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The new wave of spam hit my mailbox with more intense. The spammers appear to become significantly more active approaching the New Year celebration. I’m getting more Rolex watches offers, winning in more lotteries and even losing unbelievable number of passwords from my PayPal account I have never had.

That becomes laughable. Really. Every morning, when I’m looking through the night mail, I get a good charge of positive emotions. The efforts people apply to deliver all this spam to my mailbox should pay off somehow or there’s no sense in doing that. The question is who are those making the spammers happy? There must be a crowd of them.

At first, I was angry. Then I bacame even more angry and nearly turned into roaring beast. Soon I realized that it just became an essential part of the Internet infrastructure and you can’t get rid of it. When put into perspective all this becomes laughable. One side making patches to the software fighting with spam, the other side is looking for the holes in these patches to workaround them. And we, the poor users, are their playground. Sometimes I even suspect the builders of spam filters and firewalls in sending spam to stimulate users do more upgrades. Anyway, I’m getting too deep into speculations…

Have a good holidays if we don’t talk again!

Sometimes it’s even hard to imagine what will be the next gem you find on the net. This time it’s something really amazing and fun (as usual). I was just clicking here and there having a good time after my evening studies at Linguist Centre when one site grabbed my attention. The site is a large repository of links to different sounds. Yeah, it’s the well structured catalogue — FindSounds. The catalogue of various shrieks, beeps and clicks from all around, no matter whether it’s natural or artificial — anything you can ever think of.

Of course, it’s not the commercial library of sounds, it’s just the structured repository of the links to the sound files all over the Web. For the users it means that the quality of material is relatively low sometimes and can’t be used in serious projects. Other than that, the respository can easily be used as an excellent educational resource. Your children and neighbours will appreciate that, believe me.

On the related topic, a while ago I heard about some pet-care organizations playing sounds of kitchen stuff, noises of the city and the like to pets in their early ages to familiarize them with the future environment. That’s a great idea, I think, and it sounds pretty innovative — to train pets not to fear usual attributes of our modern living. Think about it.

If nothing else, now you know where to take all these “bells and whistles” for your grandma’s kitty, right?

Until next time!

My latest observation is that people tend to repeat familiar user interfaces when creating web documents. A good example, and particularily what I wished to focus on in this writing, is creating links from the words “click here”, or “here”, and the like. Assuming that you want to guide user to the downloads page authors often write:

Click here to go to the downloads page.

While the instructions on where to click are definitely given, the user still needs to look through the whole sentense to find why he or she should to click there. Now assume that you have a large document with lots of links and all of them are designed like above. Will this page be useful? No way, in my opinion. Neither human user nor the automated parser will find anything interesting during a brief overview if only what he sees are lots of underlined “here” and “click here”. There’s simply nothing to catch an eye with. Furthermore, I even consider it to be slightly unpolite because you intentionally force user to spend his time on useless research: where do these links lead?

In my view, the better way forward would be paraphrasing the sentenses to let the subject be linked to somewhere. In the situation with the download page it could be:

To get a copy of our product please visit the downloads page.

Now the link explains what it links to and every user will see what’s available at a glance.

The other thought to keep in mind is that The Web is a digital media. When we map it to the paper through printing these click-here-style links lose any sense, right? So the document becomes ugly and lauphable with all those beggings for a click. Ideally, the words and phrases we underline should be explained at the pages they lead to. It’s what “Hyper-Linking” means in HTML.

In this respect, the Wiki-family of products teach us a good lesson. The whole concept around them is based on linking the phrases with descriptions. Check the WikiPedia, for example. I doubt you will find there any artificial link markers; only key phrases are underlined, what makes it easy and fun to read.

Well, that was my point of view. Don’t take it too serious though. It’s not a major crime anyway and no one will sentense you to capital punishment for that. The writing was intended just to remind what you already know and always knew.

Maybe it’s somewhat usual nowadays, but I was impressed to the tips of my fingers with a paging functionality I came across on the SourceForge.net site. The paging is those numbers below the list of items you see when, for example, looking through the results of a Google search. So the guys at SourceForge made it slightly different from the traditional approach we see everywhere.

Assuming that you have a list of 505 items, 10 items per page setting and the first page selected, you will see the following pages listed below the main items list “1 2 10 20 30 40 50 51″. Clever, huh. If you now select the page 2 then it would be “1 2 3 10 20 30 40 50 51″ to give you an opportunity to jump one or several pages fore and one page back from where you are.

What is particulary amazing about it is that the functionality appears to work well both for those whole wish to review all items page by page and those who wish to briefly check the contents of the whole results set.

My sincere respect to the SF.net team! Bravo!

This Monday I decided to upgrade my system to a newer version of Ubuntu Linux which has just arrived — Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. In my past, I had hundreds of system upgrades and installations so that I clearly knew what to do.

On my laptop I host both Windows and Linux systems. Windows system I use majorly for games and various graphics stuff, whereas Linux is my primary development platform where I spend almost 90% of my time.

My migration procedures are always very simple. They are mostly down to the copying home directory to the safe place on another partition occupied by Windows. After that I’m free to replace the OS and put everything back in place when finished. We all know that FAT and NTFS systems used in Windows aren’t capable of holding all information about permissions and ownership the Unix filesystem has. That’s why I tend to use TAR to pack the whole home directory into a single file and put this file to the Windows disk.

Before this last time, my home folder was relatively small. Maybe couple of Gigs, never more. This time, mostly due to my addiction to photography, it was 7.5 Gigs and promised to take a while being packing into TAR. So I issued a command and went for a cup of tea. Later, when I got back, I noticed that the command had been successfully finished. The archive was where it should and everything looked just great. I gave it a quick look just to make sure that it has some familiar files in it and started system reinstallation sequence.

When the OS reinstallation came to the end I took the backup TAR and found that 3.5 Gigs of stuff were missing. I can’t describe my astonishment when I found that all my e-mail backup, software archive, IM logs and the like are all gone. It was the BIGGEST OOPS I’ve probably ever experienced.

I figured out that TAR command had created an archive file of 4 Gig size, which is some physical limitation for FAT32 file system, if I recall it correctly. That’s OK, but why, for all on Earth, it didn’t tell me about a problem with filesystem? How come that it failed to complete operation and reported the success? I guess, no one will give the answers on these and after what has happened I’m not keen investigating the issue, sorry. I just wished to get back to work in no time and that’s what I have done.

Well, that was my little failure story for today. It was a little technical, but I hope it contains at least two things to keep in mind: never obey the computers and always check what they do.

Have a good time! As for me, looking on the bright side of things, I can say authoritatively — it’s a NEW LIFE.

That’s a great day for us! Finally, we have released the new exciting version of BlogBridge, bridging the gap between feed aggregators and OPML feeds lists publishers.

Although, it’s in its weekly build state, which means that some glitches still may be there, the Reading List support is already somewhat terrific. Our early testers already reported about their renewed experience since this feature made its way into their workflows. Just to remind, the Reading List is someone’s list of feeds. We can say, the list of preferences that person wishes to share. Before now, people had to use static Import feature for loading these lists into their readers. Today BlogBridge offers you to dynamically monitor the changes in external lists and update your subscriptions automatically in addtion to traditional importing means. You can find the management pane in the Guide Properties or Create Guide dialog boxes.

Next, a really big heap of work has been done in order to make Synchronization functionality more intuitive and approachable. These days we offer cross-workstation synchronization of subscription lists (guides and feeds) as well as the read state of articles and lots of other attributes. Our previous attempts unveiled tons of weak places and numerious issues we made our best to address in this release. Again, we don’t expect the current state to be final. Quite opposite, we encourage everyone to share their feelings and ideas on improving this area with us. All in all, it’s your convenience on the bet. You are always welcome!

Another big change is a significant improvement of keywords and SmartFeeds criteria syntax. So far it was extremely simple and I would even say oversimplified. This deployment brings an updated experience, giving unbelievable flexibility through use of various wildcards. The best trick is that all your previous criteria and lists of keywords will continue to work smoothly but, having new power tools under your fingertips, you are free to unleash it and enhance your hits immensely. The summary of syntax will be published on the main product site promptly and I don’t like to duplicate it here.

Final major change is an addition of detection of duplicate subscriptions. Finally, we added an initial alert box telling you that there’s another feed with the same URL present. The alert appears as soon as the application finds the connection between some feeds in your list and it may take from seconds to minutes (depending on the speed of your Internet connection) or happen immediately if you specify a feed URL instead of some site URL, which requires additional resolution. The counterpart of the feature is added to Cleanup Wizard in order to help you detect and remove duplicates. When you check “Duplicates” box in the dialog box, the wizard displays all feeds in duplicates groups, which means that you have to uncheck those you wish to leave before the final “OK” hit.

Well, too much news, no? Of course, it’s better to try once than to hear times. Go, try it and let us know how it works for you!

And, yes, the official announcement with a more detailed list of changes can be found at the product site.

For those who are curious where that four-leaf clover symbol Apple uses for Command key today came from dedicated — Macintosh Stories on Folklore.org.

Here’s another time-killer for your consideration - Bubblewrap.

Personally, I’m not addicted to this kind of entertainment, but I know several companies where the job stopped for couple of days, thanks to flying penguins. Let me know if you need a link.

Sometimes the ideas are floating on the surface, but for some unknown reason no one sees them. This time is no exception.

Geominder is a very simple reminder software for your Nokia mobile. And now prepare yourself for some science fiction… It allows you to bind messages to any geographical locations, so that they pop up as you come there. Yeah, I didn’t get and believe this from the first run as well. The fast example is when you walk into the shop your mobile beeps and reminds to buy some stuff you need, or when you enter a library it automatically gives you a list of books to grab. Fiction? Yeah, we are living in some distant future already, but no one seemed to notice the transition.

The whole idea is based on the mobile cell ID. First, you teach the phone by giving the names to the cells and then you associate notes with them. Later, when you walk through the cells, it pops up the messages.

Everything genius appears to be so simple!

Some of you may know Gnome Evolution project which is a complete Outlook-like solution for Linux with contacts, calendars, mail client and god knows what else. I kind of like it as it has some indexing features allowing me to search through the years of letters in a reasonable time. It basically performs well, but recently I found that it started to slow down.

It wasn’t until my mail base grew big enough having about 10K messages at a present. Pretty good and solid number, no? Unfortunately, Evolution engine doesn’t think so. Hardly had we got over 7-8K when it became really slow clearing and re-indexing things after the mail box checks. It took seconds to complete a simple check and it hung for a while, doing some “expunging” as they say.

I had a plan X. I wished to backup whole mail base, then remove all the mail older than a month manually and continue with a nearly blank lists. It should unload Evolution allowing it to do quicker, that’s obvious. The execution of the plan didn’t even started. Where I stuck was a clear understanding of that I wouldn’t be able to look through my past email in the backup. For me it’s dead necessary to have a chance to pick letters from the past.

I did several attempts to find an utility application which would allow me to do scans through backups and display letters, but I couldn’t find any.

Do you know any of them? Or maybe there’s a better recipe?