Steven Yong's Weblog

Software installation has been the primary obstacle preventing novice users switching from Windows to Linux, until the central repository of software packages introduced in Linux world. Observe following scenario.

Let say I want to install Zip, IM Client and Firefox on my PC, the steps comparison on Windows XP and Fedora Core 9 are as below:

On Windows XP:
1) Go to www.zip.com, download zip.exe, double click on the downloaded exe, and click at least one "Next" button.
2) Go to www.im.com, download im.exe, double click on the downloaded exe, and click at least one "Next" button.
3) Go to www.firefox.com, download ff.exe, double click on the downloaded exe, and click at least one "Next" button.

On Fedora Core 9
1) Open terminal, type su root followed by root password, type yum -y install zip.
2) In the same terminal, type yum -y install im.
3) In the same terminal, type yum -y install firefox.

Some Windows fans might ask "how am I supposed to know what "yum" command to type?", the answer is same as asking "How would I know the URL of Zip download page?".

When you need to know something, you will know.

It gets close to 2 million of views and is very much of an edutainment one. It would probably make those who only read non-computer start digging into computer ones.

Often you would see error message "The device ‘Generic volume’ cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later" when trying to do a safe removal of USB storage device, but you are pretty sure that no program is currently using it. That's because there are still open handles with certain files in the USB Storage Device are in use by some processes which cannot be seen at the built-in Windows Task Manager.

This Microsoft Support article explains the cause and offers the solution that requires a separate free utility, Process Explorer.

By looking at the title, those who know me might be tempted to think that it must be NetBeans IDE, of course not. NetBeans is just the tool that I use most to earn a living.

It is Azureus.

Azureus is a BitTorrent client, written in Java, and it is now called Vuze.

Let's take a look at some screenshots.













The first reason that I like it so much: I don't feel it is written in Java. Secondly, it is really feature-rich. Other than the single core feature that it offers, which is downloading files, it also provides quite a number of nice features. For example, in the middle of downloading some large files, I find that there might not have sufficient disk space and I wanted to move the downloaded files to different disk. I can do that with just four clicks.

This app shows the essentials of a good software: easy to use, feature-rich, decent UI and efficient network and disk I/O operations.

It will be in my top ten list even just talk about software I like in general.

JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) is the core thing to learn in order to understand database connectivity in Java even though you are only using O/R mapping tool like most of us do. While O/R mapping tool might make us more productive and leave out the JDBC detail entirely, it is always good to get yourself familiar with JDBC, which the O/R mapping tools based on top of.

Article JDBC drivers in the wild over at JavaWorld gives us an insightful explanation of the details of JDBC drivers, and the article written by jeevan, named JDBC Revisited offers the basic concepts of drivers, connection, datasource, statement and resultset.

Last but not least, keep the API (java.sql and javax.sql) with you.

Changing screen resolution of X Server on Linux hasn't been easy. It usually requires manual of configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
The most easy way I could find is using command dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg, which requires superuser right. You can do a su root first or simply sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg.

The result of this command is actually a modified xorg.conf.

Correction: dpkg command is only available on Linux distribution that uses DPKG package manager, like Ubuntu and Debian. While other popular distributions like Redhat Linux and SUSE Linux use RPM.

Just used the wrong box to install Microsoft Office (XP, 2003 or 2007) and the online activation failed?

Don't uninstall it first, instead, modify the Registry, follow this Microsoft Support article.

After that, you can re-enter the product key comes with the right box.