Category: Computer

Posted on

Facebook: Friends Suggester

So for the longest time (and Derek can be my witness), I’ve wanted a Friends Suggester feature in Facebook. What a Friends Suggester is is a tool that’ll automatically suggest people who you might know based on who your friends are. In other words, typically if 5 of your friends know a particular person that isn’t your friend yet, there is a likely chance this particular person is someone you know too.

Anyway, when Facebook Apps were starting, I thought an app like this would quickly show up. At first we thought it wasn’t possible due to privacy reasons, but it turns out that your friends list is typically open to public and all the app would need is just the list of friends of all your friends and then do some mashing work.

When Facebook introduced Suggest A Friend, I thought that was what I was looking for. However, it turns out it was meant so you as a human (and not the computer) to suggest friends to new people on Facebook.

A week or 2 ago, Facebook finally added what’s been long overdue: People You May Know:

People You May Know
Found based on your existing connections

Do you know any of these people?
Add people you know as friends to make these results even better for you.

This is exactly what Friends Suggester is. It shows you a list of people that it thinks you might know and even shows the list of common friends between you two. I’ve already added 5+ friends since I found this tool.

There are still some ways to improve it. Currently they only suggest 25 people randomly to you. If you refresh the page, the list changes with some new and some old. There appears to be no order of any sort and algorithm to determine which people you’re more likely to be friends with. I’d say the more friends you share between each other, the more likely you two are friends. Having the ability to see ALL suggested friends, even if it iterates over many pages, would be nice. Sitting here hitting refresh hoping to find a friend that may pop up after awhile just isn’t that great.

Another thing they should add is the ability to discard people you don’t know. No matter how many times you show me person A, if I don’t know him, I’m not going to add him to my friends list. There is the case where you might end up being friends later, so maybe the ability to ignore a particular person for 3 months or 6 months would be another option.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this new tool so far.

Update:

I knew I forgot something. I had also wanted it to automatically email me when it thinks a new possible friend pops up in the list or alert me somehow. However it turns out they already have this feature. I just got this email:

_____ just joined Facebook. You are getting notified of this because our “People You May Know” tool discovered you and _____ both work at Microsoft. If you do know _____, check out the links below.

To add _____ as a friend, follow this link:
____________________

To view _____’s profile, follow this link:
____________________

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Posted on

ATI Catalyst 8.3 Problems with Remote Desktop

So I’ve been having problems connecting to my home PC via Remote Desktop for some time and I didn’t really have a clue on what the problem is. For the longest time, I believed that it had to do with AVG since for some reason AVG would prompt me to reboot every single day and when I don’t, remote desktop appeared not to work anymore. Reinstalling AVG from scratch appeared to have fixed it.

The problems I was hitting included immediately disconnecting from the Terminal Service after logging in with the correct username and password or ending up in a blank screen where I’m not seeing anything. Half time time, I’m able to log into my admin account and log off my default user and retry. Other times, my admin account encounters the same problems.

Anyway today’s problem was the weirdest, where I’d be disconnected immediately when trying to connect. It didn’t even prompt me for credentials. I thought I’ll just go home and reboot the computer, however this apparently didn’t fix the problem. I tried uninstalling AVG to see if that helped, but unfortunately it didn’t appear to be the cause of the problem.

I scratched my head and wondered what else could be causing the problem. I recall since I was going to reboot, I decided to update my graphics drivers. I have an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and upgraded to the latest ATI Catalyst 8.3 for Windows XP. I uninstalled all the ATI crap and rebooted and immediately I was able to connect via Remote Desktop. However my monitor was now running in like 800×600 mode.

I found this thread stating that ATI Catalyst Suite prevented some other people to connect via Remote Desktop:

RDP is working, removing ATI Catalyst Suite did the trick

Hi Scott, just wanted to thank you for your assistance, it ended up being the ATI Catalyst Suite which is installed with the video driver (these servers have ATI Radeon X550’s in them).

Removing the Catalyst Suite and using just the ATI driver alone did the trick. Don’t know why as the Catalyst doesn’t change the video driver, it just gives you a control panel utility. Go figure.

I’ve submitted a KB article request to AMD as it seems to effect at least 5 different Radeon cards that I have.
Thanks again,
Mark

Posted: 11/15/2007 @ 08:17 AM (PST)

So I went and downloaded the newest Display Driver only and installed that. However, I immediately hit the same Remote Desktop problem again. Grrrrr… I decided to try previous drivers one by one moving backwards and stop after the 1st one that worked. The sucky part of this is after each driver installation, I had to reboot to be able to test if my Remote Desktop connection is fixed. Good news is that after installing ATI Catalyst 8.2 Display Driver, my Remote Desktop connection was in full working order again, so I didn’t have to keep on going. I didn’t bother installing the Catalyst Control Center this time around since I don’t believe there’s any need for me.

In conclusion, it appears a change in ATI Catalyst 8.3 broke compatibility with Remote Desktop (at least on Windows XP).

For others who have encountered this problem, I hope this helps!

Posted on

Pidgin v2.4.1 fixes Unicode Support for AIM

Just got a notice that Pidgin v2.4.1 was released. According to the changelog:

Treat AIM Unicode messages as UTF-16 rather than UCS-2; this should have no functional effect, other than continued support on systems which have dropped UCS-2 conversions.

As I noted, it was a major blocker for me to fully adopt Pidgin, but I guess they got the message from all the feedback they have been receiving. I just gave the new version a whirl, and it has indeed fixed AIM Unicode support.

Posted on

Pidgin

pidgin I first heard of Pidgin on Angel-grrl’s blog. At that time I didn’t really think much of it, though I had been thinking about switching to Trillian for some time. Anyway, as I add more and more foreign friends, they tend to prefer MSN Messenger over AIM and now whenever I reboot, I have to start 2 IM applications.

A few days ago, Digg announced a new version of Pidgin was released. I finally decided to give it a try. Some things I was looking forward included being able to talk to people via multiple IM protocols and being able to group multiple aliases together. Some people have 3 or 4 screen names and they end up scattered all across my buddy list, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which screen name to IM. Therefore I decided to give it a try. Worse case, I just switch back to AIM and Live Messenger.

Installation:
The installation of Pidgin went through successfully and I didn’t hit any problems with either Windows Vista or running it as non-admin on Windows XP.

Multiple Clients:
The multiple client support is nice. I got AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and XMPP (Google/GTalk) working, though I don’t really have any buddies on Yahoo or XMPP. I just added them since I had accounts with them. So far, they’re working fine.

Grouping Screen Names:
This was unintuitive to discover (at least for me). Xyon claims it was semi-unintuitive as he was able to figure it out after some time. Apparently to group screen names, you right click one of them, click Expand, and now you can drag other screen names into that group. I had tried creating an alias, tried to select multiple screen names, etc, but none of those worked. Once you know how to do it, it’s simple, but the process is quite tedious.

After grouping, it has some algorithm to determine which screen name you should be IMing based on their availability and idleness. If you want to manually select a different screen, you can so with the context menu or if the IM window is already open, under the Send To file menu. I think the process could be further simplified, but I guess I’m just nitpicking here.

Keyboard shortcuts:
In AIM, to open a new IM window was Alt+i. In Pidgin, it’s Alt+m.
To close an IM window in AIM was Esc. In Pidgin, it’s Ctrl+w.

Not really saying it’s better or worse, but it’ll take some time getting used to.

One thing which I found quite annoying is in certain areas of the UI, when I start typing, a little white box pops up with the 1st letter I hit (i.e. searching for a screen name in my buddy list or searching for a font to use in the Preference window). Only the first letter registers and it just halts and doesn’t really do any searching. It also freezes the window for about 5 seconds which annoyed the heck out of me.

Unicode Support:
This is the biggest set back and may actually be the reason I finally switch back to AIM. Unicode support is horrible in Pidgin. I found this support ticket after searching for a bit: Asian Characters not appearing on buddy list:

Under the normal Windows binary of Pidgin, Asian characters are not displayed on the buddy list. When hovering over a screen name however, the contact window that pops up shows the characters just fine. This happens on Windows XP and Vista.

Reading through the history, there were a couple suggestions such as changing my default conversation font to something that supported the whole Unicode range. I changed to MS UI Gothic from Verdana and now I can see what I’m typing instead of square blocks with 4 0s in it. However, after doing some test with some friends, apparently it doesn’t send it correctly across, which it did fine when using AIM 6.0+.

There was another suggestion of changing the GTK theme, but that didn’t fix it either.

I did find this other ticket which was useful: poor IME support in windows:

I’m not sure it is even possible to programatically set the input method, so I don’t think that remembering is possible.

The closest that you can get is to have the default be the Windows IME input method, which can be done by setting the GTK_IM_MODULE environment variable to ime.

Pet Peeves:

  • Buddy Info Window doesn’t disappear – When I was going through grouping screen names together, by hovering above the screen name, the info box would appear, but wouldn’t disappear for some reason. Therefore it blocked a big chunk of the screen, until I hover over the same screen name again and it disappeared.
  • Doesn’t know monitor boundary – When I align my buddy list to the left of my monitor, getting buddy info windows would have part of it off the screen due to some centering rule.
  • Unable to synchronize settings – After doing all my alias groupings, apparently there’s no way to synchronize this information with another system, without manually copying over the settings files.
Posted on

Cute Cat Animation – Sequel

Thanks to Hjo3 for telling me a new cat animation is available:

Hey, BTW, a sequel was just posted yesterday.

Simon’s Cat ‘Let Me In!’
Simon's Cat 'Let Me In!'

A hungry cat resorts to increasingly desperate measures to get indoors.

If you miss the original cat animation, check it out here: Cute Cat Animation

I also wanted to point out the fact that if you append &fmt=18 to the back of a YouTube URL, you’ll get higher quality video. According to RayAlome, the 2 settings for the fmt tag are &fmt=6 and &fmt=18, increasing the quality and resolution. You can find out more information about these flags at: Higher Resolution Videos on YouTube and YouTube Tests Higher Resolution Videos.

Regular:
Video Resolution: 320×240
Audio Sample Rate: 22050 Hz

&fmt=6:
Video Resolution: 448×336 (higher encoding)
Audio Sample Rate: 44100 Hz

&fmt=18:
Video/Audio Format: MP4 (H264 with AAC audio)
Video Resolution: 480×360

Posted on

Microsoft DreamSpark

If you’re a student (unfortunately I’m not anymore), Microsoft is giving away free software for developing and designing software: Bill Gates talks about Free Software, Students, and Technology:

How would you like a free copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008? How about the entire Microsoft Expression Studio? Not enough…… how about Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and more?

For once, something that sounds too good to be true really is this good and really is true. Starting today (or soon in some areas), students worldwide will be able to download our professional development and design tools for free! It’s called DreamSpark and it is upon us.

We got a few minutes with the guy himself, Mr. Bill Gates, to talk about his thoughts on this student opportunity. We also discussed the fast pace of technology and how students can best deal with that. Finally, I gave him a chance to think about what he would do if he were 17 years old again and starting up the next big company. His answer was–are you sitting down because this one was a real shocker–software!

We figured since one 8er already won a PC and another 8er won a Zune, we should hook you guys up with something cool too… I better see some smiles in the comments! 🙂

You can go directly to the downloads page.

Posted on

Damaged Ear Drum?

So a few days ago, I started noticing that when I was listening to music via my Shure E4c earphones, I wasn’t able to hear anything from my left ear (stage right). I was like, “OH *@!#!$@!#*$!” I pull the right earphone out and turns out I was not completely deaf in my right left ear as I could still hear music in my left ear.

Anyway, I was going to attribute this to the fact that 2 weekends ago, I had drop a bag of glass bottles (about 15 bottles worth) at the bottom of my stairs (a small confined space) and it started bouncing on my ceramic floor tiles for ~10 seconds and it was one of the most painful experiences for my ears ever. My ears were ringing for quite some time after that, but eventually went away.

So thinking it might be my computer, I plugged the earphones into another computer, and it was the same results. My left ear was definitely not hearing as much audio. I decided I would need to go see my doctor and ask for a ear specialist referral.

So today when people were talking, I would tilt my head left and right to see if their voice actually got softer if I faced the weak ear toward them. I didn’t really notice much difference, but given that it was in an open environment, it wasn’t really a good test to begin with.

So I decided to try to change the audio left/right balance, but apparently in Vista, the balance thing is no longer in volume control you get when you double click the volume icon in your task bar. Took me a bit to find it, but apparently you have to go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound. You can also go directly to this from the context menu of the sound icon in your task tray. Under Playback, select the speakers and click properties. On the Levels tab, you’ll be able to control the left and right audio balance. After a quick configuration, I can now hear music from my left ear again.

Then it hit me today, I haven’t really tested if it was the earphones. I had just blindly assume it was my ears drums were damaged after a quick test or 2 and the fact these were some expensive earphones. I inserted the right earphone into my left ear and vice versa. It turns out my left ear was NOT damaged, but the left earphone was definitely outputting at a lower volume. I was overjoyed.

Looking at Shure’s website’s How To Use Earphones, I’m hoping it’s just that I need to clear up some earwax. These earphones weren’t cheap to begin with…

NOTE: Nozzles can collect cerumen (earwax), which can clog the earphone and lower the sound quality. If you experience sound loss, check the nozzles for clogging before sending the product in for service. There is a service charge for removing wax.

Update:
Cleaning out the earwax did fix the problem. There were also these earwax guards which didn’t really have much or any earwax, but the left one was in the wrong place, probably the main culprit of all this. For some reason, I think the left ear now is hearing better… I’d take some pictures of the earwax I dug out, but you’d probably be grossed out by it.

Posted on

How to disable Screen Saver for Vista in Media Player Classic

Speaking of Media Player Classic, for the longest time (haha, I just realized I just repeated myself), I have also wanted to tell Windows Vista to disable the screensaver. It was annoying that whenever I was using Media Player Classic, it would start the screen saver after 30 minutes into the movie. I would then have to disable the screen saver temporarily and re-enable it afterwards. Similar with turning off the screen and sleep/hibernate options.

Anyway, while I was searching for something recently, I came up on Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. It appears to be a fork off the main Media Player Classic branch and one of the things it supports now is: Kick off Screen Saver from Power Options only while video is playing (Vista). So if you’re a fan of Media Center Player and dislike the fact your screen saver goes off when the video is playing, you should check out this Home Cinema version.

Posted on

How To Get Media Center to Play Any Video File

So for the longest time, I have been trying to get Media Center to play .mp4 files, but after countless searching for solutions, I never really came across a working solution. There have been instructions on installing different codecs and adding/modifying registry entries.

Today I realized that after my format, I could no longer play Quicktime (*.mov) HD trailers in Media Center anymore. I’m pretty sure this has to do with the fact that I had reinstalled Windows Vista Ultimate recently and never bother to do something. I’m pretty sure Quicktime Alternative (now better known as QT Lite) has already been installed, but I reinstalled it just in case, but that didn’t seem to work. HD trailers played fine in WMP11 and Media Player Classic.

I knew it worked before, but I had no idea what I had changed. I started searching again and after a few tries, ended up on this thread: Quicktime movies in Vista MCE. The key thing to take away from that thread is:

Hi there

I’ve had the problem of after installing QT alternative, it will play .mov files quite happliy in mediaplayer 11, but doesn’t get picked up in Mediacentre (this is on vista, when i had MCE2005 it went fine)

Any obvious reason/fix?

Thanks

Just found the answer on greenbutton,.com:

You need to install Quicktime Alternative. This has a DirectShow Quicktime plug-in that will allow .movs to play within Media Player or even Media Centre. However, for the .mov files to even appear in MCE, you need to make the following registry edit:

In HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov create a REG_SZ called “PerceivedType” and name it “video”.

Worked a treat. (one has to ask why Olympus made there cameras to record video in a format used by about 5% of the population – if you are a PC fiddler like most of us then we’ll find a way around it, for the vast majority it’ll be no holiday videos on the MCE machine).

The trick is to create a new String Value, name it PerceivedType and give it a value of video. So I thought, what if I did this to the other file types I wanted. I went ahead and added this string value to .mp4, .ts, etc. and now they ALL show up and play in Media Center. Of course you have to get the codecs to get it playing in WMP before you can actually get it to play in Media Center.

Update:
Now if I can only figure out how to get non DVD files to show up in my DVD library.

Posted on

More RAM! Good, right?

This past week I ordered more RAM. How could I pass up on HP 1GB DDR2 PC5300 RAM that was less than $3 a stick (after rebate of course).

Anyway, my Vista Media Center PC has been upgraded from 2GB to 4GB now and I have 2 spare GBs right now which I had planned on putting into my older file server (which only had 1GB). Unfortunately, it turns out only half of my memory was correct (pun not intended). I recall specifically that motherboard support 2 kinds of RAM, but I was thinking DDR and DDR2. However when no matter how hard I try to push the RAM in, it wouldn’t go in, I realized that the little notch did not line up and that’s when it hit me that this motherboard only supported DDR and the old SDRAM.

Also, for the longest time, my Abit IL9 Pro (the motherboard in my main box and my Vista Media Center PC) would only show 3200MB of the 4GB RAM when it was POSTing. I thought that was weird, but didn’t really care so much since neither XP 32bit nor Vista 32bit was able to use more than 3GB. I finally got myself one of those USB floppy drives this past Christmas and was able to flash the bios. It now shows the correct amount of RAM: 4096MB. It also enabled some annoying sleep feature where it would constantly blink my power LED when it’s asleep and the LED is super bright. I’m contemplating on duct taping that LED or just unplugging it.

So I know that XP can’t utilize all 4GB of RAM in 32bit mode, but the number was much smaller than I had anticipated.

On XP, System Properties only shows 2.87 GB of RAM. I’ve already enabled PAE (Physical Address Extension) and 3GB. From Memory Support and Windows Operating Systems:

Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 Memory Support. The maximum amount of memory that can be supported on Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 is also 4 GB. However, Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition supports 32 GB of physical RAM and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition supports 64 GB of physical RAM using the PAE feature.

The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file. When the physical RAM in the system exceeds 16 GB and the /3GB switch is used, the operating system will ignore the additional RAM until the /3GB switch is removed. This is because of the increased size of the kernel required to support more Page Table Entries. The assumption is made that the administrator would rather not lose the /3GB functionality silently and automatically; therefore, this requires the administrator to explicitly change this setting.

The /3GB switch allocates 3 GB of virtual address space to an application that uses IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the process header. This switch allows applications to address 1 GB of additional virtual address space above 2 GB.

The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB, unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file.

On Vista, System Properties only shows 2,943 MB of RAM, which comes out to be about the same amount in XP. However, I couldn’t find a way to specify the /3GB switch since Vista has a different boot loader.

Given that, this all comes down to I/O mapping limitations in 32-bit Windows OS and you basically only have ~3GB of accessible memory. Oh well. At least they get to run in dual channel mode, right?

P.S. I’ve finally installed the last hdd into my file server, so hopefully my many months old blog entry will be finally posted.