If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.
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Photo: Factory 3
Photo: Factory 2
If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.
Photo: Factory 1
As promised, today I start showing you my factory works. I have a few pictures in my red room and plan to expose them to your judgment as they get dry. The comments are always welcome.
If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.
San Francisco Cab Tracker
Oh my, it’s been a long time since I wrote something in my blog last time. The last few weeks were the busiest time this year. At first, I had my laptop BIOS killed. Then it was successfully restored even though it required to unsolder it from the motherboard, reprogram and solder back. No, it was my father, the magician, who did all the job. Big thanks again, dad! Then there were some other minor troubles here and there taking all my focus and time.
To catch up with the news and, for a start, here’s a nice and magic service — San Francisco Cab Tracker. Never before had I seen anything like that as well as little did I know that it’s even possible to track the location of each specific cab in the area. Is that GPS-tricks?
Next time I promise to publish some cool photos from some factory in our Crimean mountains. It’s building was never finished, but what was built impresses.
Until next time!
Java 6 Mustang Beta Impressions
Eric Bruno gives us his initial impressions about the latest feature-packed Java 6 Mustang beta release. I kind of agree that the list is particulary tasty and promissing. But I know that I’m not going to use it any soon. Why?
Well, it’s simple. Take our application — BlogBridge — as an example. It has a number of users even with Java 1.4 installed, we have to support them as they represent a significant segment of our user base. We don’t want to take any more maintenance load for having it run on 1.4, 1.5 and now 1.6. You might ask, what maintenance headaches? You might wonder, it all should be compatible!
Yes, it SHOULD, but unfortunately it’s NOT.
I’m not so pessimistic as I might appear from above. It’s just that I can’t taste its wonders fully yet what makes me a little bit worried.
In any case, nice release, guys!
Writing Revisiting
Recently I’ve been working on improving my writing skills: reading articles, books and recommendations from all over the web. It’s essential for me to be able to communicate the ideas freely in a written form as writing is the only pipe between me and most of my friends. Apart of it, I simply like to write and doing it in a right and easy way brings much more excitement than desperate attempts to put thoughts into order. But this is a whole different story…
Today I stumbled across the Hints for Revising by Brian Marick which are a good collection of advices on how to make your writing clear, well-structured and deeply pleasurable. I suggest running through this article briefly even if you aren’t going to become the next Shakespear. Personally, I found several interesting tips and got the proof of that my post-writing reading technique works and works pretty well on behalf of the greatest minds out there. Oh, and I’m not the author of it of course. It’s just that I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere before, but regularily used it to revise my own creations.
BlogBridge 2.14 Weekly Released
Just willing to double the official announcement here to let my exclusive readers know. The new version of BlogBridge with lots of fun features is out and I encourage everyone to jump to it as it’s faster, understands badly formed feeds better, has smaller footprint and simply more fun to use.
The details you can find in the official announcement posted by me on our main product site. There’s also a bunch of links in it for your exploring pleasure. So don’t put it off until it’s too late… and new version is out. :)
Try it and let us know what you think. Your opinion always matters!
English: Phrasal Verbs Crossword
Hey, English Learners! I’ve just got another fascinating Macmillan English update letter (which is great by the way). Among all wonderful things they have there, here’s something I would love to share with all of you. It’s not a secret to anyone that to sound natural you have to know word collocations, fixed phrases and phrasal verbs equally well. The latest are of a special importance as they help you bring some bright colors to your nicely showering speech. That’s why I’m especially excited to share the link to this phrasal verbs crossword.
Oh yeah, and the answers are also available.
Have fun!
My Flickr Updates
Hi, I just wished to let you know that I have a photostream in Flickr and it received several new items for your viewing pleasure. So, everyone is welcome to check it out and leave some comments. I would love to hear from you!
River of News Concept
I was having some periodical brainstorming sessions on River of News Concept throughout the whole day today. By itself, the concept is very simple: you just need a newspaper-like list of articles to scroll through. The question is where do you get these articles or news items?
The first level is definitely a feed. Any feed has several items in it, or it isn’t a healthy feed. Having the feed displayed as the list of complete article bodies rather than only their titles, you get a newspaper-like look of it which makes it easier for you to quickly review what’s on. This is what BlogBridge and some other aggregators do perfectly. And now we are close to some more interesting stuff…
The next step is to combine several feeds in one more wide river with more news drifting by. The most natural way of doing this is to group feeds you like and create “the river” for this group or, speaking in terms of user interfaces, click over the group itself to see every article of every feed in that group. In my opinion, though I’m not a usability expert by any means, this approach is slightly limited. It doesn’t allow me to create several “rivers” with different filters and properties for the given set of feeds. Of course, it will work fine for some time and I’ll be pretty satisfied until I realize that it could be better. For example, I might wish to have a river for today’s news only, the small stream with articles about my favorite tool etc. Having tens of feeds merged together into the same unfiltered stream is the most short path to drowning.
What I’ve learned so far is:
- I need a way to join several feeds together into one virtual feed which I could quickly run through and get the most interesting content for me.
- I need a way to apply filters to control what’s in this feed.
Pretty simple, yet advanced requirements. At this point, I started to check what our BlogBridge project is missing in order to fulfill my criteria and it comes that not too much. There are several loose ends in Search Feeds (type of Smart Feeds) functionality not allowing me to fully enjoy this whole news drifting stuff:
First and foremost, is that I can’t group all feeds from one guide. Actually I can since today as I implemented it by adding Guide Title property to the Search Feed query builder.
The second is it’s still not convenient to read the news. Any Search Feed should be supplied with the limit value — the number of articles it can have on display. When I have say 100 unread articles all over my subscriptions list and I create a Search Feed with some special criteria (like this: limit=10, status=unread) it shows me top articles only (10 in my case) as required. But when I mark them as read they aren’t being replaced by these in the back list. From one side, it’s correct because if you mark something accidentally and it goes, you won’t be able to get it back easily. On the other hand, I can’t just sit and read — I always need to jump off and get back to the Search Feed again to get another portion of articles.
So, as you can see, we are pretty close to the ideal river of news capable aggregator. There’s just one small step to make. Do you have any ideas on how it could be better to deal with this last problem?