Ubuntu 8.04 is Out

It was Clean Thursday yesterday and hopefully you were cleaning your hard drive for a great new Ubuntu 8.04. It made it to the download sites in the evening and since then they creak under a heaviest load.

Have you ever wondered why they version their releases in that strange way — …, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04? I never mulled over that, but yesterday I was enlightened. Look at the numbers closely: 2007.04, 2007.10, 2008.04. Alright, now it does make perfect sense, doesn’t it?

While we are at it, let me explain briefly how I partition my hard drive to aid quick and painless system upgrades. Keeping in mind that Canonical releases a new version precisely once a half year, it is judicious to keep OS on a separate partition so that it can be easily replaced, while your home directories stay intact. This is how I do it:

• / (root) partition — 5 Gb
• /home partition — 5 Gb
• swap partition — 2 Gb

Every time a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I simply format the root partition and install the release there from a Live CD. Certainly I need to restore all apps later, but it’s not a big deal actually as I maintain a nice list for this matter.

I know Ubuntu has a mechanism to upgrade itself to a newer version through the Updates manager, but, in practice, being upgraded in this fashion, OS doesn’t unveil its full potential, and more like “mimics” the previous version. I compared the two in the past and am inexpressibly happy about the discovery.

Hopefully this information will be valuable in the light of upcoming wave of upgrades.

Checking fav.or.it

The invitation letter from fav.or.it almost made it to my spam folder today. The name looked suspicious and I had not a clue what on Earth do they need from me again. Now I recall asking to drop me a note when the beta-testing becomes available about half a year ago. Quite a wait if you ask me. At least, I got my chance to join in and give it a quick spin. Here are my notes:

Click on the image to get a bigger idea

The immediate impression was that the application is simply adorable. It’s very web 2.0-ish and AJAXy to its fingernails. GUI is thought out extremely well and works quickly with a pleasant after-taste of something solid. In the subscriptions management section I missed instructions or some other help information terribly (had to dig them up in a separate window) which made the whole experience a bit duller, but mainly the impression was positive and I even made notes of some interesting GUI decisions.

One unpleasant aspect though was that the actual reading space was greatly reduced by the header, borders, margins, meta-information rows and all imaginable bloated stuff (see it for yourself in the screen shot). I know, all that is very-very useful, but isn’t it the designer’s talent that makes an elephant fit on the tip of the needle?

Now to functionality. Whole focus is solely on the river-of-news concept where you choose a subject in one way or another and read, read, read. There are several ways of “choosing the subject”: tags, categories, search criteria. With tags, it’s like del.icio.us, where you say where to start, then it shows the next associated tags list, you choose something else and narrow it down (until you end up with the only link ).

They didn’t let me import a couple of my favorite Music-related feeds (simply was allowed to import zero feeds for some reason — even not a single, but zero; interesting), so I had to use something from their selection. One curious function that I noticed was following the conversations on the blogs. Even though I didn’t have a chance to test it, the idea looked much like that of coComment to me, but without any extra code on the blog-side to support. I suppose they know many blogging software types and scrape comments from the well-known places. In any case, looked fun to me.

This is all I got to share at the moment. See if you like what you saw and try it yourself. Maybe it’s the next blog reading platform, who knows.

(BTW, it’s powered by Sun Microsystems; at least the logo in the bottom-right corner says exactly that)

Upgraded to WP 2.5

Finally upgraded my blog to WP 2.5 today. Looks so sweet that I can’t help sharing it with you.

The administrative part is completely reworked, and it was a stressful experience to see the updated Dashboard, but eventually I’m getting used to it (sort of).

Basically I like the AJAXy Write Post page packed with nice “Add media” section, dynamic tags and categories, improved editor and many other things. It became much lighter and noticeably easier to use.

Give it a spin, it’s worth it!

• Short screencast on new WP 2.5 look and some features
• Download page

By the way, I find it a lot easier to maintain and upgrade when WP is installed by checking the code out of the Subversion repository. The whole upgrade process takes counted minutes as it involves running a single command to update sources and opening the database upgrade page in the browser. Check the WP on Subversion page for more details.

Firewall and Anti-Virus for Your Mom

There were several severe troubles with my laptop lately that almost cause a permanent Windows OS damage. I wasn’t able to boot and to dress the system. It simply stuck during the startup letting no anti-virus software do its job. I managed to recover somehow fidgeting in a seat for more than a day.

Once I got everything back online, I decided that it’s about time… yeah after more than fifteen years of pressing and clicking buttons, it’s about time to install some anti-virus software and configure a firewall. So I started with the former. The network is no longer a safe place for me.

I checked several famous solutions, but all of them were either expensive or didn’t promise what I need. I shared my worries with Pito, and he suggested trying one FREE solution which was supposedly what I needed — AVG Free Edition. (Later I discovered that my father uses it for more than two years already.) The checker appeared to be surprisingly useful: with selected and critical area checks, daily updates and other bells and whistles.

Now, that I regained the trust in my applications, it became crucial to protect my network. About a month ago I got a static IP address from my ISP. Since then the idea of protecting the interface didn’t give me a sleep. I recalled some names of respected companies from my distant youth and gave them a quick shot. Nothing looked promising again either it was expensive or weight a ton. The next step was to scan some reviews, and it’s where I found another FREE product crowning the list of competitors — COMODO Firewall Pro. There’s a firewall ratings table showing how all known firewalls stand different kinds of attacks, and you can clearly see the leader, which is to put it mildly, extremely impressive. Installing…

What’s your experience with firewall and anti-virus software?

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!

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?

Blogrolling with BlogBridge

Today we deployed one very interesting feature. But first, look at the Favorites section of the sidebar. Would you believe if I told you that this list is generated right from the “Favorites” guide in my BlogBridge client? The guide is being published as a Reading List. I’m simply dragging feeds to it, removing, renaming and tagging them as I wish and the BlogBridge Service does all the rest. Science fiction? No, absolutely not.

Here’s the HTML excerpt of this particular page:

<h2>Favorites</h2>
<script xsrc="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.js?tags=true" mce_src="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.js?tags=true"></script>
<p style="margin: 15px 0 0 20px;">
<a xhref="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.opml" mce_href="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.opml">
<img border="0" xsrc="http://blog.noizeramp.com/images/readinglist.gif" mce_src="http://blog.noizeramp.com/images/readinglist.gif">
</a>
</p>

You can see that the list of blogs/feeds is generated by the JavaScript scriptlet provided by the BlogBridge service for my favorites reading list. This scriptlet gives immediate access to the most fresh version of the reading list I publish which makes my site a little bit more dynamic and keeps maintenance at its minimum.

A little geeky? There’s another, more official post rich on technicalities available on the BlogBridge home site.

That’s one small step for BlogBridge… one giant leap for blogkind.

Have a good time!

BlogBridge 2.13 Stable Released

Phew, what a busy day was yesterday. I was absolutely mesmerized deploying and announcing till late night, hence I even hadn’t got a second to make this final post to my own blog. Well, you can blame me on being not very objective about it, but this release will become one of my cherished memories for sure. Not only is it packed with lots of features I’m personally proud of, but also the deployment went well, we’ve got nice and inspiring coverage from our users (check out this post by Brian from The Institue of Hybernautics) and stuff.

I don’t wish to start outlining the changes even in brief here as probably you could have already seen them. If not — check the official announcement and history of changes.

It’s a bit early to judge about download stats yet as most of the services we use for our public announcements are still have no data available, but according to our internal counters this release has an unprecedented density of installations for the latest several hours. That makes me think of some possible implications — we might need another, more powerful server here to tackle with all this traffic.

Oh, one thing I would like to warn our Linux users still running stanalone (I mean taken from TGZ) version of BlogBridge 2.7 Stable. This version will successfully detect the update, but the “Download” button will be disabled. It happens because 2.7 wants to see Debian package but it’s not available. Starting from the version 2.13 the default package for Linux users is TGZ which makes more sense as it’s quite general and fits well every distribution.

Have fun!

BlogBridge 2.12 — The Publisher

Today we release the next version of BlogBridge under the code name “The Publisher”. What makes it special is that it finally has Reading List Publishing support. Yahoo!

Reading Lists publishing became really accessible now and you even don’t need your own site for that as we will host and take care of the load, we will pay for your traffic and do maintenance for you. Everything for your purest enjoyment!

All you need is a service account, which is free for now. Now check out the quick tutorial by our lead — Pito — and start publishing like crazy! What? Still reading!?

Among other things we have significantly improved our synchronization service, performance of some operations and made several tweaks noticeable to Mac users. But still the Publishing support is the major one.

Don’t forget to tell us about your experience via embedded feedback facility (see Tools), or via forum, or contacting us directly, whatever fits best. And… enjoy!

• Link to Weekly release
• Link to complete change history
• Link to explanation of different release types

What I Played In Late 2005

Yesterday I finished playing one wonderful game — Mystery Case Files: Huntsville — and decided to quickly outline what interesting on this front happened in my late 2005 life.

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville

Wonderful game with average graphics, but very good idea. You are a detective and you are assigned to several cases. Each case consists of two stages and should be solved in the given time frame. The first stage is finding things you need to get to the other. Things are named in the list on the right of the screen. You should find them in the main area and click to get into your brief-case. Sounds simple? Yes, but in fact it isn’t so much. Things are intelligently hidden all over the playground so that you always need a sharp eye to find them. The next stage is the puzzle where the square pieces of an image are mixed and you have to exchange them with each other to restore the original look.

The game is gripping and for us, English learners, it had another important value — it helped us to learn and remember many words. After I finished playing I started to think where could I get something similar to continue this fun education.

Memory Loops

To describe it quickly, the balls are rolling on the curly path the the hole in the ground. When the time comes, they are given another power-push and roll a little faster for a second. Once they reach the hole, the game is over. Your goal is not to let them reach the hole by removing pairs of the balls from the chain. The most interesting part (and the title gives you a tip) comes here. The balls are all of the same color and with no graphics. You have to turn the ball to see the picture painted on it, then turn the other to see if the picture matches. If it is both balls are removed, otherwise they are turned back to no-picture-state. Of course, there are tip balls with trace of the picture on the upper side, lots of different bonuses, like explode, show all pictures, roll back etc.

There are several stages with several levels within the stage. With each next stage the complexity raises. It all starts with three or four types of pictures to match which is pretty easy, but then every other stage adds new picture plus speed boost and it becomes really hard. I’m still somewhere on the eight stage and continue playing.

Tumblebugs

The game play is mainly the same. The same balls rolling from one hole in the ground to the other, but this time the balls are colored and in the middle sits the bug throwing similar colored balls in the rolling chain. Your goal is not to allow the balls get to the end of the path by removing groups of three or more. It means that you need to quickly match the colors to be successful. The whole set of various bonuses is present so that you will never get bored.

There’s nothing to describe specifically. But I would like to give it A for its graphics. It’s really well-thought and well-painted. Amazing game play!

Well, that was my little favorites list. I really enjoyed and continue to enjoy playing these games.
By the way, not only me. My father, sister and Kate are also big fans of all ball-rolling-games.

Hope it was interesting and helpful.