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How important is instant messaging (IM) in your online life? For me, I don’t spend much time at all on IM. However, it is an important communications medium for me as a lot of my colleagues, friends and clients use it as the main method of staying in contact.

There are many popular IM protocols; Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk (which actually runs on the Jabber protocol) are among the more well-known. I have contacts on all these protocols, but running dedicated IM clients for each of them would be out of the question.

Read the rest of Miranda: The Light Instant Messaging Client »

From last Friday to Sunday, PIKOM PC Fair came to town. On Saturday, I decided to check out the wares on sale. It wasn’t a case of casual booth-hopping. I was actually looking for a specific equipment; a fan and heatsink combo for my aging (but still useful) Athlon Thunderbird processor. The processor may be old, but it runs on the still pretty common Socket A architecture.

So there I was, just in time to see the doors open for the 100 or so early birds (not really that early since the fair starts at 11:00 am). Surely I can find the heatsink of my dreams, right?

Read the rest of Malaysian PC Fairs Are Not For Techies »

I know my posting frequency has been less frequent than normal. The reason for this is that I’ve been packing some stuff at the office. We’re moving. It’s so tiring that the last thing I want to do is to type on a computer.

I’m compiling a list of interesting things that I would like to write about when I’m not so tired. I guarantee you that it will get posted… just not now.

I’ve upgraded several of my blogs to WordPress 2.5. However, I noticed that two of them didn’t handle 404 (Page Not Found) errors properly after the upgrade. Every invalid URL gets redirected to the index page; worse still, they returned a 200 server response code which tells the browser that the URL is valid!

Another bad outcome of this bug is that your sites won’t get verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

This problem only occurs on WordPress blogs that uses a page (instead of the more common latest posts listing) as the front page. So how can we fix this?

Read the rest of Improper 404 Error Handling Fix For WordPress 2.5 »

I’ve been using rsnapshot to backup the /home partition on our Samba server since God knows how long. rsnapshot takes the pain out of backup maintenance on Linux systems and is very easy to set up.

rsnapshot is one of those tools that you just need to configure once and once working as expected, there will be no more tinkering with it ever.

To help you get started with minimal problems, go through the documentation. It’s written systematically and should give you more than sufficient information.