Month: November 2011

Day in brief – 2011-11-03

Day in brief – 2011-11-02

  • Before, my #GoogleReader shared items went into Buzz and RSS. RSS then went into Twitter. Twitter got aggregate to my blog. Not any more. #
  • New design for #Gmail is nice. It works better for me than whatever I had before. I wish #GoogleReader ppl learned something here. #
  • @pavlatom Try the themes and the Comfortable/Compact/Cozy setting. It's way better than before. Especially conversations. Love it! #
  • @pavlatom I love comfortable. Especially when looking at search results. Easy to visually separate things. :) #
  • If you are using #CakePHP and not using bake shell, you are NOT using CakePHP. Trust me on that one. #
  • New note : Их дом – Россия (иерархия власти) sx_1200x6032u.jpg (1200×6032) http://t.co/9zudEjKr #
  • New note : GelaSkins | What are GelaSkins? http://t.co/vogvCySX #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/0SEr18J9 120 mph (192 km/h) Crash Test #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/XqG7vVSe зомби-бой в рекламе тонального крема.mp4 #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/2EjTg17c David Calvo juggles and solves Rubik's Cubes #
  • @pavlatom Actually, it doesn't matter if you do or don't. I was just stating a fact. :) #
  • @twitterstories are absolutely awesome! You have to check them out. http://t.co/WXD7ZoIG #
  • @acroitoriu No need to rush. They've made a few improvements to the #GoogleReader today. I'm sure more is coming shortly. :) #
  • @acroitoriu You can switch between All Items and Unread Items. And then mark all you scrolled through as read. That's how I have it. :) #
  • Slashdot : KDE 3.5 Fork Trinity Releases First Major Update http://t.co/f5fEaf5L #

GitHub Enterprise announced

GitHub – the place to host and manage your source code – announced the release of GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is a self-hosted version of GitHub. What I find the most interesting is the pricing.

GitHub Enterprise is priced at $5,000 per 20 users, per year. It comes with everything you need in one tidy package: code browsing, code review, issue tracking, wikis. No extra software to buy, no extra software to install, no extra software to manage.

The target is not on the disk space (understandable, with your own severs) or private repositories, but on the number of developers. $5,000 per 20 developers per year is $250 per developer per year, or about $20 per developer per month. That’s not too much, especially when compared with the salaries paid to the same developers each month. A fraction of the salary.

So, not only GitHub Enterprise is an excellent option for those companies that cannot use third-party hosting for source code, but it is also a Christmas present for those companies that work on a lot of projects. With private repositories, the price of a regular GitHub organizational subscription can go up pretty fast. With GitHub Enterprise you’d be able to have everything in-house for a tiny fee, compared.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this business will go for GitHub. It sounds viable to me. Convenient and not too expensive. With easy OVF-based installation, that would work on many virtual machines (VMware, VirtualBox, etc), with additional features for enterprise integration (LDAP!), I don’t see why not.

Which day is your candidate for the Groundhog Day?

This blog post (in Russian) tells a story of a young woman that really loves the first day of winter, when the first snow falls. The author suggests that if there was a chance, this woman would have chosen the first day of winter to live through again and again, like the character of Phil, played by Bill Murray in the excellent movie “Groundhog Day“.

The author of that story also asks an interesting question.  If you had a choice, which would be the day you’d choose to live through and through, like in that movie.  If you could pick any day at all, which one would that be?

For me personally it is a hard choice indeed.  I love and cherish every day of my life.  Except for, maybe, Mondays.  I’ve had plenty of excellent days over the years and I can’t really pick one of them.  But if I had to, I guess I’d have to go with the 1st of January, the New Year Day.  Why? Well …

I am Russian and Russian celebrate the New Year like nobody else.  It’s one of the biggest holidays in our culture.  We eat, we drink, we have fun, and everybody stays up until very late.  Until early morning even.  1st of January is a public holiday.  No matter which day of the week it is, you don’t need to go to school or work.  Since everyone stayed up late, most people sleep through the morning, waking up in the afternoon.  This is probably the only day when I am not standing out in this regard, when I’m not the only one who loves waking up past midday.

Oh, and then there is food and television.  31st of December is the evening of celebrations.  We prepare lots of food.  We call plenty of guests.  We dress nicely.  We behave.  It’s all nice, but it’s a tiny bit too official and tiring.  On the 1st of January though, it’s totally different.  It’s the relax time.  There is still plenty of food and drinks from yesterday.  Whoever survived the drunk night is not in the mood for any official behavior.  People under-dress, grab food, and spend a lot of time in front of the television watching entertainment shows or movies, taking short naps in between.

By the evening, people, and people I of course mean myself, are often recovered enough to take a short walk.  Time to see friends or relative or visit the nearest pub.  Slight tough upon the yesterday celebration with an attempt to reconstruct the chain of events from a collective memory.  And then early bed time.

I think that year on year, 1st of January is the closest day to a perfect one.  So if I had a choice to live through one day time after time after time, I’d choose that day.  Gladly, of course, I actually do have a chance to do so.  It’s just that I have to wait a year in between.

What day is your candidate for the Groundhog Day?