Maxwell Hill (Bukit Larut) - Nov 2010

Maxwell Hill (it's called Bukit Larut now) as I preferred to call it, is a hill resort situated in Taiping, in the state of Perak, Malaysia. It is at 1250 metre above sea level.

I was there with some old friends for a 3 days 2 night stay. It rained in the afternoon and hence it gets quite misty. This is a good place to get away from the city for a quiet and close to nature break. The last time I was there was many many years ago. Without TV, shops, and commercial facilities, I enjoy the stay much much better than I had with other travelling trips of which the places are usually too commercialized.

There were talks about cable car project to be built in this hill. I hope it won't happen so as to preserve it's natural and tranquility ambience.

Tibet - May 2010

Madness of investors

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

Quoted from:

Berkshire Hathaway 2005 Chairman's Letter

Warren E. Buffett

Chairman of the Board

Disk defragmentation tool

Last weekend I was preparing to defragment my computer's harddisk. I first tried the tool that comes with Windows Vista, and found that it does not show the animated progress status anymore. That means I can't see how much the harddisk is fragmented and what is the analysis anymore and I don't feel comfortable with that.

I then searched for a 3rd party tool that would serve my need and found the Auslogics Disk Defrag. Downloaded and installed it. Tried it and it works fine! And I actually find that it works quite fast.

So if you are looking for a defragmentation tool, you may want to take a look at this one at:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

It is one of the free tool provided by Auslogics. They also have other utility programs such as for finding duplicate files on your system, clean up the registry, and for recovery. Some are available for free and some needs to be purchase.

A relax and peaceful Sunday afternoon

A cup of Chinese tea, and a piece of crispy sesame seed/red bean paste pastry. Made my afternoon! Somehow I just enjoy this nothing to do, and a very peaceful afternoon, and the pastry is much much better than I have expected.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four--- calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg…

Abraham Lincoln

Error 8100030d , can't sign in to Windows Live Messenger

Today I encountered problem in signing on to Windows Live Messenger, clicking for details shows me the error is 8100030d.

I googled for solution and found this:
http://messenger-support.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8B3F39C76A8B853F!13937.entry

It suggested to determine if version of Messenger is latest, or try to clear cache files for Messenger. Since I have the current verion of Messenger, so I follow the following steps to clear the cache files:

First of all, you need to enable hidden files and folder, else you can't see the cache files.

I am current using Windows Vista, so here's what I did:
1) Exit from Windows Live Messenger
2) Go to C:\Users\App Data\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts
3) select all files in this folder and delete them.
4) Open Windows Live Messenger and sign in again

The above solved my problem. Hope it helps others who finds this entry here.

The Great Wall - Mutianyu

Petaling Street & surrounding (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

How to create Windows Vista recovery disk

Recently I had some problem with my Windows Vista system and needed to restore system to rectify it. While searching the internet for solutions I come to realize there are some who has their system comes pre-installed Windows Vista and not provided with a recovery media.
Here's the steps how you could create a Windows Vista recovery media, so that when you have problem booting up your system from hard disk, you could use the media to boot up and select the available recovery options.

1) Download the iso image of the Recovery Disk from the following site :

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

The above link downloads a .torrent file to start the torrent download process. You would need to make use of some kind of BitTorrent client. I used uTorrent.

2) After the download you need to burn this image to a CD/DVD media, so that you could use it later to boot up your system. There are different program for doing this, I have tried with ImgBurn.

It is available for download here:http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

3) Screens for using ImgBurn to burn image to media can be referenced here: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/G/Burning+ISO+Images+with+ImgBurn

When you boot up from the recovery disk, after the first few screens, you will be presented with the recovery options as below:

Faststone Image Viewer

This is a very versatile small program, which I find very handy and provided many features to edit and enhance image files.

You can also just download the portable version and take the program with you in a pen drive, without installing in the computer you need to use for editing your images.



Under the 'Edit' pull down menu you can find many options to choose for enhacing the images. Although the available options are not as extensive as some other tools but I find that they are quite sufficient for normal use.



There is a 'draw board' feature, which will take you to a screen where many drawing options you can add such as callouts, lines, ellipse, rectangle or even to add watermark image.



This is a freeware program where you can download it from:
http://www.faststone.org/index.htm

Web based Instant Messaging

Rcently tried the following two web based instant messaging:
www.meebo.com
www.ebuddy.com

One of the advantage of using web based tool is that you do away with installing each of the IM clients on your computer, and you can just log on to your IM account anywhere you have access to a computer with Internet access.

You can log on to your IM account sauch as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Luve Messenger, Google Talk, etc by visiting the web site.

And if you register at either site for an account (i.e. Meebo or eBuddy account), you can then make use of the account to log on to multiple of your instant messaging accounts at the same time. So you can have your IM buddies all list in one web based page.

You could chat, conference, video chat etc etc... with your buddies as you like.

Image editing software - GIMP & paint.NET

I have been looking for and tried out image editing software for my own usage and have spent some time on GIMP 2 & paint.NET as I wanted to learn the 'layer' features.

I have tried on both for a short while, and will definately need to spend more time to learn the power of both as they provided many useful features and effects for editing and enhancing the photgraphs. I really enjoyed very much when I started to be able to make use of layers.

GIMP 2 is open source software and can be download at the following:-
1) Installers for GIMP for Windows: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
2) Documentation: http://manual.gimp.org/
3) Tutorial: http://gimp-tutorials.net/


paint.NET is provided free of charge but you are welcome to make a donation at their web site to support their further development.
http://www.getpaint.net/