The Internet Entrepreneur Diary

It’s annoying to see the following page everytime I open a new tab window on IE7. Even after I check the “Don’t show this page again” checkbox, it is still opening a new tab with this annoying “You’ve opened a new tab” tab.

How do I turn this off to just show my blank home page?

Open the registry by going to Start -> Run -> Type regedit
Look for the following registry
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing

Right click on the right window and open a new DWORD value.

Give the name “ShowTabsWelcome“, and right click to modify the value. Make sure is shows 0.

Now open a new tab in IE7, the annoying “You’ve opened a new tab” page is gone!

Popularity: 18% [?]

Recently, I did a spyware scan on my laptop, but found few annoying ActiveX Controls running under IE7. So I change the security setting in IE7 to stop most of the ActiveX Controls. However, I restart the IE7 browser and getting the annoying “Customize Your Settings” home page every time. Even I change the default home page to “about:blank“, it still starts with the “RoundOnce” page from http://rononce.man.com/runonce2.aspx.

I have no idea what this page does, but I believe that Microsoft is trying to guide the IE7 user to setup their IE7 and download new add-on from an non-Microsoft web sites. That looks weird!

Solutions:
After digging into the registry for IE7 and found a place to turn off the Runonce.msn.com start-up page. Basically, it requires two registry key to do the magic.

Open Regedit and go to the following section.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
Look for the following two keys.
RunOnceComplete
RunOnceHasShown

if they do not exist. Add them by right click mouse -> New -> DWORD Value as shown in the image below.

Modify the value and set the value to 1 for both DWORD values as the images below.

Restart your IE7 browser. The annoying Runonce page is gone!

Popularity: 31% [?]

To run a small online business requires a lot of energy and attention on every details. It have been a good practice for me to use some of the free services to help operate my business.

Google Calendar is a wonderful tools for me and my partners to share the events and remember what have been done. Most importantly, when the stuff were done. So I can come back to search the even few months later. We will know how we are doing.

Google Analytics is a great web tools to analyze the web site traffic. It allows a company to see how their web site is doing for their business. It has nice charting report showing the performance of the web pages. It also provides the marketing view of the reports.

AIMPhoneLine provides a free local phone number that I can use as my business contact number. Since I am doing online business, I pretty always online with AIM running on my desk. I can pickup the phone at any time. With reasonal montly fee, I can make calls to 35 countries with no extra charges. This is wonderful. I also get a good voicemail services which will notify me through email and text message on cell phone, when I am on the road. I can just dial the local number on my cell phone to listen to the voicemail.

AOL Pictures is another wonderful Free service from AOL. It provides unlimited photo storage space, I can easier to share my photos with friend. The most important part is that every pictures has their own URL. In other words, I can user the picture link for blog.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Once a while, there are unwanted startuup items in MSConfig that need to be disabled or removed. For example, the Quick Button service (EabServr).

Open MSConfig, under the StartUp tab, I can see an entry of the EabServr is disabled. I would like to remove it totally from the registry.

If you look at the location of the entry, it says “SOFTWARE/…..” It’s actually under the registry under the following path.
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\MSCOnfig\Startupreg

As seen here.

It’s simpliy just right click on the key “eabconfg.cpl”, and choose to delete the entry.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I have been looking into the ultimate solution for my VOIP calls. I want the cheapest calling plan that I can find on the internet. Communication between me, my friends and my clients has been very important piece in my daily life.

I used to use pincity.com’s phone service, which allows me to pre-paid the calls and make cheap calls to Taiwan, China, Hong Kong. However, their service have been very unstable and the call quality are worst than ever before.

What I am running into is that I have to run Skype, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and MSN on my desktop. I used to run ICQ as well. Now I am making international calls to contries with Yahoo Messenger, which is very very cheap. I called my mom in Taiwan for 50 minutes, which cost me less than US $1.00. It’s $0.015 per minute call while Skype charges $0.021 per minute.

Problems? There is not much problem with the call quality with Yahoo Voice, but does with Skype. Sometimes it has a little bit delay, but not so bad. How about incoming call? I found that AOL is providing a very nice service called AIM Phone Line. Check out www.aimphoneline.com. It provides a FREE local phone number that you can receive unlimited incoming calls and voicemails. The best part is that you can listen to your voicemail from the web interface without installing the AIM software or even from any phone, not like other services. Yahoo messenger Phone-in service and Skype’s skype-in phone services require you to install the software on the computer which you want to check your voicemail.

In addition, AIMphoneline allows you to setup an alert or notification to your email and even cellphone, when you receive a voicemail. That is so cool. I will get an …

Popularity: 10% [?]

Why I don’t like Skype? I used to make a lot of international calls to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan every week. Skype said they will announce a new rate on January 18, 2007. As I post this, it’s already over the time. Where the heck is the announcement? Where is the new rate? The rate is already more expensive than Yahoo Voice.

If Skype wants to attract more people to use their services, They’d better make their promise.

Skype Sucks!

Popularity: 5% [?]

I have been looking into the ultimate solution for my VOIP calls. I want the cheapest calling plan that I can find on the internet. Communication between me, my friends and my clients has been very important piece in my daily life.

I used to use pincity.com’s phone service, which allows me to pre-paid the calls and make cheap calls to Taiwan, China, Hong Kong. However, their service have been very unstable and the call quality are worst than ever before.

What I am running into is that I have to run Skype, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and MSN on my desktop. I used to run ICQ as well. Now I am making international calls to contries with Yahoo Messenger, which is very very cheap. I called my mom in Taiwan for 50 minutes, which cost me less than US $1.00. It’s $0.015 per minute call while Skype charges $0.021 per minute.

Problems? There is not much problem with the call quality with Yahoo Voice, but does with Skype. Sometimes it has a little bit delay, but not so bad. How about incoming call? I found that AOL is providing a very nice service called AIM Phone Line. Check out www.aimphoneline.com. It provides a FREE local phone number that you can receive unlimited incoming calls and voicemails. The best part is that you can listen to your voicemail from the web interface without installing the AIM software or even from any phone, not like other services. Yahoo messenger Phone-in service and Skype’s skype-in phone services require you to install the software on the computer which you want to check your voicemail.

In addition, AIMphoneline allows you to setup an alert or notification to your email and even cellphone, when you receive a voicemail. That is so cool. I will get an …

Popularity: 6% [?]

MSSQL-PHP-ADODB Issues

MSSQL only support FETCH_MODE_ASSOC
$rs->EOF cause unlimited loop
Only the first select statement in the procedure are returned as query object
the rest of query are return as true array
You can only fetchRow once
text, ntext, image fields can not be local variables
index on datetime will not be used if date range is in the query select statement

The following features are not working in the linked server env.

@@IDENTITY insert won’t return at all
SET ROWCOUNT 500 for insert/update/select
Need to use SET XACT_ABORT ON to be able to write to the linked server

Popularity: 6% [?]