In the event that all of a sudden a working website seems to be inaccessible, you may want to try the following instead of restarting your computer. Go to the command prompt and run ipconfig /flushdns.

DNS or Domain Name System in full is the system that maps IP addresses to Internet addresses such as www.kongtechnology.com. A full explanation of how DNS works is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but check out wikipedia for more details if you are interested in learning.

By default, your computer keeps a DNS resolver cache which stores the IP addresses attached to frequently used Internet website addresses. This enables your system to bring up frequently accessed web addresses quickly, without the need to first consult a chain of DNS servers on the Internet to find out what IP address is associated with the website.

Sometimes a bad DNS entry can be cached due to many possible reasons. For example, when a server on the network has changed or has been moved to another IP address or network. When this happened, you will need to either flush the DNS cache to get rid of it, or wait up to 24 hours for it to be dropped from the cache automatically, or maybe can also restart your machine.

Now, how do you do the DNS flushing? Go to the command prompt and run:

C:\>ipconfig /flushdns

That should get your DNS cache flushed into the drain!

Here is a list of various famous names that you have known but possibly haven’t understood what’s the meaning, or where they came from:

Adobe – came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers – favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 o’clock.

Apache – It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server – thus, the name Apache.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was my lucky day as I get to follow my boss to the famous Telekom Netmyne data center which is located at Brickfields. My boss would like to co-locate a web server at the data center… as he needed some strong hands to help him carry the server, he asked me to tag along. I gladly followed him because that’s my first visit to a data center.

Of course I didn’t miss the opportunity to take a few photos of this data center. Next time don’t know when can come again! Let me be the tour guide to the data center today!

Read the rest of this entry »

How great it would be, if you could just install Wordpress plugins and themes right away in your Wordpress Admin panel (without using the FTP client)? Well, that’s exactly what Anirudh’s OneClick Plugin does.

OneClick Wordpress plugin allows Wordpress admins to upload Wordpress plugins or themes directly from the Admin control panel.

All you have to do is download the zip file of the plugin or theme you want to install. Select the “OneClick Install” option from the Wordpress dashboard. Browse to find the downloaded zip file, and click on the Upload button. The OneClick plugin will then do the rest… Isn’t this so much easier compared to using the manual way – use the FTP client?

Download this great plugin here. Trust me, it will save you time and effort in your next plugin or theme installation and activation!

I came across this great list of acquisitions by Google over the years, including acquisitions of both companies and individual products.

Among the most notable acquisitions are (in my opinion):

1. Pyra Labs (February, 2003) – this is exactly what becomes Blogger. Almost all bloggers I know start out on Blogger, the most widely use free blogging platform; before going for the paid and hosted blogging solution such as Wordpress.
2. YouTube (November, 2006) – I simply love YouTube’s variety of videos to keep me amused everyday!
3. FeedBurner (June 3, 2007) – the most recent company bought by Google, apart from PeakStream.

If you think this page on wikipedia is great, wait until you see Google tells its acquisitions itself! Nice time line, right?