Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Undo for sending in Gmail

Google Blogoscoped runs this post speculating about an “undo” option for Gmail.  I’ve touched this topic some time ago in my “You can’t recall an email” post.  The base for that post of mine was purely technical.  What is sent is sent, and there is no way to get it back.

With another look on this issue, I see that technical side can be controlled to a certain degree.  Webmail providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc), can indeed delay the outgoing message by a few seconds.  Countdowns and disappearing buttons aren’t an issue either – we have plenty of technology these days (AJAX, Flash) to implement them.  And there is a certain demand for the functionality too – this can be judged by all those browser plugins and extensions, like the one mentioned in the Blogoscoped article.

Still, I’m standing on the side of “don’t do it”.  I think it’ll add to the confusion of the interface and the complexity of the system, without too much benefits in return.  I don’t think that we should have an “undo” for everything either.   And I think that the old way of “sorry, forgot to attach this document” works pretty well and sometimes makes people to actually read through and think over again about what is that they are planning to send out.

What do you think?  Would you like to see an “undo sending” button in your email client?

On blog comments

Mark Cuban asks an interesting question:

So the question is, is it worth it to allow unmoderated comments ? Or is babysitting comments just part of the job of bloggers ? Or are comments just a waste of time under all circumstances ?

Here is how I see it.

Your blog is like your house.  In your house, you have some rules.  You don’t have them written anywhere, but everybody follows them.  Like, do you take off the shoes when you come in or if you are allowed to smoke inside.  How loud can you speak and can you bring kids or animals with you.  You know your rules.

People, who are coming in for the first time, they don’t.  There are some etiquette rules, generic for everyone, that will almost always keep you on the safe side.  Like, don’t swear until somebody does it first.  Or ask for the permission to smoke.  Stuff like that. When people come to your house for the first time, they keep it on the safe side.  They observe how you and others behave.  They ask if they need something.

This  is pretty much how comments on the blog are.  When people come to the blog, they would usually read others comments before posting their own.  They start with simple, straightforward ones.  They grow slowly.  If they do something that you don’t like, you let them know.  It’s OK.  Most good people won’t need more than one correction.  They can understand and feel the atmosphere of the blog and of the discussions.

Of course, the more popular the blog gets, the more morons will come.  Inconsiderate idiots who will feel an obligation to annoy and offend the heck out of everybody else, they will post insulting comments to a few entries in the archives.  They will come back for more…

Give them a warning.  Once.  If you are in a good mood – twice.  If it’s not your day, you can skip the warning altogether.  Then just ban the troll. Filter them out. They aren’t worth your time. They aren’t worth the time of your blog’s visitors.  The sooner you’ll get rid of them, the better.  Don’t be afraid to hurt their feelings – they don’t have any anyway.

I like the way WordPress handles comments.  It gets rid of SPAM automatically.  It sends me comments from unknown users for moderation.  If I allow a comment from someone, all further comments will be automatically approved, unless I ban the user.  If I will ever be overwhelmed with moderation of comments (not likely), I always have an option to go for “only registered users are allowed to comment”…

As to the Mark’s question of the value of comments – yes, I see plenty of value in comments.  Comments is not the main reason for me blogging, but it’s a pretty important one.

So, it is possible …

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive.  One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress).  This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive.  And I am not much sad about it.  It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience.  But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works.  And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business.  These are some good news for me – failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.

Christmas tree is up and blinking

We’ve setup our Christmas decorations today.  This a bit later than we usually do it, but still much earlier than I feel we should do it.  Anyway.  Now everything is sparkling yellow, solid green, and blinking colors.  It looks nice and fresh, but there is definitely a need to switch some of the lights off at least once in a while…

Maxim and Cappa are overexcited about this whole Chritmas thing.  Cappa tries to climb up the tree and bangs on all the toys.  Maxim helps her to hit those chocolate balls in hope that they will fall off and he will be allowed to unwrap and eat them all.  Or spread them all over the walls and furniture in the most unaesthetic manner…

The Christmas is coming.

Getting rid of my hardware museum

In the pre-Christmas cleanup craze, I cleaned out the bigger part of my in-house computer history museum.   In cold blood, I threw away about 40 kilograms of computer hardware.  Among that were a few kilometers of network wires, all sorts of power and signal cables, power supplies, video cards, sound cards, network cards, keyboards, and more.  There were some really ancient things that no long work, like a 80386 laptop and a 9600 baud speed fax-modem with built-in printer and scanner.

But. I haven’t got rid of everything.  There are a few things which I could throw out just yet.  Such as motherboard with 80486 processor and 16 MBytes of memory.  I think it’s brand new or so.  It is still packed in anti-static envelope.  Also, there are a few cables that I have a suspicion that I might need one day.  Don’t ask…