Headache of ISO-8859-1 to UTF8

In Perl, you can use encode ('UTF-8', $iso-text-str) to convert ISO-8859-1 encoded string to UTF-8 encoded string. And in PHP, you can use utf8_encode($iso-text-str) to do the converting.
However, you may be out of luck, for after being converted, some characters could be funky and not what you wanted to see. I think this is because, some characters in UTF8 are invisible, like x80 - x9f (see the following ISO-8859-1 characters list images)

Because I  only care of those regular characters, like \x20-\x7F or \xA9 or \xAE or \x99,  I strip other characters before applying encoding function.
In Perl

$content =~ s/[^(\x20-\x7F|\xA9|\xAE|\x99)]+//g;
$content = encode('utf8', $content);

In PHP

$content = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F|\xA9|\xAE|\x99|\n)]+/', "", $content);
$content = utf8_encode($content);

UPDATE: Actually, I found that in Perl, encode function cannot correctly convert \x99 to ™. Finally my solution is the following,

open (FILE,  ">$your_file") || die "couldn't write to epcmf file\n";
   binmode(FILE, ":UTF-8");

   $title =~ s/[^(\x20-\x7F|\xA9|\xAE|\x99)]+//g;
   $title =~ s/\x99/™/g;
   $title =~ s/\xAE/®/g;
   $title =~ s/\xA9/©/g;
   print FILE $title;

Note:

1. You should edit your script in UTF-8, for example, in PUTTY, you can change your character set to UTF-8 at Configuration > Windows > Translation
2. UTF-8 is different to utf8, so in make sure you write it as binmode(FILE, ":UTF-8");

Reset Chrome Profiles - Ubuntu 11.04

If your chrome browser is messed up, such as icon of bookmark and/or plugin is missing, cannot load your profile, etc. You may want to reset your profiles. If you use Chrome Sync, then it's very safe to just rename profiles folder, and restart chrome, and then set up Chrome Sync using your existing sync account, after that everything should be back to normal.
The chrome profile folder is under ~/.config/chromium/Default.

How to center dynamic ul

A UL is a block element, it'll take up the whole width of its container. If you remove float:left and set a width to it, then margin:0 auto will work, but only the ul will center and not the li, unless you know exactly what the width of the UL should be. If you do not know what the ul width should be(e.g. dynamic list menu), then you need to float:left the UL and li, put it in a div, and use this trick to center http://pmob.co.uk/pob/centred-float.htm

Connect to VPN via Sonicwall NetExtender

I was trying to connect to company's VPN via Sonicwall NetExtender. The version of NetExtender that I can get from my company is 3.5.629, which works fine in my Windows7 desktop, but it does not work in my Ubuntu 11.04. After doing Access Authentication, I was able to connect to server, but eventually I was logout, and the following are some error message I got.

Using SSL Encryption Cipher 'DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA'
Using new PPP frame encoding mechanism
pppd: no device specified and stdin is not a tty
SSL_read ZERO RETURN
SSL-VPN logging out...
SSL-VPN connection is terminated.
Exiting NetExtender client
Connection interrupted.  Reconnecting... 

I spent sometime Googling, and finally I found out the solution. In short, I need a newer version of NetExtender, which you can download it at  Sonicwall demo page,
https://sslvpn.demo.sonicwall.com/cgi-bin/welcome
(note that you need to use "demo" as username and "password" as password to login, and then click NetExtender to download it. I did that in Firefox, and it should popup the download link, and then you can use Active Manager to extract it.

Here are some note:
1. Before you install the newer version, you must uninstall the old version, if you already installed it. (Go to netExtenderClient folder, and run "sudo ./uninstall")
2. You need root to run netExtender (or, sudo ./netExtender)
3. You can also run sudo ./netExtenderGui (the one has user interface), but it may require java.

Hope this helps for someone who has the same problem.