Try this if suddenly you cannot access a website

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

Flush DNS

That should get your DNS cache flushed into the drain! 🙂

Weird origins of some famous Tech names

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.

Apple computer

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.

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Telekom Netmyne data center tour

Tmnet data center

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.

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! 🙂

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Install WordPress plugins with just one click!

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.

Install WordPress plugin

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!

List of Google acquisitions

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.

Google timeline

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

Your latest version of Windows Media Player cannot play DVD videos?

Can you say that again. You said your latest version of Windows Media Player cannot play DVD videos? Yes, you read that right. My Windows Media Player 11 that comes with Windows Vista Business, just refused to play any DVD discs I loaded into my DVD drive. So frustrating!

Windows Media Player

That’s the error that was thrown at me when I popped a porn DVD into my drive. Click on the Web Help button and you are brought to a page on Microsoft that explains why the error occurred. Basically, it means Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows XP operating system cannot play DVD videos because they lack of DVD decoder (also known as a MPEG-2 decoder)! How ridiculous?!

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Search Status plugin alternative to Alexa Toolbar

All of us know that Alexa rankings are flawed, because it’s mostly based on people who use their Alexa toolbar. But for those of us who use advertising systems such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Text Link Ads; Alexa ranking is crucial because it’s an important factor that determines how much we are being paid. The better is the Alexa ranking, the more we are being paid!

The sad thing is that the Alexa toolbar is currently only available for IE users. The folks at Alexa do not have immediate plans to develop an Alexa toolbar for the Firefox browser. Instead, they suggested a couple of alternative toolbars that incorporates Alexa:

  • About This Site. Gina Trapani at scribbling.net built a handy plugin.
  • SEO Toolbar. The Rankquest SEO Toolbar provides you quick access to many SEO tools including the Alexa Traffic Rank.

Search Status plugin

These two toolbars look pretty good to me although I do not use them for more than a day on my machine. The other alternative which stays in my Firefox browser is SearchStatus, a neat little plugin for Firefox which takes less than a minute to install. Once the plugin is installed, it displays the Google and Alexa rankings for each site you visit in the status area of the browser. The cool thing is that it also reports visits back to Alexa and thus helps to improve the Alexa ranking of the site!

If you like Firefox, you will like this Search Status plugin. Get it now!

Google 2048

Any idea what your favorite search engine will look like in the year 2048? The below might give you an idea. And I guess the pornography radio button should be the most clicked one. 🙂

Google 2048

Take the picture above as inspiration.

How to quickly transfer files from one computer to another?

There are probably one hundred different ways to transfer files from one computer to another.

You can use mediums to transfer the files. For example, burn the files from the source computer onto a CD/DVD, or copy them onto a USB drive or an external hard disk and then transfer it to the destination computer. Did I mention you can also use a floppy disk as the transfer medium? 🙂

Girl at computer

If the above methods do not sound too good to you, then another option would be to use USB cable. USB cables are cheap and readily available in any IT store. But, make sure you get the USB to USB type, not those that comes with your digital camera, or your MP4 player.

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