We’ve officially announced that our products business is on hold.
This blog will be on hold as well for the time being and meanwhile you might be interested in my personal blog which I’ve just started.
Archive for the 'General' Category
I think that’s obvious. Google misses file sharing functionality of Dropbox and Dropbox misses editing functionality of Google Docs. Dropbox is VC funded. I bet at least one of the exit strategies (if not the main one) is selling the company to Google and integrating the service into Google Docs.
Apparently, lots of people have trouble with Vista doing something with their hard drive all the time. My previous post about this gets quite a lot of hits from Google.
Here are the top keywords for this week:
Continuing my notes on Vista usage:
- User Access Control or UAC is really as annoying as Apple depicts it in the famous ad. I have switched it off after an hour of clicking “Allow” all the time. Not only it is annoying, it also prevents the programs that are not aware of it from copying certain files which UAC thinks it has to “protect”. I use a program called Far Manager to work with files and it was just complaining about not being able to copy certain files (not even sure what was so special about them, not the system files certainly). When I disabled UAC the copying started working without problems.
- Constant disk activity can drive you mad. In my case it was caused by one of the “features” which I think lots of Vista users will be turning off. It is a “shadowing” feature which you can enable for each hard drive separately. It basically saves the copies of all your data so that you can later go back to a previous version of any file, directory or even all hard drive.
That’s great of course. In theory. In reality I have a 500 Gb hard drive which is half full already with data, movies, games and other big files. This data is constantly updated by me and Vista constantly copies everything. Not only the constant disk activity is annoying, but this eats the hard drive space too. When I disabled the feature I immediately got back 50 Gb of free space. I’ve decided that I’ll better use good old undelete from a 3rd party vendor to get the accidentally deleted files back.
Both of these “misfeatures” reminded me about one thing that I hate in programs like Putty. The developers do not let you save the password by design. They think that this is the best way to provide maximum security for the password. If the password is not saved anywhere in the program, then no one has any chance to hack the program and steal it. Right? Wrong!
The only thing that they achieve with this approach is that the users have to write their passwords elsewhere. On piece of paper, in the notepad, everywhere. Is this more secure then letting the user store the password in the program and then using some advanced technique to properly encrypt it? Nope, this only makes security a bigger problem. Of course, it becomes the users own problem, the software developers can not be held responsible if someone stills that paper with a password from the user’s desk. That’s so wrong in my opinion.
And the same happens with that 2 features in Vista. A person like me just turns them off because of their annoyance. Both features are great in theory and I definitely like to use them but not at the cost of such annoyance.
UAC is actually so wrong that I am quite sure Microsoft will be fixing it in the first Service Pack for Vista.
Upgraded PC and installed Vista. Some notes:
- Little known fact — if you will upgrade your PC with 4Gb of RAM, 32-bit version of Vista (the most common one) won’t be able to use all of the memory due to how 32-bit architecture works (PCI devices memory also has to be addressed within the same 4Gb). On my new PC, Vista only saw 2.93Gb (from 4Gb total).
- Device drivers could be a problem — usually installation disks that came with the hardware do not work, giving strange errors. Far from all manufactures have updated the drivers or updated the software.
- On the other hand my WiFi card which requires drivers installation in XP, worked out of the box in Vista, with no additional drivers installation.
- Still says stupid things like “About 1 hour and 0 minutes remaining” when files are copied. 0 minutes?
- When I was copying “My Documents” folder from the old PC, in the middle of the copying process, when it got to My Pictures, My Music and My Videos folders, Vista suggested to move them to the new Pictures, Music and Videos folders respectively. Smart!
iPhone is certainly great and revolutionary, but what’s up with all these fingerprints on the screen?
Maybe after all there is a reason why mobile phone manufacturers use a stylus?
I can now talk via Skype and SkypeOut with an (extra)ordinary cordless DECT phone!
Here are my toys:
- Gigaset SL560 — a very nice DECT phone from Siemens with Bluetooth.
- Gigaset M34 USB — a special dongle again from Siemens which plugs in the USB port and also connects to the Gigaset’s DECT base station.
- An old-and-not-so-sexy-anymore Bluetooth headset from Motorola.
Here is how it works.
I can see M34 dongle as another handset in the internal menu of the base station (accessible from any handset connected to it). I connect to M34 and I see its own menu, where one of the options is “Skype”. I select Skype — and all of my contacts from Skype are displayed. I can choose any of the contacts, press the “call” button on the handset and a Skype call is done on the PC. After the contact answers the phone I can hear her and speak to her using my handset. A miracle!
But that’s not all. Thanks to the wonderful bluetooth capabilities of SL560 I can connect a bluetooth headset to it and then communicate with my Skype contacts using the headset. Don’t forget that it connects to the handset, not to the computer. So I can carry the handset with me, go away from the base station for up to 300 meters and still talk via Skype via DECT phone via Bluetooth headset.
As I’ve wrote some time ago, I have created a web-based structure synchrnoziation tool for MySQL databases. We’ve needed a thing like this ourselves, so I’ve decided to create the tool as a standalone product from the start.
I’ve called the product Stuffed Sync, but never had enough time to prepare it for a proper release (write installation, documentation, create a dedicated site section, etc) . Finally, a week ago we’ve made a decision to launch a free service that allows to synchronize MySQL databases. The service was named SyncSQL.com and I am happy to report that as of now it is available for public use.
Basically this is a much lighter version of Stuffed Sync the product. But it should be sufficient for a lot of scenarios and we hope that it will make life easier for a lot of developers.
How it works?
You specify structure dumps of the source and target databases and hit the “Synchronize!” button. Your dumps are analyzed and all required alter statements are prepared for you. Then you should run the prepared statements on the target database and its structure will become identical to the structure of the source database.
How it looks?
They are out of their mind! Yes! I want to save on one domain and pay $99,999 for 100 years!
Opera browser has become completely free not long ago. This is a very nice browser with a great interface and with a very fast rendering engine.
So I’ve started to use Opera occasionally and the single feature that makes me come back to Opera again and again is a full screen mode. It’s hard to invent something new here, right? Well, apparently Opera engineers didn’t think so and they have created the greatest full screen mode I’ve ever seen.
When you hit F11 in Opera, the page that you are currently viewing takes over the whole screen on your monitor. There is absolutely no bars, navigation buttons or anything else from the browser, just a pure web page. This really feels awesome! You should definitely try it yourself.
Of course a screenshot won’t do this feature justice, but still here is our new site in Opera’s full screen mode (this is exactly as I’ve seen this page, I’ve just made a screenshot and decreased its size, the image was not edited in any other way!):
