VietCali.com

My wife called me one day and tell me that the store couldn’t process the credit card. Strange I though to my self, how could that be. So I call the customer service and found out someone got a hold of my card and order some stuffs on a hunting sport related website. How can some one get a hold of my credit card information? At that moment, I realize I could be a victim of some spy ware virus. Someone could tracking my computer activities for private information.
So I search high and low for a free virus scan to detect these spy ware virus, a.k.a malware. The problem I realized then, how can you trust anything download from the Web these day. A malicious website can disguise itself with legitimate looking pages and you just can’t tell.
Anyway I just got luck out when my Web host service who actually get attacked by malware and they sent me a link to this free scan. I downloaded the utility, installed it, ran it, and sure enough it found a whole bunch of malicious Trojans and other spy ware virus. So if you ever click on some suspicious link and have a gut feeling that yours computer is infected with malicious malware, please take my adivce and down load this malware scanner to make sure. If the link is broken, please do a Google search for “malwarebytes anti-malware”. The software is for free to use for scanninng. You can purchase it to get more advanced features.

Connect 5 is a popular tic-tac-toe version we play in Vietnam. The game is the same as tic-tac-toe but you have to connect 5 spots in order to win. I used to play this game with my schoolmates while waiting for class to start or sometime even during class. Back then there were no video games and computers so we kids just use our notebook and pencils to play this game and other games like find the next number, shooting the dots, or build the triangles.
I wrote this Connect5 game for Cafe75.com site. The algorithm I came up is pretty rudimentary. Give it a try and see if you can beat it.


Play in bigger window.

If you ever want to type in Vietnamese and the system you’re using doesn’t has Vietnamese keyboard suppport, try this online Vietnamese keyboard. To use it, type your text then copy and paste it over whatever application you’re working on. The Javascript just bascially filter some assigned keys and convert them to Vietnamese characters using Unicode. It’s a pure and simple tool to get Vietnamese characters into any application. All thanks to the popularity of UTF-8 encoding and Unicode. I tested the Javascript on IE, Netscape, and Firefox browsers and it works fine.
Try out the VietCali’s Online Vietnamese Keyboard.
Nếu các bạn muốn đánh tiếng Việt mà computer của bạn đang sài không có cài phần mềm cho bộ gỏ tiếng Việt, bạn có thể dùng bộ gỏ online của VietCali viết bằng JavaScript. Xin mời các bạn dùng thử.

Good to be back and post some computer tip to VietCali.com. This time I want to share with you a fix to a computer problem I ran into last week: a corrupted MBR or Mater Boot Record. The symptom on my case is the system no longer boots into WinXp. All I see is blinking cursor on upper left conner of the monitor. How do I know it’s corrupted MBR? Because I can boot the system from bootable USB so there is something wrong with my hard drive boot sequence and it only point to MBR. So if your system suddenly blinking on you, just try to fix the MBR on your hard drive. How?
1. Put the Windows XP installation disc in the disc drive, and then start the computer.
2. Press a key when you are prompted to boot up from CD.
3. Press “R” to start Recovery Console.
4. Enter your Administrator password.
5. At the input prompt, type FIXMBR and confirm with Y
6. Choose EXIT to reboot the system.
7. Remove the CD, and the system should now boots WinXp normally. No more blinking cursor on my case.