Kent J. Chen's WebLog

Ways of viewing Experts-Exchange answers for FREE

Kent J. Chen — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:59:49 PDT

How many times did you see answers from this membership-based forum popping up on the very top of Google search result? Many, many times to me. I hate this forum so much that I turned myself away every time I see it. I believe it should have been “dead pool” long time ago, especially when a lot of other much better similar sites emerged lately, for example, Server Fault, and soon released Super User.

However, the same feeling has gone once I discovered a few ways of bypassing their sign-up requirement and viewing the answer for free. And I am sharing them now here in order to others can ease the same pain I had. After all, they may have the answer you are looking for down the road.

The official way

Becoming an Expert on Exchange-Expert to view all answers free. You can go to this page first and read all the information about an Expert on EE before signing up as an expert at the bottom of the same page. It’s possible but not that easy to get.

As an Expert, you may earn your Premium Service Membership by answering questions and receiving 10,000 points initially and 3,000 Expert points on a monthly basis to maintain your status.

Another words, if you don’t contribute you won’t earn Premium Membership. And if you don’t earn Premium Membership you won’t get see all the answers.

The dirty way

Spoofing your browser’s user agent string to pretend as a Googlebot. Because all answers on EE are well indexed on Google they must provide the necessary info to grant the access to Googlebot crawl their entire website without signing in a user. Credit goes to here who describe it how in very detail on his blog. In short:

Download and install this Firefox add-on
Download this xml file
Tools>User Agent Switcher > Options>Options>User Agents and Import the file downloaded on step 2.
In the same window, select “GoogleBot”, go to Edit, enter “GoogleBot” on first line and “Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)” on second line. Leave the rest empty.
Close everything. Go to Tools, Options, privacy tab, “expections” and block www.experts-exchange.com and experts-exchange.com from giving you cookies.

However, as you can see, it’s not that straightforward and use to use. Quite dirty to me.

The easiest, clean way

Experts Exchange always displays the accepted solution on the page itself if the answer is referred from Google. So all you need to do is scrolling to the bottom of the page or pressing shortcut key Ctrl+E to view the solution, without signing in as a registered user. Credit goes to here. It only works if you are visiting the site from Google Search, which is not a problem to me at all.

you can only view the answers if you are visiting the site from Google Search, if you do not see the answer using the above method, copy the URL or title of the EE forum and search for it in Google, click on the EE link to view the answer using the above method, this should work 99.9% of the time.

One thing I have to admit is that they did a very good job on SEO. Without that, they wouldn’t get ranked so high on most of their answers. And without that, we won’t get see these answers for free. :) Tip my hat to Experts-Exchange’s SEO team.

Some of the beautiful concept designs for Windows Mobile

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:21:20 PDT

Long Zheng at istartedsomething revealed some of the best Windows Mobile concepts from Microsoft ATC Studios in Beijing that are never gone public and wondered where actually went wrong for Windows Mobile. By looking at those awesome design concepts of Windows Mobile from Robin Zhu, a very popular and respected UX designer in China who used to work at the ATC (Microsoft Advanced Technology Center), I actually wondered the same.

I had wanted a smart phone for a very long time and during my watching waiting period the ones that are based on Windows Mobile had been pretty much at the top of my wish list. However, I never jumped the gun and acquired one until the release of iPhone 3G in Canada last Summer. So Why had I waited so long and went for an iPhone instead of a Windows Mobile powered device? Simply put, the awesome UI and more UX design from Apple and the seamless Apple Store integration that makes an huge extensive use of device supported by many of awesome 3rd party apps.

It looks like Microsoft already has piles of good concepts in place. What they really should focus on is how to better utilize them and add more innovate user experience design into it, and more, building a better marketplace that attracts more designers and developers to come up more appealing apps for Windows Mobiles. They also need more innovative ideas on top of that to make it successful, because simply following Apple’s step won’t get them further enough to defeat the iPhone.

Keep up all your good work, my fellow Chinese Designers.

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Tethering new iPhone 3.0 over Fido

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:00:17 PDT

The new iPhone OS 3.0 is out now with one of the most anticipated feature “Internet Tethering” in it. Excited? But wait, are we allowed to use it in Canada? will there be any extra hidden cost on top of the data plan to use the tethering? Well, the good news is:

Tethering Policy
Tethering is the use of your phone as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet from your computer. For a limited time, if you subscribe to a data plan which includes at least 1GB of data transmission between June 8, 2009 and December 31, 2009, and if you have a compatible device, you may use tethering as part of the volume of data included in your plan at no additional charge. Tethering cannot be used with data plans of less than 1 GB.

- from Rogers Smart Phone Data Plans: http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-plans/iphone_smartphone_plans

And this guy even went ahead and asked the Rogers’ social media guy Keith McArthur whether tethering would be free for the life of the contract. He confirmed that over on twitter:

What we've said is that tethering will be included at no extra charge until at least the end of the year.

If you are still confused where you are in the plan, this post from iPhone in Canada may help you clear it up. At least, it cleared up my situation,

As for all those people that already have data plans of all different sizes prior to June 8, 2009, you seem unaffected. That presumably means you can tether all you want using the amount of data you have in your data option, even beyond December 31, 2009, and have no worries about extra charges.

Great, now let’s get the fun part started. To enable it, go to Settings –> General –> Network –> Internet Tethering, slide the switch to on, but wait, the error message pops up asking me to contact Fido to enable tethering. What? Why is that? Fortunately, guys at iPhone in Canada seems to have figured it out already.

So it would seem that this is the method in which Rogers/Fido will control this new tethering policy.

The way they do this is through iTunes. Rogers/Fido have what are called IPCC files or “iPhone Carrier Configuration” files. These files are loaded onto Rogers/Fido iPhone’s and give you MMS, Tethering, etc.

In this case, in order to enable tethering, you must call in to Rogers/Fido, have them place an “internet tethering promotional SOC code” (pronounced “sock”) on your account and then tethering will be enabled. The only catch is this is where Rogers/Fido get you because remember, if you have a data plan less than 1GB, Rogers/Fido will not activate tethering.

And they even posted in detail in the same post how you can get around it. However, here is a simply link that you can access from your iPhone to simply replace the tethering configuration file on your iPhone to remove that promotional SOC code. It works like a charm on mine.

Fido Configuration – visit it on your iPhone.

And if you are with the providers other than Fido, check here for a complete list.

The rest of the stuff is easy enough, once it’s enabled, you can tether you iPhone via either Bluetooth or USB. If through USB, make sure the computer that your iPhone connects to has the latest iTune installed because it requires the proper driver to have the Apple network adapter properly installed.

Now, with my iPhone and laptop, I am unbeatable.

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Excited About the RSS Subscriber Count Jump? Not too Soon

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:21:35 PDT

When I saw the number of my RSS subscribers jumped to double I was thrilled, more excited actually. However, I know things like that won’t happen overnight. There must be reasons behind. So I log into my feedburner account and dig into “see more about your subscribers” to see what actually made the boost. Sure enough, there are 80 more subscribers came from one source named friendfeedagg, from FriendFeed. Then their latest blog, subscribers count, confirms the change made last night on FriendFeed aggregator that shares their subscriber counts with your favorite FeedBurner subscriber count.

We're happy to announce that we've recently started sharing FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl for the latest version of your blog's feed.

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you've added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog's feed.

Is this a good move, from an end user point of view? I am not sure. Some people concerned that it may look too artificial but I am ok with that. As long as that’s the number of people seeing my RSS feeds, I am fine with that. It’s It’s always good seeing more people subscribe and read your hard-worked posts. Besides,

Keep in mind though, that even though this is the number of people who are subscribed to you, the number of people who actually see your posts within FriendFeed can be substantially higher, because whenever one of your subscribers 'likes' or comments on one of your items, that item gets shared with their friends as well!

However, how is this move going to affect the Adsense for Feeds in FriendFeed? I don’t think it works that way.

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After the Deadline Helps Blog Better [web application]

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:48:44 PDT

One thing I am struggling on blogging is my writing skills. It seems that grammar errors, typos are inevitable, even though with the help from the spelling check inside the Windows Live Writer. So that’s why this cool well designed web app, After the Deadline comes in handy. I will be using it a lot.

After the Deadline has a very nice domain, polishmywriting.com, which indicates exactly what the website does. What it does is to check spellings, detect misused words, check styles, grammars, and explain errors. The results are quite good because it use artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions. It’s free for personal use but offers various service plans for commercial use, start from 5 writers all the way up to 500 writers, and suggests a self-host plan for more than 50,000 requests per month.

Overall it’s a very useful web application for people like me who have the bad habit leaving grammar errors and typos all over the place in blog. It’s definitely going to help improve my overall writing skills.

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A Collection of iPhone Apps for IT Pros

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:26:29 PDT

As a iPhone fan, I never felt enough hunting down the good apps that can help me perform my work better, and . as a IT pro the same time, I found having a great list of cool apps on iPhone for various tasks related to my work is extremely useful and handy. Some of them had saved me a few time when I got an emergency call while I was on the road having no access to my laptop.

Let’s start with my own collection first:

Remote Desktop (RDP) on iPhone
Tracking Web Stats on the Road on iPhone
Speed Testing the Bandwidth right from iPhone
Air Sharing – share the documents with your computers via WiFi and view them on the go.
My 5 Reasons why Twitterrific is Terrific – yes, IT guy also twitters.

And another list of 12 great iPhone applications for sysadmin and webmasters from guys at pingdom. The list contains tools mostly for web stuff such as whois lookup, domain checkup, speed test, etc., and some other tools for remote control.

And a few others I discovered lately.

Citrix Receiver from Citrix – a must have app if you are using citrix.
Skype – too bad, not available in Canada yet.
myLite – small but useful tool when you have no light in the server room.
Snap – it stands for Simple Network Area Prober

Last but certainly not least, can’t wait to get the long waited copy-paste and tethering on the OS 3.0 which will be releasing tomorrow on June 17.

The remote computer disconnected the session because of an error in the licensing protocol

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:50:02 PDT

One remote user from work called me the other day saying her remote desktop client stopped working because of “there are no terminal server client access licenses available for this computer”. Well, that’s easy, I walked her through and successfully deleted the MSLicensing registry key on her Windows Vista computer, and happily told her you can try it again now. But surprisingly, she replied a few seconds later saying no, still didn’t work. But this time the error message was different:

The remote computer disconnected the session because of an error in the licensing protocol

It’s surprising because having been using remote desktop client for ages this is the first time I saw the error message like this. Out of luck after a few checking here and there, I went to Google for help. Nothing had worked until I was landed to this Microsoft KB, Removing Terminal Server licenses from an RDP client. At the very bottom of this KB, it mentions:

If you delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSLicensing subkey on a client that is running Windows Vista or a later version, later attempts to connect to a Terminal Server may fail. Also, you receive the following error message:

An Error occured in the licensing protocol.

And suggests that to resolve this problem, right-click the Remote Desktop Connection icon, and then click Run as Administrator.

Bingo!! That was it. Did I mention that this problem was actually occurred on a Vista computer above? And it only happens on Vista or later OSs because:

By default, the remote desktop connection runs as a user with the lowest user permissions. By default, a restricted user does not have permission to write registry entries to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Therefore, attempts to rewrite the MSLicensing key fail. Starting Remote Desktop Connection with administrative credentials provides the permissions that are necessary to write the needed registry keys.

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Finally There is A Phone Better Than iPhone

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:08:22 PDT

There are news all over the place today as Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) went by, so no need to repeat them here again. Just go and look at Apple’s iPhone page to find out all the buzzes happening there.

I am a huge fan of iPhone, and guess won’t be changing it any time soon. From my point of view, there are just no other alternatives come close, heck, I should say they are way behind the game. No matter how hard these venders push the market trying to catch up, it’s just not happening. The much anticipated Palm Pre was just released not long ago but feel too bad for them as Apple seems to have beaten them again in every category, even the price is cheaper than what it offers at $199. It got sold 50,000 items in the first launch weekend, but sorry, the number is not even close to how many the first generation iPhone sold in the first launch weekend, not mentioning the 1M items sold when 3G launched.

With the new iPhone 3G(S) released on June 19 and much anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 released 2 days earlier, it’s actually leaving almost no room for others to play in this game. Just look at these new features included on both device and OS, there is finally a phone that comes out and beats iPhone.

MMS

Video Recording

Cut, Copy, Paste is finally here! (Yay)

Undo support

Landscape keyboard works in email, notes, and messages.

Search. You can search calendars, music, notes and email.

Spotlight

iTunes to allow rental and purchase of movies from the iPhone.

Enhanced Parental Controls with control over movies, TV shows and apps.

Tethering. Allows you to share you iPhone internet connection with a PC.

Update to Safari:

Faster than ever before!

Support for HTTP streaming audio and video. Bitrate and data quality adjust to connection speed.

Autofill allows you to optionally remember usernames and passwords.

HTML 5 support.

Find My iPhone Service.

iPhone OS 3.0 will fully support 30 languages.

1000 new APIs in iPhone 3.0 SDK.

Push Notifications

Books for the App Store.

3.2 Megapixel camera (with autofocus, low light and macro modes)

Voice Control

Digital compass

New Accessibility Settings with VoiceOver.

Built-in support for Nike+

32GB Storage

While I won’t be able to get my hands on the new iPhone 3G(S) anytime soon, probably will have to wait until my current one’s contract gets expired, I will definitely try out the 3.0 OS as soon as it releases on June 17. Can’t wait.

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Face it, document what you do is part of your life

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:05:36 PDT

A few years back when I was still the only IT guy in the office, during a review after I worked there for half year, I was asked to fulfill a project that is simply just documenting everything in IT. The reason behind that is simply, because the firm needs to be prepared 1) if I got hit by a bus one day; and 2) during the time I am on vacation.

Exactly, it’s just that simple and clear. The business needs to move on no matter what, even if you got hit unfortunately one day. Someone needs to pick things up where you left when bad thing happens. We all work hard designing a system equipped fully redundancy that can hardly fail, but without a good documentation system in place we are putting ourselves in a position where we become a single-failure-point to the system. So if you haven’t started, you better start it soon. Just don’t put yourself in that position. And if you already started, well, you will have to keep doing it to no end.

So, are there any good guidelines out there?

There was a exact question asked on Server Fault yesterday, which got a very nice answer that lists some of the principles that should be kept in mind when doing documentation.

Principle #1: It’s never done!

Principle #2: The only thing worse that no documentation is WRONG documentation.

Principle #3: You are writing documentation for your successor, not for yourself.

Principle #4: “Why” is often more important than “how”

Principle #5: It has to be easy or you won’t do it.

Very precise and practical. A very good summery.

And what should be documented?

My take is everything. Or at least try your best documenting as much as you can. The more you document, the better. The only thing you don’t document is the thing you are not certain, because the principle #2 says the only thing worse than no doing is doing it wrong.

Any good tools out there to easy this endless work?

Well, I would say you should be using whatever works for you, no matter it’s just plain text file saved in your file system, or more advanced system like wiki. However, apparently, wiki is most popular choice in IT world. It fits just so well. You can just pick some of the good wiki open source and working on it.

I thought about that too back then but found it wasn’t quite fit at least for my requirements. At least, posting stuff on wiki wasn’t that easy to me, which seems to violate principle #5 :). Instead, I set up a blog type system using Graffiti CMS, and use Windows Live Write to post. So far, it works great.

I also posted the same question on Server Fault, which already got some good responses. So if you are interested, you can definitely go and check it out.

Enjoy, and happy documenting what you do at work. :)

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Bing is bringing some traffic to here

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:39:49 PDT

Microsoft just released its new search engine lately which they hope they can compete with Google in some way. I started seeing some traffics that came from it, a little bit more than before. Not sure if it continues but I hope so. For that matter, I actually welcome this new service and hope it will be doing good.

The home page, see the screenshot at right, looks not bad, certainly not decent but can’t really say ugly or bad either.

The search result page, however, is certainly very poor designed. Whoever designed that page is no way a designer and should not be doing job like this at all. Even in-creative I can do the design much better than this. Why the heck did they put this ugly blended image in the background at the top the page?

Not only that, the logo, is crappy which looks more like something you’d use for a yogurt brand than a search engine, which I agree.

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