A friend of mine asked me today how to run Age Of Empires II on his Asus Eee tiny notebook. While trying to run the game he was getting a Direct Draw error and the game was closing immediately after starting up.

The fix is very easy. You have the Age Of Empires II icon on your desktop. Right click on it and select Properties. On the “Target” field, leave a blank space after the ending quotation mark and then add nostartup

So it should look like this:

(there is a space between the last quotation mark and nostartup)

Click OK and you are ready to play!

Editing hosts file on Windows Vista requires administrator permissions, which means that it is not as straight forward as on Windows XP. Opening it under any account other than the administrator will not let you save it.

But this doesn’t mean that editing it is difficult. Just follow these steps:

1) Click on Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accesories

2) *Right* click on “Command prompt” icon and select “Run as administrator”. Accept any alerts from Windows Vista.

3) When the administrator command line opens, type these commands:

cd %windir%\system32\drivers\etc
notepad hosts

Now the notepad opens with the hosts file in it. You can edit and save the file normally.

Today I noticed that Google changed its favicon, the small logo that appears next to the URL in the address bar.

The capital G has given its place to a small blue “g”. What do you believe about the new favicon? I am waiting your opinion in the comments of this post.

With the evolution of Web 2.0 there are lots of webmasters wishing to create a video sharing portal, allowing members to upload videos that will be converted on the fly to Flash Video format. Something like YouTube, Metacafe etc.

But what do you need to create such a web site? ok, lets become realistic. It is not that easy.

Solution #1 (I don’t suggest this)

First of all you need a dedicated server or VPS with root access. Then, you will need a 1,5 hour process of installing codecs, converters, plugins, PHP video conversion modules, compiling software and reconfiguring your server from scratch. Even in this case, video conversions may not work as wanted (bad quality, failed conversions for some files, no sound in some videos etc.). So you need much money for a dedicated server and lot of time without being sure that your video sharing portal will finally work.

Solution #2 (my choice)

Buy a cheap video sharing hosting package from a hosting company specializing on FFMPEG packages like the well known Cirtex Hosting. They host their packages on servers configured and tested for video sharing where all PHP video scripts are guaranteed working fine. How much will this cost? No more than $2.99/month

The 5 minutes process: you buy the package using PayPal or a credit card, you get immediately your password for FTP, cPanel etc. and you instantly setup your PHP video sharing script using their online wizard. Total time: 5 minutes and total cost: $2.99 a month to be a webmaster of the evolving Web 2.0
Click here to learn more