Jabunta

It’s almost the time of Chinese New Year 2010 or it’s also called Lunar New Year by English speakers. This year, Chinese New Year (or Hari Raya Imlek in Indonesian language) will be celebrated at the same with Valentine’s Day, which is February 14th. Unfortunately, this Indonesian National Holiday is at Sunday. I mean unfortunately because I was hoping for extra holiday in workdays. Hahaha. Well, everyone has their wishes.

Chinese New Year 2010 will the transition from Ox Year into Tiger Year. Many things will happen this year, some could be good things, some could be bad things. As for Chinese or whoever celebrates this Lunar New Year, there is belief of Chinese Zodiac, Fortune Cookies and Chinese Lucky Symbols. What are they?

If you are familiar with Astrological Sign, then Chinese Zodiac is quite similar. The difference is Astrological Sign is assigned based on in which date range does your birthday fell and Chinese Zodiac is assigned based on your birth year. There are 12 animals representing the year. As for 2009, the animal is Ox and Tiger for 2010.

Meanwhile, Fortune Cookies is crisp cookie with “fortune” paper wrapped inside it. You can usually find it in Chinese Restaurant or access this Fortune Cookies application.

What about Chinese Lucky Symbols? Chinese characters usually have one or more meanings and some of them are particularly loved by Chinese people. You can pick one for yourself using this Chinese Lucky Symbols application.

Having these three information, I hope you will cherish the Chinese New Year celebration.

By the way, Cap Go Meh will be celebrated on March 1st, 2010. And don’t forget to give me angpao (money in red envelope), OK?

I always see some funny Facebook wall in my new news feed and I can’t help not to share it to you. The contents are sometimes funny, sad, genius, and many emotionally smart content. So, I want to share some of my Funny Facebook Wall. I also share some of them in Indonesian language (bahasa Indonesia), entitled Status Lucu Facebook.

It does not hurt you to read one of my poems occasionally :D. I want to share my first poem to you as I have kept it for myself too long (well, almost three years). You can access Fall otw to AH poem here. Just skip the Indonesian text, the poem is in English (I hope my grammar is fine, well, it’s poem either way). Have a nice read!

Have you tired entering question “How to search unknown driver for hardware ?” into search engine? Or, you might forget to back up your computer driver CD or lost it somewhere. Meanwhile, you just did a fresh installation of operating system. For that problem, I have solution that you might find useful in your daily routine involving hardware driver installing process.

1. Open Device Manager in your computer/laptop. Click Start, then right click on My Computer, then click Properties.

After System Properties dialog box pop-up, choose Hardware tab and then choose Device Manager.

2. On Device Manager, right click on the unknown hardware driver. Click Details tab.
You can find keyword needed to identify the device. In this case, the keyword is “VEN_14F1&DEV_2BFA”. Having this keyword, we know that the Vendor Code is 14F1 and the Device Code is 2BFA.

3. Then, open PCIdatabase.com website, this is a popular website providing information about computer device. Enter the Vendor Code or the Device Code to start the searching process. For your information, PCIdatabase.com only provides information about the device, you can also find URL to download the driver most of the time. In case there is no URL, just search the required driver in the Internet. Having information about the device name, IMHO, is enough to retrieve several links from search engine.

I hope this information can be useful for you.

I just found this image in my computer. I don’t remember where I got this image. One thing for sure is that the image depicts the internet speeds and costs around the world. I am not sure in which year the graphic was created. It was probably around 2008-2009. The graphic contains top 20 Nations in ITIF Broadband Rankings.

What I can understand from the image is that Japan has been penetrated with 61mbps internet connection and the cost is only $0.27/month. YES, IT’S TRUE. WOWWWW!!!!. Well, sorry for my hysterical response. I couldn’t help it. Indonesia is not even in the top 20, not to mention the internet cost.

I thought The Netherlands would be in the top 5 countries for Internet speed and costs (I lived in The Netherlands for 3 years), but I was wrong. The Top 5 countries were Japan, Korea, Finland, Sweden, and France (61mbps, 46mbps, 22mbps, 18.2mbps, and 17.6mbps, respectively). Netherlands was in sixth position. How about USA? Uncle Sam was behind Iceland and Germany (4.8mbps). In the 20th position was Greece.

I almost forgot to mention that about 60% of Japanese (approximately 76 million people out of 125 million people, data 2009) has access to this broadband internet connection. In USA, only about 8%-10% of American (approximately 27 million people out of 308 million people, estimated data 2010) has the access to the broadband internet connection.

I hope the cheap and fast broadband internet connection will penetrate Indonesia in near future.

You might a little paranoid when someone is trying to access their flash disk, external hard disk, or CD/DVD in your personal computer or laptop. You do not have clues of where those media have been “traveling”. They could be infected by malware from computer somewhere.
Worse, you might not know that when you plug your flash disk, hard disk or trying to access your CD/DVD, Windows will do autorun by default. What is autorun? Autorun is a process run by operating system when a drive is mounted. In most of the time, virus was also trying to execute itself when autorun is running.
What the malware would do to computer? Well, the bottom line is your productivity will decrease and not to mention, your stress level could be skyrocketing.
Then, how to disable Windows autorun? You could try these steps:

• Click Start button
• Click Run
• Type GPEDIT.MSC. Then Group Policy screen will appear
• On Computer Configuration dan User Configuration menu, click Administrative templates
• Click System
• Right click on Turn On Autoplay, choose Properties. Then the Turn on Autoplay propeties screen will appear
• In Setting tab, pilih Enabled
• In Turn off Autoplay on column, chooseAll drives
• Click Ok

Well, good luck trying!

My year 2010 was started with laptop’s problem. When my brother was connecting to free broadband wifi in my town, the power was suddenly off. After the laptop was connected with the power supply, the operating system was error. My Windows XP Media Center Edition can not properly do the booting process. I have tried to repair the system file by using Windows CD. However it failed big time. Why? Just continue reading.

Some of my laptop problems are:
1. The DVD Room can not be used to read data. I can put DVD on it, and judging by the sound it produces when the DVD just entered the hardware, there is no problem with the power cable or the DVD optical reader. I suspected that it must’ve been the software.
Despite the hours I have spent on the Internet, I haven’t found the solution yet. I have tried fixing it by installing software, and the most extreme (I also got the advice from the Internet) is by whacking the laptop gently three or four times (and still FAILED).

I am still researching. Some says that it has to be the operating system that has problems. Well, I’ll inform you if I have the right solution. I found out that many people have the similar problems.

2. It’s hard to believe that my laptop series can not be found in Acer official website. My laptop is Acer Aspire 5672WLMi.
The implication is it’s hard to find the right driver for my laptop’s hardware. Until now, I can not find about 3 more drivers for the hardware. Even, it took me 3 days, wandering around the Internet just to search the right driver for my VGA card. For your information, the VGA card is ATI Radeon Mobility x1600.

I have tried to install the driver from ATI’s official website for this type VGA card. However, it failed big time. The driver is not suitable for the hardware.
After a while, I finally stumbled upon a great website, providing the driver and great additional software for my ATI Radeon x1600.

Before I give the website link, I also want to inform you that my device manager keep telling me that the correct driver is something about “Video Controller (VGA Compatible)”. I have searched the Video Controller (VGA Compatible) driver; however, after I downloaded the software and try to install it, the driver did not work.

Well, no further due, my ATI Radeon Mobility x1600 driver was downloaded from Omega Drivers website. Using tagline “Home of the ATI & NVIDIA Omega Drivers”, the website provides you the required VGA card driver. Along with ATI Radeon graphics, the website is also the house of NVIDIA GeForce drivers and 3DFX Interactive driver. The later sadly is no longer under development. In this website, you can search the right driver for your graphic card. By the way, if you are satisfied by the software, please do not hesitate to donate money. It can be used for further development.

Hope the remaining problems will be solved in no time.

Well, I just realized that I only posted one article after I delivered my Happy New Year 2009 message last year. Pathetic right? Not really an example of a discipline blogger. Well, everyone has their time for that.

Quoting from Charles Dickens (English novelist (1812 - 1870))’ book, A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”

What can I say, 2009 maybe one case of the worst of times and lack of wisdom :D.
It’s 2010 now. Before talking about this year, I want to congratulate you with Merry Christmas 2009 and Happy New Year 2010. It’s not late to say Merry Christmas, in fact, I’ll have my first Christmas celebration this year in my place (last year Christmas is sometimes celebrated after 25th of December and in January the next year here). I can only wish that 2010 will be a great year for us, in respect of love, economic, work, relationship with family, friends, colleague, study or whatever thing you want to achieve this year.

Last but not the least, keep visiting my website, please don’t hesitate to comment. Okay?