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Have you ever heard Microtechno music? Everyone heard about Techno, Trance, Acid, Jazz, Classics etc etc, but I bet there are very few listeners aware of Microtechno, Microhouse and the whole family of micro-styles.

What’s the difference? The difference is in approach. While those traditional styles are mainly fighting for making music more powerful and rich with special effects, their Micro siblings are aimed to bring simplicity of sound and structure to the final listener, avoiding false complexity of representation. They keep it simple and that attracts. The simplicity of their world is somewhat different from what we are used to deal with. It lives, evolves and behaves as a living creature. The simplicity which absorbs you entirely, giving you a new sense, new motives to live and percept. OK, that was probably too deep, but it is what I actually think when listening to this amazing stuff.

I wouldn’t pretend to be your guide in this complex world of Micro-sound. What pushed me forward writing this small post was an unexpected discovery of one extremely typical and very tallented artist — AcidRain — and his album “Maridia”.

Have a good listening time!

Yesterday Kate asked me whether it’s possible to connect her professional Sony display to her iBook G4 to get a better picture and color representation or no. I answered, yes, without any hesitation and… it’s where the tricky part started.

While it was farily easy to connect the other monitor by simply plugging it in, it quickly become clear that it’s useless. Firstly, the second screen showed exactly what was on the main. Secondly, the resolutions of both were the same. That’s what is called Mirror Mode there in Macs. I couldn’t believe my eyes. While I could clearly see that the display settings dialog box has everything for laying out several screens to form a bigger virtual space and controls to change resolutions of the screens separately, there obviously were no ways to enable Extended Desktop functionality itself.

I made a quick Googling and found a very interesting page about Macs firmware patching, enabling this multi-screen feature. Well, I hesitated… There were so many warnings that I started to doubt this pilgrimage. I made a little more Googling and finally found what I was looking for — a prove that it’s relatively safe. It was an article on MacWorld site telling the complete recipe. And again the first site has been mentioned there.

I took a deep breath and installed the DMG… Woohoo, now we have a bigger CRT monitor connected to the iBook. The native screen and the display show their own part of a virtual desktop, having different resolutions, different refresh rates and even different background images.

Life is good again!

Two days ago one good friend of mine showed me a link to another rendition of the famous ID’s Quake 2 — Jake2. What makes this reproduction stand out of a crowd is that it’s rewritten entirely in Java. An exciting side is that its last version is very close to the original in terms of performance. You can find their benchmarking reports amusing to look at. And now some spectacular moments…

Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.

As you might know, BlogBridge is an active user of OPML. We use it for internal data interchange between the client and the service as well as we have some OPML import functions which are liberal enough to understand even the worst samples of human-made outlines. So, if we do pretty good with all that, what else do we need for the full happiness?

We are always looking for the ways to collaborate. We are constantly improving our services and application functions by adding more and more features other online services provide. For all this come true the strictly-defined and reliable Open Standards are required in order to make the data echange as simple and flexible as reasonable. The whole network could have easily got into a mess and disorder, if everyone have used their own standards and formats for data publishing and exchange. In this worst case we could barely dream about any collaboration and evolution, in broader sense.

There are number of innovations, like Reading and Attention Lists, which are currently in focus and under heavy discussions net-wide. We have a glimmer of hope that even though we and our interests are so different, we still have very good chances to find a compromise and design really flexible and simple outline format.

Jumping into the discussion, here’s the summary of the OPML format we use in BlogBridge.

Let us and other know what you think! It’s the right time.

Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.

Something that I always missed in Google Search was the fexibility of expressions building. Sometimes those tricks mentioned in the advanced search facility is barely enough to fulfill my immediate needs and I have to make series of searches and combine them later. That’s what always bugged me. Yesterday I was doing some collocations searches for my English classes after my working day full of coding was over and unexpectedly typed in an expression looking more like something from a programming language. To my astonishment it worked finer than fine and returned lots of useful results.

In this short writing I would love to share my finding with you. It may come that you have already seen a similar description somewhere or maybe it’s even documented (?). Who knows… Personally, I saw this functionality for the first time. So, let’s start some magic?

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Often, when you are developing some application you wish it to run one instance at a time. If you are writing a native application, there’s no problem because the platform you are aiming on most probably already has everything for this kind of magic. When it comes to cross-platform approach it’s vitally important to choose something neutral. This post is about my experience in this area.

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The first exciting week of living with Mac is over and, I guess, it’s time to share my impressions. Although, I wasn’t using it too much (you might remember that it’s Kate’s personal workbench), I had several nice moments during this week when I was granted the permission to spend several hours wandering through the system and trying various applications. Overall, I’m very positive about Mac. All the way I was using it, I had a smile on my face. It was the smile of pleasure as I was thinking how intuitive and highly integrated things could be if they are done right.

I had a pleasure to try various development tools and what was really astounding that the iBook G4 1.42 (1Gb of ram) performed much better than my HP nx9005 Athlon 2400+ (512Mb of ram) working under Ubuntu Linux. And the difference became more noticeable when I plugged out the power cable. The performance of my HP laptop dropped very low and it became nearly impossible to use it as a development station with high-load compilation and debugging sessions, while the difference in performance of iBook maintained subtle.

The other important and outstanding aspect is an amount of noise produced by Apple hardware. Again, my HP laptop is quite noisy and often when it comes to lots of compilations and other CPU-intensive activities, like gaming and graphics processing, it sounds like hell. In contranst to it, iBook is always barely audible, whatever load I give to it.

Battery life is something not to forget about. I have only kind worlds in my mind regarding the power consumption of the machine. I made an experiment when I had an opportunity to work nearly whole day on iBook. So, I plugged out the power supply cable and started to do what I usually do during the day — lots of coding, compilations, profiling sessions — all are quite CPU and disk intensive. To my astonishment, it worked more than 5 hours in my usually high tempo without even a sign of slowdown. Amazing! I wouldn’t tell you how different these parameters are from what I have on my other laptop. I always callibrate my battery there according to the schedule (yes, it’s true, I have the schedule of callibrations entered in my mobile organizer) and it still can’t barely be compared to Mac.

As I already mentioned, I had a very nice time playing with this notebook. Hope to have another good and lengthy session soon. Do you hear me, Kate?

Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.

Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!

Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.

At last, Kate’s Mac has arrived and we are celebrating! We had some Sambuka cocktails in the evening and other exciting stuff.

But let’s get back to the subject. My first impression is that it is unusual. I realize that everything is easy to do, but not for former Windows/Linux user who is used to some common use patterns. A good example is an application uninstallation. I was nearly exhausted looking for some sort of an uninstaller or installed packages manager. At some point I noticed that the entry in the Applications list tells an approximate full size of installed application. It gave us a clue that probably all we have to do is sending the application to Trash Can in order to remove it from the computer.

We did it; the application has gone. For me it’s a bit scary. Why? Because I always think of registry records and data files which are left after an application removal. The removal on Mac didn’t leave any traces of the application with small exception for some configuration files. Wonderful!

So, I’m satisfied with the buying so far. Let’s see how it goes next! For now we are expecting a big package of software to arrive later this week. It will be complete Adobe and Macromedia suites, some tools and games, and more.