IBM acquired Cognos at $5 billion USD

SAP bought BusinessObjects last month and now IBM acquired Cognos, last of large independent business intelligence providers. In just a month, two leading business intelligence players have been acquired.

http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2007/1112.html

Star Wars in DOS Version

It had been almost two years after my last blog. Today when surfing the net and came across this DOS version of Star Wars make me suddenly had the feel to post in my own blog and share it. This is the reason that make me blogging again after two years. Now let us watch the Star Wars.

1. Open the command prompt by typing the cmd from Run.
2. Type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl in the command prompt and enjoy :)

Below is the screen shot of the Star Wars that captured by me.

Hope you all enjoy it ;)

Removing unused device drivers from Windows XP machines

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box or go to Control Panel System.
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.
6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.
7. In Device Manager, go to View Show Hidden Devices.
8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.
9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

Display Chinese on Mozilla Firefox in Linux

If the Firefox failed to display chinese word for a web page, make sure that the character encoding is correct.(under View --> Character encoding).

If the chinese web page still cannot display properly, then you need to install the 2 extension which are mozilla-firefox-locale-zh-tw and mozilla-firefox-locale-zh-cn.

Then restart Firefox and all the problem should be solved.

Steps to install J2SE 1.4.2 in Linux

1. Download the j2sdk-1_4_2_09-linux-i586.bin from Java Sun.
2. Copy the j2sdk-1_4_2_09-linux-i586.bin to /usr/local/bin.
3. Run ./j2sdk-1_4_2_09-linux-i586.bin and a folder j2sdk1.4.2_09 will be created.
4. Create a symbolic link using ln -s /usr/local/bin/j2sdk1.4.2_09/bin/java /usr/bin/java
5. Finally run java -version to make sure that J2SE is installed sucessfully.If there is java version printed, then means that all should be OK already.