A startup, based in San Francisco, called inbox in reverse, "XOBNI" are working on a software to better manage your emails.

These guys have been working on their startup company product since 2006. They are currently in Beta version.

XOBNI promises to orginize your emails in relationship contexts from historical emails as well as the web.

Check them out by clicking on the image link below.

Have you got an HP Compaq nw9440 laptop?

They're a great laptop with lots of grunt and a huge screen. And this is exactly why I decided to buy one of them.

These little wonders come with an NVIDIA Quadro 1500M chipset that does all the drawing on your 17" screen. But the driver that comes with the laptop is old and is the only driver from HP that has an installer that works for this chipset.

The HP driver works fine. Well, almost. It works fine for most situations, but starts falling for applications with lots of text. For example, when working with large Excel spreadsheets, I had Excel crash more than 5 times on me in a day. Each time this happens, it was preceeded by certain misbehaviour in drawing cells, rows, or refreshing the display. Let this happen a few times and kaboom!

This calls for a driver upgrade. Surely HP or NVIDIA must have fixed this issue by now. So I searched HP's website for an updated driver with no luck there. Then I moved on to search on NVIDIA's website. And behold, I find a newer release of the driver.

I downloaded the Quadro FX driver for Windows XP and tried to install it, but it failed with this error:

"nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit." 

The reason this installer fails is that it couldn't find the device it was written for. The installer will run for the Quadro 1500 chipset but not for the 1500M. M stands for mobile.

Hum.....

Force installing the driver seemed to me a good solutions. I was desparate to fix the redraw issue in Excel.

Again this did not fix my problem. It did however delay it from happening and Excel was crashing less often.

To plan B. I decided after this failure to download the NVIDIA FX drivers (162.18_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe). Similar to its Quadro brother, the installer did not run on the nw9440.

Didn't NVIDIA manufacture and sell this chipset?

Why is it then that they don't provide an updated driver for it?

Let me see, hardware ... software... software for hardware... hummmm. Duuuhhhh!

Well you want a solution. Luckily I've got one for you.

Please note that if you follow my solution here, do so at your own perril. I take no responsibility for any damage or result of taking action based on my blog. If you are unsure of what this procedure does or the effects of it, please do not try to follow it.

If you read on NVIDIA's forums, you can see the frustration of people with this chipset.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t26943.html

Well I guss Ill just answer my own question, since it doesn't seem anyone here had come accross this problem.
I called nVidia, and sorry for my flame on this, but I was informed that nVidia doesn't support the Mobile graphics chips (beside the Go serieis).
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Then why is it that when I download the driver from HP, it unzips and then launches the NVIDIA install package?!!!
Thats not an HP driver!
Anyway, Im sure there is a valid explanation for this, but I find it to be silly.
So for anyone who may come accross this problem:
I ended up FORCE installing just the regular Quadro FX 1500 driver from 100.59 (instead of the 1500M).
So far so good, I havn't had a crash yet, but I am still throwing games and apps at it to make sure.

Although Dave suggests a solution in the forum, it did not work for me.

Run dpinst.exe

Then, update video driver, say browse my computer, and let me pick , use have disk, point to the folder the above loaded files which is
windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\nv_lh.inf

Works like a champ and I have all the resolutions for the display now.

Dave

I couldn't find dpinst.exe nor could I find nv_lh.inf.

What I did find, though, was a file called "nvbl.inf" in the Windows\system32 directory. This file has the parameters needed by the installer. Take the values in "nvbl.inf" and place them in the file "nv4_disp.inf" found in the NVIDIA installer directory. I will leave a link to the file as I have modified it if you want to grab a copy and see what I've done.

Click here to get my copy of nv4_disp.inf

I ran "setup.exe" and now it happily installed.

After a reboot, I loaded up the large Excel spreadsheet I was working on a gave it a try. After 15 minutes of trying, it didn't crash. So I've got my solution, it seems.

UPDATE 1

After a few hours of work, I put my laptop in standby mode and when I restarted it, it seems the issue is back. This time, I noticed bad display with Internet Explorer. When I use the mouse scroll wheel to move up and down pages, it leaves white marks behind. Google search results seems to do it quite often.

Back to searching. This time I was looking for the "NVIDIA_G71.DEV_029B.2", which is the driver name for the 1500M chipset. Found the following link http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1315, but it's dated back to 2006-02-03 21:55:56. Don't want that.

Now from the previous thread I went to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8128. Very interesting post indeed. Let's see where this will take us.

From laptopvideo2go's website I got to this easy to follow thread:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9243

So far so good but none of the modified inf files work with the latest driver, so back to modifying the inf file manually.

Click here to get the inf file for the nVidia Quadro 91.85 version.

This seems to work.

1. Download the nVidia Quadro 91.85 installer from nvidia's website.
2. Use the modified inf file to replace the one that comes with the 91.85 installer
3. Install the driver

UPDATE 2

30 hours running so far without any issues. Looks like this was the solution.

Hope that it works out for you.

What is Quintura?

Quintura is a search engine, but not a Google or Yahoo! clone as such. In fact, its results are retrieved from Yahoo's directory through the use of their XML API but the presentation of the results is quite intruiging.

As you can see from the snapshot below, the user interface is split into 3 main sections, the top search bar, a left category presentation of the data, and a right search result.

When you enter a search term in the search text box and click on the loop icon, the matches and associated or related categories are displayed in the left part of the screen. To the right you should see a list of links to websites or pages.

When I searched for "hoohee", I got a list of categories from which I selected "free download" by clicking on it with the mouse. The top 4 results came all from this website. Interesting.

I then jumped and tried to search for my free radio automation software, Broadcast Power. The term "Broadcast Power" returned a link from hoohee.com in the third place. So, I tried selecting the different categories from the left to see if I can narrow my search and get to the home of Broadcast Power, http://www.bp2x.com. Couldn't do it by selecting from the categories.

Plan B. Let's search for "radio automation software" then. No where to be found there too, which is fine. This time there was a "free" category. Clicking on this one didn't return bp2x.com, but it did return at the top of the list "R.O.S.S. - Free Software for Radio Automation". R.O.S.S. has a link to bp2x.com. Not quite the same thing, but good enough.

I'm not too sure how to rate this engine. It definitely is an improvement on your standard search engines in terms of user friendliness of data presentation. I like the fact that it does not use flash to present the results, although, admitedly, I fancy nice graphics of some other search engines with flash user interfaces. However, flash powered search sites tend to be a bit slower than their HTML counterparts.

Give it a try, you might like it.

I will blog next about another search engine with an interesting flash user interface.

If you're an MSDN subscriber and are sick of waiting for slow file transfers for the ISO images on the site, you'll be pleased to know that there is a solution.

The reason the download might be slow is the fact that a DNS lookup from your Internet service provider might return an IP for a replica MSDN download machine on a slow network. To connect to MSDN file servers on the faster networks, you will need to change your hosts file to resolve the following domain global.ds.microsoft.com into an IP address of a MSDN download server on the faster network. Also, you need to add the site to your trust list in Internet Explorer.

One of the IP addresses I've tested to work faster is: 207.46.252.185

You can read more on how to do this on the following sites:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/11/20/speed-up-and-download-faster-from-microsoft-msdn-downloads/

and

http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss/archive/2005/06/07/410690.aspx

Firstly, I'd like to wish you all a happy new year. I know it's too late but I know you'll forgive my lateness, especially that I haven't wrote a line on this site since last year.

Yesterday, we got our new broadband connection (ADSL2+ Annex M) provisioned at the office and I wanted to see how fast it is.

Well, it was darn fast. The theoretical limit is 24Mbps upload and 2Mbps download. In reality the tests showed a 6.6 Mbps upload and 850 Kbps download speeds. I am not too sure if that's due to the limits of the server with which I was testing or the actual pipe.

If you want to test your connection speed and compare with others, I suggest you have a look at .

Speedtest has a nice GUI and links to lots of servers in most regions of Earth.

I tested with the Melbourne server, the closest to me. Make sure you pick one close, geographically, to your base connection.

It's been a while since I've blogged. As a matter of fact, I was bogged down at work with tight deliveries and not enough resources. Any help is appreciated.

Now back to the subject of this blog.

During one of my business trips, I decided to buy a Linux magazine out of curiosity. What grabbed my attention was the double sided DVD with all those Linux distribution to test and a couple of articles on some graphics software. I am so glad for being curious. I discovered, to my surprise, how sleek Linux has become. Of the few distribution I've ran and tested, I like Open SUSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 the most.

I haven't touched or worked with Linux for more than 7 years now. My first experience with Linux sucked. I tried installing Linux about 7 years ago on a laptop. I struggled for a week and then decided to dump it for Windows. The problem with Linux then was that it didn't have a simple installer and it didn't support hardware devices like Windows.

So, 7 years on, I decided to give it another try, except that this time I installed it on my home PC. The system configuration is a P4 3.02 Ghz (dual core) with 1GB RAM and 2 x 120GB SATA hard disks. The VGA card is an nVidea. The motherboard is ASUS with onboard LAN and DSP (Audio card). I have an external USB SB Extigy, a USB Canon ImageClass MPC600F printer and a Lexmark Optra T616 network printer.

I installed the Fedora Core 5 distribution on the above configuration, using only one of the hard disks. I partitioned the disk in three, the main or boot partition, the secondary or data partition and the swap partition. I set the swap partition to 5 GB and split the rest among the other two partitions.

Installing Fedora was a breeze. The installer is graphical and easy to follow and it detected most of my hardware devices. But I wished running all the devices on Linux was as simple as the first step.

After the first boot of the system on Linux, I was amazed at how nice the Gnome desktop is. But unfortunately, Linux failed to recognize my Extigy audio device. It did show a USB audio device with the name Extigy, but couldn't play a sound or do anything with the device. After researching for hours, I found a device driver for it on creative's open source website. To my bad luck, it's not an easily deployable device driver. I have to recompile the Linux kernel to get it working. I haven't done so yet, but I'll share my experience with you when done.

The next setback was the Canon printer. I couldn't manage to have Linux recognize it. The internet is your friend when you're running Linux. So trawling for a few more hours I failed to find a Linux driver for this device. It seems Canon doesn't provide a Linux driver. I should voice my dissatisfaction about Linux supportability with Canon. Linux is generating headway in the desktop space and we need hardware vendors to back up the Linux community.

The third setback with Fedora was the fact that it doesn't allow you to mount NTFS volumes. Connecting to Windows shared folders was as simple as point and click. Unfortunatley, mounting NTFS volumes wasn't that easy. For some weird intellectual property reason Red Hat doesn't include NTFS support with its distribution. So I had to search the internet and found an unofficial site describing the procedure for adding NTFS support in Fedora (http://www.fedorafaq.org/#ntfs).

Three days on, I still don't have a fully functional Linux. So I decided to remove Fedora and try with Suse next week. I have seen the Suse live distro DVD and it looks nice. Suse does come with NTFS support, so one less thing to do. Also Suse 10.1 comes with XGL (Xserver on top of OpenGL) which produces faster screen rendering and some snazzy effects. I am also hoping that Suse will identify my Extigy. Stay tuned for more.

On a final note, I really love the tools and programs that come with most of the major distros. Specifically, I loved the Open Office 2.2 that I replaced my Office 2003 with it. It may be early days for such a drastic decision but I didn't hesitate to switch over.

My next steps will be to get Suse up and running and install MONO, Kylix, Eclipse and play around with GTK+ development.

This information is presented for your convenience and we do not take any responsibility for the use or misuse of this information.

1. Generate password of at least 8 characters in length.
2. Mix both alpha and numeric characters.
3. Don't use words from the dictionary.
4. Don't write your passwords down.
5. Random and meaningless strings are the best, if you can remember them.
6. Use a formula to with an easy to remember number and mix it with the reverse order of a word or string that you know by heart. As an example you can use ln(X) where X is the number you know and then take a word or string like "Hellomyfriend" and mix them. To be more concrete I will assume X is 1234. ln(X) = 7.1180162044653331234148038000684. Now we can mix with our string and the generated password becomes "7dn1ei1rf8ym0ol1le6H".