Overriding DNS or How to Hack Microsoft

9 October 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ programming tips

Today I would like to share one extremely useful tip on overriding DNS information. But first, how it may be useful. Let’s imagine that:

You are running a site and planning the migration to a different provider. You wish to move your data first; then switch the name to point to the new location and then leave the old one. The problem is that before you switch the domain name to your new location, you can only guess if the site is working fine or not.
You are building a site for someone else and need / wish to access it using its target domain name. It may be necessary if there are some places where you hard-coded it etc.
You wish to show your friends what a great hacker you are. You open your browser, type in the name of some gigantic site you’ve “just hacked” ( i.e. microsoft.com ). Voila… “Vasya was here.”

Memory Building

24 September 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

Yesterday I was fixing a pipe in the kitchen, today it was the bathroom door. These days I’m feeling like a true house-husband. Taking the wooden door heavy as hell off the hinges appeared to be not a do-it-alone kind of task even though I managed to succeed. Just let the professionals do their job the next time you need to fix something like that, or at least find a good helper if you still plan on doing it yourself. I was half dead when I finished as it took several rounds to make everything look just right. Phew…

How To Download Whole Podcast Archive

19 September 2006 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ tips

I was planning to write something different today, but this just poped up in front of me and I can’t help sharing it with you. So please enjoy and hope you appreciate it.

It’s always interesting and, what’s more important, pleasant to learn some hack you could continue using; something really useful and not obvious. Yeah, it’s nice. I have something of a sort for you today. A feather in my hat actually; but at first, here’s some background.

A Productivity Recipe

13 September 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

Couple of weeks ago I started the next round of attempts to improve my workflow and organize the day better. It had started to take way too much time to stay on top of things and something had had to be done about that. So, I began collecting feeds and read books on personal productivity and management, scanning them on a daily basis for new, more effective approaches and methods.

Dojo'ing My Way

13 September 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ programming

This week has started with learning very promising JavaScript toolkit — Dojo. Yeah, it’s been for some time on the stage, but I didn’t quite needed it until now. For the last couple of years I’ve been involved in extremely intensive development, and you know its name. Right, it’s BlogBridge. Mainly, we do some serious Java programming, but sometimes, and Feed Library is a great example, we switch to web development. This is the reason I’m trying to expand my horizons and learn something new in the area.

Focus On Photography

7 September 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ photo

Whole yesterday night the electricity was acting up, like a naughty child, and in the end went off. We woke up that morning only to find the lights, computers and radio completely dead. An unusual feeling… especially if all your life depends and is mainly spinning around the Internet that comes over the wires with electrons on the run. We spent a wonderful day reading, solving Japanese puzzles and preparing to our English classes that had started earlier this week. Now I’m back online and ready for action.

Good Writing, Bad Health

4 September 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

My fever was progressing slowly over the last few days and I had to spend whole weekend at home almost chained to bed. It gave me enough time to review what essential reading was still in progress and choose some books to move on. It appears this weekend was dedicated to English studies and improving of writing skills.

Getting Things Done This Autumn

2 September 2006 ⋅ 8 min read ⋅ personal

It looks, feels and smells, like autumn has finally come. It’s raining two times a blustery day and it’s cold like on Moon chilly nights. Some day this week I caught light cold and still suffering from aching throat. The heat wave had left unexpectedly, then the door bell rang, and in a fraction of a second we are welcoming the autumn in all its colorful beauty.

Links for the day

30 August 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ thoughts

More and more ‘links for xx-yy-zzzz‘ posts I see each day in my favorite blogs. I don’t know how you like it but it bugs me. I know where the legs grow from and it’s very convenient way for a publisher to share intersting places he just found, but …

To my mind it’s way too impersonal. When you post a link to del.icio.us you don’t really bother explaining what’s really cool about it. You just drop a sentence or two about the contents and move on. This convenience smells badly, and, in my opinion, quickly leads to the miraculous transformation of good quality into large quantity. You no longer analyze the reasons of why the place looks appealing or grabs your attention; you just pick it up and post like crazy.

The other perspective on this is that it feels like an author doesn’t know what to post and submits daily link list in order to fill the gap between really thoughtful articles. I know, lots of my readers are friends of mine and some of them do post links this way. Look, I’m just describing how I feel about this and it’s not necessarily how everybody does. Don’t take it as offense. It really has nothing personal …

I hate to tell this, but I’m already thinking of a filter to mark all posts starting with ‘links for‘ as read and hide them altogether. It’s not a protest. I just don’t think I have enough time if you don’t have it for better organization and providing own insights. If I needed links, I could subscribe to your del.icio.us account directly or sit and read Digg all day long.

Do I miss some important point? Maybe there’s some special value I don’t see?

Opinions are surely welcome in comments. Sorry if I sounded rude to you.

On The Road: Mangup (The Map)

29 August 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ travel

As promised, here’s the map with the route between the starting (Sapun Mountain) and destination (Mangup Mountain) points. Additionally, I indicated the places where the pictures from the previous post (and corresponding Flickr set) were taken. No doubts, Google does great job with these maps, but some places are clearly low resolution — my apologies for the quality.

Map