[Reeder] Еще одна RSS читалка для iPhone
Если год назад, когда я только обзавелся iPhone'ом, выбор RSS читалок с возможностью синхронизации с Google Reader был, скажем прямо, крайне бедным, то сейчас ситуация заметно улучшилась. И тем ни менее, найти подходящее приложение до сих пор мне не удавалось. Одни расчитаны скорее на людей у которых всего с десяток фидов, другие просто не работают правильно и постоянно глючат. Так было до тех пор, пока я случайно не наткнулся на Reeder. Это приложение полность отвечает моим требованиям, пусть и не самого крутого, но продвинутого RSS пользователя.
Twit everyone, twit more!
As always Dilbert is amazing. Catches the very point of what Twitter is all about!
P.S. Hmm... Should I twit this comic, or blogging is enough? 
Google suffering from "permanent Beta" syndrom?
To start of with, let me explain you what I mean by "permanent Beta". This is kind of a state of software project when something is constantly broken or when functionality is being added ad-hock without giving much thought and without any regards to users' expectations. Furthermore, in this state you can expect functionality to disappear randomly.
How exactly does this relate to Google? Well, I believe they've dangerously approached this state. While there services are mostly stable (thanks to great backend architecture) functionality set is quite surprising, lacking at times and inconsistent. Let me give you just a few example that speak for themselves.
Google Calendar while being a great tool can't really replace Outlook or even iCal without such a basic feature as... tasks. For God sake, what kind of a PIM it is without tasks! Instead of adding them in the calendar what do we see? Tasks in GMail. You might disagree, but I don't think they belong in there.
Google Talk is another example. They started of by providing a standalone client and a web interface. Then a flash based client was added. The desktop version looks quite dead now (yeas there is a beta but its more or less same as flash). There doesn't seem any sign of it being ported to any other platforms so its great voice functionality is lost in vane.
I am not gonna keep rumbling much longer but will just mention that Google recently announced that they won't develop Notebook any further.
Overall, I believe Google should stop for a second and have a careful look at the pile of there creations. And start creating a true integrated service out of them. Feature-complete (at least up to the point expected by most users) and consistent!
Unfortunately so far I don't see such tendency, instead they add new experimental and sometime dead-born services like Knol.
Enough negative emotions. I still believe that Google is a fantastic enterprise which does amazing things. They just need to get a bit more mature.
Athens
Finally I visited Athens. Quite strange that it took me so long, as I live in Cyprus and we have like 4-5 flights there a day. Nevertheless this was my first trip.
I must say that I have quite mixed impression from this city. In some sense it reminded me of Russia in 90's. The first thing that one would notice is that its not the cleanest capital in Europe. Dunno if this is related to recent street fights or its the the normal state but all walls and buildings in the very center are covered in graffiti which looks rathe wired on a beautiful antique style main library.
Another observation is that amount of arbitrary street "markets" is vast. Every now and then you'd see people of eastern look selling something right on the street. I doubt that this kind of activity is controlled or allowed and yet there it is!
But what was most striking and what actually reminded me my home are people or rather their looks and expressions on there faces. Somehow I compare what I see with London, as I spent there the last year. Well there everyone seems relaxed, dressed how they like it, not hurrying anywhere . They just live there there lives and apparently happy ones. In Athens, though, people leave impression of stress and concentration. I haven't seen many smiling faces around...
On a bright side, I found that getting around the city to be fairly easy. Metro is very clean and all labels and announcements are repeated in English. But even if this was not the case navigating metro with just three lines is not rocket science 
So for me it was a transportation method of first choice. Much faster than busses and cars with all the traffic around the center.
Being in Athens, there is no way I could miss the opportunity to see Akropolis. I haven't spent much time there. Weather was rather ugly and a great part of it is under reconstruction (apparently a permanent one!). But even what I managed see was great. Having read so much about ancient greece seeing parphenon with own eye was a terrific experience! Wish I spent more time there and wish there was some kind of an audio guide cause I barely understood what those locations were!
A picture worths a thousand words, so here it is!
Giving up on MobileMe
Yeah, I know. I'm not the first one, neither am I the last. But every one got his own reasons. And not everyone describes the alternatives. This is exactly what I will do in this post.
First of all I want to say that MobilMe is great.... for unexperienced users who want something simple that "just works" and is now bloated with functionality they don't even understand. But its missing quite a few bits for the rest of us and bellow you can find detailed "what the hell" list.
- [BLOCKING] Mail doesn't support custom domains. It just doesn't work for me. I don't want to be stuck with the @me.com address for which I have to pay every year! Besides I need to use the SMTP server to send emails from other mail accounts!
- Mail has no server side filters, which kind of strange if you remember that you can actually sync the rules with MobileMe!
- iDisk is rather slow and there is now easy way to send links to public files. I have to send link to my whole public folder (what the hell?). Furthermore, its filled with unnecessary stuff they use for syncing purposes
- Blog engine in iWeb is something beyond my understanding. Why can't I have a web based admin panel like in blogspot?!
- [Half Blocking] Gallery public interface is bloated with JS and buggy in older browsers. So I never know if my friend will be able to open it.
- Bookmarks are not accessible from web interface. Syncing bookmarks between browsers without giving access to them is so not modern! What if I'm traveling and want to check that linked I saved right before living home?
- Mail is of course replaces with GMail! After playing around with IMAP settings and enabling some lab feature I set it up in Apple Mail just perfectly!
- Address Book is synced with Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), which is a fantastic services that allows you sync anything with anything and it's free!
- Calendar... hmm I wanted to sync that with Google but then the plugins are not free and I don't use it that much. But wait! Plaxo can sync it and then sync it with Google. Fantastic
- iDisk is surely replaces with Dropbox. Much cleaner and faster.
- Photo gallery - Picasa from Google
- Bookmarks go back to infamous del.ico.us service. And there is even a plugin for Safari which costs just 10$ (http://delicioussafari.com/). Buy it if you are a heavy user.
- Passwords can be synced with 1Password+Dropbox 1Password is an amazing tool for storing you secure information. 40$ and it worths every cent!
- Blog... well that can go anywhere. Why not blogspot, we have google account anyway.
Posting short notes to Blogger
Sometime I really feel like sharing wiht my readers something cool I came accross online. But going to blogger page, starting new post... argh too much hassle. And then I forget about it.
Now I found and ultimate solution! Turns out Google has a couple of dashboard widgets, one of them is just that a tiny and simple blogger client. yay! hopefully I'll post more often now
Check it out: http://www.google.com/macwidgets/
Ouch… Linux hurts after Mac!
For the last half year I was working almost exclusively on Macs both at home and at work. But now went on vacation and took my laptop with me. I used to think of my HP 6710s with 2Gb ram running ubuntu as a perfect workplace. Not any more! Man, it hurts having to work on anything but OSX now.
Anyone willing to trade it for a MacBook? 
Google Notifier in Leopard menu
Google Notifier is a "must have" if you are have GMail/Google Calendar like I am. It does its job, but doesn't look that nice in Leopard (10.5.x) menu. All icons there are black and white and gmail stands out shining in all colors. As usual, someone already fixed it! Have a look at this post .
P.S. Thanks to http://www.pajbam.com!
Updating Kalyway to 10.5.5
Kalyway is one of the best hackintosh builds at the moment supporting both AMD and Intel CPU's. Unfortunately the latest version is 10.5.2 and there is a combo update to 10.5.3. What if you want to upgrade to 10.5.5?
Well, don't try software update it will destroy your system. Installing official Combo update will do prey much the same. However, a clever guy came up with a solution which allows you to backup existing kext's install combo update and then (without restarting) install necessary fixes. It's really cool that you can just restore some critical modules if you're not sure if new versions will work.
Warning, this seems to be Intel only. No idea if it will work for AMD.
Check out this tutorial and the related forum thread.
MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008
MagLev is a new full stack ruby implementation including caching engine and persistent storage developed with scalability in mind. Its not ready, not just yet but will be pretty soon. Meanwhile you talk watch this presentation made by the developer at RailsConf 2008
MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 from Monty Williams on Vimeo.
