Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

While scrolling through Matt’s conference notes, I’ve stopped for a second at his name and contact information slide. Two slides actually. The first one has the name “Matt Mullenweg” and a picture of him a few years back (either that, or a totally strange other boy). The second one has the URL to his website – photomatt.net and a quick tip on how to find it – Google “matt“.

Now it’s that last bit that caught my attention. I saw it before, but never thought about how nice it is. Google for “matt” is much easier to remember than “photomatt.net” or “Matt Mullenweg”. Isn’t it?

Well, it would be nice if it was so simple and effective for everyone. But it’s not.

My blog used to come up within the first ten or so results when Googling for “Leonid”. But nto anymore, and righteously so – there are more important Leonids. Like “Leonid Brezhnev” and “Leonid meteor shower“.

My surname though is pretty unique. If you Google for “mamchenkov”, you get exactly what you should. But the problem is that no one can remember “mamchenkov”. And half of those who can, can’t type it in correctly.

So, I tried to find a shorter way of looking myself up. The experiment with chopping some letters off my surname didn’t work out:

• mamchenkov – ideal, but nobody can remember this.
• mamchenko – nobody can remember this, and it doesn’t work anyway.
• mamchenk – only 3 results, but all of them are related to me. Nothing direct though.
• mamchen – nothing for me, but a bunch of results overall. One of them is this funny doll.
• mamche – chance. Mamche.com is a popular classifieds portal in Bulgaria.
• mamch – nothing for me, loads of international stuff, and a suggestion to search for “match” instead.
• mamc – these four letters have less to do with my surname than I thought.
• mam – to say the least, this is a very popular abbreviation.
• ma – 1,560,000,000 results. My life is too short to page forward to see if I am 1,560,000,000 or 1,559,999,999…
• m – this is the title of the movie, that has been building up its Google rating since 1931. Obviously, I’m not in it.

Mkay… so much for the surname.

I’ve played some more with Google results, and the shortest string that people can actually remember, seems to be “Leonid Cyprus” (“Leonid in Cyprus” works the same way). This one is OK for now, but I’ll have to work on something better.

What’s the easiest way to find your website?

The other night I was walking down the Molos promenade, listening to The Raven ‘n’ the Blues podcast. The show mp3 played on my mobile, which was hidden deep down in the pocket, and I was getting the sound via a pair of earbuds.

I was walking, minding my own business, when someone came up to me and asked what was the time. I had to “unplug” myself first, to hear the question again.

Later, when I continued my way, I started thinking about the evolution of the earbuds…

These days, if you see someone with earbuds, you can be almost sure that there is some mp3-enabled device on the other side. It might be a mobile phone, a standalone mp3 player, or some such.

About five-six-seven years ago, mp3 players weren’t as popular as they are now. And CD players were in wider user than they are now (I don’t know this for sure though, I’m just assuming). So, if back then you saw someone with earbuds, you won’t be able to tell if there is an mp3 player in the pocket, or a CD player.

Go further back in time, and there is a cassette player now. Also with earbuds. Is it a cassette player or a CD player? You don’t know.

If you reverse few years more, you won’t have any mobile device with earbuds (or am I too young to remember?). So, if you walke down the street with earbuds plugged in, say, 30 years ago – nobody would know, what’s that hanging out of your ears.

Don’t you just love competition?

Today I wrote about a few user interface improvements for Bloglines, and now I have to write this post about Google Reader’s completely new user interface. I went to check it out, and you know what – not only I liked it, but I found it difficult to “disconnect”. I wanted to just try this and that for a few minutes, but I am still there two hours later. And I hate to leave to blog about it…

So, I’ll make it short. Just go and check it out for yourself. Export your subscriptions as OPML from your current feed reader and import them to Google Reader. See if you like it as much as I do.

I’ve noticed that there was something different about my Bloglines feeds today. Somehow they looked as good as always, but a little bit better. I rushed towards the Bloglines news feed, and indeed, there was an update to the user interface.

• We no longer update the entire left pane when the unread or “kept as new” co unts change. Now the counts update in place with a fading yellow indicator. The result is a f aster, more pleasant way to cruise through your feeds, especially for those quick on the hotkeys.
• We’ve decreased the time between automatic updates to your unread counts so you don’t have to press the “r” hotkey quite so often.

Thank you guys! Now I’m loving yet even more.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-09-28

• 33′ Rockers | The 10 commandments of Web Design
  Tagged as: design development rules tips web webdesign
• BBC Learning English | Ten Days
  Tagged as: english language bbc uk tutorials
• 14 things you can learn from the Google story — Excellent list of smart things
  Tagged as: google business vision money ideas lists
• How to get music with BitTorrent – Lifehacker — Nice and simple BitTorrent tutorial, with screenshots.
  Tagged as: audio bittorrent howto lifehacks music p2p software torrent tutorial guide

Today I became a happy owner of PrimeTel PrimeHome installation, also known as Triple Play. Triple Play is this new way of bundling together loads of television channels, ADSL Internet connection, and really cheap telephony. It’s said to cost only 25 CYP month, but I got lucky and received a promotion offer of free installation and 3 month of service free of charge as well.

I didn’t have any time to play with it just yet, but it looks quite good. Here are the things that I’ve noticed during my short experience:

• Television has an electronic TV guide with a time schedule for all programs for all channels. This is very handy.
• Internet connection was way to easy to install. Just plugged the Ethernet cable straight into my laptop and I was done.
• Sound quality in the telephone is a bit less than CYTA’s. There is some minor background noise all the time. But it’s not as bad as it can sound.
• Switching channels on TV is a lot slower than before. This will need some getting used to. But it’s a fair trade for not having to configure any of the channels, crispy clear quality of image and sound, TV guide, and the selection of channels.

I’ll probably post more about it later, when I’d played more with it, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

P.S.: I might be somewhat biased being an employee of PrimeTel Ltd., and having received the package free of charge (installation + 3 month). Take my words with a grain of salt. And pepper.

Here is your chance to smile – Sue has a post about Cyprus highway code. Nicely done.

There is one thing I can add to what has already been written. When my wife (well, technically girlfriend back then) was going through the process of getting a driving license, I noticed that the “highway code” book she used to study was called “How to pass a driving license exam”. It wasn’t “Traffic rules”, or “Driving safe”, or “What and how of the road”. It was a tutorial on how to pass a driving license exam. Nothing more, nothing less.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-09-27

• Learn Greek — A nice set of tutorials for Greek language
  Tagged as: language greek cyprus greece references resources

These are the greatest news I’ve heard for a while – Google Calendar expanded their SMS support for providers outside of USA. Particularly, Cyprus Telecommunication Authority (CYTA) is now in the list of supported providers.

I have configured and verified my mobile phone, and it seems that notifications and reminders work just fine. The only problem so far is creating events via SMS messages, and requesting schedule information, like next event and daily agenda. This is most probably due to the shortcut number that Googles uses. Hopefully this will be fixed soon too. But even if it won’t – free SMS notifications for Google Calendar is something I’ve been waiting for.

As usual, you can have more infomration about SMS interface to Google Calendar check.

Yet another strange problem that I was banging my head at recently was the magical swapping of network interfaces after reboot. It’s not such a big issue, as reboots are rare, but when they happen, it annoys the hell out of me. The problem is that I’ll get my eth0 device would become eth1 and my eth1 would change to eth0. And back again after the next reboot.

Today I got really bored with this swapping, as I had to change my firewall settings once again, and decided to solve it once and for all.

The solution turned out to be trivial. There is a simple way of specifying which network settings should apply to which network device. All I had to do was edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file and add HWADDR=my:mac:address:here line. Then I did the same for the eth1 device.

I’ve tried a few reboots just to test the solution and so far it looks great.