Throx

Recently I have tried 2 pinyin program for windows. Its really help to type faster compared to the default Microsoft pinyin. They are pretty smart with the words combination.

They are easy easy to use and install, just download it and install it and you are done. Press alt + Shift (may be different, check your language settings) to switch between English or Pinyin input.

Google Pinyin, plain and simple.

Sougou Pinyin, with many themes to play with.

If you stay in overseas, you can still donate to victims at Sichuan china from this website www.onefoundation.cn through Paypal or other payment types as states in the webpage.

Microsoft recently released a Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP users. SP3 includes all previously released updates and also includes a few of new functionalities. However, users do not need to fear as the new changes will not significantly change the experience with the operating system.

Quick Details
File Name: xpsp3_5512.080413-2113_usa_x86fre_spcd.iso
Version: 1
Knowledge Base (KB): KB936929
Date Published: 5/6/2008
Language: English
Download Size: 544.9 MB
Source

If you want to Slipstream Service Pack 3 into your Windows XP installation CD, you need a Windows XP installation CD and nLite application.

Complete guide can be found here: Slipstream Service Pack 3

Sichuan (四川) Massive earthquake death toll raised to 20k people. It was really sad to hear that. God bless them.

Video took by student at Sichuan University 2:29pm in the afternoon.

Squid proxy itself will not hide your external IP address but I will show you how to do that when squid combined with OpenVPN. First you need to have a working OpenVPN connection from your PV to the Linux machine. Guide on how to install OpenVPN can be found here.

If you have a success OpenVPN connection, then you can proceed to next step to install Squid.

1. You can use yum to install squid

#yum install squid

2. Open the squid configuration file

#vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

3. Edit squid configuration to allow you to access to the web via the squid proxy.

Locate “http_port”, default port number is 3128, you can change it to any port you like. In this example I change it to 8080.

http_port 8080

Because you want to hide your IP address, you must connect to squid via OpenVPN tunnels. Now we need to create acl list to allow your VPN ip address to get through your squid proxy server. Search for “acl our_networks” then uncomment and modify it as follows:

acl our_networks src 10.8.0.2  #assume your client VPN address is 10.8.0.2
http_access allow our_networks

4. Save your squid.conf and restart your squid.

#/etc/init.d/squid restart

5. Config you web browser connection settings to access the web via your squid proxy

Firefox user:

Tools -> Options -> Network -> Settings , Select manual proxy configuration
HTTP Proxy: 10.8.0.1 and Port: 8080

IE User:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings , Tick the check box “Use a proxy server for your LAN…”
Address: 10.8.0.1 and Port: 8080

6. Go to http://www.whatismyip.com and check your IP address. You should be browsing with your squid server IP address now. Good luck.

If you got a fresh installed LAMP with phpMyAdmin and notice an error below saying

“The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results”

and

“Cannot load mycrypt extension. Please check you PHP configuration”

You are not alone, you can solve the problems with the followings steps.

mbstring

New linux repo has the mbstring removed by default, just install it back.

#yum install php-mbstring

mycrypt

Install libmcrypt and php-mcrypt

#yum install libmcrypt
#yum –enablerepo=centosplus install php-mcrypt

Restart your apache / httpd, the warnings should have gone now.