Author Archives: Andrius

Fix Resharper Go to everything in Visual Studio 2013

Some time ago I got a new dev machine. So I needed to install again all my development tools, Visual studio, MS SQL, etc. Luckily with help of Boxstarter and Chocolately this time consuming and not so interesting work (bigger part) can be automated. But usually were some annoying tweak and tune settings which are not or can’t migrated or forgotten to migrate.

Somehow I had not backup of my Resharper settings file, so I needed to change few settings from defaults. The most difficult one was get get rid of navigation to object explorer (default VS behaviour for external assemblies when using CLTR+click). I wanted to see decompiled sources of external code. Here is the setting you need to set in Resharper Options:

Resharper external sourcesp.s. For myself: make settings backup!

Domain buying fraud\scam

Recently I decide to sell one of my domains. After a few days I was contacted by someone via email. Probably he got my email from checking domain’s whois information.

From (1): info@vspace-services.info

Hello!

I’m a broker of an investor who would like to buy memonerd.com.

My investor has six figure budget for 75-80 domains.

Please email me your desired price.

How can we transfer money to you (wire transfer, escrow)?

If you have other names please email me the list. I may help you to sell them.

Regards,

Michael Friedman Woods, Ph. D.

Internet Domain Name Lawyer

5 Roundwood Avenue

Stockley Park

Uxbridge

Middlesex

UB11 1FF

United Kingdom

0345 467 2619

My answer was simple. You can buy the domain via Sedo and I have provided the link. Next day I got an email back.

From (2): info@vspace-services.info

 I’m not interested in transactions under $1000. My client pays me 10%-15% on every sale.

May I suggest to change your price to $5000? In this case I will earn a better commission.

I hope you understand my business model better now.

I started to smell something, so for an experiment I have increased the domain price from few hundred Euro to several thousand. After that I notified “the buyer”.

From (3): info@vspace-services.info

4499 eur –  Ok.

Before my client buys he will need one thing from you:

To be sure in legitimacy of this sale and to avoid possible trademark problems my client buys domains certified by an official certification authority.

The certificate my client needs must include two things:

1. Independent manual valuation of the market price. My client does not trust automated valuations. It must be a manual valuation. The expert evaluation will help to determine the true value of your domain’s worth so you can maximize profits during the sale. On the other hand, it minimizes risks of my buyer.

2. Trademark infringement verification. It proves your domain has no trademark problems.

If your domain has been certified please email me the certificate and we will proceed with the sale. If you don’t have a certificate I may send you a link where you can obtain it. Please don’t worry. It won’t take much time and money. It takes 1-2 minutes to order it. The results will be sent to you within 24 hours. Then you send me the certificate via email and we’ll proceed with the sale.

As a broker I’m very interested in a good valuation part of this certificate because my client pays me a commission (10-15% of the sale price) on every domain purchase.  You can read suggestions about choosing a right certificate agency at http://answers.google-answers.net/archive/threadview192724.htm (“Domain Broker” is my nickname).

The process is very easy:

1. Go to the Certification authority site (http://tools.domainsaletools.com/certificates.htm) and order a certificate for your domain. Just enter your domains in the “Domain List” field at Certificate Order Form (http://tools.domainsaletools.com/appraisal_order.htm) and specify in the “Comments” field you have a buyer with $X,XXX offer so you need an evaluation near this value.

After 24 hours you will get the results. If the appraised value in your certificate comes higher he will increase the offer accordingly.

2. Then send these results via email and we’ll proceed with the sale.

What a surprise. I need to spend a small amount of money to get a big amount of money. 100 % scam\fraud\phishing schema. I started checking everything what I know about this guy:

  • Email of the “serious” buyer is a free email box, not a company email. After I asked him about it, he explained me that he doesn’t need such “brand” email.
  • Provided address points to an empty building. Thanks to Google street view you can be a detective very easily.
  • Domain google-answers.net is fake one, to make you believe it is found via Google or something similar. Only one page is available and the domain is registered only few months ago:   http://domain-kb.com/www/google-answers.net. I even saved discussion page to pdf for the future readers Google Answers_ Can someone recommend a good appraisal service with a trademark verification_
  • The same applies to “Certification site”. Very young site (few months old) with a style of year 2000: http://domain-kb.com/www/domainsaletools.com

domainsaletools.com

What I did next, I have “placed an order” for evaluating my domain.

From (3): info@name-tools.net

Dear Customer,

You have submitted your domain for the certification. We will help you to certify your domain in 4499 euro range.


Please pay for the service at https://secure.2000charge.com/sys/PaymentSelect.asp?id=10564&pricepoint=10564100&purchaseamt=79&currencyid=EUR&purchasedesc=DomainCertification
After we receive your payment we will certify your domain. It will also include the TM verification. The results will be sent to you within 24 hours.

Sincerely,

Amanda Rosenberg

Customer Support

Here you see a new scam domain name-tools.net (http://domain-kb.com/www/name-tools.net), which points to the same site as domainsaletools.com. Payments site (secure.2000charge.com) probably has nothing to do with this fraud, but I am not sure.

I hope I have helped all the people who will be looking for information about this domain buying fraud. In general, be smart, think at first and don’t forget to check on the internet.

Google “frauds list” to see how many deceptions there can be . If it is too good to be true – then it probably is not real.

p.s. The funny thing is, that all domains are hosted in the Netherlands (NL), where I currently live. I hope the bad guys are not my neighbours 🙂

Update 2015-09-06. All mentioned scam addresses:

http://name-tools.net

http://tools.digital-certificates.net

DIGITAL-CERTIFICATES.NET

http://www.cert-tools.org

cert-tools.net

topdomainsales.net

Update 2015-09-12

http://www.tradera.com

http://archive.answers-google.org

http://www.dnjournal.com

 

Dell Latitude E6540 with AData Premier Pro SP900 SSD

It is almost end of the year, although Christmas starts earlier than usual for me. Just got a new laptop with SSD at my work. So I want to give you an impression how it feels to switch from 2 years old Dell Vostro 3560 with Windows 7 to Dell Latitude E6540 with SSD and Windows 8.1.

One of obvious differences is Windows version. From my feeling, Windows 8 is so so faster compared to older versions of Windows. When Windows 8 was in development stage I was actively following all the coming news directly from Microsoft developers. I have seen many greatness coming up. I can feel now the built-in improvements in the new laptop for sure: amazing start up time, sophisticated resources management and really fast UI responsiveness.

Of course, software can’t do much without good hardware. Software developers are used to have best class CPU and a lot of memory for everyday development tasks. I always thought that hard drive speed is not improving so fast as lets say CPU or GPU. Although it is not totally true, because hard drive size is constantly growing, but speeds are not decreasing. The typical HDD is usually 7200 rpm, has less or more cache available and an interface. I have even read somewhere, that technology used in HDD remains the same for the last 30 years. So you can’t expect too much, from the old man, right?

So I did this comparison on the old laptop running full of stuff vs. and the new one already pre-installed with most of my components for every day work: IIS, windows services, SQL server, etc.

Lets see some numbers now. Just check this benchmark HDD vs. SSD:

Vostro 3560 CrystalDiskMark WDC WD5000BPKT-75PK4T0Latitude E6540 CrystalDiskMark Premier Pro SP900If you compare only plain numbers, read speeds are 5x-268x times faster and write speeds are 3x-270x faster. Just amazing. Now cold start-up time of the machine is 15-20 seconds (till I can start clicking). Visual studio solutions compile times increased at least 2x-3x times. To open Visual studio takes less than 10s. For me, used to the old machine, these are really fast numbers. I can’t say how much performance is affected by the SSD in this case, but I believe it is a lot.

Old HDD was nothing special, just a standard model for consumers:

Vostro 3560 CrystalDiskInfo WDC WD5000BPKT-75PK4T0If somebody will be looking for more hardware details about E6540, I made several more print screens.

AData Premier Pro SP900 SSD:

Latitude E6540 CrystalDiskInfo Premier Pro SP900CPU:

Latitude E6540 CPU-Z Intel core i7 4900MQ

GPU:

Latitude E6540 GPU-Z AMD Radeon HD 8790MLatitude E6540 GPU-Z Inten HD graphics 4600Latitude E6540 HWinfo64

Happy coding!

Free OnePlus invitation

Something like year ago, I was looking to buy for my first smart phone. IOnePlus have also taken a peek at OnePlus One. Although I didn’t want to wait for an invitation, but created an account and just bought another middle range phone.

Sadly, just few hours ago I finally received my invitation to buy OnePlus One. To make someone happy, here is the link to claim the phone. Please put a comment below if you have used it.

You have a new invite!

Dear fanboy/girl,

Whoop whoop! You have just received an invite to purchase the OnePlus One.

To use this invite, please follow this link to claim it as yours (you have less than 24h to do so): https://account.oneplus.net/invite/claim/GLVE-IWWM-B4H6-1PDB. If you haven’t yet registered your account, no problem. Just follow this link: https://account.oneplus.net/sign-up

Remember that this invite can only be used for orders shipping to Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and United States.

The invite will expire 24 hours from when we sent this email, not necessarily when you received it, please claim it as soon as possible as expired invites are not re-activated.

Enjoy!

Azure MSDN subscription disabled even not all credits are used up

I did try out Azure payable services using MSDN credits. But after several hours my account was disabled. When I login in Azure portal (old or new, doesn’t matter) I see this information message: “Your subscription has been disabled as it has no credit remaining. Remove spending limit”.

Azure MSDN credits disabled 1I have not used Azure so heavily to consume 75 Euro so quickly. Here is a list of my total usage currently shown on the portal:

Azure MSDN credits disabled 2New Azure portal shows this billing summary (I have one private and one MSDN subscriptions):

Azure services billing including MSDN subscriptionMaybe someone knows why it happened and what to do now? Comments are very welcome.