shazron.com

Want to frustrate (most) e-mail address harvesters out there? Most spam operations get e-mail addresses by scraping them off websites. Using the encoder tool on this webpage, you can potentially stop your e-mail address from being harvested. Go to the tool I made here.

How does this work? The encoder basically encodes each character of your e-mail address into a “character entity reference”. This entity reference is rendered into their character equivalents in your browser so you won’t see any difference there but they exist as encoded characters (the char. entity reference) when you look into the page source. It is this encoding that will frustrate e-mail address harvesters because to them it will look like jibberish. At least until e-mail address harvesters figure out how to decode them!

I recently updated my version control system to Subversion from CVS, and so far I’m loving Subversion. I hated the fact that I couldn’t rename files/directories in CVS without losing my history which made refactoring a pain. And you gotta love the branching/tagging in Subversion, which makes a lightweight “copy” of the current trunk. And atomic commits!

AnkhSVN’s integration with Visual Studio.NET is a time saver. I’ve used TortoiseCVS before, and TortoiseSVN is even better. Find out more at the Subversion site.

At work however, they are using Team Coherence from Quality Software Components. It has an integrated bug tracker system where you can link revisions to reported bugs and such, and is very user-friendly. Definitely easier to train management and the graphic designers in using Team Coherence than CVS or Subversion I feel. Subversion is not at that level (yet).

Here’s an interesting article: “The Top Ten Subversion Tips for CVS Users”.

I dual boot Windows XP Pro (Media Center Edition) with Windows 2000 Server. I use 2000 Server for development (for my contract work), and XP Pro is used for other daily use. Of course, Visual Studio.NET 2003 is installed on both OSes, and I wanted to do some development on the XP system (haven’t done this in a while), and when I hit “Ctrl-F5″ (start without debugging) on one of my projects a dialog popped up (after hanging the IDE for 3 mins) with this message:

“Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.
The debugger is not properly installed. Run setup to install or repair the
debugger.”

Huh? This hasn’t happened before. Of course I Googled for a solution, and partly came to it from Gregg M.’s weblog. I knew the only thing that changed was I installed XP Service Pack 2, and that could be the source of the problem.

It turned out it was Office 2003. It had replaced everything in “%CommonProgramFiles%/Microsoft Shared/VS7Debug” with its own versions especially the Machine Debug Manager (mdm.exe), and it was this Office 2003 version that was not able to be loaded by Visual Studio.NET.

Following the instructions here, I managed to fix debugging.

Maya Bay was a nice destination for my honeymoon on Phi Phi Island (it’s in Thailand, eh). Excellent snorkeling nearby in the other bays, but not at Maya Bay though. Extremely crowded! Got there by private boat (powered by a longtail prop). Of course, if you must know the bay has been popularized by the movie “The Beach” starring Leo DiCaprio.

I took the panoramic image that is the title image of this site, but I didn’t lock the exposure on some parts of the image, and some parts don’t blend well (I didn’t have a tripod handy). The panoramic image was created using the PhotoMerge feature in Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 2.0.

View the panoramic image as a Quicktime VR file (3.5 Megabytes).