If you like curry fish ball , there is one place that I would say not the best in town but still I can’t miss out every time when I visit Lowyat Plaza. The stall just located in front of Lowyat Plaza facing Sungei Wang Plaza.

A friend recently approached me to look for a used laptop with a budget in mind. Guest what , I managed to get one and this model was Hp Pavilion dv4-1167Tx. When the unit arrived , I was thinking this is a high performance machine and bundle with lots of stuff from Hp. It did stuffed with lots of thing inside … with some noisy sound when the machine was running.

After some inspection , I found that the system fan was too dirty and need some cleaning. The easiest way to do that without dismantle the machine is to use a vacuum cleaner and suck all the dust from the breathing hole or duct ( what ever you name it ). Amazingly after the vacuum session , the sound was gone. Now the machine start running quietly, no more sound pollution. Somehow the performance of the machine at this moment is far below expectation. It was so slow that even it take too long to load a single program and the taskbar is full of shortcut icon, not to mention the desktop. There are at least 30 over icons on the desktop and for me this is a bullshit.

Guys…. doesn’t mean that it was named shortcut , then you need or wish to put all those  program shortcut on the desktop. Unless you upgrade your machine with extra memory RAM, if not all this will only slow down your machine. This Hp Pavilion dv4 was stuffed with 4Gb of memory RAM and what a waste of that , with that kind of performance in hand. Plus…. Windows Vista Home Premium as the operating system.

I finally made up my mind to restore the machine back to it’s factory default value. But I was thinking Hp must be putting a lot of software into the machine , so that if someone buy their products, the buyer don’t need to add anymore software for daily computing task. I started my work restoring the machine back to it’s default state. While waiting for the process to run , what else if not to grab a coffee.

Read More »

Another project that I had just completed for a friend. The photos are not as good as expected, ( photo taken using iPhone … no flash and this is the result…” sigh”… ). A friend recently came over to have some soccer game … and are amazed with what a computer can do beyond just ordinary office task. So he decided to have one of his own system that can play the soccer game ( Pro Evolution 2010 ) and at the meantime serving multimedia files when needed. And all of this task to be displayed with his LCD TV. A total Home Media Center…

Below are the spec’s :-

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz (E7400 Wolfdale).
• Gigabyte motherboard.
• Samsung DVD writer.
• 2Gb DDR II memory RAM.
• 320Gb Sata HDD.
• Apacer card reader.
• Nvidia GT220 Graphic with 1Gb DDR III ram.
• Htpc multimedia casing.
• Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse.
• LCD TV.
• HDMI cable.
• 2.1 speaker system.
• Joystick controller.
• Windows 7 Ultimate – ( Windows Media Center with plug-in and add-on ).
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 ( Blend nicely into Media Center start menu strip ).

After all this is not the highest spec I ever build but the system is more than enough for him to play games, enjoying multimedia files and doing regular daily computing. There’s a lot of room for upgrade in the future like adding extra memory RAM , HDD, TV card, Blue-Ray player and etc.

This a tutorial on how to setup RSS Feed for an ordinary html website. If you are using a blog then this is not for you because every blog system will have their own build in RSS Feed .This tutorial need you to have a basic knowledge of markup language and usage of “File Transfer Protocol” because later you will need a ftp client to upload your files to your web server.

Things you need to have:

1. Notepad or any text editor.
2. FTP client software.

Step 1:

Start your text editor and type in this code

Save the file as rss.xml (with xml is the file extension). Ok let’s review the code and some explaination of what does the code do. In this set of code you will see some tags. There are title, link, channel, pubdate and item tags. Let me explain what this tag means and how do you use it.

If you are familiar with what is RSS FEED , then you should know that you subcribe to a website by clicking the website’s RSS link and subcribe. Sometime when you visit a news portal like staronline.com ( Online version of English press in Malaysia named Star ) , you will see a lot or at least more than one RSS FEED link that you can subcribe. We named all the RSS FEED link in that website as a channel. So this shows that staronline.com have several channel of news and you can subcribe to the channel that you most interested seperately.

Anyhow for an ordinary website , we only need one channel and in this tutorial I will use one channel for a reference.

Ok, now add a title to your channel by typing a name, in the title  tag. and type your website’s address into the link tag. Remember, to type the words in between your opening tag and closing tag.

Step 2:

What does item tag do? Ok, in this case item tag represent your article or news. So if you have 3 latest news then you will have 3 set of item tag. Inside item tag there’s some other tag’s that represent the content of each item.

For pubDate tag  you need to follow the following format.  Sun, 19 May 2002 15:21:36 GMT.

If you have more than one item, then repeat the step as mention above.Remember all your item tag need to be wrapped by channel tag.

If you put in two item in step two , your code will look like this,

And the complete code will be like this,

Step 3:

Now save this file.

Step 4:

Fire up your FTP client and upload this file to the root directory of your website. Next you need to download your website landing page which is normally named “index”. The file can be index.html , index.php or index.asp.

Step 5:

open the file that you have just downloaded with your text editor. You need to put in a line of code into the <head> tag. Type in the code as show below.

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Type in your feed title here” href=”Type in the url of the rss.xml file here”>

rss.xml is the file that you uploaded earlier to your webserver. Remember the line of code above need to be wrapped by head tag. This means that the code need to be in between opening head tag and closing head tag of your html page.

Step 6:

Now you need to create a link somewhere in your webpage, so that your visitor will know that they can subcribe to your website by clicking that link. You can put a RSS icon if you want.

Step 7:

Save the file and upload the file back to your website and overwrite the old file.

Step 8:

Now all you have to do is to edit the RSS FEED file which is the rss.xml file, everytime when you update your website .You need to update the item tag properties accordingly.

Above are 8 simple steps to add a RSS FEED function to your normal website.This wraps up my tutorial and hope this will help in your future project.

I like shopping and do my own cooking when ever I had the time. That’s the reason why we always do shopping and stuff that we bought usually are for cooking. I love doing western dishes and my most top of the menu will be pasta and steak. Plus some red wine will be very nice. I was thinking of doing a website about various recipes around the world for some remarkable dishes and some cocktails . But I ‘m too lazy for that at this moment. I was very busy with the upkeep of my other website. A website about web design and also computer technology.

But somehow I will try to share most of the tips and some good recipes from the Internet here. I just love cooking and who said man can’t cook…

Above are some photos taken during our weekend shopping at Jusco.