Alvin Poh’s Blog

How To Find Out What’s Locking Files or Folders in Mac

One of the first problems that I came across the Mac was the “File in use” error that occurred whenever I tried to unmount a hard drive, or unmount a USB thumb drive. It was annoying because I didn’t know how to find the source. In Windows, I would face the same problem too, but [...]

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How To Run The Apple Hardware Test On Your Mac

After I did my last post on 4 Months After Switching Over From Windows To A Mac, I got asked about how I actually ran the Apple Hardware Test on loop mode. To do so, you’ll need the Applications Install DVD that came with your Mac. This is the one that has a little block of [...]

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How To Login To Apple Genius When Your Password Is Rejected

I was trying out Apple’s iTunes Genius today, but then kept getting an error message saying that my Apple login credentials (username or password) was invalid. I was 100% sure that my username and password were correct, and even went to Apple.com to login again to make sure. It was annoying, but I finally found a [...]

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How To Reset The MySQL Root User Password and Privileges

Problem: I was developing using PHPMyAdmin when I added a new root user (with a host value of %), and removed the rights of the default root user. When you do that, you’ll get a gut-wrenching feel that you just made a huge boo-boo, find that suddenly everything will not work, and kick yourself in the [...]

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How To Solve Codec Type Mismatch Error When Converting Videos With ffmpegX

For a video conversion tool that’s so powerful and easy-to-use, ffmpegX is something that throws up occasional errors that just frustrate you to no end until you discover what it means. One such error that I get is when I convert video files to Flash video (FLV). Here’s the error: Codec type mismatch for mapping [...]

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How to Solve Photoshop MFC71.DLL Problem

My friend’s computer had the error message that said: “This application has failed to start because MFC71.DLL was not found.” whenever she tried to start Photoshop CS3, and this affected the way plug-ins ran (in some cases, they wouldn’t run or display at all). To solve this, just grab the MFC71.DLL at http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?mfc71 and put this [...]

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PHP Code to Detect IE Browsers

The extremely buggy way that Internet Explorer renders CSS annoyed me again, this time because of the different way it displays elements with z-indexes. I spent a couple of hours trying to fix the bug, failed, and decided to go about it another way. The problem lay in a CSS/Javascript rotating banner gallery ,so I used [...]

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