18November2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: LAMP; Tips.
Most of the Linux users should be familiar with Gnome and KDE since both of them are the most commonly used desktop managers in the various Linux distros. Now, if you are using an old PC with low hardware specs, you might find that the above two desktop environments are too heavy for your computer to handle.
In this case, you will have to consider using an alternative lightweight desktop manager for your Linux. Here are 8 of the best lightweight desktop managers that I personally use and recommend.
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9November2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General.
The styling of a website is not just the looks, it is much more than that. It is the thing that makes the visitor feel comfortable, the thing that will make him subconsciously love it, make him feel like home.
Perfect design is the one that is subtle and helps the visitor use the website and not just admire it.
Let’s see for example a news site. Visitor should not spend time looking your delicious gradients and your sexy rounded corners on every element. He should spend him precious web-time reading the valuable content. We must help him find as fast as possible what he is looking for. Help him read as many articles as possible. Make him stay more. Transform the first time visitor, into a loyal fan.
To achieve all these we must offer harmony and uniformity in every element of our page, even in the small and less important. The summary of is going to give us the desirable result.
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8November2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General.
When I talk to people looking to get into game development some of the first things I often hear fall along the lines of, “How do I make games?” or “I want to make a game like Quake/Everquest/Starcraft and…”. The first is just way out of the realm of answerability, as there are too many aspects to possibly go into, and each of those components can be infinitely complex.
The second, however, falls into just being unrealistic in expectations. Starcraft, Everquest and Quake were all made by teams of professionals who had budgets usually million dollar plus. More importantly though, all of these games were made by people with a lot of experience at making games. They did not just decide to make games and turned out mega-hit games, they started out small and worked their way up. This is the point that anyone who is interested in getting into game development needs to understand and repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes such a part of your mindset that you couldn’t possibly understand life without this self evident, universal truth.
Until you understand that all skills in game development are learned by experience, (meaning to start very small and working your way up) you will be absolutely doomed to never finish your projects. Even the infinitesimal number of teams that do manage to finish a non-trivial project before they have made any smaller ones have to learn incrementally, it just takes them many times longer than if they had started out with smaller projects.
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7November2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General.
For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in documentation of frameworks that help developers to write better code, and to create applications that are more efficient and easier to test, debug, maintain, and extend. During that time, it has been interesting to see the continuing development of best practice techniques and tools at one of the leading software companies in our industry. Most of the work was outside my usual sphere of ASP.NET and Web development, concentrating mainly on Windows Forms applications built using .NET 2.0. This is an area where the standard design patterns that have evolved over many years are increasingly being refined and put into practice.
However, I regularly found myself wondering just how many of these patterns are equally applicable and advantageous within ASP.NET applications, where we now have the ability to write “real code” in .NET languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C# – rather than the awkward mix of script and COM components upon which classic ASP depended. Surely, out of the 250+ patterns listed on sites such as the PatternShare Community, some must be useful in ASP.NET applications. Yet a search of the Web revealed that – while there is plenty of material out there on design patterns in general, and their use in executable and Windows Forms applications – there is little that concentrates directly on the use of standard design patterns within ASP.NET.
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6September2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: Tips; Windows.
SQL Server 2005 Express does not come with a DTS Wizard unless you install the SQL Server 2005 Express Toolkit, and run DTSWizard.exe manually. An easier way to export your schema and data to a remote SQL Server installation would be to use the SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard. This utility gives you a simple wizard you can use to directly export to a remote server.
Download here
No clue why this useful utility is not part of the standard SQL Server 2005 Express installation…
31August2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: Tips; Windows.
If localhost on Vista resolves to localhost.com, this is usually because Vista is looking at the IPv6 address for localhost and resolving to ::1. You can check this by either pinging localhost on your machine, or doing a nslookup on localhost.
To resolve this issue:
- Edit
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
- Uncomment the line that reads
::1 localhost
Now Flush your DNS Resolver cache by running ipconfig /flushdns a couple of times and localhost should resolve fine.
13July2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General.
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
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12July2008
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General.
The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers, bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.
It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.
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