Michael Ong | On9 Systems » Musings

Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910) with a USB drive

michael — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:24:25 +0000

Quick n dirty Guide to Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910)

For fun to get blood pressure to suitable level.

Go to Dell website and look-up the manual for the netbook. Note they mention re-installing operating system requires a optical drive and installation media. They forgot to add “Sucks to be you if you don’t have it”.
Curse Dell for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

On a separate Windows machine

Download WinToFlash (http://wintoflash.com/download/en/)
Prepare a USB thumbdrive (1GB or more) and Windows XP CD-Rom (don’t have it? Borrow a suitable version that matches your netbook’s license)
Unzip WinToFlash
Run WinToFlash specifying your Windows XP CD Drive and USB Drive and let it transfer. Wizard mode works.

On Netbook

Plug USB drive (with XP transferred) to Netbook
Boot from USB Drive on Netbook
Choose Option 1, run through XP setup process in text gui. Take note which your windows is going on, 1 (dell formatted) or 2 (most probably the case)?
When done copying files, boot in Option 2 in graphical gui.
When XP is done with setup, you might encounter a hal.dll missing error.
- Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \system32\hal.dll
- Continue to boot from USB but select the debug boot “Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2″ in boot.ini on USB drive [multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2" /fastdetect]
Allow Windows to finish setup
Fix c:\boot.ini (hidden file) to set default boot to “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)”
Copy \i386 from USB drive to c:\
Start patching and installing Dell drivers from Dell support site
Curse Dell again for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

Disclaimer:

This is quick guide for me to read if I ever need to do this again (I hope not). Works for me, if it doesn’t work for you. Post questions to WinToFlash forums instead.

Back to basics in Mobile Development

michael — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:51:15 +0000

I’ve been holding off starting iPhone development for some time. The recent iPad announcement coupled with the lack of progress in the Windows Mobile world has lead me to making a decision to try out a new platform (finally). With the purchase of the MacBook Pro, it’s time to dive right in and start from basics again. I first started in Palm development (horrors of C++), moved on to .Net (C#) and now with Objective-C, it seems “C” is the common thread linking my mobile development path.

Time to dust off the great “C – How to Program” and gettting started with the first book “iPhone SDK Development“!

Day 2 with Google Wave

michael — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:53:14 +0000

Impressions after more partipants have gotten their invites. Wave is a huge mess once everyone tries to talk (not unlike a real life meeting). You can also hijack a person’s message if you want to so that can be rather distracting. Still not sure how it’s going to work unless we work on a project using only Wave (I wonder if Sales could be convinced to use this though).

Performance-wise, its rather bad once a huge wave or even an ongoing one with 2 people starts to load, cpu utilization goes up and it definitely feels laggy. KC mentioned that he had shown me a similar XMPP style code collaboration tool in Eclipse so real-time messaging isn’t something new.

On the plus side, I really liked SAP and Salesforce demos especially the customer support bot. Check it out here. Can’t wait to see what gadgets are being developed!

Some things I’ve found out to make it a better experience if you’re starting out the first time

To add a wave to the public timeline, do this

Add contact “public@a.gwave.com” , force add it even if the submit button remains disabled.
Add “public@a.gwave.com” as a participant in the Wave.

More waves are appearing locally and here’s an effort to organize them
Making a Singapore Google Wave List

Actual Waves (about Singapore) , you can search by doing this “with:public singapore” or whichever keyword you want to look up. You’ll need wave access for following links.

Tweety, add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your wave and once you authorize in the pop-up (lower right bottom corner of Chrome), you’ll be able to post to Twitter and read status updates within Wave itself.

Most importanly, treat this as a new experience and forget about Outlook and Notes (I try everyday to forget I’m using it). Wave is messy, its gory but what’s not to like about a mash of IRC, ICQ, Forums, Search, Widgets(or Gadgets) and Google way!

Day 1 with Google Wave

michael — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:35:22 +0000

Managed to get Google Wave access yesterday and have been testing out the various features. An area of interest to me is how to best reduce the UI clutter of various windows and incoming streams as I keep up to date with news and try to work at the same time.

The concept of waves to mash up all the various streams into conversation threads seems like a great idea but definitely requires more polish to succeed. I can see myself using it if gmail was tied directly in today. The idea of “wiki” style collaboration on documents in real time could really improve how things work in most places. However the barrier would be resistance to change (happens in any product that dramatically changes how people work). Google’s idea of pushing their brand and products to schools (great work on signing up MOE) is definitely the right step to get young minds hooked and warm up to the idea of new ways to work and collaborate.

Some gadgets I’ve tried

Wavr which allows embedded waves in self-hosted wordpress
- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wavr/
Tweety that provides Twitter conversation in Wave. This could potentially remove the need for Tweetdeck, Yammer clients running right now!
- http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=5002
- Great guide with screens on how to add Tweety access http://daggle.com/add-twitter-google-wave-1424
Map and Yes/No/Maybe Gadgets are pretty cool on what’s possible to built as extensions

While waiting for the invite (took 2 weeks!) I came across some good reads and discussion on this very early dev release (thanks Google for the invite, hopefully more will be able to experience a more polished product soon).

Lastly, here’s an embedded wave just to test out the interaction

Useful applications to make life easier in web design and development

michael — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:00:49 +0000

Just put up this list to share with others in the team so thought I might as well post it here since it could be useful to folks starting out in web development. Do feel free to add on to the list if there’s something useful for us to use.

Mind Mapping
XMind http://www.xmind.net/ (Thanks to @David_Shen for introducing this .. much nicer than Freemind! I use this for meeting notes, to-do lists and jotting down ideas)

Color Palette
ColorSuckr http://colorsuckr.com/
Color Palette Generator http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

On Screen Rulers
JR Screen Ruler http://www.spadixbd.com/freetools/jruler.htm
Pixus http://code.google.com/p/pixus/

Screen Capture
MWSnap http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

Hard Core Editing (i.e. know your markup)
Notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Firefox Addons
Web Developer Toolbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
Screengrab! http://www.screengrab.org/
User Agent Switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
Firebug http://getfirebug.com/
Pagespeed http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

FTP
Filezilla http://filezilla-project.org/
Fireftp http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

IE Tools
IE 6 and 7 Internet Explorer Toolbar http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
IE 8 has built-in developer toolbar

IDE
Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 (it really does its job well, have tried hard to replace it without much success)

Wireframes/Design
Adobe Fireworks CS4 (started using Fireworks since Macromedia days and its my favorite program when a mock or design is needed)
Balsamiq http://www.balsamiq.com/ (Just started using this recently to improve my pen n paper process and its working out nicely)

Great reading for design/dev ideas
Web Resources Depot http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/
Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Hope this helps you in your daily work. Happy coding!

Places I’ve worked in (and had a desk)

michael — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:47:49 +0000

Walked past the old office in Chinatown yesterday and realised that over the years, I’ve had a desk in various parts of Singapore and tried to recall where they were.

The list so far in chronological order

American Express - The Concourse, Beach Road
RBR Networks – KA Centre, 150 Kampong Ampat
JuzPC – Kallang Place and Circular Road
EdLabs – Chinatown (South Bridge Road)
Societe Generale – 80 Robinson Road
Asis-T Solutions - Choa Chu Kang and Ang Mo Kio
Cornet Technologies – Purvis Street and Chinatown (New Bridge Road)
VISA – Caltex (Chevron) House, 30 Raffles Place (Highlight was the Aeron chair!)
IConnectE – Circular Road
SPH – 1000 Toa Payoh North News Centre

Other places which I’ve had to frequent (almost felt like second office at one point!)

KC Dat – Lok Yang Way
Nippon Express – Alps Avenue and Toh Guan Road East

Map

View Places I’ve Worked in a larger map

Getting Dreamweaver CS4 to code highlight .phtml files

michael — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:26:41 +0000

I’m currently working on a Magento project which requires some custom template work and with Dreamweaver, it doesn’t color code the syntax for .phtml files even though they are just php files in disguise. A simple solution would have been to allow different extensions to be specified in the preferences but of course, hiding it away in a obscure config file is more fun.

The file to look for : (check your installation path)

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS4\configuration\DocumentTypes\MMDocumentTypes.xml

Search for this code snippet :

and change it to :

,phtml” macfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5,phtml” file=”Default.php” writebyteordermark=”false”>

Restart Dreamweaver and say goodbye to the wall of black text! This will also work for any other syntax that needs to be highlighted and isn’t represented by the usual file extension, you’ll just need to find the correct documenttype id.

Google Voice… Invited but not available!

michael — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:21:24 +0000

Just got a alert in Gmail “You’ve been invited to Google Voice” and I thought the policy had changed to allow registrations outside of US. Unfortunately scrolling down further stating its only available for sign up in the US.

If you haven’t already heard about it, Google Voice is a service that makes using your current phones much better!
Here’s what it offers:

A personal phone number that rings all of your existing phones when people call

All of your voicemail in one inbox with unlimited online storage and free voicemail transcripts sent to your phone and email

Low-priced international calling to over 200 countries and free SMS

Other powerful features like the first phone spam filter to protect you from unwanted callers, the ability to ListenIn^TM on your voicemail messages while they are being left, conference calling and more

Tried my luck anyway and got this :

Google Voice is not available in your country.
Thanks for visiting Google Voice. We’re not yet open for users outside the US, but are planning to expand our service to additional countries in the future.

I do wonder with e-mail, browsing habits and now voice (leading to Android platform), will Google hold too much information on a person’s habits?

Pre-ordered iPhone 3GS.. first Apple I’m going to own!

michael — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:56:56 +0000

I remember seeing my first Apple Macintosh at cousins house at a very young age and being amazed about the green glowing text on the screen. That sparked me off on the journey that has me fascinated with technology. For some reason, I’ve yet to own a Apple product in my life! So its rather prescient when a Facebook quiz which asked “Are you a Mac or are you a PC” results in a Mac! When Singtel sent the invite to pre-register I didn’t give it much hesitation since it looks to be a great platform for development and a capable smart phone (At last).

Counting down to welcoming Apple to the bunch of Windows machines in the home. 2 days to go!

Will also be saying good-bye to M1 on Friday. Have been with them since my first Nokia phone in 1998.

How many languages do you know?

michael — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:45:36 +0000

Sudden thought occurred to me that I’ve been learning programming since 1989 and how quickly its now 20 years.
Here’s a chronological order of the languages picked up so far.

1988-1989 : Logo Programming
1992-1994 : C Programming , some dBase
1995-1996 : C, Pascal, Dabbled in Assembly (demos in the day impressed me a LOT!)
1997-1999 : C++ (self taught during National Service to ensure brain didn’t rot)
1999-2003 : ASP, Visual Basic, PHP, Java, LISP, Perl, OpenGL, MPI, HTML, Javascript, SQL
2004-Present : C#, VB.Net, ASP.Net and more PHP

I’m looking forward to doing more of PHP, Objective-C, Ruby and HTML 5! and who knows what else in the coming years. Might even re-visit Java since Android needs it.

For code editing, after a few years of using Visual Studio, I find myself using Dreamweaver and Eclipse more. Apatana and Netbeans have also taken residence so shall see which IDE takes over. Otherwise there’s always Notepad++.

Technorati Tags: programming, languages, chronology

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