Raymond.CC Blog

A short and easy to remember domain name plays a very important part for a website. You want your visitor to remember your website and also not to spell it wrongly bringing them to your competitor’s website. I would definitely prefer to have raymond.com, raymond.net or raymond.org but they were all unavailable for registration so I settled with raymond.cc many years ago. You may have noticed that some of the registered domains names doesn’t have an active website because the registrant is waiting for a buyer that is willing to buy over the domain name at a high price. For example, raymond.net has a bar on top of the page that says “To purchase this domain, click here”. For the fun of it I sent an inquiry and the seller offered to sell raymond.net domain name at a whopping $29,000 USD! If I had to spend that amount of money, I would prefer to buy a new alternative domain name and spend the rest on employing professionals to do marketing, designing, custom coding and etc.

Other than the top level domains such as .com, .net and .org, there are actually hundreds of other interesting top level domains for countries such as .to, .at, .bo, .so and etc. So far I’ve found two websites, EuroDNS and Only Domains which is able to search the availability of all domains including country code on the word that you provide.

There are a lot of giveaways nowadays but unfortunately there is no 100% way that can prevent it from being leaked. Recently I’ve purchased a PC PRO magazine from a bookstore and this edition offers a full AVG Anti-Virus 2012 license valid for 1 year. At page 62, the article about the cover disc provides a link to get the registration code but visiting the link gives me a georestriction warning with the message “Sorry, due to licensing restrictions, this offer is not available in your country/territory. Try again tomorrow”. I know that PC PRO is an imported magazine from UK which is why the offer is not available for us Malaysians but I pity the people who bought this magazine thinking that they can get a free AVG license but ended up not being able to get one.

Bypassing georestriction is quite easy by using a public proxy and there are quite a lot of websites that offers free proxy list but the biggest problem is looking for one that is still online, not too slow and doesn’t require authentication. There are some online proxy checker but I personally do not like to use them as they are quite slow and doesn’t support multi-threading. For a faster result, you can give Web Proxy Checker software a try.

You may have heard of JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, and they are all actually different image formats. Each format has its own pros and cons so you will have to choose the correct image format to use depending on the situation. Unless you do a lot of image editing, you probably don’t need to understand what are the differences between different image formats. In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital photography. You may have tons of JPEG photos on our computer because most of the digital camera saves the captured photos in JPEG format. However there are times when JPEG photos can get corrupted or damaged due to many reasons such as bad sectors, partial transfers, blue screens and etc. One easy way you can scan for possible damaged JPEG images on your computer is by using Bad Peggy, created by Coder’s Lagoon the same author who created TruPax.

It may not seem possible to send a message to someone’s email that will auto delete or self destruct after reading because the email format is either in plain text or HTML. Allowing an email to auto delete by itself is just simply impossible because of the security risk involved. However, there are web services that lets you send notes that will self-destruct after being read. All you need to do is write the message, then a unique URL link will be generated containing your message. The link will automatically expire and will not be accessible anymore when it has been opened. You can find such service from Privnote and KickNotes but obviously it is not fool proof because the message is still displayed on-screen allowing you to copy the message and paste it to a text editor such as Notepad.

A better option would be Burn Note and DestructingMessage because it comes with a timer feature where the message will automatically be removed upon reaching the time set by the sender.

There are a lot of free apps from the Google Play (previously known as Android Market) where you can download and install it on your Android device. When you want to install an app, all you need to do is click on the DOWNLOAD button and it will start downloading an APK file and automatically install. Normally there is no need to save the APK file after installation but if you need it, one painful way is to download the APK file to your android phone, use Astro to backup it to SDCard, connect phone to PC, then copy the APK file to computer. redphx from Vietnam who is an android app developer has made all of that easier by creating an extension called APK Downloader that allows you to easily download APK files from Google Play with one click using Google Chrome web browser.

I am a big fan of Notepad++ and there is no need to use other text editing tools once you have Notepad++ because it is packed with features and most importantly it is free. Once you’ve gotten used to it, you may not even want to use the built-in Windows Notepad anymore. In fact it is even possible to replace the Windows Notepad with Notepad++ so that even if you type notepad in the Run window, Notepad++ will launch instead of the Windows Notepad. One big limitation on the Windows Notepad is it cannot refresh the opened text files which is very useful to view log files generated by a software in real time. Closing and reopening the text or log file just to check on the update can be very troublesome. Unlike in Linux, it comes with a tail -f command where you can view the log files in real time. If you didn’t know, we are able to monitor for changes in real time on text or log files with Notepad++ as well.

There are so many benchmarking programs that can use to benchmark the performance of your GPU and one of it which I’ve settled with is Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark based on advanced UNIGINE engine. Previously I’ve used the older version of Heaven Benchmark 2.1 to benchmark the 3D graphics performance on the antivirus performance test. Reason is during that time Unigine Heaven Benchmark was the only one that supports DirectX 11, while many still stuck at DirectX 10 plus it is free for personal use. It is also easy to use, simply install, select a few options and run the benchmark. A score will be given at the end of the benchmark together with the minimum, maximum and average FPS numbers. Few days ago a new version of Heaven DX11 Benchmark 3.0 has been released with many technical improvements, it now runs on Mac and supports for variety of new hardware, including extended support for multi-monitor configurations.