Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

This is a follow-up to my recent post “MostSliced.com summary - picking PSD slicing company“.

Once the choices for the PSD slicing service were established, I did the next step - actual order.  I started from the top of my list, which happened to be xHTML Master.  I sent them the order through the form on their web site and got a pretty fast response apologizing for the fact that they were too busy to undertake my order.  No problem.  Good that they notified me in a timely manner.  So, I went to the next choice - PSD Slicing.  Again, submitted the design and went into the waiting mode.

Pretty soon I received an email letting me know that the order is OK and that they can start on Monday (next working day) and finish it by Wednesday (two pages, with one of them being a rather complex design).  The timing was well within my limits.  I sent them 50% of the down-payment and started waiting again.  Today, on Tuesday, around lunch time, I got my order back, fully done and finished.

First of all, of course, I was a bit surprised with the speed.  I thought it would take them more.  When I checked the results I was even more surprised.  In short: outstanding job!  The images were cut properly, some in PNG, some in GIF, some in JPG - properly chosen each time.  The xHTML was small and clean, validated perfectly with XHTML 1.0 Strict (not even Transitional!).  DIVs, proper CSS, nicely indented.  CSS was also done nicely - small, simple, and straight-forward.  Fully valid.  Also, the whole codebase is pretty semantic and, as a bonus, validates with web accessibility standard (Section 508).  To say that I was really impressed with the result was to say nothing at all.  I was stunned for a few minutes.  It’s been a really long time since I saw anything so beautiful.

It was so good that I couldn’t believe it.  So I thought maybe it will break in one of the major browsers.  Then my attention was caught by something else in that email message that they sent me.  It was a link to BrowserShots.org , which is the web service that can show you how your web site looks in a whole lot of browsers.  PSD Slicing provided me with the link to the screenshots of their results in all major browsers that I cared about!

After checking that code back and forth, the only suggestion I could come up with is … comments.  They aren’t required or anything, since the whole CSS and xHTML files are very small (something around 6-10 KBytes), but still it would have been nice to have some comments, especially in CSS.

Am I satisfied with their service?  You bet I am.  Will I ever recommend it?  Yes, of course.  I’m doing it already.  Is it worth the money (around $120/page)? Yes!  [insert more questions here and answer them "yes"]

Web Worker Daily is asking an interesting question:

which sites and services on the new web (defined however you like) are important enough that you’d pay for them? And how much? Or are you dedicated to always finding ways to do things online for free, no matter what the entrepreneurs might like to hear?

I try to find things that I need for free. But sometimes I don’t. Or things that I really like give me an option to pay for them. And then I do. Currently, I only pay for my Flickr account and Linux Weekly News subscription. I also donate frequently to sites and tools that I like, but that, I guess, doesn’t count.

If I had to pay for the tools I’m using today for free, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Goolge Docs, Google Analytics, Twitter, and del.icio.us would be on my list. I’d also had no problem at all paying for software: WordPress,  Firefox, Vim, Pidgin, Fedora Linux. And I would subscribe to TechCrunch, Web Worker Daily, and Slashdot. This probably sounds like a lot, but I really can’t imagine how I could keep up with the world without using all of these.

What about you?

Theodotos sent me a message, letting me know of the upcoming Ubuntu / Fedora release party that will take place in Frederick University on May 17, 2008. Here is a quote from the announcement:

office furniture in Bulgaria

Taking the opportunity of the new releases of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Linux and Fedora 9 sulphur Linux we are organizing a party to celebrate the event. There are going to be Presentations, Installation workshops and pre-installed systems where you can test the new releases. There are
also free CDs with the new releases for everyone. You can bring your own computer too!
The event will take place on 17 of May, to the Campus of Frederick University in Limassol (near the Polemidia round-about) from 4:00 - 9:00 pm, at rooms 304 and 305 in the first floor

Basically, all you need to know is that there are going to be plenty of Linux geeks. If you need to know anything else, it’s in one of these two PDF files : announcement in English or leaflet.

P.S.: Apologies for an ancient Red Hat Linux image, but I haven’t done one with Fedora yet. Stay tuned though.

After years of using Vim, I recently moved to its graphical version - gvim. It turned out that things that I didn’t like about gvim are trivial to fix.

set guifont=Console
set guioptions-=m " No menu
set guioptions-=T " No toolbar
set guioptions+=c " Use console dialogs where possible

You’d probably want to read “:help guioptions” for more.

Now there is a greater variety of colorschemes to choose from, and, finally, I can have italic font for comments in the code - nothing beats that!