Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Browsing around YouTube for more videos to watch I got redirected to an empty page that was saying “I call shenanigans”.  It looked like this.

Obviously, something went wrong.  But shenanigans?  Really?  What’s that?  A brief Google search suggested an explanation from the Urban Dictionary:

Once a person calls shenanigans, he or she has temporary complete control over the surrounding events, objects, actions, and laws of physics.

Funny.  And ironic.  Especially considering the fact that I was watching the FAILblog channel.

Being a web worker, I spend a lot of time in my browser. Over the years, I’ve used pretty much everything – from early versions of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer, to text-mode browsers like lynx, links, and w3m, through a whole bunch of Linux desktop browser like Konqueror and Galeon, through mobile browsers, through the latest versions of Opera and Mozilla Firefox. And out of all that variety, Mozilla Firefox was pretty much my only true love browser. It was reasonably fast, free, open source, and with a billion of extensions.

In fact, I accumulated so many extensions that I had to group them into four different Firefox profiles. With all those extensions, I tweaked and tuned my browsing experience to exactly match my needs. And I was happy for a long time. And I couldn’t even think of leaving Firefox for another browser.

Lots of people complained (and still do) about Firefox stability. But I never had any major issues with it. My sessions were stored and backed up automatically, and in those rare cases when the browser crash, I’d just start a new instance and it would automatically open all windows and tabs and bring me back up to speed all by itself.

Most people complained about Firefox performance. Well, I can understand them. It does feel slow and sluggish sometimes, but I was thinking of it as a rather cheap price to pay for all the extensions that I had. Opera, for example, is a much faster browser, but doesn’t have even 1% of the extensions that I use. And that makes it pretty much useless to me. No matter how fast it is.

So I was mostly happy with my browser. I loved it and it loved me back. And then Google released their vision for a modern browser – Chromium. At first, it didn’t even run on Linux, which is my preferred desktop operating system. So I didn’t bother. Then it ran, but people were saying that there were no extensions what so ever. So I didn’t bothered again either.

But the hype was growing, and people were shouting all over the web about how fast and how convenient Google Chrome is. So I just had to try. I thought, I’d download and install it, and use it for a couple of days, just to get my own opinion of it. That was the very beginning of December 2009 and I wasn’t even remote thinking of switching to another browser.

Now that it’s almost middle of February 2010, two and a half month later, I have to confess. I switched to Google Chromium. But that’s not the most surprising thing ever. What’s extremely surprising, at least to myself, is that I switched to Chromium the first day I tried it. Without even knowing.

It was indeed blazing fast. Super-fast. Super-sonic even. Convenient – yes, but it was way faster than I though was even possible for a browser. Extensions were missing, but I was saving so much time with the fastest browser experience ever, that I could do anything my extensions did manually, and would still have plenty of time left. I was shocked and hooked.

And about two weeks later, when I just started to get used to how fast a browser can be, Google opened up their Chromium extensions site. So now I also had some extensions to install. And which I did. And there was no going back.

To this day, Chromium is my default, primary, and mostly preferred browser. It does still have a few shortcomings and things that I’d want different, but all of them are nothing compared to the performance boost that this browser brought into my web life.

For reasons that I totally don’t understand, many companies choose Skype as a standard communication application.  I’d understood such a decision if they were using voice or video calls.  But they don’t.  Chat only.  And pretty much everyone knows how horrible Skype is for chats.  It’s slow, often losing offline messages, its history management is horrible, etc, etc, etc.  But today’s post is not about that.

It’s about parallel universes.  And how Skype is the master of them.  Consider my example from this morning.   I came to work, logged in to Skype, saw who is online and started chatting with one of the co-workers.  In the meantime, a guy next to me was doing exactly the same thing – came in, logged in to Skype, saw who is online, and started chatting with another co-worker.  But the interesting bit was that we couldn’t see each other online.  If we tried to send messages or files to each other, they’d fail complaining that the other party is offline.  The same was true for those co-workers with who we were chatting, they couldn’t see the other half of the office, which was online, chatting, and couldn’t see the first half of the office.

Is there any other explanation except that Skype managed to create at least two separate, parallel universes and signed in half of our office into one universe, and the second half of the office into another universe?  I can’t think of one…

Google Calendar team recently ran a survey, asking users what is it that they like and dislike about the product and how to make it better.  Of course, I submitted my opinions, but, as always, better thoughts come after the action has been already taken.  Here is my two items wishlist for Google Calendar.

1. [Update: not true anymore, see comments] SMS notifications for additional calendars.  Google Calendar only supports SMS notifications for your primary calendar.  But if you want to have a separate calendar for work and personal life, then you’ll have to choose which of these will send you messages to the phone.
2. Related events.  Quite often I get into a situation where I need two related entries in the calendar.  For example, I might have a birthday party event and shopping for presents, or a beer session at the pub and table reservation.  Having just one event and a tonne of reminders for it doesn’t really work.  Having two events however makes it more difficult to manage them.  If the party was rescheduled, I’ll need to update my calendar to reflect the change, but I’ll also need to find and update the related event.  It would be so much more convenient if I could just relate one event to another and when I move one (a couple of days later, for example), the related event would reschedule itself as well.

What are the features that you want to see Google Calendar?

Git is on the rise right now, especially in the Open Source Software development circles.  Some even went as far as predict the death of Subversion.  As much as I appreciate git (here is a link for you, if you don’t) and what it is doing for the Open Source Software, I have to agree with Brandon Savage:

Corporate America needs a centralized version control system. Subversion still offers this: Subversion centralizes the repository and simply checks out a working copy (versus Git, which gives you a complete repository). Corporate America still needs to have cannonical version numbers, and the ability to see the progress of a product over time as a single line – not a bunch of branches and independent repositories.

And this is true not only for the corporate America.

There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how dead the email is.  Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and what not – all were named killers of email.  What a load of crap, I think.

Firstly, those who think that X can kill email, are probably misusing email themselves.  Email is awesome for email.  For other ways to communicate you already have chats, forums, mailing lists, blogs, social networks, and so on and so forth.

Secondly … nevermind.  What I really wanted to say was that today I hit to edgy cases in my email usage.  Both of them in one day – that’s rather weird.  First, I noticed that my 7.5 GB Gmail storage is at 91% utilization.  That’s a lot of email.  Worried that I might run out one of these days, I cleaned up and reorganized some of the archives, dropping disk space utilization to 64%.  Second (again, I know), if you think that I am just another pack rat and I store tonnes of useless stuff, you’re probably right.  But, right or wrong, today I was asked to find some emails from 2010, 2009, and 2008.  As early as I could get on that specific discussion.  Not every day that I get request like that, but I was rather glad that I could satisfy it.

Thirdly (yes, I decided to continue), there is this really silly corporate world.  In there, people still uses faxes.  They still use emails.  And they just started getting used to Skype.  So it will take them a really long time to get off the email.

So, for all those of you who think that email is about to die, get off the pipe.  There is a huge world out there, and you should go out and experience it.  Over and out.

Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12.  The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.

Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month.  An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases.  So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.

Of course such a long path would pretty much guarantee that things would break.  But gladly I didn’t have to fix them for every upgrade, only once, after Fedora 12 upgrade was complete.  So the actual upgrade routine was rather simple: insert DVD with the new version, reboot, upgrade, remove DVD, reboot.  I was attempting to boot the system at least once into each new version to see how much stuff would break and if I notice anything going horribly wrong.  Everything was going smooth, except for once machine refused to boot into the new version (Fedora 8, if I remember correctly).  That didn’t stop me though.  Just upgrade to the next one, and then to the next one, etc.

After the upgrade was finished, I installed the updates for Fedora 12 and started fixing things.  The thing that I was worried for the most was Request Tracker (aka RT3) installation, which is a Perl application.  As any proper Perl application, RT3 utilizes a whole lot of Perl modules from CPAN and every time Perl version is changed signifficantly, these modules should be downloaded and installed.  Before, it was a rather slow, boring, and time consuming task.  Now however things are much simpler.  Before any perl upgrade just create an autobundle using the command “perl -MCPAN -e autobundle“.  This will create a bundle with all your current Perl modules.  After the upgrade is done, run “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::Snapshot_2010_01_27_00‘” (where 2010_01_27_00 is the bundle version, as given to you by autobundle).  Now Perl will download all modules and their requirements from CPAN and install them automatically.  Pure magic.

Apart from RT3 only one thing broke.  One that I would expect to break because I don’t follow the development of it that close.  It was Samba.  After the upgrade to Fedora 12 none of the users could connect to any of the file shares.  ”Access denied” was given no matter which username and password was used and what was the access level to the share.  A quick Google search revealed the fix.  Apparently, somewhere in between Fedora 6 and Fedora 12, Samba changed default back-end for storing credentials.  A fix was as simple as adding a single line (“passdb backend = smbpasswd) to the configuration file, that switched Samba back to the old backend.

And that’s it!  That’s all that broke and had to be fixed after an upgrade between 6 versions of a rather dynamic Linux distribution.  Once again, I am really amazed by how well things are managed in Fedora.  Kudos and congrats!

I have just learned about a really awesome service – Backupify.  This a really simple yet extremely useful web application for those of us who use plenty of web services.  Backupify, as you have probably guessed from the name of it, does backups.  It can backup your data from a whole lot of services – Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and so forth.  Backups are stored at Amazon’s S3 service.  And you have an option of using your own S3 subscription if you have one.  I don’t so I chose to use the one from Backupify.

As I said, the service is extremely easy to use.  You just register for an account and then specify which of your online profiles should be backed up.  There are options for daily and weekly backups and email notifications.  Support for more services is in the works too.  And the best part of it is that if you register today (before December 31, 2009), you’ll have a free account forever!

But if you were late for the free cheese, I’m sure the usefulness of such a service is beyond a few bucks that they will ask you for later on.  Strongly recommended!

While reading yet another sad story of the data loss, I came across a really awesome picture.  Whether you like it or not, it perfectly describes the disaster recovery plan and implementation in way too many companies.

My online video experience until very recently was limited to watching clips directly on YouTube and Google Video, and downloading episodes of Diggnation once in a while.  There are of course more places and worthy video podcasts on the Web, but I just didn’t have the right tool, and I didn’t bother enough.  But all of that had changed.  A few days ago I stumbled upon Miro.

So, what’s Miro?  Miro is a cross-platform (works on Linux, Mac, and Windows) application for downloading and watching online videos.  It has a really simple and straightforward interface and does a lot of magic by itself.  You just search for things that you are interested in – either by keyword or by category – review the list of results, subscribe to shows that you like and Miro automatically downloads them to your computer.  You can watch those shows any time later.  Even when you are not connected to the Internet (such as on the airplane for example).

You can search through downloads, sort them in a number of ways, etc.  After you have seen the video, you can either delete it or keep it.  If you do nothing about it, Miro will keep it on your computer for a few days (defaults to 5), and then will delete it to save some space.

Miro also comes with a built-in video player, so you don’t need any external ones installed.  On Linux, Miro supports two back-ends – gstreamer and xine.  I had a problem with gstreamer not playing any audio, so I switched to xine and everything is working nicely now.  As an extra bonus, Miro’s video player remembers your last position for every video you played.  So if you just stop the playback and decide to continue later, you won’t have to fast forward – Miro will just automatically start playing from the point where you stopped.

Miro supports a number of sites for video downloads.  With YouTube, for example, it downloads a high definition (HD) version of the video by default, if its available.  Also, torrent sites are supported and Miro handles them automatically as well.

Miro is such a simple and useful tool that it changes the way you see online videos.  For example, before Miro I could only handle just a few podcasts, but now I am subscribed to dozens.  It’s like an RSS aggregator for online video.  It’ll make you want watch more videos.  And it will make it extremely easy to do.

Obviously, I can go on and on about how wonderful it is, but instead of listening to me, you should get Miro and give it a try.  Let me know in the comments if you liked it at all.