Svyatogor’s Cave

Finally, Google Gears - a powerful plugin that makes many web applications (Google Docs, Google Reader, RememberTheMilk etc) available even when you are offline is now available for Firefox 3!

Note to fellow ubuntu users - it doesn’t seem to work with the beta version of FF availble now in official repos, so you’d have to update to RC2 or final version. Add this to your apt sources and upgrade:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ubuntu hardy main

Unlike many other companies (I am pointing at anyone he he) Google is known to add cool features silently.

Recently I found that use Google Spreadsheets you can easily collect information from people via Forms feature. Form can be anything from order request to a poll. The information entered to the form will be stored in your spreadsheet. All you have to do is to create new spreadsheet, go to Share tab and invite people “to fill out a form”. Cool, yeah? And there even more to it, you can embed it in your html! Just like this…

And you can see the results here

Недавно меня один приятель просвятил, что совсем рядом с нашим универом есть чудесный парк Virginia Water, а в прошедшее воскресение не только расказал, но и показал! За что ему огрмоное человеческое спасибо!

Парк десйтвительно впечатляет! Если бы не аккуратные тропинки и высажаные в каком-то особом порядке кусты, можно было бы подумать, что это лес. Очень тяжело описать его. Все вокруг очень аккуратно, ухожено. Но при этом нет какого-то нарочитого строгого порядка, который словно говорит “это сажали люди!”. Там можно бродить часами. Да что говорить, лучше вот посмотртие то немногое что я смог запечатлеть.

P.S. Надеюсь я туда поеду еще и сделаю куда больше фотографий.

Yohoo! Hello, my dear facebook friends!!!

When we talk about Web 2.0 first things that come to ones mind are tags, rss, blogs, wordpress, facebook… Well, let’s use all of those!

I have quite a few not so technical friends who are unaware of how to subscribe to my blog and wouldn’t visit it regularly. Yet there are on facebook (who isn’t these days!). It turns out that I can share some of my posts with them very easily.

A standart Notes application has a feature to import extenal rss feeds. So I will mark the posts that I want to be on facebook with the ‘facebook’ tag and will add this feed.

P.S. Oh, and by the way, if you want to do the same with your blog, here is the guide on tech-recipes

I want my desktop to look, yeah, perfect. I think it’s approaching the desired state!

p.s. panel-width patch.

If there is one thing M$ really knows how to do - that would be fonts. And as long as I have the license to use them (yes, my laptop came with Vista Home Basic) why not make use of them.

There is one strange thing though some fonts, like Calibri don’t seem to be antialiased. What a hell? As it turns out, these fonts have embeded bitmaps in them. So we need to explicitly disallow this feature. Just add the following section your ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font" >
         <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
             <bool>false</bool>
         </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

Finally, Yahoo! releases new plugins for their wonderful social bookmarks service del.icio.us! They are now available for Firefox 3 and.. yep Internet Explorer (thought I couldn’t care less for that).

Firefox extensions is pretty much the same as it used to be. Got polished in a few places plus for bug fixes. The main news in the support of FF3.

So, go and grab it right here http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/04/firefox-3-delicious-and-you.html

P.S. I am switching back to del.icio.us after trying foxmarks for a month or so.

When I first saw Gedit it was to Gnome as Notepad to Windows. Time passed and Notepad is still the same Gedit though became much more powerful. I’d say it’s approaching TextMate. And it has a very powerful plugin system. I had couple of ideas of useful plugins, but decided to start with a simple one.

Objective: A plugin allows to search in all opened files (even unsaved) or files in a given directory. In the later case it allows to specify if subdirectories should also be scaned and has a way to specify which files to search in.

There are two similar plugins available at Gedit page, but they don’t meet the above requirements fully. So I spent an evening studying how to write plugins in python and here is the result!

Download plugin: gedit-grep-v0.1

To install the plugin just unzip the contents of the archive into ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/ and then enable the “Grep” plugin in Gedit preferences.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now. Sometimes I want to write something to be discussed by those people who don’t speak Russian. Putting it all in one place isn’t such a good idea. People tend to be scared of blog when they can’t even read most of the posts!  One straight forward solution will be start a new blog, but… nah, I’m too lazy. Besides I am not such a heavy blogger.

I think this is quite an elegant solution - I start a separate category named “English” in this very blog and it has it’s own RSS (links to be found in usual places), so if you are welcome to subscribe to it. For the rest - nothing has changed.

p.s. I might but a lang switcher at the top at some point.

Если бы я мог слушать только один подкаст - это был бы FLOSS Weekly. Leo Laporte и Randal Schwartz беседуют с наиболее выдающимися людьми в истории OpenSource. Это и Ward Cunningham - создатель концепции Xtreme Programming и Wiki, и Richard Hipp - создатель SQLite, и, даже, Rasmus Lerdorf - автор PHP. И многие, многие другие.

Из этих интервью вы узнаете о том как зарождались технологии, которыми мы столь активно пользуемся сейчас, как они развивались и что нас ждет в будущем. Гости передачи деляться своим богатым опытом и взглядом на многие технические вопросы.

Каждая передача пронизана духом Open Source, ведь почти ни одна из этих технологий не стала бы на сотую долю столь популярна (или вообще умерла в зародыше) если бы ее автор не решил отдать свои идеи и наработки сообществу и продолжал бы на протяжении многих лет поддерживать и развивать свое детище. Для многих это стало постоянной и довольно хорошо оплаачиваемой работой, как, например, для создателя SQLite.