Month: September 2011

Day in brief – 2011-09-10

  • @ektagon good effort, but isn't facebook places about to disappear? #
  • @ektagon Seems you are right. I somehow missed that one. http://t.co/PVWAQyk #
  • Google Translate thinks that a Russian word "весёлый" (funny,cheerful) translates to German as "Homosexuell". I must have missed that class. #
  • @titanas maybe you travel so much that they know and trust you by now :-) #
  • @ektagon Foursquare is still my pick for location services. Facebook has the crowd, but foursquare is doing it right. IMHO. #
  • It's been longer than usual since a pint or two at Ship Inn. I should visit it tonight, before waiters forget my face. :-) #
  • Checking out wine festival, apparently. (@ Limassol Municipality Garden) http://t.co/MvswYMK #

Day in brief – 2011-09-09

  • GitHub: mamchenkov pushed to master at mamchenkov/Color-Image-Generator http://t.co/zrWHZLk #
  • GitHub: mamchenkov pushed to master at mamchenkov/Color-Image-Generator http://t.co/IEyWHvo #
  • GitHub: mamchenkov pushed to master at mamchenkov/Color-Image-Generator http://t.co/h583Koh #
  • Should I open this cookie? :-) http://t.co/hwDznns #
  • @stepanov Google Chrome all the way! :-) #
  • @stepanov maybe I can help. Which ones are you missing? #
  • @stepanov PDF viewer is built into Chrome for a while now. I have no problem with it. Spell-checker you mentioned before. I can't find one. #
  • Just noticed that @fxccforex blog got a much needed face-lift. Looks way better now. http://t.co/6ucKCcp #
  • Shared: CakeFest 2011 http://t.co/XgAjitg #
  • @LeaVerou @jng5 That's just wishful thinking. By far not a fact. :) #
  • @tdh You can, once someone else becomes an Administrator. You can't leave a profile without admins at all. #
  • @tdh Create a dummy email account. Use it to admin dead sites. You'll be able to remove yourself then. :) #
  • @tdh It doesn't matter who the owner is. If you have admin access (not read-only) than you can do everything an owner can. #

Day in brief – 2011-09-08

Twitter – social glue that is here to stay

Today, while playing around with the Lovely Charts, I decided to make a quick diagram of a few social networks that I use.  The purpose of the diagram is to illustrate why Twitter is here to stay.  Here is the diagram itself.

As you can see, I use Twitter as a glue.  It aggregates favorites, likes, shares, bookmarks, etc from all other social networks that I use.  These are all gathered together and automatically published back into my own blog as ‘Day in brief’ summaries.   This way, I can own most of my social activities in the space, which I actually own – my blog.  So even if a social network dies out and disappears, I still have bits and pieces of content in my archives.

As for the Facebook, I don’t really use it so much myself, but a lot of people find it more convenient to follow me there than anywhere else.  So I configured Twitter to forward all tweets there too.  And since my WordPress blog is tweeting every post I publish, I get a very nice exposure overall.

Since Twitter is so simple and popular, pretty much every web service and social network does some sort of integration with it.  It would be way more complicated to configure integration between my WordPress blog and each and every social network that I use.  I’ve recently learned that quite a few people use Twitter the same way.  That’s something that no other social network gives you yet.  Google+ is a good potential candidate, but it still has no APIs.  And Facebook could do it easily  if it wasn’t for their moronic attitude towards exporting users’ own data.

P.S.: Thanks to all those people who made the social networks logos that I used in my diagram.

Unix learning tips from Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza – a very well known programmer in Linux circles – shares a few tips to having a better experience in Unix environments.  Here is a summary of what he recommends:

  • Read, learn, and memorize the “Unix Programming Environment” book by Kernighan and Pike.
  • Read and learn the “Unix for the impatient” book by Abrahams and Larson.
  • Learn Emacs.
  • Use Midnight Commander, which Miguel is the author of.  Here is a handy manual.
  • Keep a copy of the “Unix Power Tools” book nearby.
  • Learn touch typing.

These are all solid recommendations.  I’d suggest to use Vim instead of Emacs, but that’s more of a personal preference – learn one or the other.  And I can’t agree more on the touch typing.  That is indeed the most important skill that you will ever learn.  Right next to the camp fire starting.

At this point you might be thinking “I am awesome”, “the world is my oyster” and “Avatar 3D was not such a bad movie”.

But unless you touch-type, you are neither awesome, nor you are in a position to judge the qualities of the world as an oyster or any James Cameron movies.

You have to face the fact that not only you are a slow typist, you do look a little bit ridiculous. You are typing with two maybe three fingers on each hand and you move your head like a chicken as you look at you alternate looking at your keyboard and looking at your screen.

Do humanity a favor and learn to touch type.