Goodbye WordPress and hello, Tumblr!

After using WordPress for a few years, I’m finally moving to another platform: Tumblr. Tumblr is a simplistic micro-blogging platform, with a Web 2.0-ish design and a whole lot of features. You can post photos, quotes, text, chats, links, videos and even audio on your Tumblr blog, a “Tumblog”. I’ve decided to move to Tumblr because of how easy-to-use and minimalistic it is, focusing on your content and not forcing it to be just a text article, like WordPress and others.

I’ve moved just a handful of older posts, and so I will keep this blog open for archiving purposes. I already changed the design, customized my blog and set it up, and I even wrote a new post: Hello again, World!

You can find the new Smiley’s Life located at smileybarry.com. See you there!

P.S.: If you’d like, you can also visit my software development blog at windy.smileybarry.com. (Windy is my developer nickname.)

Me VS Virus: Progress Report

I recently handed in my PC for a disc drive repair, and it ended up that one of their USB pen-drives, which was used on my computer, was infected with a autorun.inf virus. They also apparently disabled my antivirus’ behavioral scanner, which enabled the unknown virus to act. So far the only thing it has appeared to do is spread by making an autorun.inf file on every USB stick, and I’ve managed to track it down to a Services group in Windows. To investigate, I disabled all but the basic and antivirus services and am now scanning with various other ones (Mine, BitDefender Antivirus 2009, couldn’t find it even then.). I may even contact BitDefender support for help and attach the infecting file for them to investigate, but it seems I may need to format and reinstall. Fortunately, I only set it up 9 months ago and clearly know what I need to backup and what I can simply redownload.

My mom and I already decided we will buy our future computers from a known OEM like HP when the time comes again, because of the amount of times we’ve been burnt by their bad parts and lousy support. As of now, I’ve replaced my old PC’s motherboard about 3 to 4 times, changed the power supply twice, and on my new PC that is only 9 months old, I changed the power supply 4 times and replaced the disc drive once (now). And my mom’s new PC’s disc drive is defective and can’t read any discs’ last sectors.

Given the new development, once my mom comes home from Beijing (she’s on a trip to Beijing and Tibet) we’re going to send a letter to the CEO of Ivory Computers, only ship the parts we know are bad to Ivory requesting a replacement according to our warranty agreement and if necessary, take the computer to a different branch for repair, since my uncle uses Ivory PCs and has not come across an issue like ours.

I’m sick and tired of these troubles that I didn’t even have anything to do with. I just want to use a normal, working computer. If this continues I’m sure my mom will agree to buy new HP PCs already and reuse the graphics card if the troubles continue. Trust me, the gas used to drive there all the time may actually cost the same.

This is doing wonders to my ongoing depression.

Poem: Fake Crush

Sometimes when I’m bored, I come up with poems about many things just for fun. (Most are, obviously, about love.) After re-reading one I wrote last night, I decided to share it and some of my following ones on my blog every now and then. Here’s my first one, named “Fake Crush”:

Before you first came along,
I was heavily depressed.
But when I saw you,
With my heart you’ve messed.

You gave me strength to go on,
And show everyone the real me.
And I thought this may in the end,
Make you go out with me.

But as I walked towards the light,
It became clear.
You don’t really know me.
You’re not even here.

You’re on the other side,
Playing for the other team.
And everything I wanted,
Was nothing but a dream.

If you have anything to say about the poem – feel free to comment!

Store your game progress in the cloud — for free

Valve introduced a sub-service of their content delivery system Steam last November called Steam Cloud, which is basically a system to store your saved games on Steam servers as well, so that you could pick up where you left off on any other PCs you might have, without needing to do anything. The service sounds well, but sadly, only supports a limited number of games, most of them from 2008 and later. Games like Half-Life 2 and Portal were excluded with a notice from Valve that they will be supported in the future. In addition, Steam Cloud only supports games purchased and/or activated through Steam. But with a little willpower and about 5 minutes, one could make his own Steam Cloud without repurchasing games or even paying a single dime. You don’t have to be a computer expert, too; you just need to have an advanced knowledge of computers and not have the irrational fear of black-background-white-text console windows many people have.

• It is strongly advised to backup your saved games before playing with junctions, as they can cause you to lose some of them if you accidently do something you shouldn’t.

1. First of all, go to getdropbox.com and sign up for a free account. Dropbox is a service currently in alpha beta which can sync a single folder across all of your Windows PCs, Linux computers and Macs. You can sign up for a free account and get 2GB of online storage on getdropbox.com, which will come in handy for many things.
2. After you’ve signed up, install the desktop application on the website on the computers you’d like to sync. A new folder will appear in your My Documents folder called “My Dropbox”. That’s the folder which will now be synced in realtime with the other computers.
3. Once that’s done, download and extract Junction from Microsoft‘s website. Junction is a utility for creating junctions on NTFS file system drives. A junction is a virtual “shortcut” mechanism for folders, which is mainly used for times when you want an application to save data at another place than its default one. (In the case you can’t change the location in the settings. Like having Firefox save your profile data in a more visible place.) It’s recommended to extract Junction to some easy-to-type folder on your hard drive. I extracted it to C:\Junction.
4. Now, think about where you’d like to have your saved games in your new Dropbox. I keep mine in a folder named “Steam game saves”. (NOTE: Don’t make a folder for each game in it! That will be done later.) Leave the window open when you’ve decided.
5. Track down where your games save your progress. For Steam-distributed games by Valve, it would probably reside in “C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<your Steam username>\<game name>\<game name>\SAVE”. For other Steam-distributed games, it will reside somewhere in “C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\<game name>\<look here>”. When you find that directory, leave the window open.
6. Click your “Start” button and choose “Run…”. Type in cmd and press Return/Enter on your keyboard. In the new console window, type in the address to where you’ve extracted Junction and the executable in it. For example, it would be “C:\Junction\junction.exe” for me. (Don’t press Enter yet!)
7. After it, type in the location (or copy it from the open window showing the appropriate folder’s address bar) of where you’d like to keep the saved games (in Dropbox) in quotation marks, along with the game’s name (or any name you’d like) after it as if the folder existed. For example, for Portal it would be “..\My Dropbox\Steam game saves\Portal”, despite the fact the folder Portal does not exist. (It will be created by the app as a junction and not as a folder.) The example is shortened on purpose and you shouldn’t type in those first two dots, but the full path.
8. Finally, type in the location (or copy it from the open window showing the appropriate folder’s address bar) of where the games are actually saved in quotation marks. Again, for portal, it would be “..\steamapps\<username>\portal\portal\SAVE”. (Once more, the example is shortened on purpose and you shouldn’t type in those first two dots, but the full path.)
9. Now, you may hit Enter. If the window says the junction was created, it went successfully. If not, read the error and retry the operation.
10. On your other computers, do the exact same steps but make sure you reverse the junction — make the saved games folder in your games folders the junction and set the folder in your Dropbox as the target. In other words, type in the directories in reverse order: first where the games would actually be saved, and then where they are right now in your Dropbox.
11. From now on, when your games (on computers other than the first) try to load your progress on their original directory, they will actually access the folder on your Dropbox without knowing this. (This method theoretically (and practically. I didn’t have any problems with it so far and I’ve used it for over a month.) has no additional problems than the ones present before you made the Junction.) Test your games and see if they can load your saves. If they can, you did it! If you they can’t, check your steps and look inside the folders. If you’re using Windows Vista, a little arrow may appear on a junction’s icon to let you know it’s not a real folder.

NOTE: Don’t delete the junctions by hand later, simply run Junction again but this time only with the junction’s location (the link, not where the games actually are) and with “-d” (without quotation marks) preceding the path. If you delete it through Windows Explorer or through other apps, you may accidentally delete the real folder.

And there you have it: your own Steam Cloud remake. The best part about using Dropbox instead is that, unlike other syncing services, Dropbox only uploads and downloads the parts changed in a file, and not the whole file again, which makes syncing a lot faster in some cases.

Image credits:

• Cloud by nicubunu, released to the public domain on Open Clip Art Library.
• File:Steam logo.svg adapted from Steam’s logo, uploaded to Wikipedia by Skybon under a fair use license for non-free logos.

iPhone App Review: Byline (and giveaway!)

Byline's main screen shows your unread items and their count, starred items, notes, and folders. Sadly, it won't show lonesome feeds.

UPDATE @ 8PM Central Time (2AM GMT): …and that’s it! The giveaway’s closed. Apparently, only Lisa entered so she’s getting the free copy. Congrats, Lisa!

UPDATE @ 6PM Central Time (12AM GMT): Bah, I forgot to close the giveaway. Well, you’ve got one last chance thanks to that. I’ll close the giveaway in TWO HOURS. That’s 8PM Central Time, 6PM Pacific Time or 2AM Greenwich Mean Time.

Today, I’m starting a new section of my blog where I review applications for Windows and iPhone OS. This odd combination of systems was chosen because I use an iPod touch and Windows PC. And to hit it off with a bang, I’m also having a little giveaway! Its details will be available after the review. (For the subscribers out there it will be placed after the link to the full article.)

Byline, developed and sold by Phantom Fish, is a Google Reader application for iPhone and iPod touch, mostly known for its key function: syncing articles for offline browsing.

Upon opening the app (or tapping the refresh button), the application starts syncing itself with your Google Reader stream. By default, the app caches all of your starred items, and up to 200 of your unread items. It also syncs the first linked page of every unread and starred item, (AKA the “real” article linked from its title in RSS readers) which is very helpful. However, the process takes too much time in my opinion, and as I don’t have a Wi-Fi connection very often or even for a long time, I disabled it. You can also have Byline save read items, so it would function similar to Google Reader when you select “all items” in reading mode instead of “x new items”. Caching also usually saves the images in the article, which helps with a lot of feeds. Especially the Sims 3 story blogs. With web page saving disabled, caching is pretty fast.

On the main screen (shown to the right) you can find out exactly how many new items are there in your stream, view your starred items, notes, and even read items by folder. However, if you keep your feeds unsorted like me, you won’t see them there. Sadly, Byline only shows folders and not lonesome feeds. Hopefully Phantom Fish will add that option in future versions.

In any screen (unread items, starred items, folders, etc.) you can sort items by feed or by date. I prefer sorting them by feeds so I could leave the good stuff for last. When looking through items, you can star and share them, with or without a note, in one single tap. Links inside the feed open in the application, and no matter the page size I have yet to run into a “out of memory” crash you could get with applications which embed Safari. (You can open the post in Safari, however, if you need to.) Sadly, posts showing videos from sources other than YouTube (like Failblog, which started using Viddler recently) appear video-less in both online and offline mode. The app feels smooth, fast and easy-to-use, with barely even one freeze ever since I started using it a little less than a month ago, and the interface looks pretty great as well, both giving the app a polished feel – performance-wise and appearance-wise.

However, Byline’s key feature is offline browsing. After your items have been cached, Byline can show you them when you have no internet connection. (For iPhone users, when you’re on the subway or in Airplane Mode, or for us iPod touch users, most of the time.) Items load very quickly from the app’s cache, without a single issue. (Except for YouTube videos, but hey, did you expect the app to cache a 20MB+ video?) The feature is great for iPod touch users, as we don’t have a constant internet connection. It’s also great for iPhone users without an unlimited (or high-bandwidth) cellular internet package, as Byline has an option to cache only when connected to the web via Wi-Fi.

In conclusion, Byline is a great RSS client for iPhone, and possibly the best Google Reader client for iPhone, which doesn’t just import feeds like most other “Google Reader-compatible” clients. iPhone users will find it a great Google Reader client to replace Reader’s web interface thanks to its great performance, look and feel, while iPod touch users will love it for its offline browsing capabilities. As of such, I give Byline a 4 out of 5.

Byline requires an iPhone or iPod touch running iPhone OS 2.2.1 or newer. The application is only available in the iTunes App Store, which can be found .

And now, to the giveaway!

How to: Set up push notifications for new plurks on your iPhone, free of charge.

UPDATE @ 02:34AM: It appears apps like eBuddy don’t push the instant message itself as a notification, but tell you you’ve received a new instant message from the bot. Perhaps I should start looking for a new push-enabled instant messaging app. I guess the free path isn’t so useful. Yay?

When iPhone OS 3.0 was released, like any other iPhone or iPod touch user (I use a first generation iPod touch) I began looking for push-enabled apps. There aren’t many available, but sometimes you can get push notifications for an app through unofficial means, until the developer adds them. For example, you can set up push notifications for new plurks (short messages on the Twitter-like website, Plurk) in just 5 minutes, without having to pay a dime. Here’s how:

1. Get a push-enabled IM app for your iPhone. I use eBuddy, as it’s the only free push-enabled IM iPhone app I know of. (If there are others, please say so in the comments!)
2. Go here and configure one of Plurk’s instant messaging bots for use:
   1. Type in your instant messaging username or ID in the “IM” field.
   2. Select your instant messaging service from the “Service” field. (I used Google Talk)
   3. Click the orange “SIGN UP!” button.
   4. You will now receive 4 messages from a user located under the domain “plurk.com”. (“bot@plurk.com” for Google Talk users) Reply to it with your Plurk username.
   5. Send the word “on” to the bot to enable plurk updates by instant messages.
   6. Plurking via IM is now set up! Send the word “HELP” to get a short explanation of what you can do through the bot.
3. Add the bot to your contact list.
4. Open Plurk’s Friends panel by clicking the “My Friends” link in the upper-right corner, and set up who you’d like to follow via IM by clicking on the graphic in the appropriate column (“IM Follow”). For example, to follow “John” I would click the first graphic, in this case displaying “OFF”, making it “ON”.
5. Go into the application’s settings and set up IM push.

That’s it! Now, every time a new plurk is posted, it will be pushed to your IM app. To reply to a plurk, just IM the bot with the plurk’s unique identifier and your reply. Example: “#45333 This is a response”. For more tips, go here.

As you may have noticed, eBuddy currently has an inactivity limitation of 30 minutes. So after 30 min. of not sending or receiving IMs, you will be automatically disconnected. I hope this restriction will be lifted in the future, but if you’re serious about instant messaging and do so very frequently, I suggest getting “IM+ With Push” or “Beejive”. IM+ is also on sale at the moment, sold for just $4.99 instead of $9.99, a great discount for non-stop chatters. Unrelated to the sale, I personally recommend IM+, but it’s your choice. I don’t use instant messaging that often, so I’ll stick to eBuddy for now.

New bookmarklet: Inspect website with Mcafee Site Advisor

Earlier, I was browsing the web and I discovered this site called “Zaazu”. It was something like a new “Smiley Central”, a program you install to get free smileys for your emails, IMs, social networking sites, etc. I got suspicious. So I opened the Mcafee Site Advisor website since I don’t have the extension anymore (Last time I used it was with Firefox, when I had a little automatic checker), and typed in the address. I discovered it had the same good effects (well, except the “I-installed-a-toolbar-in-your-IE-and-changed-your-search-engine-and-home-page-lol” part) which basically were allowing easy insertion of smileys, as advertised. No hot keystroke action.

Then I realized something: why should I go through the big trouble of looking it up manually every time? Why not just have a little, easy-to-use button to do it?

So, I started coding a new bookmarklet. And in a minute or two, I had a working Javascript bookmarklet which got your current site’s top directory (E.g.: Using it on “http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en” would return “www.google.com”), connected it with the Site Advisor website URL (the previous example would become “http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/www.google.com”) and browsed to it, showing you Mcafee’s professional inspection detailing how safe that website and its downloads are. All in one simple click!

To install it, go here and drag the link to your bookmarks bar or bookmarks menu. (Or button, if you’re using Firefox 3.)

Ivory should use the opposite of Apple’s slogan: “It Just Doesn’t Work.”

Time to celebrate! (Sorry for the bad quality, had to use an online photo editor.)

About a month after I got my new PC I noticed something: the power supplier was acting odd. Sometimes, out-of-the-blue it would just restart (no Windows BSOD pun intended). About 2 months later (I couldn’t find the time earlier – go figure!) I went to my PC parts supplier and assembler and asked them to replace the power supplier. They did, but then it was another odd-acting one. This time? Whenever a component needed massive power (mainly the graphics card), it would just crash electrically and will not turn back on until I switched off the power supplier, took out the power cable, put it back in, switched it on again and pressed the power button. So I went over there again. On the spot, they replaced it with another weird one. That one would not supply enough power, so whenever I tried to play a game it would run amazingly slow. And they forgot to plug the DVD drive back in when switching the cables all over the place. So this time they sent a tech to me to make it up to me and he installed a new power supplier, this time a GOOD one, (Good as in not faulty, not as in the scale: “bad-ok-good-perfect”.) and connected the drive again. Then it was all good.

Until now.

So, guess what just happened? I’m betting you’re now thinking “Is the power supplier broken again?”. Well, no. But close enough: My DVD drive just broke. It still works electrically but will not read any CDs or DVDs. (Yes, it’s a hardware problem. I ran some tests.)

So now, I have to go all the way to their nearest store, wait in line, give them the PC and do it all over a few days later when it’s replaced. Why? Because they “have to check everything” before they replace something! Right, if you would’ve done that properly, I wouldn’t be here bitching.

If one more thing breaks, I will seriously consider suing them and getting a branded PC (E.g.: HP) or a Mac. Paying more for a computer is a lot better in the long run if I don’t have to take it in for repair every few months!

(P.S.: I had the same problems as with the power supplier but with the motherboard on my previous PC (at the start), which was also from them. It fried in 3 days, then was replaced but with one that wasn’t my previous model, then replaced with a good one that was the correct model.)

Pirate the crap out of those record companies

UPDATE: Google can also be used to search for torrents explicitly! Just type in anything and attach “filetype:torrent” to the end of it, and you’ll come across nothing but torrents for what you wanted. For example, searching “fallout 3″ filetype:torrent will yield almost 800 torrent results for Fallout 3. Interesting, huh?

A while back, the Pirate Bay four (the guys hosting the website) were sued for assisting copyright infringement and copyright infringement itself and just recently, they were found guilty and sentenced to jail for one year. I’m pissed off about this, as their (the four’s) winning argument which didn’t work for some reason was right: the Pirate Bay is just like Google. It just provides links to what you want, like any other search engine. It doesn’t host the files, but just the directions – like a street expert knowing where all the drug sellers work. Want proof? Open Google, type in what you’re looking for (a song, movie, show, etc. – keep it commercial), attach the words “free download”, and hit Google Search. Voilà. You just did the same as looking up the same words on the Pirate Bay only without the “free download” appendix. Heck, even adding just “free” or “download” would work. (And honestly, using HTTP instead of torrents is sometimes a lot faster, so in this case Google may be more of a threat than the Pirate Bay. HAH.)

And so, I offer this week-long project. For every song (they were being sued by the record companies, so let’s only hit them) you’d like to download, illegally or legally, just go on Google and look it up like I said above. (song name + “free download”) (Don’t use The Pirate Bay if it comes up or iTunes or Amazon or whatever – keep it illegal.) Then, when you’re done, share the fact you just did the same as using The Pirate Bay by merely using Google along with what you were looking for and the URL. (“I just got Ciara’s Love, Sex, Magic illegally by just using a link given to me by Google, exactly like how The Pirate Bay works. http://someillegalwebsite.com”) Use Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Plurk, Identi.ca, WordPress, whatever – just let the world know The Pirate Bay is as guilty as any search engine. It just gives you a link to what you want.

Of course we won’t cause the companies to lose a ton of money, but hey – at least we’ll voice our opinion to the public. And maybe we’ll eventually get to the whole ignorant world. Maybe.

Plurk patch #1: Make qualifiers more fluid and less out-of-place

Those of us who use Plurk have come to recognize these little, button-like qualifiers that make up our thoughts, like: says, thinks, feels, wonders, etc. (If you don’t know what Plurk is, it’s a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter that has more useful features: your plurks (like tweets) can act as conversations, you can use cute & animated little emoticons, and you can unlock more emoticons and features the longer you plurk, thanks to a “site score” called karma) A while ago, when Plurk launched its CSS customization option, I wrote a little piece of code which made qualifiers have no background and a different text color in each, representing its old background color, to provide a more fluent experience on Plurk. Here’s an example:

Comparison of old layout and new layout. The top part is before, while the bottom is after.

Photo credit: Alexandra Daikon. Her page was used as it has the least CSS out of all my friends’ pages.

As you can see, the text is more fluent and the qualifier doesn’t stand out as much as before. It’s a bit easier to read, as you aren’t attracted to the qualifier immediately as before. Then, Plurk’s developers blocked changing any qualifier’s (but “says”, for some reason) background via CSS. Then, all my qualifiers, excluding “says”, appeared as just a colored box. (Since both the background and the text had the same color) So, I reverted to the previous classic qualifier, but modified it a bit.

But, I just finished writing a little bookmarklet that applies the mod I wrote earlier to any Plurk page, without having to change the CSS yourself. All you’d have to do is click the bookmarklet to apply the style, and voila. To use it, click here and drag the link in that page to your bookmarks. (WordPress won’t let me link to Javascript.) Then, to apply it, just click the bookmark once after you finish loading your Plurk page. If you experience any issues, leave a message in the comments.

I’ll release more mods that are undoable by the normal CSS function soon. If you’d like to be among the first to see them, subscribe!