Fixing a Dying Hard Disk

My (wife’s) desktop PC at home started to act up. The boot hard disk was dying. This was a Windows PC. I didn’t want to re-install the OS and all the software, partly because I can’t find the serial numbers of some of the software I have already installed. So what I needed to do was to clone the dying disk to a new disk. How can I do the cloning?

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WordPress Release Testing

WordPress is a great blogging software. But its frequent releases that break backward compatibility is upsetting some users. Is the WordPress team to blame for poor release testing? Someone has come out to defend the WordPerss team, but I kind of disagree with the arguments. Some of the blame has to fall on the WordPress team.

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SingTel Announces iPhone 3G Prices

Hello, Singapore. SingTel has announced their iPhone 3G prices. You could get the phone free, if you’re willing to shell out $205 every month for the next 24 months. The prices are high, but not unexpected (see here and here). Once M1 and StarHub get into the fray, the prices might fall. Or it might drop anyway soon after launch, because Singaporeans are not going to fall simply for the iPhone “wow” factor.

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IT Security Carnival

This week is IT Security Week at NUS, and so they have an IT Security Carnival held at the Forum. They have been running this for some years now, and I must commend the organizers for their excellent work all around. In my opinion, this is one of the more successful and meaningful event, and I’m not saying that just because IT security is one of my pet areas too.

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Table Tennis vs National Day Rally

Table tennis wins over the National Day Rally. The live telecast of Singapore’s National Day Rally is postponed to the next day, because the timing clashes with the live telecast of the finals of the Olympics women’s team table tennis match. Singapore’s Prime Minister decided on this arrangement so that Singaporeans could tune in to watch the live telecast of the match.

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Recruiting Student Network Engineers

We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help us run our network and data centre operations. This is like an internship, a program that we’ve run for one semester already. It is a really exciting opportunity for students as they will get hands-on learning experience working with production enterprise networks and data centres.

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iPhone 3G Launch In Singapore

After much speculation over the last many months, it is now officially confirmed that SingTel will launch the iPhone 3G in Singapore on 22 August 2008. The same day will also see the iPhone 3G launched in about 20 other countries. The Reuters report of SingTel’s announcement said nothing more. I guess the next biggest question on everyone’s mind is: How much?

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On The Second Week Of School

This is the start of “Week 1″. It is the second week of school at NUS because the semester started with “Week 0″. Yes, how very much like computer people to start counting from zero. Week 1 is where orientation is over and classes officially start. Week 0 at NUS wasn’t overly crowded. Today, I’m seeing congestion everywhere.

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Celebrating National Day

This is Vanessa celebrating National Day. This is her 2nd National Day, but the first she is celebrating since she was too little to be involved in anyway with the 1st. This year, the cashier at Cold Storage gave Vanessa a little Singapore flag, and she was happily waving it around (and chewing the plastic stick too later!).

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Setting Up Your Mac For NUS

The new school year at NUS has started. Many people are buying new computers. Some of them will be buying Macs, particularly since they have gotten quite popular in the last few years. Now, how do you get it working in NUS? Most official help resources are going to focus just on Windows XP or Windows Vista. So here you are, my concise guide to getting a couple of basic things setup to work in NUS.

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