Yesterday was trying to fix my Xbox 360 controller’s receiver for PC by taping a conductor across the fuse, well, it didn’t when well, since the tape can’t hold it up to the board, so head to Ace Hardware and grab a soldering tools, and now it fixed!! Just felt that I’m waiting something to happen by fixing it myself.

It’s been a while since last update, it had been super busy month for me, and I still having busy month waiting ahead.

While trying to play some game to relief a bit from work, I found that my Xbox 360 controller’s receiver for my PC isn’t working anymore, Windows does not detect it, the light doesn’t glow, and the best part is I lost the receipt (Ouch!), I guess I can’t send it for warranty.

So then I found a fix on the receiver (duh, why Xbox’s product having this hardware problem).

First, I have to get the cover open, it don’t have screw any where, it’s glued to the based, so I have to lever it up through the back of the receiver, which I found it is more easy to get in as the back there is rubber.

After get a crack from the back there, will need to proceed to the side.

After that the board need to be take out, the fuse is located at behind of the board. Unscrew the only 2 screw on the board, and flip it over.

The problem is fuse, it burn or something, and we need to bypass it by soldering the 2 side together skipped over the middle part, where fuse sit, at the F1 location on the board.

Too bad I don’t have the soldering tools, but tested with some conductor, it works, I wish I can say I fixed. While I get my soldering tools, I’ll just stop gaming at the moment. But not sure if bypassed the fuse will bring any harm to the receiver or my CPU, finger crossing.

Recently found out a HTML5 example, showing off the power of the new HTML version, sadly, it doesn’t works on IE8. Try the Sketchpad demo here

Apple’s iTunes appears on Facebook page, am not sure when it’s first appearance, but what I know is, they offering 20 free songs for iTunes user, to be precise, U.S iTunes store customer, valid until 15 March 2010 only.

Since I already using an U.S iTunes Store account, so I’m eligible to get those songs, simply become a fans of iTunes and add the apps, then we can use the link to launch the iTunes and the 20 free songs will waiting in the download list.

Wandering around the net, and found that Microsoft and a university is doing a research on a new multi touch table, and it’s cooler than Surface.

Heard about Excel’s VLOOKUP for quite some times, but still not sure what it does and what it use for. Having help my friend with some files, I learned that Excel can be quite flexible.

My friend are required to prepare a Excel report/form that need to draw data from another sheet, which will shows in a convenient drop down list, after selected, the other respective cell should automatically filled.

To start, we need to create a data list in a sheet, for example sake, I used fruits as the list, with some sample fruit’s code and price for each. Now I need to prepare the name for future use, select all the fruits name, and key in the name ‘FRUITLIST’ as the name, and hit enter.

The fruit list is for the drop down list data source, now we need to create a list for the other cell to retrieve data when the fruit’s name are selected.

Now, on my second sheet, on the cell that wanted to serve as drop down list, select Data from the menu, and then Data Validation. On the Data Validation window, choose List for the Allow, and =FRUITLIST as the Source, and click OK. Now the cell got a little arrow on the right hand side, click on it should show the list of the fruits from sheet 1.

On the cell that we wanted to show the code, we key in the formulae =IF(A2=””,””,VLOOKUP(A2,FRUITS,2)), where A2 is the cell where we created it as drop down list, first, we use the IF statement to check for A2 value, means if we did not choose anything from the list, this cell will be empty, else, we use the VLOOKUP to grab data, first parameter A2 is what we want to lookup, second parameter, FRUITS is where we want to lookup from, and the 2 is which column (it is the column for the FRUITS, but not sheet1).

Now when we choose the fruits from the list, the Code and the Price (will need to use the same formulae used on Code, but with different column) will be auto populated.

The OpenID idea is great, save the hassle for user to register before they can start using the page, the idea is like using existing OpenID supported provider, like Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, etc to login to OpenID supported site and start using the site.

With RPX, they provide developer and easy to use services, the paid services with handy API is rather expensive, but the basic one do well for most of the time. After registered the basic account, we’ll have 6 slots for providers, some provider required us to setup on their site first, like Facebook, we need to create an application, so do Twitter, as for Windows Live, we need to setup and Live Services on Azure.

All the login interface is taking care by RPX script, which we can get it from their site, is few lines of JavaScript that put on our page’s HTML. What we need to do is to trap the post data token returned after user successfully logged in through the provider. In C#, can do it this way, for the sake of example:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {  
  if (Request["token"] != null) {
    //now we get the token needed for our POST call
  }  
}  

Because I’m using the free package, so I don’t have access to nice API call, what I can do is to retrieve the basic information from the provider, using this https://rpxnow.com/api/v2/auth_info?apiKey=&token=&format=xml. The apiKey is the key we get to identify the RPX account we are using, and we can get the apiKey after registered an account. Token is the key retrieved from the POST data after the user logged in using their selected provider. By default, the RPX return us result in JSON format, I’m not familiar with it, so I pass in format=xml to ask RPX return me in XML format.

To call the POST in .net:

WebRequest wRequest;  
Stream stream;  
StreamReader streamReader;  
WebResponse wResponse;

string response = "";  
string url = "https://rpxnow.com/api/v2/auth_info?apiKey=";
string api = "someAPIKey";  
wRequest = WebRequest.Create(url + api + "&token=" + token + "&format=xml");  
wResponse = wRequest.GetResponse();  
stream = wResponse.GetResponseStream();  
streamReader = new StreamReader(stream);  
response = streamReader.ReadToEnd();  

and we’ve get the result in XML format!

There are few info we can get from the call, like username, provider name, the identifier for the provider, photo (if applicable), name, family name , phone and others depends on which provider, some data is common for all (I’m not yet tested all) provider.

Happy logging in and logging out~

I had a very good day to start my whole new 2010 year, I received a special gift, a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate, oh yeah~~~, I got to thanks a person for giving me this special gift of all time, hell yeah, is me!! Thanks me very much!

I took around 20minutes to install my Windows 7, including reboot time, is a very good experience. Well, this is also my very first time of phone activation, due to my stupid connection is down again. At first I thought I’m going to talk to an operator, but it isn’t, is actually an very smart automated activation process, where I will greet by a recorded girl operator, and the nice thing is, I can speak to make my option, rather than old fashion pressing the number.

I’m required to give the system around 8 or 9 groups of digits, I’m taking the opportunity to try the speech recognition, since I dialed Malaysia’s number, I thought it should be able to recognized the local slang. After 2nd times complained by the operator, said that she can’t understand me, she suggest me to use the keypad instead, I’m LOL at the moment.

Well, there are couple of things that I noticed in Windows 7. We can now link our online ID to our local account, according to the helps, it said that it can make us easily share files over the network and online, just using the ID, rather than creating a user account on the local computer for other user, I’m all alone in the network, and my line is too slow for upload, so I guess I will give it a pass.

There is also a small helpful (some how) check box in IP setting dialog, which it will auto call up network troubleshoot to verify our connection once we save the setting. I’m not quite sure about the tablet handwriting input panel that float on the left/right edge of the screen, it got new features that can let us to split, merge, correct the handwriting more easily, and also, the virtual keyboard came with it, now have large button, I guess they are made for the touch screen.

One thing I noticed, one the safely remove hardware icon, it list all my internal hard drive as well, it is because all my drive enabled the caching by default, it said to be increase performance, so I’m not going to turn it off, hopefully I didn’t click on it.

Beside they remove one game that is newly added in Vista, they also removed the sticky notes gadget, and add in a not so useful Media Center gadget, why?

I still love my Windows 7 after all…

edit: Energy screen saver is missing as well.

I bought Office 2007, and I got Outlook 2007, I used to use it with outlook connector to download my Hotmail and Live Mail’s email, but my Hotmail doesn’t work with it any more, I can’t figure out what is the freaking problem caused, my Live account works very well.

After contacted Microsoft Support several time, they told me that something is wrong with my MSN account on their server, so they assisted me to reset the setting, after that they follow-up with helpful email to teach me clean Outlook Connector and re-add my Hotmail into my cleaned Outlook again. It works very well, for 3 days, after that it keep on showing error on mail like usual. I can’t no longer send, receive email.

After months of frustration, I decided to go Windows Live Mail, although it looks like a child thing compared to Outlook, but it works! But after a while enjoying, it starts to not sync my email properly, but it still working, just not that consistent. And now, Microsoft released Outlook Hotmail Connector beta some time back, it still gave me problem with Outlook, but right after I remove all mail, delete profile, and recreate everything, it now works again! Oh yeah!

Working with a project, some page happen to use query string a lots, passing data in the URL, there are a lots of data passing through the URL. Finally I ran into a problem:

The server complaint that the URL is too long, guess it can’t digest. According to Microsoft, the maximum length for URL is 2,083, ran a test to verify, the exceeded character is truncated. But in my case, we are passing data in the URL, and we need the server to accept it, of course, there is always a better solution! If it happen that we do not have permission or some reason to edit the source, we could tell the IIS to accept more, by adding this,

<configuration> 
  <system.webServer> 
    <security> 
      <requestFiltering> 
        <requestLimits  
          maxAllowedContentLength="30000000"  
          maxUrl="260"  
          maxQueryString="1000"
        /> 
      </requestFiltering> 
    </security> 
  </system.webServer> 
</configuration>

The maxQueryString can be set to allow more, yet, I’m still not verify what is the maximum for this and what is the possible impact on the server apart from heavy data problem, I guess the default maximum there for a reason, so is best to not abusing the setting.