Domain propagation sucks. I mean waiting 7-48 hours (which, in my experience, is a total hoax) so that you’re site’s domain becomes active is totally frustrating. Moving a website from our test server to the production server will still means that we have to check several things (configuration files, database, files, etc.), and the most convenient way to check this is to see if your “live” site is running perfectly. Some Administration Panel like Plesk has a “Site Preview” feature that allows you to, well, preview your site. It’s not totally effective since the URL becomes cryptic and you don’t know what’s happening under the hood.
I learned this trick from one of my officemates: the HOST file. Actually, it’s like tricking your browser to look on a specified NameServer (which in this case your deployment server). HOSTS file is located in:
\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\
Open it with any text editor. Here you will find tab-separated, value pairs like the one below:
# This is a comment and btw, this explains why localhost points to 127.0.0.1
127.0.0.1 localhost
Add the domain of your site and the IP of your server. Restart your browser and Voila! A sneak “live” preview of your website! Don’t forget to remove (or at least comment) it when the site goes live!
Installing Windows Vista on my newly-assembled PC was not a walk in the park. I bought a Seagate 250GB SATA Hard and partitioned it into 3: 100GB, 100GB and 32GB (the remaining part) using another PC. During the installation, I was prompted with this error “Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation”. Not knowing what to do I restarted the entire set-up hoping that it’ll do the trick. Stupid idea, of course it won’t work. So I boot on my old 80 GB IDE drive, attached my new SATA drive and deleted all of the partitions (Ugh!). And it worked! The installation proceeded perfectly.
‘Turns out Windows Vista needs to be compatible with partitions (as I have suspected). I found this. Well, that was a little late. But it’s all good now. I’m feasting on Vista’s Aero. Slick!
Yesterday, the future arrived. Or at least we had a good preview about it. I'm talking about Microsoft's latest computing platform: Surface, previously dubbed as 'Milan'. I'm too lazy too discuss it's definition and stuff so I'm gonna excerpt some from the fact sheet, "Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that’s easy for individuals or small groups to interact with in a way that feels familiar, just like in the real world. Surface can simultaneously recognize dozens and dozens of movements such as touch, gestures and actual unique objects that have identification tags similar to bar codes."
Here's more:
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Direct interaction. Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands and interact with content through touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
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Multi-touch contact. Surface computing recognizes many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger as with a typical touch screen, but up to dozens and dozens of items at once.
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Multi-user experience. The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
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Object recognition. Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.
Surface is really mind-blowing! Multi-touch is one thing, but Object Recognition? Man, that is something. Here's another video demo. It will really change the way we interact with computers. I think this will benefit most on productivity and interactivity.