Month: February 2006

Skype with SkypeOut

Continuing my Skype saga…

I’ve finally fixed the headset at the office. Again, it turned out I had two sound cards – it’s just one of them was disabled completely. Instead of trying to please the SoundBlaster Live! I turned that other one on, and it worked like a charm. Damn Creative. Every time I try to use – I have a problem.

So, anyway, with all the headphones and microphones working, I decided to go further along and buy some SkypeOut minutes. SkypeOut minutes allow one to call from Skype (read: computer) to any regular or mobile phone. Anywhere. Dirt cheap.

I used my PayPal account to buy a 10.00 EUR credit. It worked like a charm. I made a couple of test calls around. The quality is OK. The additional benefit is the anonimity. The calls are not signed with any number, so if you want to call anyone anonymously – here is your option.

That’s it for now. Soon, I’ll tell you about things that I think suck in Skype.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-02-23

Happy Birthday, Maxim!

Measuring Maxim

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, today is Maxim’s birthday, and he is one year old.

It was the most remarkable year of my life. Everything has changed so much. Yet, time is the thing that surprise me the most. This year was by far the longest year of my life. Probably, because it was so packed with emotions, worries, thinking, studying and observing. The longest. By far. But looking back at it, I have this feeling that it passed so fast. Where did all that time go? Confused…

One thing I am certain about though. It was the best year of my life so far. Hopefully it will continue to be this way…

Happy birthday, son! (maybe one day you’ll even read this)

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-02-23_Maxim_1_year_old

RegExp reminder

I was just reminded about this small thing, which is so easy to forget – regular expressions that have markers of line start (^) and/or line end($) are so much faster than those regexps that don’t have these markers. The thing is that with line start/end marker regexp engine needs to make only one match/substution, whereas when there is no such markers, it has to repeat the match/substitution operation at every character of the string.

In practice, it’s unbelievable how much difference this can make. Especially when using complex regular expressions over large data sets.

P.S.: I understand that it is not always possible to use these markers, but I think that they can be used much more often than they are. Everywhere.