualization solution, and VirtualBox is still my favorite due to its wide range of supported formats, and its speed. While we are talking about speed, the latest version finally fixed the Hardware Virtualization support on my VIA chipset motherboard. Previously, it would caused BSOD, but now, it works perfectly! Hurray!

Chrome

Since Chrome is now available on Linux, I decided to give a trial. I have tried the Window version before, but I don't like it such to its "lack" of security features. With Firefox, you can set it up to delete privacy information on exit. However, there isn't anything remotely close in Chrome. It is minimal and far too minimal for my taste.

For my date to date browser, I will still do it on Firefox as there is nothing come close to its plug-in ecosystem. However, Chrome has its places for certain "application" where tabs needed to open and close constantly. With Firefox, activities of such would gradually degrade its performance due to memory issues. If Chrome can manage memory as it advertise, it should handle this type of situation much better with its process base tabs. Well, time will tell.

AutoMKV

I do a bit video conversion every now and then, and the tool I am using for the job is AutoMKV which is almost idiot proof. However, I always have trouble to run it under Windows Vista/7. Today, I come across a post in a forum said that it may be due to missing .NET Framework 1.1 installed. I will give it another try later and see if this fix my problem.

Handling Button Events inside aspx that uses master page

Here is an example of how to add an event handler to a button on a page that uses Master page.

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!