Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

WordPress plugins revisited

Since I just upgraded my WordPress installation, I thought it would be a good time to check what’s new in the plugin area. WordPress has a lot of attention recenlty, and thus, all sorts of extensions are flourishing. Here are the plugins that I decided to try out:

  • AuthorHighlight. The number of comments on my site is slowly rising and I thought that it would be nice to highlight my own comments differnently. I still have to configure the style.
  • Archives by Year. A really small change that makes a difference. I think archives are easier to use this way. More structure is better.
  • DoFollow. All comments on this site come pre-moderated and there is no SPAM at all, so there is no good reason not to give linked sites some credit.
  • List Manager. This is one of the most useful plugins ever! I wonder how come that I never wrote it myself. It allows to manage all sorts of lists through administration interface, rather than edit posts directly. I have switched my wishlist, movies to see, and 200 things to do lists already. While switching, I’ve updated and corrected some.

I’ve also seen a number of plugins that I considered for installation or even tried, but decided to leave out for the time being. If you have nothing better to do, I suggest you check them out once in a while – things grow and expand much faster than I want to follow.

Bumped it up to 1.5.2

I’ve been very lazy with site changes these days. It’s been almost a month since WordPress 1.5.2 was released. I have updated the site only today. There shouldn’t be any visible changes as most of the improvements are under the hood. If you see any problems with the new version – let me know.

Video tapes are gone. Long live DVDs.

I have given away our VCR about two years ago. It was malfunctioning and wasn’t fun to watch anymore. But the legacy remained in our house in the form of about twenty video tapes. Those were all excellent movies that either I bought myself or was presented with by my close friends. “Snatch.”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Dogma” – films like these are jewels in anyone’s collection. I had no use for them though as I didn’t have any means of watching them.

Slowly, one by one, I got all these movies on DVDs and my collection was back to useful state. And those tapes were still laying around needless.

Today I gave them all away. I was going to do it sooner or later. I just couldn’t find anyone who I knew would have a VCR and would appreciate the films. Some of my friends have long switched to DVDs and DivX. Others have completely different movie tastes than I do. Yet another others already had their own collection that included either some or all of these films.

Dimitry and Lana passed by our place today after the trip to mountains. They confirmed that they didn’t have these movies, or if they had any they would be dubbed in Russian, which is not a good thing. Especially for the family that speaks English in its entirety. Their movie tastes are very close to mine. And so I was glad to present them with all my tapes.

I’ve emtpied the whole shelf that can now be used for storage of a new movie media – DVD.

Wikipedia, here I come!

I should probably check my referrer logs more often. A lot of interesting stuff goes on in there. Most fun are, of course, Google search phrases that bring people to my blog. But today something even more interesting was discovered. I made it into Wikipedia – the world’s largest free encyclopedia. I know that anyone can edit pages there and add a link to their own website, but trust me – I didn’t.

Someone has linked to my 220,000+ domain ideas from Domain hack page (scroll the page down to ‘External links’).