Month: April 2008

Live Free or Die Hard

I just watched “Live Free or Die Hard” DVD, also known as “Die Hard 4.0”. I was trying to catch it in the cinema, but somehow that didn’t happen. I’m glad I finally caught up with it.

I was something anxious and worried about this new “Die Hard” episode. After all, the previous parts were so good, and it’s been more than 10 years since the last one (the last one was “Die Hard: With a Vengeance” dated 1995). With this new one be as good as those parts? Isn’t Bruce Willis too old for this? I had no clue, but follow-ups to some other films of the past proved to be worthy (*cough*Rambo*cough*) – that gave me hope.

“Live Free or Die Hard” turned out to be as good as the previous movies. And maybe even better. For one, special effects and the whole visual craft went a long way since John McClane had a gun in his hand. Even watching it on a 15″ screen gave me shivers sometimes. I imagine how impressive some of these scenes looked in the cinema! Sometimes, of course, it goes a bit too far – like in that scene with a fighter jet, truck, and bridge – but in action movies with Bruce, Sylvester, and Arnold it is always better to go a bit too far rather than not come close enough.

Another thing that I was worried about before watching this film was the computer theme. The 4.0 is the title of the film suggested that there will be a lot about computers. Plus I saw the trailer, and it was obvious that we are back to square one with graphical user interfaces for searching, tools with progress bars for password breaking, and all sorts of communications, security, and general IT terminology. Well, the computer side of the film was as bad as you can get it. But, on the other hand, it was so unrealistic from the very beginning, that I had no problems abstracting it away from the real life. Meaning that in my mind there was this natural separation of how computers work in real life and how they work in this particular movie. So that wasn’t a big problem.

Overall, the film was very nicely done, entertaining and in the same mood as the previous ones. So I got what I expected and even more so. I’ll give it a firm 7 out of 10.

Hope to see more language controls in Google Reader

If you read this blog even for a short while, you probably know that I depend on many Google tools, such Gmail and Google Reader. As a power user, I believe I know pretty much everything these services have to offer. I also know a few things that these services don’t have on offer yet, but which I’d gladly welcomed.

I already mentioned a sharing of interesting items in Google Reader with your contacts. That’s a really nice feature. And you can even control which users you see shared items from. However, one important thing is missing in that functionality – language control.

You see, I don’t have that many friends who are using Google Reader and share items, but even those few that I have speak a total of 7 languages (Russian, English, Greek, French, Ukrainian, Dutch, and German). Not only they speak this languages, but they also share a lot of items in those languages. That is sort of useless, since I only know two languages – Russian and English. These two are enough to provide the common ground for communications with all of my friends.

So, what I would really like to see in Google Reader, is a new setting which would let me filter my friends’ shared items to only those languages that I can understand. I know this can be a bit tricky to implement (how does the system know in which language the shared item is? or, even, what should it do if shared item is in more than one language?), but it would be really helpful functionality. And a huge time saver too, since then I wouldn’t have to go through all those items that I have no understanding off and marking them as read.

Should such a feature appear, I’d like to see it taken to extreme. I should be able to automatically tag or do searches on content in specific language. This will give me a useful tool of comparing hype about the same topic in different language communities.

Microsoft support – a myth or reality?

gapingvoid, a blog well known for cartoons drawn on the back of business cards, has this post about monetizing on open source software – a very old discussion, as we know it. In that post, one IT guy is quoted saying:

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

What’s your first thought after reading that? Mine was “Have you ever even called Microsoft support?“. It seems that a lot of people believe in this notion of Microsoft support magically fixing whatever problem they might have with any of the Microsoft product.

The question really is – will they? Myself I never had any experience with Microsoft support, but I know quite a few people who did. Most of them seem to agree that Microsoft support is pretty much like any other technical support service of any other company. Meaning that to get anything good out of it, you have to know how to get through to knowledgeable people and you have to know how to convince them to spend some time with your case. Otherwise, you’ll get into an endless loop of answering machines, checklist questions, and advices like “Please, reboot your computer and call us back“.

I have to say that that makes sense to me. Microsoft is the biggest desktop software vendor. Desktop computer users tend to be the most uninformed and untrained category of users (no offense intended). If even half of them believe in magic of Microsoft support, imagine what Microsoft has to go through to keep their support costs reasonable. If you have a serious problem, you’d probably need to get through all that protection and prove that you know what you are doing and that your case deserves attention. Getting through requires knowledge, experience and patience. How many people of those who believe in Microsoft support actually have the knowledge, experience and patience to get through? I don’t think many do. Am I wrong?
P.S.: By the way, there is an interesting discussion in the comments to that original post.

Flickr videos

Flickr has recently added support for videos. Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

Screenshot of Flickr upload page

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it. Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were. The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites? Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it. There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it. There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled. Flickr went for a very nice definition – “a long photo“. They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now. That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr. I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now. I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely. Most of my videos are very short and rather personal. For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers. But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos? What do you think?

The sad truth about web working

Celine Roque of Web Worker Daily makes yet another observation that makes one nod his head in agreement:

There’s a slight irony about being a web worker and staying in your home office most of the time.

The post goes on to suggest a few ways to spice up your life, in case you are a web worker…