I have a bad feeling in my mouth. Too bad, it would have been a good T-shirt sign: 12 exams in 1 month. Now it's gonna be even longer 10/11 exams passed, 1/2 failed in one month :)

The last two days I went skiing (well, actually snowboarding) with a friend with which I haven't before and learned some new tricks. Now 180° turns aren't a problem. First the training started with doing (trying to do) turns without jumps (this is really exhausting because a jump alleviates the whole thing - rises you in the air), then little by little I started testing steep jumps with low speed (rises you high without being fast) and it worked.

Some of the turns (when riding on the back edge of the board) can be done in an easier manner when part of it is touching the snow while turning - it looks like doing half a circle. This way if there's some unevenness it can be used to help lift the board.

The whole thing took a lot more energy than usual, because of all the jumping and falling down. Now I have muscle aches all over my body, but it was worth it.

There are no pictures because it's hard to take some with two pairs of gloves and wrist-protectors in the middle.

There's a second Psycho coming soon.

Guess who's on the picture there (1st row, 1st guy from right to left).
    Yes, you're right, that's me on the first Psycho.

Here's one more picture from it (I'm the guy looking right):

After a ton of spam email, and numerous invitations for outrageously stupid quizzes I was thinking of closing my facebook account.

Today I saw an invitation to support: "Stop violence in porn animation" cause.

The account will stay open - facebook emails are now forwarded to my PHUN folder.

After a month and a half of homeworks, essays, analyses and exams, it's all over. There are still four exams pending, but the studying is over.
Life is beautiful again :)

Since yesterday there are problems connecting to Google:

There are time-outs connecting even from the states.

Really strange. Search and Calendar work fine, Gmail does not even load:

I had an issue for quite a while with pingbacks in dasBlog:

Error: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Net.WebPermission, ... failed. at ... at newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime.Proxies.WeblogUpdatesClientProxy.Ping(String weblogName, String weblogUrl) at newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime.BlogDataServiceXml.PingWeblogsWorker(Object argument) The action that failed was: Demand The type of the first permission that failed was: System.Net.WebPermission

It comes up that medium trust allows opening connections only to originHost (I guess localhost).

Here's how I solved it:

go to

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{version}\CONFIG\web_mediumtrust.config

and find

<IPermission class="WebPermission" ...

and add some additional URIs:

<IPermission     class="WebPermission"     version="1">     <ConnectAccess>         <URI uri="$OriginHost$"/>             <!-- [Mihail Stoynov] dasBlog needs it for pingbacks START -->             <URI uri="http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2"/>             <URI uri="http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping"/>             <URI uri="http://ping.blo.gs/"/>             <URI uri="http://rpc.pingomatic.com/"/>             <URI uri="http://ping.feedburner.com"/>             <URI uri="http://api.feedster.com/ping"/>             <URI uri="http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/"/>             <URI uri="http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2"/>             <!-- [Mihail Stoynov] dasBlog needs it for pingbacks END -->         </ConnectAccess> </IPermission>

These addresses were in %dasBlog%\SiteConfig\WebServices.xml

Second time I do that.

Now all my clothes smell like strawberry :(

If it was clean who would have left this drawing on the rear windshield of my car:

Another reason for not cleaning it up.

I had some free time today (just trying to avoid studying) so I decided to dismantle my laptop (due to heating problems).

With some help from my roommate (a lot more experienced than me in that area) I finally found the screw that stopped me the last few times and opened it.

Everything was fine until I settled my eyes on the fan. But first to explain - the fan gets fresh air from beneath it and blows it through a radiator. The radiator itself is connected with a heat pipe to the processor, graphics card and some other stuff. So back to the story - I'm seeing the radiator and the fan and between them I see a "block" of dirt - it was like a chocolate bar - thick and shaped like a rectangle. (Sadly enough I was so excited that I forgot to take pictures).

So after an hour of cleaning and few attempts of assembling it (one of the times nearly until the end until I saw the fan standing outside), we tried it.

Amazing.

The temperatures before the cleaning:

The processor:
65-85 depending on the usage and access to fresh air (being on a couch for example)

Graphics card
65-80 depending on the usage and access to fresh air

HDD
No thermometer, but generally quite hot.


After the cleaning:

The processor
40-55 The fan doesn't even start, but when it does start it could drop it to 39 (previously a number I could only dream for)

Graphics card
~55; After I watch a movie I could say more.

HDD
mild to warm


I'm having ~20 degrees drop in temperatures.

That's amazing. It was undreamed of.



Update: pictures of the dirt in the radiators:

    

Look at this:

The message boxes are from a software that's supposed to be a spell-checker for Bulgarian.

Can this software fail at displaying Bulgarian characters?

The software is called Cyrilla Correct 2007 - it is intended for MS Office 2007 and this is a clean install of the trial version. This happens on first use.

A crap, I'm disappointed. And this is supposed to be the best thing on the market.

Does anybody know anything better? (Something that would work as seamlessly as Firefox's spell checker)

Weird,
upload speed ~ 2 x download speed:

(That's in the office)

The last 30 days I've been taking a lot of exams (part of my master's degree).

Since January 26th until today I have
7 (seven) taken
3 (three) pending
2 (two) to go

That's a whopping 12 exams in a month.

Pending means awaiting results.

Please cross your fingers for the last five and especially for the last 2, because they are the cherry on top of the ice-cream - hardest mother F*ers ever.

I've always thought that whenever you distribute software or a service that does not need a central server that is under your control, people will always find ways to break that software or service for various reasons - to use it for free (think of Windows), use it for prohibited in the EULA purposes ( A good example would be ripping a movie or an Audio CD and distributing the ripped content).

I've always thought that even when having a central server but distributing clients (client applications) to the users would be hard to enforce the policy you want - ICQ guys (Mirabillis, now AOL if I'm not mistaken) would like you to use the official ICQ client because they sell ads (ads are shown in message windows), but I'm not using the official client and many others aren't.

So the perfect solution (in my opinion) would be to sell an online service - like what google is doing - search, gmail, ads, picasaweb, calendar, reader, gtalk are only a few that I'm using (without the ads). There are offline/thick client applications that google has, no doubt, but the majority is online with a thin client (browser).

Well guess what, there are companies that have a business with an offline client (thick client) that are doing their best to avoid all these problems.

All the other popular (and maybe unpopular) messenger networks have their protocol studied and many free and not so free clients written (trillian, pidgin, qip....., even online: meebo....). All of them, icq, gtalk, hotmail, yahoo, ... except for one - Skype.

Think, why is there no other client for the Skype network? Not even for chatting. There is no other that I know of. And I've searched.

Here's an article that explains why:
http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf

It is kind of freaky - these guys have made everything they can think of to make it as hard as possible to reverse engineer the client, the protocol, the whole idea.

Skype is amazingly hard to debug and investigate - it has parts of it's code  compiled at runtime, it checks timestamps to see if there's a breakpoint. It calculates pointers at runtime to avoid debuggers. It has bogus code inserted, some code encrypted, all is really well obfuscated.

It's the same with the protocol - encrypted, hard to detect, hard to stop/filter by an administrator.

Even freakier - they have skype clients acting like proxies or routers for other clients - your client may be one. There are 20 000 worldwide.

The author says there is no antivirus that could detect a virus or a trojan if there was one. Skype client is the perfect blackbox - freaky.

They can read what ever they want from your machine and transmit it back to their servers and since the protocol is unreadable nobody would know.

Skype guys did a good job at protecting their business, but they created something far more capable that could be used for far more (how to characterize it) undocumented and unwilling-by-the-user things.

Nothing serious, I just got careless.

Part I is here
It's really annoying to have pictures in the blog.

Here are a few more reasons why I find it hard:

1. dasBlog only allows adding pictures one by one. Of course I know were is it uploading them to, but this is cheating and I avoid doing it.
2. Thumbnails have to be done manually.
3. Making a picture a link (<a href...><img src../></a>) is quite hard (see this) - the raw html editor has to be used.

Of couse images can be linked from external sites, but I wouldn't want to depend on that because links can change.

I was thinking of directly copying thumbnails from picasaweb, but then all the styles also came through and broke the whole idea.

Another think I was thinking was to embed the flash picture viewer from picasa, but it only works if you read the entry from the website directly. Google Reader blocks it:

Picasaweb picture viewer (you have to read the blog entry directly - I have no idea which rss readers support it):

If someone has had the same issues, please share your experience and possible solutions.

Half of Deep Dish was in Sofia. The party was great. Personally I enjoyed Cedric more than Sharam. Cedric made contact with the public and whenever the euphoria started to leave he took some action to bring it back, while Sharam started the beat and didn't care that much

Here are some pictures:

There was no one around eleven

       

Sharam and Cedric



This guy was constantly fixing something


Why were they at the party - I have no clue


Full size here

A really annoying lack of functionality in dasBlog is emerging in my mind.

That's what MS Word has:
(the pictures are into the text, which is quite nice)

Here's how it's done in MS Word:



In the dasBlog text editor such functionality is missing. Of course, there's raw html editor, but that's too burdensome (I'm lazy).

Even the border in the upper pictures is done via the raw html editor - It's only setting the border from 0 to 1, which is not that hard, but for something more complex I'd rather use a rich text editor.

So if someone knows how to tweak this, please give me a call.

One of the victims:


These are the new six:
The guy who sold them,  

said that four of them should have access to direct sunlight,
3 of them should be watered more often than the others.


The problem is... that I don't remember which ones.

Full size here

      

I was warned by my good friend Google:

dasBlog can be made to send emails on every single event - comments, edits, referencing, ....
A good practice would be to have a separate email for the blog, at least that's what I did. Then if there's SMTP Server (google mails is perfect for that), the application sends messages to a designated email for every defined event. Perfect.

Another great thing: if your mail account has POP3 (google mail again), then the application (dasBlog) can be defined to check the mail regularly and if there's a mail with a subject containing a secret word, like that:

Subject:

ALABALA  I just passed my exams

Body:

I got an A in <b>Marketing</b> and F in Accounting....

Then the title of the new blog entry would be "I just passed my exams", and the body would be the message body, keeping the formatting. Of course ALABALA should be defined as your secret word in dasBlog settings.

They say, that they support inline images and attachments, but I haven't tried it yet.


There's a small chance for dasBlog to delete all your emails in that account (a special option in settings, that strangely enough is enabled by default), that's why it's better to have a separate account.

Create an account here: analytics.google.com, get the script and paste it here:
dasBlog_DIR/themes/[your theme]/homeTemplate.blogtemplate just before the </body> tag. That's it.

Как се пише "и с ударение":

Предполагам имаш предвид "ударено и", защото с краткото видимо нямаш проблеми. За твое успокоение, "ударено и" липсва дори при БДС подредбата. Има Unicode знак U+045D (според Unicode спецификацията това е CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER I WITH GRAVE, води се македонски знак ), но фигурира в много малко шрифтове на Windows, в това число Tahoma, Microsoft Sans Serif и Palatino Linotype. Липсва в най-широко използваните шрифтове като Arial, Georgia и Verdana. В ANSI кодовата таблица CP1251 (или Windows-1251) такъв знак изобщо не фигурира.

Все пак начин има - уверяваш се, че имаш легален Windows, сваляш си Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (изисква валидация и .NET 2.0), след което с негова помощ модифицираш съществуващата наредба и си слагаш "ударено и" където пожелаеш. Имай предвид обаче това за шрифтовете. Пусни си Character Map (Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Character Map) и сменяй шрифтовете за да видиш, кои го имат и кои - не. Като цъкнеш отметката "Advanced view" се появява едно поле "Go to Unicode", в което можеш да въведеш "45D". Ако в мрежата от символи отгоре видиш заградено "ударено и", то шрифтът го съдържа. Ако видиш заградено "кратко у" - не го.

Някъде бях чел, че може да се произвеждат ударени символи посредством комбиниране на гравис (AltGr+`) и буквата. AltGr е десният Alt на повечето клавиатури. Не съм сигурен как точно се прави, тъй като при мен не работи във виртуална машина.

Източник: http://forums.megalan.bg/...


Моят опит показва, че ако този знак (U+045D: Cyrillic Small Letter I with Grave) го няма в използвания шрифт, браузърът го изписва със шрифт, който го съдържа, ето пример:

Майка ѝ каза, че...

firefox: забележете как и-то изглежда по-различно - просто е с друг шрифт

Току що пробвах и с Internet Explorer 6, оказва се, че той не го заменя и се вижда квадрат!
Updated: пробвах и с Internet Explorer 7, там всичко работи, даже изглежда сякаш не сменя шрифта, не знам как го прави.

Във форума на уикипедия пък, използват U+300: Combining Grave Accent, което поставя ударение на буквата преди този знак (http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/... и http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), записва се ето така в html ("и" плюс уникод запис във формат &#ХХХХ;) "и&#768;" (768 е десетичното на 0х300), ето как изглежда:

ѝ       стои малко накриво (доста нагоре и надясно)

Updated: тук ударението се вижда само във firefox, в IE6 слага квадрат върху буквата "и", в IE7 слага квадрат до буквата "и"

Този вариант не се води стандартен, защото ударението не е част от кирилицата (вижте дискусията в уикипедия - линковете по-горе)

Явно идеално решение няма. Аз ще използвам първия, тъй като е стандартен, макар и точно този знак да е с друг шрифт.
За жалост той има още един проблем - търсенето по цели фрази ще се провали, защото това е друг знак, но то май и при втория вариант търсенето ще се провали.

Както и да е, писнало ми е да пиша чисто и или "и кратко" затова за мен решението ще е U+045D: Cyrillic Small Letter I with Grave


Updated: В html това най-лесно се пише така: &#x45D; (шеснайсеттично) или &#1117; (десетично), ето пример:
...<body><p> Майка &#x45D; се скара</p></body>... и излиза:
<body><p> Майка ѝ се скара</p></body>

A better theme.
Updated: this theme is definitely pretty, but it overrides all fonts defined in an entry, which is kind of annoying

While checking the logs to see what's going on (yea, now it's documented - I do have one reader), I found out that when doing a Google Images search for picasaweb one of the pictures in the blog (the blog entry with the picture - here) appeared in the first search page:


Strangely enough, the picture is not hosted at picasaweb, although there is a copy of it in one of my albums.

Weird.

While I was updating to dasBlog 2.0 I found out that search displayed duplicate entries (every entry is displayed 3 times). I though I broke it while I was updating.

After doing a clean install and testing the search bug appeared again so I decided to look for the problem in dasBlog itself. I found another blog using the 2.0 version and it too had this bug.

So now I'm happy the "problem is not in my TV".

I'll try to contact the guys and file a bug entry.

And then there's nothing better but to wait for an update.

I just updated the software (dasBlog 2.0.x).

While doing so I decided to start the blog at http://blog.stoynov.com and blogging from that address.

Well, I managed to delete two blog entries and to send an updated feed for another 10, which would fill the blog readers people are using.

DEAR READER (I know you're only one), I APOLOGIZE


I think now everything is stable, http://blog.stoynov.com is only a forward.

Copy of Phonetic Keyboard For Windows Vista for better indexing

Както всички, които са ползвали поне малко Windows Vista, са забелязали - няма я старата фонетична подредба. Аз лично я ползвах доста. Вместо нея има сложена една "стандартизирана от БАН" фонетична подредба, на която обаче няколко букви са разместени. Примерно Ж е на мястото на W, което на мен не ми харесва.

Имаше някъде спор из нета относно коя да бъде - старата или новата, но ме мързи да търся.
Аз си харесвам старата и открих един инструмент от Майкрософт (тук ще ги похваля), с който сравнително лесно могат да се пренаредят клавишите (едно време имаше нещо подобно във FlexType (моля ви, не си слагайте FlexType - Инженерът ще се кара)).
Инструментът се казва Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. Работата с този инстурмент не е толкова елементарна колкото изглежда, аз няколко пъти оплесквах нещата.

Та а използвайки тоя инструмент си направих фонетична подредба.

Update: във фонетичната на БАН забелязах нещо интересно: Shift + ь = ѝ. Тоест малка оптимизация. Ер малък се използва само като малка буква. Главна такава буква в Българския език няма. На мястото на главната буква те са сложили "и с ударение". И с ударение също няма главна буква, тоест ѝ трябва само една позиция на клавиатурата. За "и с ударение" имам малко инфо тук.
Та аз реших да направя същата оптимизация и направих нова версия на класическата фонетична за Виста.

Инструкции за инсталация:

1. от zip файла с инсталатор цъкнете на setup.exe, следвайте инструкциите.
2. Клавиатурата сама се "пъха" в активните, така че веднага е готова за употреба.
   
3. Ако все пак искате да цъкате ръчно разни неща: "Regional and Language Options" в Contol Panel -> "Keyboards and Languages" -> "Change keyboards..."
4. Фонетичната на Виста/БАН се казва "Bulgarian (Phonetic)", моята излиза като "Bulgarian (Phonetic) - REAL"
5. Ако имате старата ми версия инсталирана, по-добре я махнете, тъй като и старата и новата излизат с еднакво име. В списъка с инсталирани програми се различават по версията, обаче.

Поддържани хардуерни платформи: i386 (32 bit), ia64 (64 bit), amd64, wow64 (дори не знам какво е това).

Това е фонетичната подредба за Windows Vistа (в архива има инсталатор):
Bulgarian (Phonetic) - Old School (by Mihail Stoynov).zip (253.38 KB)      (без оптимизацията за "и с ударение")
Bulgarian (Phonetic) - Old School (by Mihail Stoynov) v2.0.zip (252.92 KB)       (с оптимизацията за "и с ударение")

Ето и самата подредба (ако някой иска да си играе с нея, не е никак елементарно):
Bulgarian (Phonetic) - Old School (by Mihail Stoynov).keyboard layout.zip (2.26 KB)      (без оптимизацията за "и с ударение")
Bulgarian (Phonetic) - Old School (by Mihail Stoynov) v2.0.keyboard layout.zip (2.33 KB)     (с оптимизацията за "и с ударение")