Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I officially call this week a Diggnation week.  Not that I have anything to do with Diggnation except being a fan, but you’ll get what I mean in just a second.  First, on Monday, while shopping at Carrefour supermarket, I came across Michelob lager bottles.  Michelob is an American brewery which used to sponsor several Diggnatino episodes, and Kevin and Alex even did a tour of the brewery.   Not a particularly great beer (here in Europe we are blessed with a variety of excellent beers), but not a bad one either.

Secondly, I was waiting for a fresh episode of Diggnation to come out and give me an atmospheric reason to chuck the first bottle and enjoy the second.  And what did Diggnation do?  They came up with probably their best live show episode ever.  Episode #246 in Austin, Texas.  It started off slowly, but it turned epic with Leo Laporte streaming a live TWiT show while crowd surfing (fast forward 40 minutes or so).  And then it went even crazier with Robert Rodrigez himself showing up at the show and doing a brief interview about an upcoming Predators movie.   In the words of Alex Albrecht: “What??!!!”

P.S.: If you watched a few episodes of Diggnation and haven’t got hooked, don’t worry.  I skipped quite a bit of Diggnation history.  Until I saw them with my own two eyes back in Amsterdam.  The guys are awesome!

A couple of days ago I bought two Lenovo G550 laptops – one for me, one for my wife.  After spending a day browsing all the online shops and driving around all computer outlets in the city, I decided that this is the best option available.

Specifications: Dual-core 2Ghz Intel CPU, 15.6 inch glossy screen (WXGA, maximum resolution 1366×768), 4 GB of RAM, 250 GB hard disk, a bunch of USB ports, HDMI out, DVD writer, WiFi, and all the standard stuff, weighting at around 2.7 kilograms. Battery life is around 4 hours. Price: 500 EUR + 15% VAT = 575 EUR.

Both machines are running Linux (Fedora 12) already, even though they were coming with some Windows pre-installed.  I wouldn’t know which one since I haven’t even booted into that once.  Fedora Linux installation was straight-forward and everything worked, except for the wireless networking, which needs an extra step to enable those Broadcom drivers.  Gladly, the required step is widely covered in the blogosphere. – basically, enable RPM Fusion yum repository, install kmod-wl package, and reboot your machine.

Everything is working find and I really enjoy the laptop, except for a few things that annoy me with its keyboard.  The layout is somewhat weird.  First of all, I am not used to having a number pad on a laptop keyboard.  But that’s OK – if there is space, then why not, right?  Well, there is space, but I think it would have been utilized better for Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys.  As they are now, PgUp and PgDn are located next to navigation arrow keys and Home/End keys are only accessible through a Fn key, which is really strange.  On top of that, Insert and Delete keys are in a different part of the keyboard – on top of the Backspace key.  And while I don’t use Caps Lock all that often, some people will notice that Caps Lock indicator is missing, as well as NumLock and ScrollLock.  What can I say?  That’s one weird keyboard layout.

Other than that though there is nothing that I can complain about.  The machine is nice and cool and pleasant to use.  My wife seems to enjoy it as well.

Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I am catching up with all the RSS feeds, news, and announcements that I’ve missed recently.  One of them was the release of OpenSSH 5.4 – a tool for pretty much every Linux user.  There are a few interesting bits in the changelog:

Added a ‘netcat mode’ to ssh(1): “ssh -W host:port …” This connects stdio on the client to a single port forward on the server. This allows, for example, using ssh as a ProxyCommand to route connections via intermediate servers.

and

Add a ‘read-only’ mode to sftp-server(8) that disables open in write mode and all other fs-modifying protocol methods.

Also, it was mentioned that sftp got a whole lot of improvements, including tab completion, user-friendly sizes option, recursive transfers, etc.

Overall, a very welcome release.

Last year I participated in the Open Source Survey ran by The 451 Group, who are well known for their analysis and research technology and business trends.  Back in December they emailed me the results of the survey.  Unfortunately, it sort of got lost in my mailbox and never had the time to read it.  Now, cleaning up the stuff, I came across the PDF file with survey results.  While parts of it are rather predictable it is still an interesting read.

Lower cost is still the top reason an organization decides to use open source software, but flexibility has become a more significant factor in recent years, and is now cited as the biggest post-adoption benefit of open source. Meanwhile, vendor lock-in appears to have become less of a concern. With nearly half of our survey respondents citing cost, we believe it will continue to be the leading factor driving consideration of open source. While flexibility, mitigation of vendor lock-in and even reliability will continue to be significant factors, the cost element is reinforced by the time-to-market and time-to-value advantages of open source software.

Today was my last day with FxPro Financial Services Ltd.   Looking back at how much I’ve learned and at how much the company changed during my time there, it’s really difficult to believe that I was there for only two years.  In that time, the IT infrastructure was totally redesigned, several major versions of the corporate web site were launched, MyFx.Pro was developed from scratch and much improved over hundreds of iterrations, the company moved into a new (and bigger) office, and the staff grew in numbers.  While internal changes are not always visible to the outside world, an accumulated effect is rather obvious – the company is now well established, known, and respected in the industry.

For me, this work was personal.  And how it couldn’t have been?  During the last two years I enjoyed working with and learning from a lot from a number of people.  Each and every one of them left a trace in both my personal character and professional career.  And for that I’m thankful.

As much as I enjoyed working at FxPro, now is the time to part our ways.  I wish good luck and all the best to the company as a whole, as well as to everyone individually.   It was a blust!  Thank you.

My Gmail free space has been running out way too often recently.  I got bored with cleaning it up all the time and decided to upgrade my account.  While the process of buying something online is often trivial, I was pleasantly surprised by Google Checkout.  It was even easier than ever.  It felt like every little detail has been thought about.  Here are the things that I particularly liked:

• Simple, straight-forward interface.  No bragging about coupons, special offers, promotions, and a trillion redirects.
• Sensible defaults.  Google knows my name, address, and telephone number.  They can use this information to make order form submission easier.  And they do.  Including the default for the “name on card” field.
• Clear information about the amount being charged.  Order submission button itself displays the amount that will be charged.  This way you can’t be confused by all the sub-totals, taxes, etc.  Crystal clear!
• Excellent email notification.  The email clearly states what I have bought and when I will get it.

While none of the above sounds like rocket science, it actually is.  Go and buy something, enjoy the experience.

About a month ago I praised Chromium browser (and Google Chrome incarnation of it).  It’s fast, slick, and like Firefox has a gadzillion extensions.  Unfortunately, I switched back to Mozilla Firefox for now.  And as much as I’d like to use Chrome, there is an issue that annoys me enough not to – profile corruption.

As any other young application, Chromium crashes quite often.   That is understandable.  But the problem is that every time it crashes, my browser profile is corrupted, which results in loss of history, saved passwords, and open tabs.  That’s just something I can’t tolerate.  Crash  all you want, but bring me right back to where I was, when I restart your sorry butt!

Hopefully this problem will annoy enough people for someone to step up and fix it.

• I favorited a YouTube video — Andy McKee – Guitar – Drifting – www.candyrat.com http://youtu.be/Ddn4MGaS3N4?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Don Ross – Never got to Pernambuco – www.candyrat.com http://youtu.be/1TLWzY-Pkuw?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Antoine Dufour – Memories of the Future – www.candyrat.com http://youtu.be/vRvRBQTqUKI?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Tommy Emmanuel – Guitar Boogie http://youtu.be/6lbvSBNLLoo?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Stanley Jordan plays "Eleanor Rigby" http://youtu.be/OHZTyfKseZE?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Kiwi jetpack invention gets ready for domestic takeoff http://youtu.be/WtI1GP147Cs?a #

• I favorited a YouTube video — BMW S1000 RR. Dinner for RR. http://youtu.be/-cM9S2AzU28?a #

Jason Kottke links to a post in Ars Technica with an argument that people shouldn’t use ad blocking browser plugins when visiting their favorite sites.  The argument is as old as ad blocking browser plugins.  And I most often here exactly that side of the story – the site that you love depends on the advertising and by blocking it, you’re effectively closing its oxygen supply.

I don’t disagree, but I find this point of view too narrow.  I think advertising should work for both the site and the visitor.  If we are asking a visitor to take a responsibility, we should also ask the the site owner to do the same.  Because the truth of the matter is that most sites out there are overloaded with advertising.  Most advertising out there is irrelevant. And on top of that, most advertising out there is annoying.  I think if site owners were spending more time selecting an appropriate and relevant advertising, their visitors wouldn’t spend as much time blocking it.

Consider the practical side of this.  From all the people I know who browse the web, everyone (and I do mean everyone) is browsing through a whole lot of web sites.  It’s not one web site, not two, not ten.  It’s hundreds and thousands.  If you look at all those web sites collectively (no matter who the person is), you’ll agree that the majority of those web sites have too much of advertising, which is too annoying, and too irrelevant.  And from the point of view of the site owner, it’s often much harder to fix than it looks.

First of all, most site owners don’t have advertisers standing in queue. So the choice is quite limited.  You get what you get most of the times.  Secondly, there are tools like Google AdSense which help site owners show ads which more relevant.  But with that being completely automated there is just so much control over the results. Most of the times you don’t get to pick the company or ad content.  Thirdly, the fact that not everyone not everywhere is on the web has something to do with ads relevancy.  For example, I live in a small country of Cyprus in the middle of nowhere.  There are probably a total of 40-50 companies here which advertise on Google.  None of those companies have anything that I am interested in.  But because there isn’t much choice, I’ll be shown these ads anywhere I go (every site that uses Google AdSense).

Even being a site owner myself, running Google AdSense block, I am still a supporter of ad blocking browser plugins.  I think the end-user should have a choice. And not only have it, but exercise that choice too.  If someone is getting annoyed by a huge ad block in the top right corner of this site, please, by all means, feel free to block it.  You don’t see it, you don’t click it, you don’t care about it – you just improve my click-through rate.  That’s the parameter I worry about.  I’d rather have 10 people see the ad and 10 people click on it, than have 10,000 people see the ad and nobody click on it.