General on Miro's World

A Wiki Wiki Wikend

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Last weekend 25th to 27th of September, members of Wikimedia Slovensko met in Dubnica nad Váhom. It was great to meet the fellow Wikipedians in the flesh again (Matej, Patrik and Filip), and to meet Kormi in 3D for the first time.

It was mainly a planning, coordination and brainstorming meeting, but part of the programme happened outdoors, with cameras. By Sunday the town’s 18th-century Calvary had its own photos on Wikimedia Commons, a record on Wikidata and the start of a Slovak Wikipedia article. The local Jewish cemetery gained a set of new photographs too. That weekend is a good small example of what this whole thing is about.

How klassify.com went live: one static page, GitHub Pages and Route 53

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:30:00 +0200

My company, Klassify s.r.o., has had a domain for a long time before it was even registered (I registered klassify.com way back in early 2000 in Canada, but never actually did anything with it) - and a web page since this afternoon. For all that time klassify.com carried only my email - there was no A record at all, nothing was served, and whoever looked up the company from an invoice or a contract got a browser error and, I suppose, some doubts about whether the company exists. So here is how it got fixed in one afternoon, in the order it happened and with the reasoning. Nothing here is clever or sophisticated or the only/the best way. The point is the sequence of creation: there are two places in it where it is quite easy to break something that matters more than a web page.

The Five-Year Intermission

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0200

The last post here is dated February 18, 2021. It was a perfectly ordinary how-to about Bitbucket permissions, and nothing about it suggested it would be the last one for five and a half years. There was no farewell post, no “taking a break” announcement. The blog just — stopped.

This post is the missing announcement, written from the other side.

What happened
#

The short version: life kept running, and the writing habit didn’t.

Quote of the day

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 11:22:48 +0800

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

Happy birthday Czechoslovakia

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 11:22:48 +0800

Czechoslovakia would be 100 today
#

1918-10-28 - 1992-12-31
#

We (both nations) we lucky to separate paths the peaceful way and at the end of the day, both countries are in the EU, NATO and relations between Czechs and Slovak are probably the best ever because the quarrels over budget and transfers ended.

Mission (almost) accomplished

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 11:22:48 +0800

It’s been five years since I started toying with idea to learn first romance language in my collection - despite living in Canada for over 18 years, I never picked up French.

The learning was slow during 2014 and 2015 (just summer school in Spain and Duolingo) - but it accelerated a lot in last 2 years.

Fast forward to now: on Sunday while watching Prime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(film)) we have decided to switch from English to Spanish (with Spanish subtitles) to enjoy the movie better than in original.

Simonyi Karoly in Valencia

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 11:22:48 +0800

One of the Microsoft old-timer bilionaries, Charles Simonyi, Hungarian born software engineer, famous for his Hungarian naming notation - who would not remember lpstrzDescription or wFlag - is visiting Valencia on his yacht Skat.

Those who do not write code (or better said - did not write code 20 years ago) may be familiar with his other contribution - Microsoft Word, something I feel much less positive about than lpstrzDescription.

Third time is a charm

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 16:25:06 -0700

As part of “back to basics” software minimalism movement, I have exported the old Wordpress blog and loaded it into Jekyll with intention to publish it on my Github

This contains almost 10 years worth of history of my posts, plus few not yet previously unpublished posts.

It is based on Jekyll Clean theme, created by Scott Emmons - see it / get it from github.

If you are interested in the Jekyll Clean theme:

Miro's World 2.0

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 00:54:46 -0500

The continuation of the old Wordpress blog with more agreeable tools: Github Wiki + Gollum, Markdown and Git.

My old blog at Miro’s World has been kinda neglected in last two years. I have written several entries and published them only internally. I have decided now to pull those of the entries that do not contain customer references, code or customer IP out.

Google+ is superset of both Facebook and Twitter

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:49:41 -0400

It may be too early to express opinions about something so new as Google+, but in the short few days I was playing with it, I started to like it a lot. Many bloggers consider it to be a Facebook killer - and it (unlike two previous Google attempts on social networking) eventually may become that. Conceptually, however it is much closer to Twitter than Facebook.

The biggest difference is that in G+ there is no peer relation - "friendship" that needs to be confirmed by both parties. Both ends are disconnected in Google+ - set of people whose updates you see in your stream and set of people that see your updates is not the same and can be in extreme case disjunct.

Unintended coincidence

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:50:14 -0500

To be fair, the book is to appear in March 2010, so most likely the cover image is not ready yet. But I found lack of images for book whose main point is to make explanation illustrated quite ironical :-).

Attention is new currency

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:02:09 -0500

Some companies just do not get it.

It starts with an email, like this one:

By coincidence, you are on project that has the CRM component so you decide to check it out and click on link. After all, it is free, right, so why wouldn't you ?

The catch is that it is not free at all. Without realizing it, you have already made your first payment, by doing the sender a favor: as we know, clicking on a link in email is definitely not a good idea and recommended behaviour, unless you know the sender and trust the sender. Which - in this case - you have absolutely no reason to.

Here we go again

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:56:40 -0500

This is reloaded version of my previous blog - or continuation of the fork.

First thing to start is to explain why did I do something quite contra-productive as relocate the blog and loose all the audience - however small it could have been.

It would seem that I like restarts and things reloaded. I did pick a new country to become new home for me and my family (if emigration is not a restart, what else is ?). Back in 2004 we have started Thinknostic to be "Montage Reloaded" - a new incarnation of the company I worked for before and liked it a lot. The same story repeats with blogging.

Book recommendation: Outliers by Malcolm Caldwell

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:24:39 -0400

From the author that wrote Tipping point (on my reading list) as well as Blink - which I listened to but found rather controversial. I was very curious what will this one be about.

The book is about success and people that managed to achieve extraordinary results. It touches several topics, I will pick three of them that I found most interesting. It starts with interesting observation - if you look at the MONTH of the birth of junior NHL hockey players, you'll discover that over 50% of them was born between January and April. Certainly not anything like normal distribution. The point is that cutoff-date for signing up children into hockey training in Canada is January 1st. At the age when this happens (5-6 years), kid born in January has significant physical and mental advantage against kid born in November or December. As result, the early born children perform better in their category, and as result they are more likely to make the selection between the talented and perspective. Those selected get much more opportunities to play and practice, which causes them being really better players than late born ones - a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. As result - if your kids are born after August, better reconsider the NHL dreams. If you believe what M.G. is saying, I mean.

Lost in the social networks

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:09:35 -0400

This is public answer to all who were asking why is my blog so badly neglected. Short answer is: It is because I am pretty active elsewhere and did not really find any additional time to allocate. If you are busy person, now you know, see ya later. If you are curious what elsewhere means, read on.

Last year and before, blogosphere and this blog was *only* part of the social networking space I was paying attention to. Since about 3-4 months I started to really pay attention to Facebook. I originally joined to find out what my son and couple of friends are up to and somehow I started to see value in this channel of communication. Recently, even my nephews and children of a very good friend that moved from Ottawa to Europe. So Facebook became the "generation bridge" and channel for stuff out of workspace.

The myth of premium hardware or why Ottawa needs Apple Store

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:46:44 -0500

Back in November 2007, when I was buying Macbook Pro, I did order the AppleCare option, which added several hundred dollars to already pretty expensive notebook price. For moment I was tempted to go without it - after all, Apple makes top grade, high quality hardware and considering pretty low failure rate I have seen with my Windows based notebooks between 1998-2006, why to pay more ? Little did I know how much mileage will I get from the extra cost :-(.

Weird Rogers 3G network error - fixed ?

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:34:20 -0500

Just tried out to switch the iPhone to automatic Date and Time setting with 3G on. The time jumped from 11:31 to 11:30 (my iPhone was about 1 minute too fast) and STAYED THERE.

This could mean that the issue is finally fixed. Can anybody confirm that ?

Weird Rogers 3G network error

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:19:51 -0500

Since about Sunday, Dec 7th (I remember exactly because I noticed it when leaving the regular ByMUG meeting at Patty Bolands) my iPhone for no particular reason decided to translocate itself to GMT+1 time zone. It was not visible immediately, only emails received at 16:20 were shown as received 6 hour in the future.

All this without any changes or installing anything on my end ...

The Clock application showed what was wrong (this snapshot was taken on Sunday, 16:02 Ottawa time):

Chapters goes Mac

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:22:48 -0500

I have noticed few of this beauties in Kanata Chapters. Nice replacement for the beaten up CRT terminals that used to be around. They somehow looked right and familiar from the distance.

Beautiful screen, with touch capability.

Nice presentation and user interface.

The keyboard with unique personality.

And after looking closer, it was very obvious why:

Proper keyboard simply must have Command key ;-)

About time to break the silence

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:32:03 -0500

Several people asked what is going on with me: no blog posts for almost a month, litlle presence on Gtalk / MSN. It is simpler to answer this way that write same email over and over.

Unfortunately the reason for being quiet is not that I am taking time off and enjoying myself somewhere in Caribbean on a secluded island without internet connection. Those who know me well also know that I would never go somewhere without access to Web for longer period of time than week - and even that would cause serious withdrawal issues. I am in Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere in between - physically or virtually.

Dewey's Classification can be funny

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:08:20 -0400

Yes, I mean *that* dry, boring Deweys Decimal Classification used by libraries around the world.

Here is what I noticed in Ottawa Public Library:

Can you imagine two subjects so far apart from each other - and sometimes sooo close ;-)

iPhone firmware 2.1 - first impressions

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:35:42 -0400

I was brave and updated right away last Friday, as soon as the update appeared, both the iTunes and the iPhone firmware. And so far, so good. Initial observations are quite positive - at least so far, from using it during last few days.

I never had any issues with the dropped calls, so I cannot report any improvement. What seems to work better is browsing: I get much less (if any) connection errors. It is hard to say whether it was the firmware, or Rogers fixed something - or the fixed firmware causes less issues to network - it looks like improvement.

Too good to be true ?

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:39:20 -0400

If this thing is real, I am buying one. Regardless that I really, really do not need another Mac :-). Form factor of thin screen of size 9-12 inch, with reasonable subset of touch gestures would be EXACTLY what I need from a internet terminal / reader. Plus the option to tether it with iPhone for ubiquitous connectivity ...

Chrome is interesting, but I'll stick with Firefox ...

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:21:34 -0400

Everybody seems to be crazy about Chrome, the new superfast Google browser. The odes on speed sounded quite exaggerated, so I had to try it. I opened up again my old battered Fujitsu Lifebook and after 3 reboots (it was not used for about 2 months and Windows update had to have its patching done) I downloaded and installed it.

The rumors were not unsubstantiated ... it IS considerably speedier than anything else, including Opera. I have not seen any issues on the few sites I have tried - everything seems to work just fine.

More on kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork Error 302

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:38:19 -0400

A friend made me aware of this (thanks, Peter):

The Inside Deets on iPhone 2.0.2 and Dropped Calls
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/08/28/the-inside-deets-on-iphone-202-and-dropped-calls/

Sounds like plausible explanation.

It is not the network that is fault but the interaction of the bad
power control algorithm in 2.0 and 2.0.1 software and the network that
is at fault. The sooner everybody is running 2.0.2 software the better
things will be. Having seen the graphs the 2.0.2 software has already
started to make difference.

We are hiring

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:12:00 -0400

After everything-but-quiet summer, things got even busier and we need to add more great people to our teams.

At the moment we're looking for

* Junior Java developers

* Intermediate Java developers

* Intermediate .Net developers

* Senior .Net developers

* Junior Graphics/UI/Multimedia Designer

Sorry - no teleworking, you must be local to apply. If you feel like fitting in - or know somebody in Ottawa that would fit, email Miro at thinknostic dot com ...

Linux vs Windows - great comparison

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:35:47 -0400

I have been "living in a command line" for last few weeks. Pretty refreshing experience. As result, I had to google a lot, especially when it comes to e.g. subtle differences between tar options on Ubuntu Linux and Open Solaris ... While doing that, I somehow stumbled upon this great writeup on cultural differences between Linux and Windows. Nicely written, no flamewars - obviously pro-Linux, but no Microsoft or Windows bashing and lots of insight. Higly recommended.

iPhone 3G first impressions: Applications

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:09:00 -0400

Having used Touch 2.0, I managed not to install everything I found in AppStore. Majority of which is crap anyway - people are still learning how to use the platform properly. Pretty soon though, all those flashlights, tip calculators and similar pointless-ware will be replaced by apps that make sense. I hope.

Just for the reference: here is my iTunes snapshot as of today:

Some applications are pure time killers (when waiting in line and there is signal to read news online) but some are actually very useful. Few comments to those I actually use are below - actually, first three of the apps are below - I will get back to few more in subsequent posts:

How to make screenshot of running application on iPhone 3G

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:04:37 -0400

It is sooo simple:

1) Run the app you want to get screenshot of

2) Press the home button at the same time as On button. Screen will flash white for a sec

3) Find the picture saved in your photos.

This is second amazing thing I have found out about iPhone in last few days. First was hidden button on the headphone mike that can start/stop running iPod music, pick up the ringing phone or (doubleclick) advance to next song. Very useful while walking ...

Good hard shell case for iPhone 3G

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:35:12 -0400

After carrying in my pocket for 3 days, I have decided to get something to prevent my smallest Mac from scratches and breaking when drops (I did drop the iPod touch and it was close call: one of the edges was scratched and slightly damaged).

It took some time to decide, but at the end I settled for this one:

In white, of course. It is a bit tricky to put it on, but it feels very solid and does not slip.

How to kill iPhone battery in less than 2 hours

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:58:44 -0400

This may be a random event, but here is what happened:

1) Switch on camera and and take couple of pictures

2) While camera still on in taking pictures mode, switch off the phone (by the switch on top).

After doing that, about 1.5 hour later I took out the phone to check the emails. Phone was very warm - not the kind of unpleasantly hot you get from Macbook Pro battery when rendering movie on batery power , but still much warmer than ever. Camera was still on. The battery that was two hours ago fully charged was on less than 10%. Strange.

Create own ringtones for iPhone 3G

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:48:00 -0400

One of the many things that I never did before was actually customizing the phone. Neither of the songs that I really liked for ringtone (and were unique enough) were available of course. I found this website: http://audiko.net/en.html that allows to take an MP3 (one that you legally own, of course) and convert it to ringtone.

Here is how it works:

1) Find a suitable MP3

2) Go to above website, upload MP3

Quote of the day

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:13:27 -0400

A gem from Merlin's twitter feed. I found it being both hilariously funny as well as wildly applicable :D

There's nothing wrong with me that couldn't be fixed by a little exercise, some discipline, and a weekend at the Dog Psychology Center.

Merlin Mann

iPhone 3G first impressions: Phone, Battery Life

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:02:56 -0400

Phone

The sound of the iPhone is much clearer and generally better than my old RAZR.

What I really like is a built-in microphone in headphones that allows making and answering calls without holding phone next to your ear. Second is handling of the incoming call while listening to podcast or music: it fades aways and after finishing the call, it slowly fades back in. Very nicely done.

But the best phone feature is seamless integration with my address book, which thanks to synchronization that works very well always the same as address book on my Mac. It offers classic "wheel search", list of recent calls, list of favorites and dial keyboard. What is really awesome is the easy to add or update information: for example, you receive a call from a friend that just got a new phone. After hanging up, with single click on the recent entry you can assign the just received number to an existing contact. And it is always that single address card you use - with address (that you can show in Google map with another click) or email addresses that you can fire up with single click..

iPhone 3G - I surrender

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:51:12 -0400

I was holding off for over two weeks, decided not go with that outrageous iPhone voice/data racket. Even trying to encourage people to wait in a hope the demand will be weak and Rogers will bend and lower the rates.

Only, it was not. I mean demand. iPhones seems to be selling better than beaver tales on Dow's Lake during sub minus twenty sunny skating Saturday. Especially the 16 GB ones.

No words necessary. No DRM either ...

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:49:21 -0400

Back to normal

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:13:45 -0400

So, after few days working diskless, I am back to normal operation mode. About time, we are late with last episode of screencast ...

The copying of external disk went error free and took almost 5 hours (210 GB). Fortunately, the MBP was usable - I did not want to modify too many files, but it was perfect for Web research and writing in Google Docs.

After reboot, the TimeMachine decided that 85 GB needs to be backed up again. This seems like bug in TimeMachine, because I have not really changed much more than few gigs - 4-5 max during the few days.

DMCA for Canada ? Act now !

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:33:21 -0400

I have got a letter from Online Rights Canada. I believe that what is about to hapen, may have pretty deep implications down the stream. Minimum thing I can do is try to help spreading the word.

Here is the message:

Dear Online Rights Canada Supporter,

We understand that the government will imminently introduce legislation to amend the Copyright Act - and it intends to push it through quickly. We at Online Rights Canada wanted to let you know what was ahead in the next few weeks, and what you can do to protect Canada from a new DMCA.

Quote of the day

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:24:47 -0400

I've been writing a lot of code for the past 6 months. I have to admit, it is a welcome change from Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Java, unlike text and graphics has a clearer definition of correct and finished.

From Software Is A Craft by Dan Pritchett

Catching up with Hanselminutes

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:31:29 -0400

Thanks to great weather, the walking season is in full progress :-) and that means I was able to add some more listening material to my podcast collection. I still keep track with all part of TWIT network - This week in tech, Security Now!, MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly - but that is nowhere close enough for both walking and driving ...

I have returned back to listening to Scott Hanselman blog (Hanselminutes) - mostly out of curiosity how did working for Microsoft change is very balanced and realistic view of technologies.

Rogers, Bell and Net neutrality

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:09:14 -0400

I do not blog on political issues, but this one is kind of different.

Couple of weeks ago I received a letter from my ISP provider (Rogers Cable), stating that days of unlimited downloads are over. More or less. Rogers capped the monthly transfer depending on your subscription plan, which in my case means maximum 95 GB / month for sum of upload and download.

They started to monitor the traffic in December and will start charging for the transfer exceeding the cap in June.

Heroes Happened ... here

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:50:06 -0400

Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).

I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started. But Microsoft is such important platform that one must pay attention what is going on.

On White Stuff and Other Disasters

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:29:13 -0400

Guess what are three most useful tools without which no proper Ottawa household can exist ? Snow shovel, snow pusher and car window ice scratcher. If the number was 4, the next would be snowblower. Up to yesterday, our family was in safe position being equipped with several shovels, four or five scratchers and one pusher.

Then disaster stroke: my son broke the pusher while moving away few cube meters of snow we removed from the roof. In case you do not understand - removing snow from roof is another favorite winter leisure time activity in Ottawa: almost everybody is doing it. Not that it would be so much fun, but because of the dreadful consequences - avoid it and you may end up like this guy.

Free Microsoft Press E-Books !

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:44:27 -0500

Microsoft Press is handing out 3 books:

- Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo

- Introducing ASP.NET Ajax by Dino Esposito

- Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney

Silverlinght 1.0 is probably a bit outdated (with 1.1/2.0 close), but the others should be good, judging by the authors. Dino Esposito wrote couple of very good books on ASP.NET and .NET.

See this blog for more details and download links.

Absurdity of the DMCA

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:50:14 -0500

If the world of physical objects would governed with the same rules as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does impose on all things digital, scissors would be illegal and you could end up in jail for manufacturing, and maybe even owning or using them. Crazy ? Well, see this presentation and judge for yourself.

This "law" is currently impacting our friends south of the border only, but it is very real that it will soon become a law in Canada as well.

Over $500 worth of software for $49.99

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:10:23 -0500

As long as you are using OS-X, this is something worthy looking at: the MuPromo is running the annual bundle offer with (currently) 8 applications, worth $534 for the mentioned $49.99. The sale is on for 4 more days. The way how it works is that at certain marks, additional applications will be added to the bundle (for the same price) and will be made available to everybody who purchased the bundle. Including me :-). Currently, the sales are at > 1600, the next app will be added at 2400 (pretty sure it will happen) and the last one at 5000 (fairly likely).

Crossing bit boundaries

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:41:31 -0500

Today is a special day for this blog as two bit boundaries were crossed. This is post number 256, which means that I have used all 8 bit numbers for numbering and jumped into nine bit space. The byte is not enough any more - vive la 0x100.

Another boundary crossed today is number of hits as tracked by Wordpress (which does not count my visits). In this case the number reached and crossed was 0x8000 or 32768 decimal, which brings us to upper half of the 16 bit address space. From today, full 16 bit counter must be used - and it must be even "unsigned short int" :-).

Book recommendation: Seth Godin - Small is the new big

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:25:50 -0500

On previous weekend I had great opportunity to spend a lot of time listening to books and podcasts. The opportunity was long drive to Quebec City and back, plus the two days spent walking around with camera, taking pictures, enjoying the differences in style and architecture and listening to Seth Godin's book - Small is the new big.

There is nothing in this book that would actually require to drive almost 500 km one way - you can comfortably get the same benefit out of it without moving out from your favorite sofa, walking around your neighborhood or on a treadmill (hi Joel). The real reason being in the capitol of La Belle Province was Skate Canada - Grand Prix competion in figure skating. And while my wife was watching Jeff Buttle, Joannie Rochette and many others - which is her favorite leisure time activity, I was walking, taking pictures and listening - which is mine.

Going (mostly) virtual

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:39:09 -0400

With my new Macbook Pro on the way from China, I have started the big consolidation of hardware and software platforms. The goal is to improve the change management of software development environments, increase mobility and increase stability of the environments.

The way how I am going to do that is moving all "fragile" environments to virtual machines. My most fragile environment is Windows XP (I am still resisting Vista). What I mean "fragile" is well known "software rot" of the developers machine, caused by frequent installs and uninstalls (or upgrades) of components, tools, etc. After some time (which varies by the kind and frequency of installs), the machine becomes more and more sluggish, registry bloated and occurrence of weird things more frequent - up to the point that developer decides to blow off the Windows install and start from scratch.

Ordered a Macbook Pro

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:07:11 -0400

I have to confess, I did it :-). But no, I did NOT do it right away after Friday 6PM when Leopard became publically available. I managed to wait for whole 5 hours... partly because I was not sure whether the 6PM is local time or Cupertino time - and partly because the Apple store was stubbornly saying that my MBPro would ship with Tiger. At about 10:30 there was a "sticker" saying that all new Macs will be shipped with Leopard ... and after that, you have to agree I had no choice ....

Book review: The Dip

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:30:49 -0400

Subtitled "A little book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick" by Seth Godin.

So what is the dip ? It is the strange valley after you start with something, causing that after initial quick success you will get worse before you can get better. Obstacles that you either overcome - or you quit. Seth explains that these obstacles are there for a reason - they separate those who want something badly enough from those who do not. We know them in various forms. Back at the university, the first 2 years packed with math were the dip. Very little of the math we have had to learn was actually really necessary - other that learn you how to think, how to study and in addition to that, separate those who really wants to have that Computer Science degree strong enough.

Book mini-review: Breaking Windows

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:15:23 -0400

I've spent lot of time today reading. I am catching up with my reading stack. Between stuff I've finished was: Breaking Windows : How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft

The impression ? Mixed feelings. Maybe I've expected something different. Lot's of details on internal politics and inner fights, not too flattering portrait of Bill G as control obsessed person with very questionable interpersonal skills. From technology perspective, very little what was both interesting and new. I can hardly tell how close to reality are the facts presented, but I often disagreed with the conclusion and analytics. Overall, it was probably worth the time spent on the book - the more you are into politics and relations, the more you may like it. If you are (as I was) expecting a view from more technology side and other stuff that matters, get another book.

Book recomendations: Google Story, The Tipping Point

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:14:25 -0400

Thanks to sudden memory jump in my iPod (from 4GB Nano 2gen to 8 GB iPod touch) I have enough space to load some books in addition to podcasts. I normally do not like abridged versions, but the weather is getting worse so I do not get enough walking time for full versions. These two were both 3-4 disc long audio books.

The Google Story is interesting if you are into history of computing - because it describes the probably the largest transition in computing history - the evolution of World Wide Web to a platform and the evolution of the company that made the Web actually useful. I still remember how much time did it take in 1997/1998 to find anything relevant when the best way how to do this were directories (in early Yahoo! style) or AltaVista and hours and hours of paging through the irrelevant results. Then in early 1998 my friend Rajeeva (I was working in New Jersey at Merrill Lynch) made me aware of that company with funny empty looking page and strange name Google :). And now, 9 years later the shareprice of GOOG is well over $600 - just unbelievable.

Free eBook and audiobook on media business and distribution control

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:05:37 -0400

Gerd Leonhard, co-author of the Future of Music book is making an experiment with his new book - The End of Control. He is publishing the chapters of the book as they appear in PDF format as well as MP3's on his website. First two chapters - "Attention is the new currency" and "Copyright in the Age of Uncontrolled distribution" are currently available for download / reading / listening.

The books tries to address very important questions on how will the new media business function in environment with little control over the distribution channel. Attempts to enforce control with technical tools were not very successful - just recall the Sony rootkit fiasco's, hacking the HD-DVD and others. Currently, there is strong movement away from DRM and towards non-~~crippled~~restricted content.

Who said government's Web pages are boring ?

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:47:06 -0400

Look how creatively did French government - more specifically Ministère de la culture et de la communication - approach even such mundane subject as the 404 page :-).

BOTD: Figuring out computer science

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:18:18 -0400

It is all about deep questions and problems computer science. Including the question whether such thing as computer science actually exists. I thing it does, but have occasional moments of doubts - mostly when I read something related to real science :-).

What does Andreas Zwinkau (it is read as ts-win-cow, my anglophone friends ;-)) think about it, can be found http://focs.wordpress.com/

His comments are amazingly deep for such a young guy. I wish when I was getting my comp-sci degree (1981-1986) we have had the same wonderful things these young fellas have now: ubiquitous internet and really world wide web with Google that actually makes it useful, Linux and many other wonderful open source projects (Apache, Jakarta, Firefox, Eclipse - you name it). Can you imagine studying computer science in a world where the Web does not exist (yet) ?

Like Netmeeting - only much better

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:10:30 -0400

My current client is multi-national company, headquartered in Ottawa with offices in USA and Europe. With teams all over the globe, the conference calls and network meetings are part of the game. This usually means Microsoft Netmeeting to share the screen and teleconference bridge for voice. Netmeeting usually works quite OK - except when it does not - for no obvious reason :-).

Thanks to Yugma, there is now better alternative. Yugma is Sanskrit word meaning "the state of being in unified collaboration" and also a name of a startup, offering teleconferencing product that aspires to unify colaboration between platforms. And they mean it, because their product runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and integrates with Skype to take care of the voice portion.

Microsoft will ship MVC for ASP.NET ?

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:00:05 -0400

From Scott Guthrie's interview on .NET futures

SG: We’ve seen demand for an MVC framework on two fronts. One is for even more testability, having the ability to completely mock-up a request. We’ve also always seen with ASP.NET that some people like having the server control, postback model; some people say, “I just want absolute control.”

The MVC framework we’re coming up with is a fairly simple MVC model, it’s very clean, it’s a front controller model, and it integrates very well into ASP.NET so you can use ASP.NET forms authentication, session state, security, personalisation, caching, all the standard features, but with an alternative to the postback model where you have a more traditional controller-view separation and have complete control over your HTML.

Quote of the day

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:02:18 -0400

Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted.

Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.
They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough
They are there to stop "the other people"

Randy Pausch

If you want to watch and listen to a lecture by professor of CMU Computer Science that will teach you things way beyond realms of software engineering, check this video.

Book: Softwar - an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:54:31 -0400

This is blog entry I wrote over a two years ago - before this blog has even started. Now I found it on the disk during cleanups and found out it is still valid. The iPod mentioned was my first, now long dead first generation Shuffle.

Here it comes:

Spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday reading this book. I did not really expect to finish it, considering the size (~ 500 pages) and the fact that I am not such a great fan of Oracle products - especially not the Oracle Apps. But it turned up to be way better that expected. I mean the book, albeit I partially improved my opinion about the 11i. Technologywise, it is still kind a dinosaur, but now I can more appreciate the sheer size of the problem these guys were trying to address. But back to the book.

BOTD: The Reader

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:06:21 -0400

Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader".

Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/

Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need. If I should pick some enhancements hat would make a huge difference, it would be:

Webbits 2007-06

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:12:09 -0400

Few nuggets from recent surfing and reading newsfeeds:

A very nice explanation of differences between Ruby Gem and Rails plugin in Arun Gupta's blog

The community seems to be still fairly divided on the "Is Vista good or bad" ? For the laters, read the story from the corporate IT point of view. I still have not found any good reason to upgrade :-).
Good story of how the experience of joining a project should not look like

Field test of Sony eReader

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:00:41 -0400

One of the many gadgets I have packed for the summer vacation was of course Sony Reader and SD card with nice selection of texts. It was fresh and fully charged, so I assumed that I will be well prepared for the gaps in program during the following three weeks ahead of us and for the long flights over Atlantic.

Obviously, the flight was first moment where Reader was used. During the 7 hours, I spent about 3-4 hours reading. We flew through the night, but the overhead spotlight in airplane was more than sufficient and the letters were very well readable. I also enjoyed the almost non-reflexive surface of the screen.

The price of anonymity

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:18:40 -0400

The combination of software allowing anonymous access to the Net, not too competent police officers and laws not quite 21st century ready can be a very dangerous combination. According this story, the operator of the Tor node was arrested by German police ...

I am quite curious how be would situation like this handled in Canada. First of all, would it happen ? Would the RCMP be more technically up to date than Deutsche Polizei ? What defines the responsibility of an operator of server, that moves encrypted content ? I am not crazy enough to try it out just to find out :-) - so no, I will not setup a TOR node (even if I do admire this cleverly designed piece of software).

Quote of the day

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:08:14 -0400

First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.

Leo Rosten

BOTD: Good Math, Bad Math

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:09:48 -0400

Today's BOTD (Blog of the Day) is "Good Math, Bad math".

What it is about is summarized in its subtitle:

Finding the fun in good math. Squashing the bad math and the fools who promote it.

There is no need to add anything to this.

Only maybe an URL: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/

Quote of the day

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:36:08 -0400

Software problems aren't like mathematical problems. They have no clear boundaries or axioms and the problem domain is always shifting and evolving and changing. This fundamental difference ensures that while mathematical knowledge has a long shelf life, technical knowledge seems to last little longer than most popstars. And the changes wrought in programming are not just shallow refinements or surface innovations but fundamental changes wrought by order-of-magnitude shifts in the virtual landscape.

New iPod touch as ebook reader ?

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:23:53 -0400

As the September 28th is approaching (the day when the new iPod touch will be available in Canada), I have a real dilemma: do I go with the "iPhone without the phone" or not ? The price $329 for 8 GB iPod is pretty high - compared to $279 for 80GB classic - which would allow me to carry all my music, some movies and all podcasts with me. On the other hand, the Touch has WiFi and can be used as pretty decent Web browser on top of iPod functionality.

Great article on data visualization

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:23:50 -0400

"Data visualization: Modern approaches" - great read, highly recommended. Available here.

Sapkowski in English is out !

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:05:54 -0400

For all my fantasy-loving friends who consider reading in Czech or Polish too inconvenient: the first book of the grand master Andrzej Sapkowski in English is out. It is book of short stories about Geralt, the Hexer (or Witcher if you want), who is the main character of the 5-book saga with the same name.

You can get it on Amazon.

Most important event of the year

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:30:15 -0400

I have been pretty quiet during last month. Few reasons why, none of them business related. The summer is not the season where people in our industry are incredibly busy - that's what winter is for ... and end of March, government fiscal year end ;-). We had family visit - my two nephews were staying with us for few weeks. So instead of blogging, I was spending evenings with them and weekends as a tour guide around Ottawa's attractions. I have even - finally, after 9 years in this country - overcome my dislike for really long car trips and visited Niagara Falls.

End of democracy - or how I turned into platform

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:20:32 -0400

Once upon a time, there was an application named Democracy Player. A really neat one, capable of downloading videos from internet and playing them in multiple formats. It even can download YouTube videos.

For some reason, the Democracy Player name was replaced with a new name. My name. The Democracy Player will be know as Miro. I have not discovered why this name was chosen, or if it means something. Maybe the guys responsible for it had similar thoughts as my parents over 40 years ago :-).

Smugmug "processing image" - follow up

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:33:32 -0400

In the previous article I have mentioned the potential issue with some uploaded images hanging in state "Processing image" for surprisingly long time after upload and expressed hope that there is some background "catch it all" process that would take care of all these. As it turned out, there is. All uploaded images that were haging in the processing stage turned up to be fixed by next day or so (it was about 10-20 images out of about 3-4 thousand).

First week with SmugMug

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:44:14 -0400

Week ago, my SmugMug 14 day trial period expired and (as expected) I signed up for the 1 year service. Here are my first impressions after over week of use, with over 3000 uploaded photos and 6.8 GB disc space consumed :-).

Good news is - it really works as advertised and I still like it a lot. I have not really tried many of the features, but what I did try, worked as expected. The uploader (I am using the default, Java applet based drag-and-drop universal uploader) is very friendly - the small status windows shows not only status of the upload, but also the thumbnail of the uploaded image.

Search for perfect online photo storage

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:46:19 -0400

One thing that is on my Someday/Maybe list for quite some time is to get some off-site storage for my digital images. They are reasonably safe on RAID-5 NAS with a copy on USB disk, but what is missing is off-site copy. At minimum, a remote backup, ideally with an UI resembling something like Aperture or Photoshop Elements or Shoebox: photo organizer with Web intefarce and remote storage. So that in addition to have offline backup I would have an option to work with images from any location.

Quote of the day

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:25:19 -0400

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

-- Maurice Wilkes

What is so worthy mentioning on this obvious stament, describing fate likely shared by many thousand or milions of software developers worldwide ? Not much, only the date. According this book (which is a pretty good read btw),
Sir Maurice came to the sad realization mentioned above in the year 1949.

MSDN Documentation - the follow up

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:01:02 -0400

Judging by the number of hits, Joel (and myself) are not the only people who would like to see nicer, better and faster MSDN documentation. As a very nice surprise, some of the feedback came directly from the people than actually can do something about it - like Darren Parker from Microsoft and Anand Raman from the Sandcastle project. Rob Relyea suggested and interesting looking tool based on XAML.

Thanks everybody - it is always nice to find out that even really big companies listen to the developers and want to address the problems. It almost feels like OpenSource experience where (it was few years back) we have encountered an issue in one of many Java templating libraries, posted to discussion group a question and few hours + several emails later had patch for the bug from the library creator :-). But back to the topic.

MSDN Documentation - the worst in class ?

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:41:36 -0400

Did it ever happened to you that you were using some tool day after day - and never realized it's pretty big deficiencies ? Until somebody, coming from different background pointed out what everything is wrong with the tool ? Before that moment of revelation, the issues were just inconvenience, but right after that they became real annoyance ?

Exactly this happened to me last week and the credit for pointing out what is wrong with MSDN documentation (and the "standard" .NET documentation format in general) goes to Joel :-)

BOTD: Strange Maps

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:39:44 -0400

Today's Blog Of The Day is named Strange Maps, which strangely accurate name. If you have are into maps, or information visualization - or combination of both, do NOT visit this link, because you risk sticking there for few hours :-).

Some ideas presented are quite original and wonderful: for example the map of the USA, having instead of names of the states name of the countries with same GDP as the state. You will find out that Canada == Texas, France == California and Hungary == New Mexico. Or a transposition of the map of Europe and map of Middle Earth - this places Rohan to southern Germany (not a bad match), Isengard is Hamburg. The Mordor ended up in Transylvania with Mount Doom in Romania, Minas Morgul in Hungary and Minas Tirith approximately in Austria.

Game over, back to business

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:34:51 -0400

The wild ride is over and the city gets back to normal. I wish we had won the Cup, but - Ducks were playing pretty good and found what worked on our team. Thanks, Alfie and the Sens - for all the great moments. You were fantastic. There will be another season in few months and another chance to bring the cup home.

On the positive side - it is good to have 2-3 more free evenings a week, now - when there is again nothing on the TV :-). Time to start catching up with neglected podcasts, blogs and feeds.

iTunes U: Great beginning

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:16:42 -0400

With latest iTunes update, quite silently, a very nice new feature appeared. Apple started to offer for download lectures from many universities, with wide selection of topics: from environment through politics to mathematics and computer science. Most of the lectures are videos, but you will find also audio tracks - albeit for some topics, audio is quite problematic. Can you imagine doing e.g. differential equations in audio-only ?

The best feature - the lectures are free downloads. See more details here or on iTunes.

Why blogging is important

Thu, 31 May 2007 23:06:24 -0400

Joel Oleson is suffering if you do not blog ! Sounds strange ? Read the article Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/05/25/you-don-t-blog-i-m-suffering-because-you-don-t-blog.aspx

He makes several very good points - which have very little to do with Sharepoint - but I think the best one is helping the "organic indexing" of the Web space and helping the search engines out there better rank content. I wrote about this while ago.

Quote of the day (Martin Fowler)

Tue, 29 May 2007 22:33:38 -0400

"Corporate IT is dominated by bloatware. Time and time again we have to deal with expensive software purchased on golf-courses that just get in our way while sucking funds and development hours. Technologies that make it harder for programmers to do what they like to do best - make a difference for the businesses they are supporting. "

-- Martin Fowler

DHH on RIA

Thu, 24 May 2007 20:46:02 -0400

DHH is (obviously) David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and RIA (in this context) means Rich Internet Applications. And here is the quote:

I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.

Three amazing visualization projects

Wed, 23 May 2007 22:33:48 -0400

Found by accident - as usually - while searching for something completely different.

Visuwords - visual dictionary, showing semantic relations between words.

Universe by Jonathan Harris.

Wikisky - detailed online sky map, showing the positions & basic characteristics of space objects using a Google Maps like interface.

And two great videos: the 4 minutes video summary on what Web2 actually means and very funny presentation about PowerPoint presentations.

Using Wiki markup without a Wiki

Thu, 17 May 2007 22:10:44 -0400

Even with having Wiki as the main documentation repository, not all documentation ends up in a Wiki. Some documentation needs to be managed as part of the source tree - e.g. Readme's, compilation instructions and similar. This information is usually either plain text or in some form of text processor format, mostly Microsoft Word compatible. Both have their selection of problems. Word documents are large, bloated, harder to version controlled and not readable in shell environment (try to cat or tail Word document :-)). The plain text format lacks visual structure and without headlines, bold/italic, font sizes etc is harder read.

More programming quotes

Tue, 15 May 2007 10:15:54 -0400

"If it works, leave it alone — there's no need to understand it.
If it fails, try to fix it — there's no time to understand it."

"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek:
Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..."
— Joshua D. Wachs, Natural Intelligence Inc.

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." — Martin Golding.

Best book for Ruby on Rails

Mon, 07 May 2007 20:41:16 -0400

During last two weeks I have been reading and playing a lot with Rails. Now I am in the state where I think I started to "get it" and understand how things work under the surface. Which means I am ready actually start using the framework for real work and become proficient as I get my hands dirty.

To get to this state, absolutely essential and by far the best book is the classic one - Agile Web development with Rails co-authored by the original Rails designer and one of the Pragmatic Programmers. Like other books, the first part is sort of step-by-step code tutorial, which leads you through creation of a Rails application, shows you how you access data, create UI, use scaffolding, etc etc. Unlike other books, this does not stop there and the second part of the book is an excellent coverage of Rails internals - ActiveRecord, ActiveView and templating system. Very well written and offering great balance between covering important features without becoming reference manual.

Few interesting links

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:53:10 -0400

Repository of presentations - http://www.slideshare.net/ on variety of topics.

Specialize code-only search engine: http://www.krugle.com/

New Google product on vertical search - Google Co-op.

New great podcast

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:48:29 -0400

Running out of Security Now! and TWIT episodes, I have subscribed and started listening to few newly discovered podcasts.

I have started to listen to the .NET specific one from Scott Hanselman named Hanselminutes. There are couple of factors that makes it better that other geeky blogs out there. First reason is the content quality. There is very high signal-to-noise ratio, pretty much all content counts and both guys in addition to being smart are quite good at achieving right balance between keeping on topic and spontaneity.

You should write blogs

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:00:05 -0400

YOU should write blogs.

Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It's become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you're thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.

From http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs.

Quote of the day

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 23:47:23 -0400

C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs to a dog.
(Steve Taylor).

When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb.
(Unknown author).

I guess somebody got pretty fustrated with good ole C++ :-)

Kurt Vonnegut - R.I.P.

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:39:47 -0400

It is a sad news - Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of the great sci-fi writers, died at the age of 84.

Thanks for all the great hours spent reading many of great books he wrote over last 55 years. I guess that best way how to show respect is re-read something he wrote - like this one.

Long weekend coming

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:30:41 -0400

I have decided to take weekend off. No catching up, no work, no stress. And it will be a proper weekend - 4 days long in total because both Friday and Monday are statutory holidays in Thinknostic. Great opportunity to relax, decompress, catch up on some reading and audio books and do something fun. And maybe gettogether with friends and celebrate Vlad's birthday. After all, the 28H is not every year :-)

Quote of the day

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:29:00 -0400

Often, scientific "failure" teaches you more than success ... An experiment which gives you a clear answer is not a failure; it can surprise you, though. Failure comes only when an experiment answers no question -- usually because it's been done with ignorance or sloppiness. The true trick in science is to know what question your experiment is truly asking.

Gregory Benford
Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

Google Notebook - new feature

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:22:20 -0400

Actually, maybe not really new, but I have noticed it just two days ago while trying to to clean up the clips collected from the Web.

It is sort of hidden feature, but very useful one: In Actions you can find 'Export in Google Docs & Spreadsheet'. It takes the current notebook and makes it a new document in you Google Docs. All texts, including pictures are transferred. It does very good job in keeping meaningful structure of the newly created document: every note will become an URL heading in document, pointing to the original.

India Time Zone mystery solved

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:11:15 -0400

It happened few times in past few months: using Google to find out what is the time in Bombay or New Delhi, I used the search phrase "India time zone" and got two types of results. One was referring to the India Time zone as UTC+9hrs and the other was giving the correct answer - UTC+5:30. I know that whole India is in single time zone and this time zone is 5.5 hours before GMT. What did the UTC+9 mean ?
As I found out, the India in India time zone is not the India as a country, but military spelling of the time zone for letter I. The military uses letters to label time zone, starting with GMT or UTC being the Zero Meridian or Z time zone - spelled as Zulu time. Then going East, the zones go A, B, C - spelled as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta - up to the letter I which is spelled as India. West from Zulu you start with N, O, P - or November, Oscar, Papa ... Up to March 11 we were living in Romeo time zone, now we moved to Quebec time zone (again, nothing to do with La belle province, just spelling of Q)

Webbits 2007-06

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:49:25 -0400

Time to clean up the link cache again. I did not surfed much during last two weekends, so there is less to clean than usual :-).

If your computers are still confused about the DST change, here are some links that may be useful dealing with the issues - for Windows as well as for Mac. Speaking of which, I just checked that my Fedora Core 6 Linux-based NAS did recognized the DST without any issues at all as well.

Times are a-changing

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:07:13 -0400

This year unusually early, we switched the Daylight Saving Time. The clocks did spring ahead one hour on Sunday morning. Btw, this is a good mnemonic how to remember which direction does the clock go: it Springs ahead and it Falls back ... Technically, it was decision of the US legislative to start DST early but because of the integration of the two economies, Canada had not much choice, just to follow. So, for next three weeks or so, we are one hour closer to Europe.

Computers Ltd.

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:25:32 -0400

Same as last few weeks, I have spent most of the weekend reading. Unlike the weekends before, this time I was actually reading a book, not source code. It was nice change ...

I have picked this small book with title Computers Ltd in Ottawa Public Library last Friday, while returning some books on CD. Written by David Harel of Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, the book is trying to explain what computers cannot do. It speaks about complexity, P / NP problem and other fundamental limitations of what we can and cannot do with our favorite toys. This book is nice proof that even on such complex and abstract problems it is possible to find very nice and readable presentation - without sacrificing the precision. It reads as novel and thanks to very short format, it is an excellent complement to quiet Sunday afternoon. Recommended.

Quote of the day

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:07:05 -0500

Data is zeroes and ones — software is zeroes and ones and hard work.

As seen on The Third Bit.

Security of the browsers

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:00:27 -0500

I have just finished listening to the back-episodes of Security Now! # 38, where Steve Gibson describes his approach to securely browsing Web without antivirus and with Internet Explorer. The idea in a nutshell is - use properly locked down IE zones. Steve has modified the security settings of the default (Internet zone) to maximum: not allowing any scripting, cookies etc. Which makes many sites unusable, of course because increasing number of browsers does require Javascript enabled - or else game is over.

Project management using Wiki

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:50:04 -0500

It has been half a year in March since we have started to use Wiki as main project management, collaboration and content creation tool. I think this is period long enough to look back and summarize what we have discovered, what worked and what not. This was not the first attempt to use Wiki in this context - however, it was first case when the result can be considered full success. I have tried (both in at-home and project environments) several Wiki implementations, notably JSPWiki,MoinMoin, FlexWiki, Wiki module for DotNetNuke and MediaWiki over period of about 5 years. During this process I have discovered by trial and error, which features are important in software development project environment and what are the conditions/consequences of using Wiki as main information hub.

Ottawa Mac User's group meeting

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 17:02:54 -0500

Thanks to exploring the Google calendar (when playing with public calendars related to Ottawa) I found the Ottawa Mac User group's calendar and discovered that

a) they exist

b) they hold monthly meetings in nice Irish pub at the Market

The group is actually named Bytown Mac User's group, for the reasons explained on the Web site or here.

So I decided to go there. I thought - what the heck, worst thing that can happen that I will have a glass of Guinness at the pub I never visited before, which is not a bad thing at all. And besides, the Rideau Chapters store is very close (the plan B). It turned out pretty well, though - meeting was interesting. The group is fairly small (I believe somewhere about 10-15 people) but nice, friendly, dedicated and interesting. It sort of reflects the Mac representation in the market. Unlike when attending Microsoft users events, where almost everybody is by profession tied to the software development of IT business, here larger percentage of people did something non-primarily computer related for living - like creative writing, art, video processing. Again - it represents well the real world situation. Not too many people that actually do software development (other than Web design) but there was one guy who is exploring the same path as I am looking for: Objective C and Cocoa development.

Programmer's classification

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 22:00:04 -0500

Gabo sent me this link - it is some half-joke half serious knock-off of the Myers-Briggs personality classification. Same as in case of MB, it gives you four letters. Unlike in MB, the letters are different:

Instead of E/I - Extroversion or Introversion, N/S (iNtuitive / Sensing), T/F (Thinking/Feeling) and J/P (Judging/Perceiving),
it classifies you either as D/P - Doer or Planner, L/H - Low or High level programmer, S/T - Solo or Team programmer and C/B Conservative/liBeral.

Webbits 2007-05

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:52:10 -0500

It is not Friday today and I am obviously late with next link collection. Somehow I have completely missed the weekend - so much was happening at work that I had barely had time to notice what is going on on the Web. My Google Reader is overflowing with new links and there are lots of new links in delicious. Let's start.

Merlin Mann of 43folders started to do videopodcasts - have a look (in the second edition he interviews Jonathan Coulton, famous creator of the Code Monkey song). This little utility allows to synchronize contacts and tasts between Thunderbird and PocketPC. Interesting article on how to make Gmail you personal information centre.

Good book on coding and software development

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:23:54 -0500

I have picked it two days ago in Chapters - Code Craft by Pete Goodliffe. Somehow similar in topics covered as the Rapid Development or From Coder to Developer - but newer. Divided into 6 parts:

Part I - At the codeface - defensive programming techniques, naming, formatting, commenting, error handling

Part II - The secret life of code - code contruction tools, testing and debugging methods, building

Part III - The Shape of the code - code design, architecture, source code growth and decay over time

Webbits 2007-04

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:56:40 -0500

It is Friday again, time to clean up the link cache. I'll try to make this a Friday affair and stick with weekly schedule.

The DRM is having hard time: after Steve Jobs article about how DRM is bad, EMI announcement of considering dropping the DRM, another of Net celebrities - cryptography legend Bruce Schneier (of Applied Crypography and Blowfish fame) wrote an article for Forbes Why Vista DRM Is Bad for you. He makes several good points, it is good read.

Many ways how to "Get a Mac"

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:45:52 -0500

I found out by accident that the famous Get a Mac ads exists in many versions:

Some nations have their own actors
http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/

Other have only just language version of Long && Hodgman act

http://www.apple.com/de/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/fr/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/es/getamac/

The Austria and German speaking part of Switzerland are using German version of the ads (no surprise there) - http://www.apple.com/chde/getamac/ - and the francophone part of Switzerland uses the French version. As it looks like, Italian and Romansch speaking Swiss do not count :-(

NAS Odyssey: Up and running

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:31:55 -0500

After lots of attempts (see here, here and here), I have finally resolved my disk space problems and the RAID-5 NAS server is up and running since about two weeks now. I have stayed with Fedora 6, successfully installed Samba, configured the shares and copied all family JPEG's, videos, MP3's etc onto the huge 907 GB large RAID5 share. The old NSLU2 is still dead - I did not have any time to try to re-flash it, but all content of it's disk was without any issues readable by the new server (the NSLU2 was using ext3 filesystem) so I did not even have to try to use backups.

Who is the most successful programmer of the world ?

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:52:35 -0500

Depending on how you define success, you may get different answer to the question above.

If you choose for the success criteria:

- amount of money made by programming AND
- number of people using the product AND
- impact on the community at large

the answer is probably Charles (Karoly) Simonyi, Hungarian born ex-Microsoft employee, billionaire, astronaut and original author of Microsoft Word.

True, there certainly are people that made more money than him and their fortune is closely related to software - but unlike Simonyi none of them was actively programming for major part of their career. Take Bill Gates for example - most of his coding goes back to his teenage years and after creating Basic, his role was not related with active code writing. Also the number of people using Altair Basic (or any basic) today is likely nowhere in the Word league.

Math is fun

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:23:54 -0500

I've stumbled upon this page, full of math jokes. Many of them are IMHO really good and extremly funny (your mileage may vary, though).

My favorite few:

Two male mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math.

The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.

Blogs of the week (9-Feb)

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:51:46 -0500

1) Bruce Schneier

Bruce is author of several excellent books on cryptography, from very easy, thriller like read to a classic work Applied Cryptograhy (highly recommended). The blog goes back to 2004 and is fascinating read.

2) Paul Thurrott

Paul is the Windows guy from Windows Weekly podcast (recommended) who also runs the Winsupersite . He is one of the few people who focus on Microsoft technology and still keep balanced, fair view of the affairs. Paul is certainly not a Microsoft fanboy - and obviously not a Microsoft hater. He seems to share the same balanced approach in case of Apple and OS-X - he appreciates his strengths without being an Apple zealot.

Webbits - 2007-03

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:46:44 -0500

How to extend the life of the Vista trial period to 120 days: Technically, if you try to use Ultimate Edition (which is legally allowed to use in VM) nothing really can prevent an unscrupulous user to keep using Vista for free - for the price of re-installing the VM every 120 days ...

Few Mac goodies: Adium is out in version 1.0 - get it here - more details on http://adiumx.com/

Last build before Leopard is out - http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0702.html. Btw, did you know that Apple UK has their own Mac guy and PC guy ? I love their accent, but I still think that John Hodgman is the best :-)

Webbits - 2007-02

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:38:11 -0500

Time to clean up the link cache once again.

Obviously, most of the news on Techsites are Vista related. Web Worker's daily gives you 10 reasons why to upgrade to Vista and 10 reasons why not. MacHouse comments on complicated upgrade paths and Brian Briggs offers decision chart for the updgradees.

General spirit - compared to the launch of Windows 95 - is fairly cynical. The italian Mac bloggers sums it up: Niente di nuovo in Vista. So does this one. This site shows some real innovation :-). Despite it is Vista launch, Steve Jobs and OS-X seems to get almost as much publicity as Vista and as few bloggers commented - Microsoft does not take it easy - see Bill Gates TV appearance.

Nice resource on TCP/IP and Networking

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 23:26:54 -0500

As of today, I am at podcast #26 of Security Now! and Steve with Leo are have started their "foundation series" on How Internet works. It is really great and enjoyable topic, nicely and very enjoyably presented. Given the delivery format limitation (voice without possibility of adding any drawing), there is of course limit on the amount of details that can be presented. Being a curious creature, I wanted to dig little bit deeper into "excruciating details" of TCP/IP and started to search for a good book.

Mac is the way to enlightenment

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 11:55:46 -0500

Even Dalai-lama is using it. See the proof - http://flickr.com/photos/timsimpson/255420579/

Note for Gabo - it looks like Macbook Pro :-).

Evergreen Security Now!

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:07:26 -0500

I have started to listen the Security Now! podcasts from the very beginning - sometimes in summer 2005. Unlike some news-and-rumours podcasts that sound kind of weird if you listen them month later, this one did not loose a bit of it's freshness. Even listening the story of Sony Rootkit discovery again was very entertaining. I am now at first "mod-4" Q&A podcast, Number 16.

Every time I listen to Steve Gibson, one of two things happens. Either I learn something new, or I discover new, better way how to explain something I knew about in a very nice, accessible way. Steve's handling of differences between WEP and WPA, explanation why MAC address filtering gives no security and his VPN coverage was an excellent example of the later.

Too good to be true ?

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:08:20 -0500

Since over 1 month I am using Web based tools for calendar, email, task management, bookmark management and note taking. One problem that these tools have is that as soon as your connection goes down, you are done. Game over. Few days ago I have discovered Scrybe, a tool which maybe can address this problem. Unfortunately, I cannot tell from my own experience, because the system is in private Beta and does allow you to register. But if you can believe the sneak peek video (linked from the site), it should combine calendar which is even better than Google Calendar, task manager and note taking program that would make Google Notes look like second class citizen.

Improve your English, use spellchecking !

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:06:27 -0500

For Jack, Manju and Michel: here is the poem we talked about.

Eye have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

From latest podcasts

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:56:57 -0500

Lot's of things happening this week - Macworld and CES generated lots of activity in podcasts. Macbreak has interesting series of interviews done (mostly) by Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann with various people from Macworld. If you are interested how the author of Cocoalicious looks like in flesh, go and grab the few Macbreak episodes. There is also interesting interview with creators of the Modbook (Macbook based tablet), the Omni group, makers of the great OmniOutliner who recently release OmniPlan. It should be the first project management tool that does not suck. It is hard to believe that there can be a piece of software that contains Gantt diagram and is logical and usable <grin/> - it certainly does not apply to MS Project. I am really curious how the OmniFocus - the new GTD tool in preparation - will look like when it is done.

Repetition is the mother of ... the Web

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:39:50 -0500

I had a discussion few days ago with a friend of mine on blogging. The topic was that as soon as something happens on the Net, thousands and sometimes even more people are writing, posting, discussing and blogging about the very same topic. A sort of information tidal wave that spreads across the cyberspace. Which was according to my friend huge waste of time and energy. Generally, he meant, from a whole community perspective, it makes no sense to write about something unless there is reasonable chance you will be saying something very unique that nobody else will likely say - otherwise it adds no value, just clutters the content by repeating and rephrasing the already said. At first it sounded reasonably sound ;-), but the longer I was thinking about it, the more I was convinced it may be quite the opposite.

Vocabulary test

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:49:25 -0500

Just out of morbid curiosity I did the test, here is the result :-)

Your Vocabulary Score: B-

You have a zealous love for the English language, and many find your vocabulary edifying.

Don't fret that you didn't get every word right, your vocabulary can be easily ameliorated!

How's Your Vocabulary?

Quote of the day

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:37:59 -0500

From today's Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld 2007:

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. "
Wayne Gretzky

I guess everybody is going to write about iPhone - which is OK because it is indeed very interesting gadget and it stole the show. To bad it will be 6 more months until it will be available in the US and (my best hopes) 8-9 months to have it here in Canada.

Sony eReader - first impressions

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:12:07 -0500

I have got my eReader on 30th December, so after few days of playing with it, here are first impressions. I managed to read one book and played with it quite a bit, but I am still learning.

The quality of the display and "electronic paper" look and feel is great. It actually looks like paper, not like screen. The non-glossy texture surface has same visibility from every angle and it really reads like paper. I have no problem with the speed or lack of it - the page turn takes about 1-2 seconds, switching to full black and then redrawing is kind of cool when the page text "emerges" from the page. The picture is perfect, steady, does not strain the eyes, perfectly readable in sunlight. It is the best feature of the reader.

Looking back on 2006

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:46:33 -0500

The 2006 was truly amazing year. We have accomplished so much - we have created the West end development centre, brought in and started several projects, completed phase 1 of employee conversion, started benefits program, ESOP program, redefined the company visual presence, grew the business and the company size considerably and created foundation for future growth.

Most important achievemnt is the fun factor - I am again looking forward to go to work - and again since the Montage days the synergy is coming back. Thanks so much to all of you who helped it happen.

Sales as Con Art - or welcome to Direct Energy flat rate plan

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:59:16 -0500

During over 8 years living on this continent I've developed reasonably thick skin in dealing with business calls, unsolicited mailings and other annoyances of aggressive selling. I was pretty sure nothing can make me really upset. Up until yesterday. Thanks to amazing capability of the Direct Energy sales force who does not take No for an answer.

But let's start from the beginning. About 3 weeks ago I started to get frequent calls from Direct Energy about their flat rate plan. After avoiding them few times, I realized that they will not give up and answered the call. I have got myself into a discussion with guy who wanted me to lock up my price per kWh for next 5 years. Sort of protection plan. The idea is that you pay same amount - starting with higher than market price - and as the price goes up, you may end up to be better off over time.

Got the Sony reader :-)

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 11:24:11 -0500

Despite Sony's attempt to ignore non-US markets and leave Canadians in the cold (pun intended, even if it is still above zero), I have become a proud owner of the wonderful gadget for all eBooks fans. I still do not have it physically, so I cannot put it under the tree. It is coming next week, when my friend who now enjoys the vacation down in the south returns. He was not only very kind to buy one for me too, but he also wrote a wonderfull review which he is going to post on the Net. I will add a link as soon at it happens. Until that time, here is the summary, in his very own words:

Statistics are fun

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 23:42:10 -0500

I have discovered recently the nice feature of Wordpress - Dashboard which shows number of visits, but also shows incoming links and search phrases the people used to land on my blog. Sometimes, they provide really interesting and surprising insights. Of course, I do not see who they are or where the visitors are coming from - so no privacy concerns.

Because of my first name (which is btw abreviated form of Miroslav), I am getting some visits from the people interested in the works of Joan Miró - spanish/catalan artist. Must be quite a disappointment for them, sorry. Nothing to do with visual arts here - unless you count art of coding ;-).

Few more podcasts

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:38:31 -0500

Unfortunately, as of previous Sunday I have run out of the backlog in Security Now! episodes, which means that with all three of my favorite podcasts (Twit, Windows Weekly and Security Now!), I am pretty much dependent on their weekly releases. This is a problem, because the sum of 5-7 weekly commutes to work and back (about 15 minutes one way) plus about 40 minutes in a gym every day equals to about 6 hours of required podcast quality content, and the new episodes of three podcasts above cover barely half of it.

Surfmania

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:19:35 -0500

Few good links I've received from friends:

- Interesting satelite images of Earth;

- New way how to discover / browse music - http://www.musicovery.com/

- All Web 2.0 sites directory, implemented Web 2.0 way

- On-line media conversion tool. Great for converting MP3 to ringtones :-)

- If you fly often, the SeatGuru will help you choose good seats and avoid bad ones

- interesting slow motion videos - http://www.redlake.com/gallery/videos/RDT.aspx

- animated knots

- nicely done Web2 (laszlo based) tool for selection of matching colors

Disappearing act of computer magazines

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 23:30:24 -0500

On my way home from the office (yes, I know, technically it was Sunday) I stopped at my favorite Chapters store just to check what is new. First stop is always magazines, partially because it is right next to the entrance, partially because it is on the shortest path to Starbucks counter inside Chapters. For many years, there used to be two shelves with computer magazines. Now there is only one. And half of the magazines are about Photoshop, iPods and digital gadgets. Not that there was anything wrong with Photoshop and iPods - I love my iPod and have deep respects for Photoshop capabilities (albeit I can hardly use the Elements). What I miss are good old fashioned developers mazines which have dimisnished almost completely.

Quote of the day

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 20:49:18 -0500

Thought of the day:

... Too much to learn. Too much bandwidth crowding the channels of communication. We can’t listen fast enough. We’re left standing on our tiptoes all the time

Greg Bear, The Darwin's Radio

This does not sound very optimistic, which is quite representative. I am down with bad headache, cannot really think straight, spending time sleeping, reading a book (above) and surfing the Web.
I found out that I made it to Ottawa Blogger's list and learned a new word: splogger

Unknown celebrity

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:50:12 -0500

Yes, I know, the title sounds like oxymoron and to certain degree, it is. What it should maybe say is Person who should have been celebrity ...

I am not going anywere close to movies or entertainment industry with this. There are more than enough sites, blogs and gossip channels out there that look at life of movie stars or singers. I will stay within the world of computers and technology, which has its own heros and celebrities, albeit known in smaller groups. In "real world", pretty much everybody knows Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Wozniak. They have made the headlines many times. Fewer people know names like James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie, Guido van Rossum, Guy L. Steele, Richard Stallman....

Too many ebooks, too little time

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:11:21 -0500

http://manybooks.net/. 'nough said.

Security now

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:38:04 -0500

After listening for over week to Security Now! podcast (thanks, Steve, thanks Leo and happy birthday), I've decided to actually do something about the security on computers around. I started to scanning my home network using "Shields Up" and was happy to found that the only open port was SSH, exactly as I thought I configured it.

As next step, I followed the advice from this podcast and used my hosts file to block out ads servers and other internet vermins. You may also want to look at the podcast notes, read full transcript or listen to it.

Podcast du jour

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:21:13 -0500

This is for Gabo, Derek, Steve and others who talked to me about podcasts and about which podcasts are worth listening to.

Since I bought Nano2, I spend lot's of time listening to podcasts. Pretty much all driving time, walking time and time in the gym is spend listening to wide selection of topics and to people producing them.

Here is my current list plus some additional recommendations:

1) TWIT and all around Leo Laporte.

Weekend nuggets

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:27:43 -0500

Technically, it was Sunday so rather than working or reading some serious stuff, I have decided to take a long walk (to catch up with lot's of new podcasts downloaded yesterday) and to surf the net just for fun. Here is some of the interesting discoveries:

There was a rumor on the net that some Indian student in Kerala discovered a way how to store over 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper. They say

Are blogs the threat for professional journalists ?

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 23:28:32 -0500

Thanks to 6 hours difference, I usually read tomorrow edition of Slovak and Czech newspapers on the Net one day ahead. Most of them switches to new edition at midnight, which is 6PM our time. I am doing this for several years already. What is different between now and 2-3 years ago is what I read. While before it were mostly articles written by journalists and news industry professionals, now I read mostly blogs. On SME blog, there are few hundreds, maybe few thousands bloggers, and content they produce is usually much more interesting and readable that the content of official newspaper.

Quote of the day

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:02:06 -0400

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often.

What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

Internal: Free books to a good home :-)

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:26:16 -0400

Again, I need to make some space on a shelf and I simply cannot throw away a book ... This time I have decided to reduce my Java bookshelf to allow new (mostly .NET books) come in. No, I am not abandoning Java - but for next 8-12 months I am very likely fully booked in .NET projects, and after that, it will be time to upgrage to new sets of books for Java 1.6 anyway ...

Road to Mac I: Hard Decisions

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:53:06 -0400

January - July 2006
#

This is the story of a journey travelled quite often these days. It describes discoveries, joys and frustrations of one long time Windows user learning how to use Mac OS-X. Many have done this before, many have blogged about it.

The reason why I am writing this down is mostly to remember, and as well because I can. One of the assumes uses of the new MacBook was creative writing so I guess I am trying fulfill the promise to myself. I have no idea whether this will be an interesting read for anybody else but me. But I’ll write it anyway.

On blogs, bloggers, blogging

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:42:55 -0400

If you would ask me to pick one technology phenomenon that had the largest impact on and was the most characteristic for the technology during the years 1995-2000, my answer would be “Web, of course”. For the years 2000-2003 I’d vote for eCommerce, online applications and collaboration (like Google, eBay, Amazon and many others). And for the last 3 years, I would definitely pick online communities and blogs.

Blogs are like tsunami that is changing the landscape of online content. There is nothing really new about what they are. Blog is user editable Web page, with very few features: implicit tracking of entries by creating calendar-based index of older entries, ability to add comments to the entries, limited form of categorization and tagging as well as some simple, blog-2-blog notification mechanisms (backtracks and pings). The only aspect in which blogs are different is simplicity of creating and running a blog. The same way as Google made searching for on-line content very easy and accessible, blogs are the very easy way how to create that content. Good content is one of the main reasons why people go online.

Hello world!

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 18:24:13 -0400

Since R&K published the The Book, the title above became de-facto standard way how to start anything. Which is one of the two reasons why I used it as title for this very first entry. The second reason is that the friendly folks from to Wordpress.com have created the title and the first blog entry for me.

General on Miro's World

A Wiki Wiki Wikend

How klassify.com went live: one static page, GitHub Pages and Route 53

The Five-Year Intermission

What happened #

Quote of the day

Happy birthday Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia would be 100 today #

1918-10-28 - 1992-12-31 #

Mission (almost) accomplished

Simonyi Karoly in Valencia

Third time is a charm

Miro's World 2.0

Google+ is superset of both Facebook and Twitter

Unintended coincidence

Attention is new currency

Here we go again

Book recommendation: Outliers by Malcolm Caldwell

Lost in the social networks

The myth of premium hardware or why Ottawa needs Apple Store

Weird Rogers 3G network error - fixed ?

Weird Rogers 3G network error

Chapters goes Mac

About time to break the silence

Dewey's Classification can be funny

iPhone firmware 2.1 - first impressions

Too good to be true ?

Chrome is interesting, but I'll stick with Firefox ...

More on kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork Error 302

We are hiring

Linux vs Windows - great comparison

iPhone 3G first impressions: Applications

How to make screenshot of running application on iPhone 3G

Good hard shell case for iPhone 3G

How to kill iPhone battery in less than 2 hours

Create own ringtones for iPhone 3G

Quote of the day

iPhone 3G first impressions: Phone, Battery Life

iPhone 3G - I surrender

No words necessary. No DRM either ...

Back to normal

DMCA for Canada ? Act now !

Quote of the day

Catching up with Hanselminutes

Rogers, Bell and Net neutrality

Heroes Happened ... here

On White Stuff and Other Disasters

Free Microsoft Press E-Books !

Absurdity of the DMCA

Over $500 worth of software for $49.99

Crossing bit boundaries

Book recommendation: Seth Godin - Small is the new big

Going (mostly) virtual

Ordered a Macbook Pro

Book review: The Dip

Book mini-review: Breaking Windows

Book recomendations: Google Story, The Tipping Point

Free eBook and audiobook on media business and distribution control

Who said government's Web pages are boring ?

BOTD: Figuring out computer science

Like Netmeeting - only much better

Microsoft will ship MVC for ASP.NET ?

Quote of the day

Book: Softwar - an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

BOTD: The Reader

Webbits 2007-06

Field test of Sony eReader

The price of anonymity

Quote of the day

BOTD: Good Math, Bad Math

Quote of the day

New iPod touch as ebook reader ?

Great article on data visualization

Sapkowski in English is out !

Most important event of the year

End of democracy - or how I turned into platform

Smugmug "processing image" - follow up

First week with SmugMug

Search for perfect online photo storage

Quote of the day

What happened
#

Czechoslovakia would be 100 today
#

1918-10-28 - 1992-12-31
#

January - July 2006
#