Daemon Tools

Deamon Tools is a software that emulate CD-Drive or DVD-Drive in your computer. However, there is no real place to put the CD or DVD in that emulated drive. So what good will that do you ask?

Daemon Tools can emulate up to 4 drives at one times, each drive can mount an image file of CD or DVD. The most popular format of image files are ISO and BIN. When mounted on Daemon Tools' drive, the computer will process the image file and the drive just like when you put CD or DVD into the real drive on your computer.

With current trend of broadband connection and BitTorrent, it became quite easy to *acquired* such files from internet. Once you have the image file, it was not necessary to burn them into CD or DVD before installing them. Since the files can be mount with Deamon Tools and then install right away.

This technique can be quite useful when you have old games on CD that has many scratches. You can make image file from the CD and play the game using Deamon Tools to mount that image file instead of using the real CD.

Web Instant Messengers: Redux

After going through some dfiifculties using the AIM Express around the time that the earthquake in Taiwan destory the fibreoptic cable. I have to look for some other web IM to use.
I had found a few so I would like to share the good ones with you guys :)

Meebo, it is one of the nicer interface web IM around. Meebo allow you to login to multiple IM protocals at once and arrange them into a single pane list, each name has the symbol of which IM your friends are (much like Trillian and Miranda IM). It is also written as Web 2.0 application and has widget which you can add to your website. However it seems to use different ports for each IMs. I can only access my Yahoo with Meebo when in office and not the others. Although I should added that Meebo does not use ads in their service.

ILoveIM, another web IM, a lot more basic looking than Meebo, use ads but work a lot better from my office. ILoveIM is quite an oddball in my opinion. It seems to be a work in progress as their single pane interface (similar to Meebo but each IM listed in their own service tab) is only available for MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk at the moment. For AOL, it will bring up a popup screen. I suppose it will be update later on. What I like about ILoveIM is that fact that it seems to be more stable than AIM Express. Their ads reload function have additional affect of refreshing the connection which helps bring back the lagged messages so you can continue the chat again.

I hope you will find this useful :)