Misc.

Off to Thailand

Anatoly Lubarsky — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:15:00 GMT

I'm in Thailand for a week starting this weekend. Will be off-line mostly. Good luck.

Can Software Code be Converted into a Block of Energy ?

Anatoly Lubarsky — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:18:00 GMT

I came across one interesting question over on "linkedin QnA" yesterday which goes like the following:

"Is there any possibility to convert piece of software code from its current form to a different form? What I meant is - Can a piece of software code be converted into a block of energy or time or disk space or light, or sound or say water?"

The answers varied from "NO" (when a piece of software is just an idea and not an object) to "YES" (sell it and convert into money or whatever).

Someone however pointed out that software code can be seen as a catalyst rather than the source of conversions. From wikipedia:

"Catalysts participate in reactions but are neither reactants nor products of the reaction they catalyze."

Quitters, Inc - Company Vision and Strategy from Quitter's Perspective

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sat, 26 May 2007 16:26:00 GMT

Paul C. shares his wild career experiences on his "quitter" blog. I was addicted reading it yesterday, so I decided to post about it. From the introduction:

"Since I graduated college 12 years ago, I've worked for 14 companies. My longest stint at any one company has been about 28 months, and my shortest stint was four days. If you count the companies that resulted from acquisition and mergers, I’ve actually worked for 17 companies. I've been laid off once, and fired twice – all in the same year, 2006, when I worked for a total of five companies in that calendar year. It was kind of a sucky year."

"At the time of this writing, I have no idea where I’ll work next, but I figure this gives me a chance to reflect on my wild career, and attempt to distill those things I’ve learned about how to run a company, and how to destroy one."

All this staff actually speaks to me since:

My current job is my 6th in hi-tech industry in 7.5 years.
In addition I worked for 2 companies for 3 days each. Which I don't count...
I've been never fired or laid off (yet).
I learned a lot of things not to do. Also I learned a lot of technical staff in-between jobs.

Enjoy :)

Riding a Bike to Work

Anatoly Lubarsky — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:15:00 GMT

I started to ride a bicycle to work and back home. Here is a picture:

Just got it after some calculations that riding a bicycle to work is the most effective choice for me in terms of time, money and in addition I exercise for free on my way to work :) It is not too far and there is no much traffic. I just need a spare tube, an air pump, and a patch kit.

I Moved Finally to Dedicated Hosting

Anatoly Lubarsky — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:37:00 GMT

My sites have finally migrated to dedicated hosting environment. Both of them:

3 years at shared hosting environment

Yesterday they were still (and had been for the last 3 years) hosted at shared hosting environment (ASP.NET applications and MSSQL databases). I want to thank people at parking.ru for their best service. However, the traffic gained significant growth in the last half year or so and it just became less and less reliable. Especially x2line suffered from pressure and even experienced downtimes here and there.

100% uptime migration

Geographically the sites moved about 20000 km. to US. While being 100% of the time up and running. If you use MSSQL as your database server I strongly recommend Red-Gate SQL Bundle for MSSQL database synchronization (schema and data). After synchronizing application files and data - you just change nameserver records and let both versions of the application run until nameserver records info is propagated all over.

Conclusion

I can finally feel the real speed and scale capabilities of the application. It IS fast. Yet to complete different configuration optimizations to the server, databases and applications.

"Et taintement, a nous deux!"

MyBlogLog Unbanned ShoeMoney, Digg Unblocked x2line

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 20:03:00 GMT

Several good moves from Web 2.0 companies last night:

MyBlogLog apologized for Banning blogger and their latest decisions, unbanned ShoeMoney. I can imagine for myself what started to happen internally when influential bloggers started to post on boycotting the service. LOL.
The other news comes from digg. Digg started to unblock sites yesterday (via TechCrunch). My site was also unblocked among others. blogs.x2line.com domain was blocked from digg for almost a year.

Some words regarding unblocking my site from digg.

"The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there."

In the past digg used to block sites that get threshold number of bad reports. During that time it was manipulated by groups and single influentials that spent hours sitting on the site. Because of this there had been too much false positives and many authoritive sites had been blocked (including mine).

YouTube RSS Feeds are Broken

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 01:59:00 GMT

YouTube RSS feeds are broken. For a while now. LOL

While I beleive some decent clients are able to read these feeds for example sharpreader reads these feeds without any problem, others don't. Internet Explorer 7 cannot read and render YouTube feeds. Because such RSS feeds do not fit the standards. Have anyone else noticed this ?

Seems that the problem is in the following attributes:

< guid isPermaLink="true">('http://youtube.com/?v=qcVMfe7NJbQ',)< /guid>
< link>('http://youtube.com/?v=qcVMfe7NJbQ',)< /link>

This is not valid uri. Seems to be a bug ?

Update (2007-02-17): the attributes were apparently fixed but the feeds are still broken, IE 7 is unable to render them.

Anna Nicole Smith 1967 - 2007

Anatoly Lubarsky — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 04:09:00 GMT

Anna Nicole Smith died today. Well, obviously she was killed. Nowadays need to have somewhat thin skin to understand that she was extremely talented, real and her life was a tragedy. She will live forever on cables and on YouTube:

R.I.P.

Total Immersion at Demo 2007

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:45:00 GMT

Don't miss this winning demonstration by Total Immersion at Demo 2007 conference featuring augmented reality:

I've already mentioned Total Immersion when they did their 1st amazing presentation at Demo 2004 - here. Back then I was sure that it is only a matter of months until somebody acquire them. But this didn't happen.

Update: I think, BTW that he is not very good at speaking and demonstrating. Though the demonstration is still impressive.

Wow, Scoble vs. Engadget

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:46:00 GMT

Actually, I'm with Scoble on this one - Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs. Comments are worth reading too, including arrogant comments by Peter Rojas of engadget (the company makes millions, BTW) style slashdot. I think this is a rare story on the net in 2007 and I agree with Scoble here.

Sites like engadget become more and more arrogant. Sad but true...

My 2 cents: Digg sucks because of arrogant community and banning domains policy. Wikipedia sucks because it does not link back as a rule having a bunch of arrogant moderators. Wikipedia is a site that you can only read, don't even try to influence.