I was attempted to set up Windows Live Writer for a friend recently, however he is behind a proxy using Windows authentication, therefore, we were able to run the downloader, Windows Live Writer was unable to connect to the blog and was therefore, we had this error message while trying to set up the blog service:

Error 407: Proxy Authentication Required

Fortunately, Windows Live Writer was developed within the .NET framework and the walk-around is fairly easy.

First, open up the directory where the Windows Live Installer was installed at, which, in my case, is C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer

If you are not sure about that, right-click and select Properties, that will give you the folder path where Windows Live Writer was installed to:

In that folder, look a file named WindowsLiveWriter.exe.config:

Right click and open the file in notepad and this should be what you see initially:

Now add the following lines right after the <configuration> tag:

If you are using Windows-integrated authentication, this is what you should add:

    <system.net>
<defaultProxy enabled=”true” useDefaultCredentials=”true”>    </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

So in the end, here is how your config file looks like:

Save it and restart Windows Live Writer and time to enjoy the power of Windows Live Writer:

The matter is a bit more complicated when you are using your own proxy address which is not default or you have your own proxy credentials which is not integrated with Windows. There is a solution here which I have not tried and therefore can not verify it. Basically you will need to compile your own DLL and add that to the configurations.

So I know I have been lazy in writing stuff to this blog (The reason I gave myself is there is nothing to write). However, at least I decided to change the look for the site after having the same look for god-knows how long.

How does the new look sounds like? Good? Bad? Terrible? Feel free to comment below.

Yesterday, I came across this interesting article on TechCrunch where the author discussed the idea of gmail-lite, where we would write pretty much like Twitter-style emails.

Frankly speaking, I can understand the rationale of people writing short emails. After all, a not-so-busy person like me receives about, on average, perhaps 50 emails from work and another 20 or 30 emails in my personal email inbox. Imagine if every single emails is written in 3 lines and therefore, I can save, say, 20 seconds on average to read each of the emails, that is at least 70×20 = 1400 seconds, which is approximately 23 minutes, saved in a day!

However, as we all know, nothing in this world comes for free. So what did we sacrifice for those 23 minutes that we saved?

The answer is what I would like to call the interpersonal “warmth”.

Just imagine if one day you walk into a store, instead of being greeted by the salesgirls with words like “how are you doing?” or “what can I do for you?”, you are being asked directly with this:

“What do you want?”

or something like this:

“You can buy all your stuff here, cashier is over there, we accept Mastercard and Visa!”

Those words indeed save our time, aren’t they? After all, you walk into a store presumably you want to find something to buy and obviously in big departmental stores, knowing where the cashiers are or what credit cards they accept could save you quite some time.

However, would you like to visit this store again?

Now imagine everyone is talking to you like this.

Your boss will send a one line email to you:”progress report on project ABC please.”

Your colleagues will send a one line email to you:”conference call at 11am.”

Your friend will send a one line email to you:”party on saturday, reply yes to confirm attendence.”

Your loved ones will send a one line email to you:”dinner at home at 7, call if can’t come.”

…

Do you still want to live in such a world?

Obviously sometimes one line email is appropriate, such as the time if I am asking my colleague if he/she wants to go have lunch, I will perhaps just send a one line email like: “lunch downstairs?”, obviously sending something like “Dear Jim, how are you doing? Is everything good with your family?…” and so on would just be outright silly.

However, I want to be able to have the ability to write long emails when I need to, instead of confining myself to 160 words for every single email I write.

After all, we are human with emotions, which distinguishes us from the animals. If we are just able to use the most basic forms of communication, what is the difference between us and the computers that I am typing this blog post on?

There was little surprise when I got the email from Yahoo! informing me that they will be closing MyBlogLog in a few months.

I have been a Yahoo! fan for years, primarily because when I first started to learn and use Internet, Yahoo! was the only (the most efficient one at least) major search engine provider (Google did not came to business until many years after that). My first website was hosted on Geocities (and I actually typed in the HTML code line by line!), first email address was @yahoo.com and first paid online album was Flicker, which is now part of Yahoo! as well.
Oh, those old days…
I am not sure how Yahoo! manage to get itself into such a deplorable state, to the extend that it even has to beg Microsoft for a search engine partnership. I guess the primary reason was it failed to improve their own technology – the Yahoo! search engine was not as great as Google’s, Yahoo! mail is not as useful as GMail (and they actually started charging money for POP and SMTP services, which was a big mistake considering how many people are using POP and SMTP to send/receive emails on their PCs and mobile devices.
As a technology company, nothing is worse than living in the glorious past, which is a mistake that Google is trying really hard to avoid these days by constantly pushing out new product lines.
RIP MyBlogLog, and all the best, Yahoo!

Just received this email from the host of the very blog that you are reading on:

Guess a picture here is better than a thousand words:

Fortunately, Twitter has managed to keep update on the status.

Time for more servers Twitter, you just have too many people using it!

I logged into my blog today thinking of keeping my WordPress up-to-date, and surprisingly, there is one comment left on my blog.

Being a half-perished blog that has not been updated for years, I was naturally surprised to see someone decided to comment on my post, so I opened it up and here is what I see:

Christian Mullen
nationaltechmark.com
cmullen@nationaltechmark.com
65.8.39.214

Hello ****,

I am interested in buying an advertising spot on your website/blog. Please

email me to discuss this possibility further at your earliest convenience.

We are open to any idea that would allow us to capture interested readers.

Please let me know if you’d be open to discussing advertising possibilities

further. If not, I thank you for your time.

Regards,
Chris Mullen
National Techmark

A quick Google search turns out that I am not the only one getting this email:

http://datafox.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/national-techmark-bibomedia-and-spam-what-an-review/

And a quick IP search shows the following:

 

65.8.39.214 IP address location & more:
IP address [?]:     65.8.39.214 [Whois] [Reverse IP]
IP country code:     US
IP address country:     ip address flag United States
IP address state:     Florida
IP address city:     Fort Lauderdale
IP postcode:     33351
IP address latitude:     26.1807
IP address longitude:     -80.2753
ISP of this IP [?]:     BellSouth.net
Organization:     BellSouth.net
Host of this IP: [?]:     adsl-8-39-214.mia.bellsouth.net [Whois] [Trace]
Local time in United States:     2011-02-09 14:52

So I guess this is part of those spam that we get once a while that offer you a job to work at home and making whatever amount of cash promised?

Regardless of what, please be aware that this is a spam.

As for this one I got, obviously it went directly into the spam comment section.

If you read the business section of any major US newspaper today, the headline is definitely Geely is buying Volvo for $1.8 Billion.

From Hummer to Volvo, and from iron ore mines in Australia to the oil sand business in Alberta, the Chinese are quietly putting their huge foreign reserves (almost $2 trillion) to what they would consider as strategic assets that are necessary towards building the modernized and industrialized China.

As a Chinese, I am glad to see that the government has finally decided to depart from simply buying US Treasury Bills. After all, basic investment class have taught us that it is unwise to put all the eggs in one basket, especially the basket is being made by a country who is, put it mildly, has many ideological differences with China.

However, it is also unfortunate to see that China is paying some hefty prices along the way. One such example is BlackStone, the American private equity company that China paid $29.605 in 2007. The share was traded at $14.53 on Friday, less than half of the purchase value.

For some reason, the Blackstone nightmare constantly reminded me of the sovereign investment history of Saudi Arabia in the 70s, and more recently, Japan in the early 90s.

I still remember the first time I went to visit the Empire State Building in New York, they were showing a video about the history of the building, which mentioned that it was bought by the Japanese for $42 million in 1991 and then sold back to Donald Trump for less than half of that amount a few years later.

The common part between the Chinese boom, and what happened to Saudi Arabia and Japan is that all countries have an extraordinary amount of wealth. Yet, none have the proper way to manage the wealth.

Yes, with the money, China could hire the best money managers on Wall Street, but just like the same theory why China should not invest everything in T-Bills, a foreign talent simply would not be a good choice.

It is critical, therefore, for China to have its own home-grown investment managers, who are familiar enough with the international market, yet has a good understanding of the needs and the Chinese business mentality and politics.

Only then, China would be a mature investor in the international arena.

The S&P Futures were up yesterday, but closed lower at the end of the day. So it is giving another try today to see if the market could reverse its downward trend and start a bear rally.

However, while the market surged this morning, the ADP payroll reduction report has definitely hit the market hard, with almost a straight decline in the first one hour of trading.

This shows the market is still very sensitive to any news that may offer a gloomy outlook of the current crisis.

Unfortunately, the reality is, the crisis does not seems to come to an end very soon.

Be very cautious in the current market seems to be an advise that everyone is getting, and something that I would definitely agree with. It is difficult to tell when would the decline be stopped, nor when would the market start to recover.

In a very short term though, I do see a likely bounce back from the current lows.

The market is likely to take a break as the reporting of Q4 financials quiet down, and be ready for another round of reports coming up for Q1 2009, which will start as early as May.

Meanwhile, governments are likely to make use of the short gap of time that they have to boost the confidence a little, by offering some even more promising pictures.

One thing not to be ignored, though, is that GM and the other automakers are running out of time in submit a viable plan to continue their survival. If they are unable to somehow prove themselves could remain alive, the market may face yet another huge blow.

Until then, I would hope for the bulls, but in a very cautious manner.

Shares of Citigroup has down 36% at 9:15am EST due to the news of government boosting its stack by converting preferred shares to common shares. S&P futures down 2.1%.

Be ready for a rough day ahead!