If hosts file does not seem to work in your browser

Given a host file with the following content:

10.100.12.10 yourhost.co.uk

If your hosts file does not seem to work with yourhost.co.uk when you load that url in firefox, internet explorer, chrome and/ or safari and you get a message like this:

Network Error (dns_unresolved_hostname) 

 
Your requested host "yourhost.co.uk" could not be resolved by DNS.  
 

For assistance, contact your network support team.  

but ping can resolve the ip address,

Pinging yourhost.co.uk [10.100.12.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.100.12.10: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 10.100.12.10: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 10.100.12.10: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 10.100.12.10: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

Ping statistics for 10.100.12.10:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

Try to go to your internet explorer, then "internet options", then click "connections" tab, then click "LAN settings" button. Although you are accessing this internet options through explorer, it affects the other browser as well. Please untick "Automatically detect settings", at least the fixed my problem, it may fix yours.

Agile development vs development by contract

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy working in an agile process but I am not totally sure that is fine for any situation...

What about when you are a company that creates custom-built software, you have a client and asks you for a budget to do application X? How do you give a quote? To give a figure, you need to agree on same requirements and depending on the implementation it will cost you more or less. If you want to give a realistic figure, you will need to think about the architecture, the technologies you are going to use.

Don't tell me that you have to trust, because that is not going to happen. This is real world. The client needs a guarantee, a figure and you need to limit what are planning to deliver with that figure: the list of requirements.

Basically I am talking about a pre-negotiation, a negotiation that should lead to a very detailed document, analysis, design and so on. Later on, you can be the most agile person or team in the world but this first step contradicts agile totally. You can even make your client to get involved and change the spec, attend the demos, etc but the first step is like the original sin, so you can't be truly agile.

Of course, after a while, your client may trust you and probably you can implement this agile approach from the scratch.

When somebody says why the waterfall process has lasted so much, my only answer probably is that at the beginning probably most companies did custom-built software, so they had all the requirements very clear at the beginning, so doing a design and then implement, was just natural. As nowadays many companies have the software development department inside, people are starting realizing that in this case, we can use a more agile approach.

Agile Manifesto and Software craftmanship manifesto

Agile Manifesto

Software craftmanship

Some links to very interesting articles for geeks and techies and developers

I have come accross all these articles in the last weeks that I have found very interesting, almost unavoidable to be up to date of what is going on in IT. They are in English and Spanish:

Why Websites Are Slow & Why Speed Really Matters [INFOGRAPHIC]

Nueva guía SEO de Google, imprescindible para saber cómo mejorar la indexación de nuestra web

London tube stations to get Wi-Fi

The impact of Garbage Collection on Java performance


Why we chose mongodb for guardian.co.uk

Your Web, Half a Second Sooner

UK beats the US to a tech-friendly Startup Visa

El navegador de Android, mucho mejor que el de iOS

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/03/Ensuring-Product-Quality-Google

The Top Five Challenges of Building Software Platforms in the Agile World

Microsoft empuja la desaparición de Internet Explorer 6

Google lanza un gestor de almacenamiento en la nube de hasta 16 terabytes

Facebook Comments: lo que necesitas saber

Los irritantes precios de los e-books en amazon.com para Europa

This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2#ixzz1IlPhp7Fr

Changing my mind a bit about Apple

I have been in love with Apple products for a while. I have not bought everything from them though. Just a Mac Book Pro almost two years ago. However I have been thinking about buying an iPhone and an iPad for a while. I was thinking about doing that this year but recently I have started to change my mind about Apple:
-Firstly I realize that most of the software I use is on the web, email, google apps, reader, facebook, twitter.
-Then, I am really tired about Safari, it used to work fine but nowadays it is very slow and it keeps waiting for a long time many times and collopsing from time to time.
-I am also quite tired of iPhoto and how difficult is to make it importing your well organized in directories collection of pictures.
-I have discovered that Chrome uses much less memory and it is always responsive.
-Also Picasa for Mac works fine and it respects my hierarchy of folders and is perfectly integrated into picasa web albums.
-I have even left iTunes, who needs to have all mp3 on the hardrive, when you have spotify? Probably the same people who has a mp3 player but I have not. So keeping my huge collection of mp3 in the hard drive does not make sense for me.
-Also Apple is still behaving specially, like not having features that everybody has, creating a close environment, strange rules for the app market, etc.
-Windows 7 works allright at last.
-Android probably is more complicated than iPhone, but it is open, more options and come on I am supposed to be a geek not my grandma, I should love all that freedom.

So basically I am not using anything apple specific. Yes probably the hardware is better quality and mac os x works allright and has a unix core but I am more dependent on Google enviroment.

For all the points before, I am really considering buying an Android instead of an iPhone, I still think iPad is better than other tablets but I think kindle is really good for what it tries to do and I will reconsider Windows for my next laptop if I buy one.