Fighting against spammers: my experiences

Started from June this year, I began to receive about 20 application error notifications every day via email from our church’s web site, which I have developed and have been maintaining ever since, indicating that “A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (txtAddress=”. Like many other applications involving membership, there is a registration form for church members to register so as to receive member-only services, such as receiving devotionals/newsletters via email, receiving […]

SMTP service cause high CPU usage

Last week when I was debugging some application, I suddenly noticed that my computer was getting slow. So I opened Task Manager, and to my surprise, my CPU usage was about 60%! My first thought was that there must be some bad process holding up my resources, but I was too lazy to find out which process was the “bad” guy and I took a very non-savvy approach to fix this issue: reboot. So I […]

Convert pwi file to mp3 file

If you use PDA to record some sound, the file format you get will be .pwi format. It is not a supported audio format for most media players, or audio converters either. After searching the Internet, I found the following work-around to convert the .pwi format to the mp3 format. You need two tools before you start: A Hex editor. I use PSPad editor. An audio converter. I use Audacity. Here are the steps: Open […]

How to Remove Entries from the Remote Desktop Connection Computer Box

Any time you use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to another computer, the name or the IP address of the connected computer is stored, so that next time when you open up Remote Desktop Connection again, you can select the computer name or IP address from the computer drop down list to save some time on typing. This feature is very handy if the connecting computer is your personal computer, but if you are using […]

Write a blog post with MS Word 2007

Microsoft Word 2007 has a new feature that allows bloggers to write posts in Word itself then publish it later. When you click the Microsoft Office Button (the icon at the upper left corner of MS Office) and select “New”, you will be prompted with two types of new documents: Blank document and New blog post. MS Word will ask you to register your blog account first if you haven’t done it, and it supports […]

Add Bookmark dialog not working – FireFox

I have had this annoying problem with FireFox for a while: when I try to bookmark a web page, the “Add Bookmark” dialog does not respond after I click “Add”. If I select a different folder to save the bookmark, the “Add Bookmark” dialog will respond but only add the bookmark without a name – a blank bookmark entry pointing to the web page. I didn’t use FireFox as much as I do now, so […]

VMWare Server on Fedora Core 6

I am a .NET developer and work with the Windows platform almost all the time, then why Linux out of a sudden? The reason is Virtulization. Every developer should have some kind of virtulization tool to help them test their applications under different environments. Microsoft’s Virtual PC may be an option. But the problem with MS Virtual PC is that if I install it on my Windows PC, then I have to maintain the security […]

I love this error message!

I got a 503 error message the other day when I was trying to write a post, which made me love the WordPress developers more. Why? Look at the screenshot of the error message and you will see: BTW, “Matt” is one of their developers. Don’t you love these guys? Maybe I should ask my supervisor if I can write an error message like this and put his name in it. 🙂

Reflector 5.0 available

Just in case you have not heard about it, Reflector, a must-have for .NET developers, was released version 5.0. If you have not used it (shame on you – I am kidding :-)), here is what it is: “Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. Reflector allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL.” Reflector can be downloaded here.