noizZze

It’s not a secret to anyone that Mac OS X has a wonderful feature — Spotlight — which greatly helps to simplify your daily life by providing surprisingly fast search facility. It helps to find almost anything in your Mac without diving deeply into the folders hierarchy. Yeah, everyone knows about it, but what was really exciting for me to discover is a way you can tell it what kind of stuff you are looking for.

(more…)

Yes, we finally did it with Kate. We decided to replace Kate’s desktop PC with an iBook from a new updated line (14″/1.44GHz/1GB/60GB/SuperDrive/AE/BT). So why have we decided to make this step?

Here’s the list of our most important points:

1. Mobility. Kate is a designer and it’s essential for her to be mobile in order to talk with her clients effectively, showing the demos et cetera. Furthermore, we always keep in our minds a potentially-soon migration to Australia and her desktop PC could be an anchor.
2. We both got tired from Windows platform. These endless problems with registry which becomes overflown once a year requiring whole system to be reinstalled can make mad anyone. Also, what makes me sick is that such a big company as Microsoft is unable to show something really revolutionary. Instead, it always repaints Start button in different colors and sells that again and again, while the whole other world is evolving. Have you seen what the Start button looks like in Vista? Wow!
3. Noise. I must admit that our desktop PC is somewhat noisy. Although, I already have an exhibition of coolers on my shelf, I still can’t find one with acceptable level of noise. My PC laptop (HP nx9005) becomes noisy only when do something intensive, like building the project, but all other time it’s silent.

Well, I have already pre-ordered the iBook. The guys at the store said that it will be available on Tuesday. Then it will be delivered to me some time, so I expect it to come in the end of the next week. Hopefully, it all will work out.

See you!

Couple of days ago I saw a link to Escape Pod science fiction podcast. At first, I didn’t pay enough attention to it, although, I still gave it a quick look. It made its way somewhere deep into my brains and didn’t show up until this evening. You might know that I’m studying English (or, perhaps, polishing it) and always looking for good opportunities to extend and improve my communication skills.

Today I’ve got an idea. Why not give it a try and combine learning with a pleasure of listening to some science fiction? So, that’s how I decided to review the site again and download some issues. I’ve downloaded two of them (#19 Implications and #24 The Death Trap of Dr. Nefario) and, now that I’ve finished listening to them, I’m definitely going to get the rest of them. It’s so wonderful and exciting that I would recommend anyone out there to give it a whirl on the off-chance. Yeah, it’s something special!

I promise, you would find it time well-spent for sure!

The other day I made a test-drive of another E-mail client written in Java — Columba 1.0. At a glance, it appeared very friendly and well-though out, but soon… Here come my (unpleasant) notes, so if you a fan, you can skip the rest of the post as it won’t add any confidence and make you proud of the product.

(more…)

Today I had another interesting task — to make splash screen window be always on top of everything else on the screen. Yes, and it’s all in Java. I know that Java 1.5.0+ already has a nice method to accomplish this –

– but what about our 1.4.2 compatibility? I wasn’t able to find any methods for doing this in 1.4.x and decided to add support at least for our users at 1.5.x . The next question was *how* to call this method without breaking compatibility with 1.4.x?

(more…)

While I was tuning an Image Cache in BlogBridge, fetching different feeds, I noticed one interesting thing. Some feeds, for a reason, impenetrable to me, put random number in a query part of an image source URL, making it different every fetch. To make it more sensible, look at this:

I find it difficult to understand why one would use this trick other than to disallow caching of images. Every time an RSS reader application fetches such feed it sees the differences in text and updates a local copy of an article. Then it tries to lookup an image mentioned in the article, which is already in cache, but, thanks to new random number in the URL, the image can’t be found and is downloaded another time… and another. Frankly, BlogBridge is clever enough not to do this, but the whole idea is arrogant, in my opinion.

Why is it done this way? Any ideas?

I just realized that I don’t share funny pictures Kate finds on the net with you. I have no excuses. Here we go…

The eyes is what is left Click on the image to enlarge

The image is taken from Game.Vladimir.Ru.

Why is it good to have static inner classes? When an inner class is not static it holds a reference to its main class. If your inner class does nothing with the main class the reference is completely useless and only takes some memory. Nothing really harmful, though.

(more…)

Another busy week is over. During this week we received some valuable recognition from our users and I would like especially mark David Herron and his analysis of the BlogBridge performance evolution. It is always inspiring to hear responses of this kind. Thanks, David!

Today was another big and very productive round of product polishing reflected in a long list of small yet necessary fixes and improvements. We worked our fingers to the bone making the application as fast and robust as it’s only possible. Hope that it’s going to turn into a feather in our cap soon.

I plan tomorrow to be a day of healthy rest. My friend and I have decided to visit several book stores. As for me, I wish to discover some more modern Japanese writers. What I noticed is that it’s really hard for me to switch to European or American reading from Japanese. I can feel that the rhythm, stylistic devices and atmosphere of Japanese books is rather relaxing and fits me better than an aggressive and speedy plot of modern western authors. There’s no rush, all the twists of a plot are very well-weighted, characters maintain a deep mental connection with you while you are literally glued to a book.

What I don’t like in books most of all is when authors explain their points and impose their own judgements of situations being described. If you have an alternative vision and own opinion (as I always do), it’s often hard to continue reading feeling disconcerted with author points. I hate to tell that, but often I have no other choice than to drop the book in the middle considering it being a waste of time.

Another good news is that today a new Ubuntu Linux release — version 5.10 — was born. I have already ordered free PC version of it and waiting impatiently for it to come in about two weeks or so. Most noticeable (for me) changes are:

• Updated GNOME (2.12.1), OpenOffice (2.0 beta 2), X.org (6.8.2)
• Integrated writing of audio CD’s
• Updated kernel (2.6.12.6)
• Further laptop enhancements (hope suspend on my laptop will start to work at last)

Well, that’s all for now.

See you!

Today I was busy with creating a BlogBridge distribution package for Mac OS X and had found that Advanced Installer supports only ZIP-packages and there’s no DMG support. Not that it distresses me, but the fact that an application bundle will look slightly different from all other native applications makes it all being a little less fun.

I don’t have Mac and I can’t judge whether it’s better to have an application in DMG or ZIP. For me DMG (Disk iMaGe) sounds like something having some additional support from OS, like automatic unpacking and applying standard installation procedures, whereas ZIP is somewhat general, which should be manually unpacked and installed.

Is that true or a ZIP-package with some specific internal structure is also handled in a special way?