Technology Front Line

21 March 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

I was wondering what’s the real place The Technology occupies in our life. Try looking for “eclipse” in a search engine of your choice, and the first thing comes neither “solar eclipse” nor “mind eclipse”. It’s Eclipse IDE, which is of a specific interest only to a technically inclined fraction of the civilization. The fact it comes ahead of everything else pushes towards an interesting conclusion: people around the planet are interested in “natural” eclipses less than techies in their project. And this fact unavoidably wraps up into something really puzzling when it comes to techie-non-techie interactions.

Spring Whispers

20 March 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

It has been an incredibly nice day today — warm and calm. As usual, I was sitting before the window and enjoyed it so much I can hardly put it all in words. Right now the sun is quickly hiding behind the horizon and the towering skies explode with color in a hundred layered shades: glowing pinks, deep purples, pure creams — the whole spectrum on a scale you even cannot imagine. Ten minutes is all that’s left before it disappears, but what a beautiful aftertaste of confidence and piece stays. The day is rushing to its end, another is coming…

Mounting Remote DVD Drive on Windows XP

18 December 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ tips

Yesterday I bought a breathtaking DVD game — Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy — which appeared to be too heavy for my laptop. Unfortunately, even though my desktop PC has the cutting-edge video card and tons of memory it is relatively old and has no DVD drive. At first I tried creating a disk image and mounting it as a virtual drive, but the attempt spectacularly failed because of StarForce copy-protection system. It just refused to recognize the disk even though the key perfectly matched. Eventually I was able to find the solution (credits go to Kate for her sensible suggestion) — mounting the remote DVD drive.

Post Tools Wordpress Plugin

9 November 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ programming

The second plugin for Wordpress — Post Tools — has just been deployed. It’s a very concise collection of methods for convenient fetching posts assigned to categories. For example, I use them to fetch three random quotations for the BlogBridge site front page. Other potential usage is selecting top N posts from a news or announcements category.

Wordpress Plugins, Random Screens

8 November 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅

I’ve just created a section for Wordpress plugins I build. Hopefully you will find something interesting there for your own blog or blog-based site. Most of my creations are running for the benefit of the BlogBridge official site and prove to work well under high pressure. I decided to release the Random Screens plugin first. It’s named this way because initially it was intended to pick up a screenshot of the BlogBridge application from the collection at random and show its thumbnail on a page at a specified place. The thumbnail would then be linked to a bigger image. Every time you refresh a page, a different picture jumps out. Very simple and nice. Have a look, maybe it’s what you always missed.

Preserving Links When Moving From MovableType To Wordpress

2 November 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ tips

So you plan on moving from MovableType to Wordpress for one or another reason. The Wordpress has an excellent Import function which lets you move all posts and comments from your MT to its database. The real problem is that the URLs of the posts won’t look the same. If you leave it this way, you will lose all the references to your posts. Here’s my complete recipe — the detailed step-by-step guide.

Back to life, safe and sound

19 October 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

Installed another anti-virus today, the fourth. The behavior of my poor Windows box has come out of control lately. At first, it was quite subtle, and the computer obeyed my orders. Reluctantly though, but still my actions meant something. Suddenly things started to worsen dramatically. Soon I ended up with the couple of nice blue screens, followed by minor data losses.

Measuring wastes

19 October 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

Three years ago, when I was working for a company, we were obliged to build the daily timesheet reports. No one really analyzed them, but the management thought it was a good idea to control productivity of the staff. Should mention it didn’t work? It took less than a day to the staff to learn playing the tricks with their reports to make them look genuinely productive. What was the point in them if no one was interested in the outcome?

Discover or Die ...

13 October 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

… in ignorance. In his “not a better aggregator” series (1, 2, 3) Pito raises an important point. It’s not the aggregator that makes your reading better; it’s something that helps you discover the relevant quality material in first place. He knows what he says. We are working on the BlogBridge project together and face the unprecedented information overload. You wouldn’t believe what number of new sites, blogs and e-mail users emerge each day. It’s horrifying.

Overriding DNS or How to Hack Microsoft

9 October 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ programming tips

Today I would like to share one extremely useful tip on overriding DNS information. But first, how it may be useful. Let’s imagine that:

You are running a site and planning the migration to a different provider. You wish to move your data first; then switch the name to point to the new location and then leave the old one. The problem is that before you switch the domain name to your new location, you can only guess if the site is working fine or not.
You are building a site for someone else and need / wish to access it using its target domain name. It may be necessary if there are some places where you hard-coded it etc.
You wish to show your friends what a great hacker you are. You open your browser, type in the name of some gigantic site you’ve “just hacked” ( i.e. microsoft.com ). Voila… “Vasya was here.”