www.qianqin.de

Windows Photo Gallery is the default program for viewing images on Vista. It’s pretty simple and works great. But it only works from the Windows Explorer. What if you want to use it with other Tools like WinSCP to preview images from different, maybe linux servers? I started looking for an Executable file to open the previewer, but the only one I could find is the Photo Gallery itself, which doesn’t open the selected image but the hole gallery. So how do I open the previewing version of the Photo Gallery?

Read more »

Many people have a GMA as their graphic card on their notebooks. There are usually some special drivers shipped with the notebook for the graphic card, which usually work just fine with office programs. But when you start using 3D-acceleration, you might encounter weird graphic bugs. So the normal action an experienced user would take would be updating the driver. But a lot of suppliers don’t allow switching to official Intel drivers, like Dell or mine: Toshiba. When you try to install them, an error message appears and the setup exists. What then? Well, you can either wait for them to release a new driver (which won’t happen usually) or trick the Intel driver into installing. With new drivers, everything might even work worse than before or break your windows, so be sure you really-really need the update.

Read more »

PuTTY is great, but it’s even better with WinSCP. You can let WinSCP manage all sessions, press Ctrl+P and PuTTY will pop up, with your session password saved and passed to it. But there are some configuration issues coming from this kind of setup.

Read more »

XPS is Microsoft’s version of Adobe’s PDF. Its major advantage is that it is preinstalled on Vista and XP SP3. You can easy print everything as an XPS for later viewing. But Firefox users might encounter a weird bug when they try to open a XPS file. When a XPS is opened, Firefox starts and asks if you want to download or open this file. If you click download, you can save it somewhere and if you click open, Firefox opens a new tab and starts asking the same question again. Why is Firefox the default viewer for XPS if can’t open them?

The reason is simple: Microsoft Internet Explorer is the built-in XPS viewer, but Firefox takes all Internet Explorer file assosiations when installed as the default browser. So all you need to do for viewing a XPS file is to right click on it, select “Open with…” and choose Internet Explorer. You can make it the default application for XPS files too, then you don’t need to worry again when you open a XPS the next time.

I always say that you can easy distinguish a computer amateur from an expert by looking at his taskbar. If it has only one row, he’s an amateur. An expert knows the advantage of multi tasking and needs a lot of space in the task bar to navigate through the programs.
Read more »

Sending Ecards was pretty boring until I found JibJab. JibJab allows you to create little animations with your and your friends heads in it. It’s really fun, see for yourself:

If there is something I don’t like about wireless technology, it’s Bluetooth. It never worked the way I wanted. Some say it’s a matter of the stack (Bluetooth software) and some say you need to buy the best dongles. I used BlueSoleil, then Widcomm and now Toshiba, started off with Bluetooth 1.2 with a cheap € 2 dongle from eBay, then the Logitech diNovo Bluetooth 2.0 EDR dongle from my € 200 keyboard/mice set and now the internal Bluetooth 2.0 EDR chip from Toshiba in my Portege R400. Did it work well with any of these combinations? Not really…
Read more »

I have been using Microsoft programs for a long time now and I have seen a lot of BSDs (Blue Screen of Death), but they usually occur when some application or hardware crashes or when you changed something in your system. 2 days ago, I experienced a somewhat unexpected BSD.

Like every night, I closed my notebook and let it go into stand-by mode. But in the morning, when I opened my notebook to check my Emails, I saw a BSD. "BUG_CODE_USB_DRIVER", it says. That’s weird… I started my system again and got a different BSD saying nothing else than "your system crashed, stupid" and rebooted after making a memory dump. Now Vista seemed to have realized that it’s not working like it should and went into repair mode. That’s nice, I thought, but after the repair mode, I still got the BSD. After the next reboot, Vista went into repair mode again… After about 3 hours, it ended with a message like "Can’t repair you system", quit and left me with the BSD. What now? I tried the safe mode, no luck. The same BSD laughing at me, preventing me from working on my notebook.

After some more hours of battling with the Vista BSD, I used the ultimate Anti-Microsoft weapon and reinstalled everything. I guess in Microsoft’s world, not even the old law "Never touch a running system!" works anymore…

I used to share a root server with some friends of mine. This allowed us to use a high performance server at a relatively low cost. I use to pay a share of € 40 a month, which is quite a lot. So we decided to move to several small virtualized servers. With VDSL 50, it was possible to host stuff at home, so I wanted move some stuff to my home server and save some money.

Because I don’t want to be limited by some provider’s stupid limitations, I searched for a virtualized server. To avoid any unnecessary costs, I wanted a traffic flat rate too. My personal limit was € 20, if the server was performing nicely according to my expectations. I stumbled upon Keyweb, a hosting company with a really outdated, but still serious enough looking design. They offer two kinds of virtual servers, one kind is called “VRS” and the other “rootDS”. So what’s the difference between these two? Well, a rootDS has a guaranteed CPU speed whereas the VRS don’t. Because the rootDS prices start at € 25, I decided to get a VRS, so I ordered “VRS Start” for € 13 a month. Included in this price is a 10 Domain Plesk license, 256 MB guaranteed RAM and 2 IPs. Perfect, I thought, everything I wanted.

I ordered it one week ago and got it this Friday, that’s 3 days more than their promised delivery time. On top of that, I needed to call them several times. Just to clear things up, after my first call, the server was delivered within 2 days, but my order wasn’t processed at all before. Anyway, after getting the server, I found it running with Plesk 8.01, the worst possible version of Plesk. So I tried to update it, but it somehow crashed and Plesk wouldn’t start anymore. I didn’t know why, so I used the “Reinstall VRS” feature of Virtuozzo. It was a bad idea as it turned out to be messing things up even more. First it didn’t delete everything and then the fresh installation wasn’t working at all. Opening an Emergency Support Ticket solved my problem within 2 hours on Saturday 1:00 am.

So after I got the server running, I started migrating my websites with Plesk, but it always failed because Plesk went out of memory while decompressing the files. How can that be? I only got Apache running and that’s not taking 256 MB RAM away. A closer look with “top” showed me that the system has 2 GB of RAM, but Virtuozzo shuts the system down whenever the RAM usage goes above 384 MB, which is pretty stupid. The system and other processes takes out way too much RAM because it thinks there is still enough available. A lot on the QoS Alerts in Virtuozzo shows the idle system between yellow and green zone. Doing anything small causes the system to jump into the red zone. Uncompressing files will take you straight to the black zone, making Virtuozzo cancel any new memory request from the any process. This again causes processes to crash or freeze, where freezing will leave your system in the black zone, killing your own server just like a DoS-attack.

So in the end, the “VRS Start” virtual server can’t really be used at all, but Keyweb offers bigger virtual server for € 20 a month, called “VRS Premium”. I have immediately upgraded because I don’t want my server dying from a few web site requests. Upgrade was done 10 minutes after I ordered it. All in all the VRS seems to be pretty fast and stable from Keyweb and I hope I won’t have any more problems with it.

I’ve been using my R400 for a while now and I have to say it’s simply great! I won it in Toshiba’s “Love to Lead” Contest, so l didn’t pay the € 3499 it is worth. But if you look at its specs, the price seems to be adequate for a convertible Tablet PC: Intel Core Duo ULV, LED backlight, 1.8″ hard disk, 3G HSDPA connection and UWB Wireless docking station with DVI (not included in the price). But that’s not all: brand new Active Notification SideShow Display, Windows Vista Ultimate, Fingerprint Reader, a beautiful and robust design and much more. The perfect notebook? Where is the catch?

Read more »