The ISP in my area just upgraded their system. So, there is another challenge for me to setup my home network.

First, my condition is very weird, the ISP gave me an Ethernet cable. And to online, first need to access any website, then the ISP server will redirect me to a website, then key in the username and password. Only then, I can access internet.

So, the router I know cannot solve the problem like this. So, I searched from Internet and found that there is a method, “Internet Connection Sharing” in Windows XP.

These days, I learnt to read the Gregorian chant music score. Then I tried to figure out how to play the music score through the PC (virtual piano). I used MidiPiano Suite before. It is quite nice. It can save and open the MIDI files.

Then, since open source cross-platform software development is very active currently, I tried to search some cross-platform music related software from the Internet. The followings are the software I found (including close source freeware), but I haven’t tried every software:

If you want to download the file from Rapidshare or Megaupload frequently, a suitable download manager is needed. This type of websites for file hosting is called one-click hosting. So, I have tried several downloaders, not only support Rapidshare and Megaupload, but also other sites like hotfile.com, badongo.com, sendspace.com, etc.

Universal Share Downloader - Russian freeware. First file hosting downloader I used. Good.
RapGet - I always failed to download the file using it.
RDesc - Spanish freeware. Not bad. Just as good as Universal Share Downloader.
JDownloader - Just found it recently. Very good. Requires JRE.

Just read the Chinese version Catechism of the Catholic Church, this is the prayer of St Teresa of Jesus:

何事扰你意？何物乱你心？
万般皆易逝，唯主不移真。
心有天主者，坚忍百事成。
夫复何所求，有主心意称。
(圣女大德兰)

When we are busy using our computer, normally we will open a lot of windows, web browser, word processor, file explorer, audio player, video player, PDF reader, etc. Especially, we need to open a lot of word processors and refer to one another.

There are 3 tools I used in Windows XP to help me for the window management.

allSnap - All the windows has the snap feature when we resize them. So, you can adjust them with better arrangement.
Taskbar Shuffle - When we open a lot application, our taskbar will be full of items. If we switch off the “group similar window” feature, then there will be a lot of items in taskbar. This tool allow us to drag and drop our own taskbar item manually, so we can put two word processors side by side.
TaskSwitchXP - Alt-tab replacement. Too many applications, alt-tab might be useless, because we need to tab tab tab to the application. But still don’t get what we want, because we can only see the icons. This tool allows you to preview the application and integrate with the mouse.
Visual Tooltip - Mouse over to the taskbar item, a thumbnail will be shown. Just like Vista.

I just signed up Twitter account.
Link.

I found that Evernote is not very suitable for me. Firstly, it has upload limit. Secondly, it cannot export to HTML through the website, unless we download and install the desktop application.

So, now I am trying Zotero. It cannot export to HTML, but it has the function to “generate” the HTML. Just like Google Notebook. And it also provide sync function to the Zotero server.

My friend sent me a URL. Then I read it. And I feel sad for what has happened.
There are several blogs related about this case

http://ksstanley.blogspot.com/2009/07/police-report-lodged.html
http://andrew4jc.blogspot.com/2009/07/sacrilege-profanation-of-eucharist-in.html
http://mucked-in-a-jam.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-muslim-reporters-spying-in.html
http://mahaguru58.blogspot.com/2009/07/al-islam-undercover-operation-at.html

About this case, the followings are my personal opinions:

What is happened, is already happened. What we need to do, is to prevent this type of sacrilege happened again. Use the peaceful way. Do not perform flaming through Internet.

Besides that, is sacrilege happened every where? I am not sure. But we know, if we commit mortal sin, we should not receive Holy Communion. Do we commit mortal sins? We also need to look into ourselves.

Since Windows XP Service Pack 3 released, we might need to install the critical hotfixes ourselves. There are several ways to install hotfixes. We can search for “windows offline update” from internet.

But, I personally prefer go to The Software Patch, and download manually. Because I can download whatever I like. However, installing those hotfixes manually is troublesome. Then I wrote a batch file to install the hotfixes automatically. But I need to update the batch file whenever I download new hotfixes. Finally, I found a good solution.

Just upgrade my web browser Firefox to version 3.5. Because it is 3.5, some extensions (addons) cannot be used. The Google Notebook extension cannot be used. This is a bad news for me. Because the development of Google Notebook is stopped. Thus, no more Google Notebook extension for Firefox 3.5.

Google Notebook is very nice for note-taking. Because, we do not need to bookmark everything because of part of the page we like. Sometimes when we are surfing net, we might like some quotes. Using Google Notebook, we can highlight the quotes, and save it.