paul.vargas

Two weeks ago, I created a 500px account.  I felt that this website is the next big thing when it comes to photo sharing. I uploaded some of my old photos and to be honest, I was impressed by its take-up and visibility rate when a couple of strangers commented on my sets.  That means those images that I just uploaded were highly visible to the public.  500px' home page highlights those photos that were recently uploaded. So far so good. Yesterday, I went to Singapore Botanic Garden and when I got home I was so excited to upload all my new photos.  Unfortunately, I reached its 10-photos-per-week limit. I was a bit disappointed by the limit they imposed but then, it's a free service, beggars can't be choosers.   The only way to remove this limit is to be an "Awesome" user by paying $49.95 per year. I then compared it's price with Flickr.  It's surprising to know that my old photo-sharing service with lots of subscribers is way cheaper than 500px.  Fl

Before I found this straight-forward solution, I had been trouble-shooting my Google App Engine for 3 weeks because I cannot point my application site to my naked domain ( http://vargas.im ). You have a naked domain problem when your website cannot work without a www in front. So if you have mydomain.com as your domain, it can only be opened only by entering www.mydomain.com . When someone enters only mydomain.com (notice the missing www in front) the error is shown. Although there are a lot of articles on the web on how to fix this, these guides are not applicable for Google Apps anymore.  Google has restricted this feature and the only way to do it was to put an A record in your DNS settings, which needs an IP address and not an alias. Google cannot give us a specific IP address because they host their apps in different servers and it is difficult to maintain these service by hard-coded IP address. Fortunately, I found an IP address that you can assign to yo

Whenever you publish your email address on your website, it will be vulnerable to email harvesters and spammers.  What they usually do is they use their own software that "crawls" over millions of websites and search and scan the all the texts and look for those words containing the email patterns. A a typical HTML code for an email link would look like this:   <a href= "mailto:myEmail@myDomain.com" > myEmail@myDomain.com </a>     As a good practice, we have to make sure that email addresses that appear on your site are obfuscated or cloaked.  In this way, only people can read it but not by bots and other web-crawlers. Email addresses can be made un-readable to these software by not putting the email address directly as plain text.  We can use the power of JavaScript to compose your email address. I'll show you how we can do this by following these steps: Step 1:    Create an anchor element and assign an ID to it. In this e

I just watched a video on YouTube showing how to physically copy and reproduce a wrench (the tool that is used by plumbers like Super Mario ) by just using a 3D printer.  This paradigm-shifting technology triggered a lot of interest from hobbyist, home makers, and even hackers.  It will enable you to  reproduce anything you want; from bolts and nuts, to chess pieces and toy parts (imagine not having to worry about losing your Lego parts?). In the very near future, this technology, just like our pc, this will be available in each individual's home. This might help speed up our technological innovations and evolution.  Creating prototypes of your inventions can now easily be done at the comfort of your "home lab" a.k.a. garage or basement. While 3D printer in each home looks promising, some people are wary of its effect.  What will happen to our manufacturing industry? Will they still survive if everyone can create their own phone casing or clothes ha

Wouldn't you wish that your phone could last for at least a day? In this article, I will show you how I managed to keep my phone up and running for 2 straight days! Just a proof that I'm not bluffing, here is my Galaxy S II phone's screenshot: I did not charge it for as long as 2 days and 15 hours. Now here are the steps on how I did it. 1. Disable all unwanted applications. When you first bought your phone, it came with some "free" apps that you may not necessary need. They are also known as "bloatware". My phone came with pre-installed Weather Apps and some apps that were installed by my Telco.  I disabled all of them by going to Settings > Applications screen. If you're not sure if it's safe to disable the application, you can ask me by sending your comments. Here are some screenshots of the applications that I disabled.  I have disabled Social Hub because I don't need it.  I also disabled

  It seems like there's not much going on in Flickr. It's been 2 years since I last registered to that site and nothing has changed to their features.  Is Yahoo letting it die a natural death? I also noticed that there's a lot of photo sharing websites that are sprouting like mushrooms.  And they all look quite good and comparable to Flicker (and also Photobucket).  I visited this website called 500px .  This website is way slicker and was elegantly designed. By its dark background, it allows you to focus on the photos.  You may want to try it.

I just downloaded Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate from my MSDN Subscription. After 2 system restarts (yes, the installer will ask you to restart twice), I was surprised to see a very bright purple-grayish IDE. Despite of all the cool features that it offers like Code Analyzer, Performance Diagnostic, integration with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, and the faster connection with TFS, I am disappointed that MS guys decided to change the theme just to suit their “Metro” look-and-feel. To be honest, I love the VS 2010 color hues. It’s just so sad that I have to use this flat bright color. But hey, Microsoft is not stupid! They should have allowed the users to change the colors to personalize their IDE!. So I eagerly checked the settings and I know it should be located at TOOLS > OPTIONS menu. Sorry, I’m not shouting. It’s just that the Visual Studio 20120 menus are in CAPITAL letters. I found the option to change the Color Theme under the Environment > G

I just compared the Terms of Service of these two giants. It was quite surprising to know that they have this contrasting Terms of Service: Google’s GoogleDrive “When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content." Microsoft’s SkyDrive "Except for material that we license to you, we don't claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don't control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service." In choosing between these two services you have to consider all factors like platform dependence and support, cost, sec

I just attended a Microsoft seminar held at NTUC Centre at Marina Bay. They talked about the new Visual Studio 2012 and a bit of Windows 8. Visual Studio 2012 is not just an IDE. It’s an integrated tool that helps you throughout the Application Lifecycle. You can even create storyboard! One of the most interesting things about this product is the Code Analysis, Unit Testing and Load Testing feature. Take a look of their very cool presentation slide. Opening Remarks Ziriad Saibi, Director Developer and Platform Evangelism Developer Collaboration with Team Foundation Server 2012 Ervin Loh, Visual Studio ALM MVP, K365LABS Sdn Bhd Agile Project Management with Visual Studio 2012 Colin Nah, Co-Founder, Biz Era.Net Pte Ltd From Unit Testing to Load Testing: Visual Studio – Your Complete Testing Tool Ervin Loh, Visual Studio ALM MVP, K365LABS Sdn Bhd Ensure Code Quality in Your Project Sandeep Joshi, Visual Studio ALM MVP Building on Windows 8 using Visual Studio

  Today I will show you how to encrypt the web.config settings in your production server at runtime. Take a look at the EncryptConfig snippet below.  This will encrypt the connectionStrings, system.web/sessionState, and appSettings section of the web.config Private Sub EncryptConfig() '1. Open the Web.Config for editing Dim cfg As System.Configuration.Configuration = _ System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath) '2. Add the configuration sections that you want to encrypt Dim lSections As New Generic.List(Of String) With lSections .Add("connectionStrings") .Add("system.web/sessionState") .Add("appSettings") End With '3. Iterate each sections in the list that we added and encrypt it using DataProtectionConfigurationProvider Dim section As Confi