Sunny Wu’s Blogging Zone

I was installing Windows Vista Business version on my Macbook to test-run Vista through Bootcamp. I tried to get it to connect to a password-protected shared folder on another Windows XP desktop. So I followed what I always did in the same situation when I was using a Windows XP desktop:

1. Go to Windows Explorer
2. Type the path to the shared folder on the server machine (e.g. \\xp\abc) on the address bar
3. It should prompt for my username and password to access this password-protected folder.
4. Connected and you can browse the files.

But in Vista, I just could not find a way to see the username & password prompt. I got this:

So I tried to dig around for the solution on the Internet and the best I could figure out is to run this command in a command window(press Windows Key+R and then type “cmd” and press Enter):

net use Z: \\xpmachine \abc2 * /USER:joe /Persistent:YES

Assuming “xpmachine” is the Windows XP computer name, the shared folder is called “abc” and the usename to access this shared folder is “joe”.

Press Enter and it will prompt you for the password and after you enter it then you can access the shared folder on “Z:” drive (and you can change it to “V:” or other unused letters).

The “/Persistent:YES” option is used so that next time you log into your Vista desktop, “Z:” will still be mapped to the “abc” shared folder but when you try to access it in Windows Explorer, this time will give you the nice password prompt, just like in Windows XP:

You can read more on the “net use” command by running “net help use” in the command window.

I was reading about the imminent arrival of the Flickr Video and trying to think of a killer feature I would hope Flickr would provide to create a stronghold in online video sharing hosting.

On Pronet Advertising, there was a post discussing concerns regarding to the late arrival of Flickr Video and competing in the crowded online video sharing market among the established competitors like (sucking in breath):

Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Google Video, Veoh, Dailymotion, Yahoo Video, Metacafe … I give up, just read the huge list here on Mashable.

So what is an edge that Flickr can create to get ahead of these fierce competition? Brand and implement a killer feature - Better Video Quality.

Flickr has always been the first word people think of in online photo sharing. It’s probably the first photo sharing website that “got it right” in the social part of the “Web 2.0″. Therefore, the brand itself is still bright and get attractive the current community to share more user-generated materials, in this case video. And this leads to the next point - better video quality.

I always have the opinion that Flickr has high quality of photos, be it due to the skills of photographers, the quality of the cameras, or the combination of both. Some are showcased on this site Flickrville. And if you look around, nearly all current online sharing sites use Flash and in turn the H.263 codec. For slow moving pictures like lip-sync-ing, it’s adequate. But if you have some dancing videos like “Chale Jaise - Main Hoon Na” (one of my favourite - not that I understand a word of the lyrics):

Can you see dancing in there? Imagine showcasing these qualities of videos with FlickrVille-featured photos like this one - they don’t match well do they?

I am not certain which video codec is feasible for large-scale video streamings, maybe H.264? But in the end, I hope Flickr will host high-quality video sharing to introduce more professional-class video producers to make online video browsing in Flickr to match the same pleasant browsing experience people have enjoyed for past few years in Flickr Photos.

Google Reader is a web application that I use everyday to read my RSS feeds. I like to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the feeds instead of using a mouse - when you have a long river flow of RSS feed items, pressing a key is easier than scrolling on the mouse continuously.

On Google Reader, you can press character “v” to open the feed item link. By default, if it’s opened in a new tab, it will change the focus to the newly opened tab. I found that annoying because usually, I prefer to open all new links while going through the feed and then go through the opened links as a bunch.

I looked around on the net and found a partial solution on Lifehacker that suggested to change the tab opening setting to force it opening in background through “about:config”. But this changes the behaviour of tab opening globally inside Firefox, e.g. if an external program like Thunderbird open a new tab for a new link in Firefox, it will be loaded in background.

So I created a Greasemonkey script so that when you press ‘v’ in Google Reader, the link will be opened in background. To install it:

1. Install Greasemonkey addon
2. Restart Firefox
3. Click here to install the script.

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