Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I am back from my trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands.  It was as good as I expected and sometimes even better.  I really enjoyed my time over there, met a quite a few interesting people, established a few useful relationships, saw some interesting technologies, photographed a beautiful city, tasted some nice beers, and more.

I brought back a few hundred photos, which took me a few hours to sort through.  Now that I am done there are just over a hundred pictures which I hope you will enjoy once they are all uploaded.  I also have quite a few posts backlogged. They are mostly in a form of notes right now, so I’ll need to expand them a bit and will publish in the next few days.

Just to give you a few highlights:

• Amsterdam is a beautiful city.  I hope I will have a chance to visit it again.
• I didn’t manage to visit a coffee shop, red lights district, or any of the recommended restaurants.  I was having enough fun without following any of recommendations.  Probably will do so next time.
• People over there are tall indeed.  Very tall.
• People over there ride bicycles even when it is cold and raining.  The city infrastructure is very supportive of cyclists, but I need to read some more about their traditions and history, because current bicycle penetration in the population is much deeper than just city infrastructure.
• I haven’t seen any cops on the streets.  Not even traffic police.
• There is lots of fighting with tobacco smoking.  Many places (like my hotel for example) completely ban smoking and don’t even have places for smoking.  Very nice.
• I’ll need to write a separate post about trains.
• It was interesting to see canals and so much water transport in operation.
• The conference was a success.  I met a few interesting people, saw some useful technologies, and brought back a few thoughts on how things should move on.

As you can see, there is a lot to post about.  Stay tuned.

I have watched a few movies recently.  Here is a quick overview, since I don’t feel like writing a complete separate review of each.

• Rambo.  I saw it in the cinema, on the big screen. And I have to say that I was impressed.  Really.  It couldn’t have been better than the “First Blood” by definition, but it was definitely better than the third part, and arguably better than the second part.  One of the scenes reminds the beach take over in “Saving Private Ryan”, while there are a couple of other pretty good fights.  John Rambo is still the same - quiet veteran, who is not so easily pissed off, but when he is, you better be on the other side of the planet.  In short: lots of blood, great body count, and an absolutely “must see” for the fans.
• Inside Man.  I am totally biased here, as someone who enjoys heist movies.  But even if there was no heist, it would have still be an excellent movie.  The story is interesting.  The cast is excellent.  The directing is brilliant. And so is every other part of the film - from music through costumes and make-up to operators.  This is how I think movies should be: a little bit of everything - humor, sadness, food for thought, visual pleasure, and acting.
• Poseidon. It was a good try at a bad movie.  I mean, there was plenty of effort in trying to make this film good.  Some good actors are in.  There are some expensive scenes.  Or at least some of them looked expensive.  There is a little bit of suspense at times.  But this film was bad by idea, not by implementation.  I mean, there is this Titanic story which can be tolled from a thousand perspectives.  And yet, in this film it was told from a perspective of a really cheap “end of the world” flick.  Oh, and the physics really sucked - from beginning to end.  But that is sort of expected in the really cheap “end of the world” flicks.

For a few years now, since I started to use real blogging software (such as NucleusCMS and then WordPress), anyone could register on this blog and become a member.  Membership didn’t offer much though.  The main feature members have that others don’t is that they can work with the archive of their comments on this site.  For the rest of the visitors, what was posted, was posted, and there was no way to change it.

Together with a few legitimate users, hundreds of abusers (SPAM posters, bots, etc) registered.  Sometimes their registrations were cleaned out by one of the plugins.  At other times, I removed them manually.  And then still a few of them stayed, masking as real human beings and not doing much damage.

As I mentioned recently, I have installed WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin, which allows comment posting folks to edit their own comments during a certain period of time (15 minutes). This works pretty well for typing mistakes, premature postings, and that sort of things, which appear to be 99% of all issues people have with their own comments.

Since there is no more need for user registration, I have closed it.  I have also removed all user accounts from this site that don’t have at least one comment.  If you think that you need an account, you can send me a message, including your email, username, and a reason for why you want it (I’m really curious).  I’ll make you one.   If you have an account, but forgot your credentials, drop me a line, and we’ll reset it together.  For the rest of you, just use the commenting form and you should be fine.

Interestingly, out of Gmail, Yahoo Mail! and Hotmail, only the first one does not append advertising messages to actual emails.  I am rather surprised by this, given we just started with the year 2008.

I remember back when Hotmail and other webmail services were just starting, it was a common practice to monetize on advertising banners shown to webmail users, while also embedding advertising messages into outgoing emails.  That was a really ugly situation, but a lot of people suddenly got free access to email, which was great, so we lived with it.

While free webmail has always been useful, most web people prefer to have a mailbox under their own domain.  Or at least they preferred before Gmail came into play.   Nobody ever took you very serious if you were communicating using a well known free webmail service.

When the coolness of your own domain started to grow, many webmail services tried to meet the needs of their users and attempted to hide the obvious facts of them being free webmail services.  This was the time when webmail services registered tonnes and tonnes of domain names and offered their users a choice of any for their mailbox.  It was also the time when some stopped embedding advertising into outgoing emails.

For a few years, I stopped caring much about this issue, since I got a proper mailbox, as did many other people with who I communicated.  I knew of webmail existence, but it was mostly outside of my scope of interests.   Until Gmail came out.

With Gmail, Google changed the perception of webmail once again.  Two things that they did differently were AJAX interfaces, which provided for a much faster and more responsive user experience, than traditional web sites; and plenty of space.  If I remember correctly, Gmail offered something like 1 GB mailboxes.  That was in time when most other webmail services were giving out 10 or 15 MB.  “You will never have to delete an email message ever again“.

Google managed to make webmail popular again.   They implemented most of the good stuff, ignored mistakes, and came up with a few smart things of their own (conversation grouping, labels instead of folders, etc).  And, of course, one of the things that they did right was the advertising.  While reading mail, users see ads for related stuff - in clean, text, no blinking manner.  And no outgoing message is ever modified by Gmail to include advertising or to suggest that recipient should  give Gmail a try, or any of such nonsense.

I move all my mailboxes to Gmail.  This my only email interface these days.  And I’m pretty used to it now. And a lot of other people are back to webmail. And so it amazes me to no avail that some web services still don’t get it.  After all this time and all these lessons.  They still including their ads in outgoing messages.  This is really weird…

To all of you using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, et al, - you should really give Gmail a try.  At least you’ll know for sure that your recipients will get messages exactly as you send them.  No more, no less.

It was almost half a year ago that I wrote these words:

Google AdSense is gone.  I’ve been planning to do this for a long time but never got down to it.  I don’t want to have any ads on my personal blog anymore.  And, it wasn’t making me that much anyway.

As a tribute to my inconsistency and greed, I wanted to let you know that Google AdSense blocks are back.  Currently you can see one in full post view, between the post content and the comments.  Another two are in the sidebar.  I’m still playing around with the ad types, sizes, colors, and locations, so don’t be too disappointment if they annoy you right now.

Why are the ads back?  What happened?  Well, first of all, I accidentally wrote a couple of very popular posts.   I wanted to see how well these posts can do financially.   Secondly, with the latest theme changes and a round of plugin shakes, there seems to be more activity on the blog (more people are coming in, they are standing for longer, and they do more - read, comment, bookmark, etc).  I started wondering if it’s possible to get a penny out of all you people.  So, you can say that this AdSense comeback is an experiment on my side, with some hopes of earing an extra cent.

Of course, I can be totally wrong and off the track (which happens pretty often, if you need to know), and all the positive activity that I’m seeing around here is fueled by the lack of ads.  If it is indeed so, not only will I earn any money with the ads, but I’ll also lose some of the audience (something I’d much rather not happen).

Anyway, call me what you want, but the ads are back. At least for now.  If they are too annoying for you, all I can suggest is start using Firefox browser with AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Filterset.G Updater add-ons.  You won’t see another web ad in your life…