Category: rulez

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

Benjamin Franklin

In Bulgarian:
Този, който е готов да пожертва свободата заради сигурността, не заслужава нито едно от двете.

Бенджамин Франклин

WinBtn + 1
...
WinBtn + 9
are shortcuts for launching programs from the QuickLaunch. It doesn't work in XP, so it's new in Vista.
It's great.

Some student made this very cool motorcycle concept:
http://3d-files.co.il/Ferrari_Motorcycle_02.htm
http://3d-files.co.il/Ferrari_Motorcycle_01.htm
http://3d-files.co.il/adds/Ferrari_V4_Yellow_Bike_2008.html

Engine:
http://3d-files.co.il/Ferrari_V4_Drive_Unit_2008.html

Problems that I see
No windshield.
No shield for the legs - too strong a wind.
The seat does not look soft.

The front look is not that good.
The front fender looks like the face of an owl.

But overall it's amazingly looking thing 🙂

UPDATE: the author: this project has not been authorized neither sponsored by
Ferrari and any past use of the trademark was not authorized and for
this reason was stopped

Too bad. It was so pretty.

The server hosting this blog was offline for a few days due to a persisting problem with the TCP/IP stack.

I had to reinstall everything which took a while. And these days were not the perfect time for that.

The good side of all this is that this was the perfect opportunity to do all the changes I was planning to do but delayed due to "lack of time".

Post page: https://mihail.stoynov.com/blog/2008/10/05/BackOnline.aspx

I just got my tickets for this: http://www.mysound.bg/?act=article&id=2745

"One of the best on the planet"
~Alex Ferguson

When one presses Alt key while in MS Word 2007 the shortcuts for all the commands are listed:

When one enters one of the tabs with the given shortcut, a next level of shortcuts are displayed:

I first saw this feature in Joel's FogBugz:

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/60/topics/basics/KeyboardShortcuts.html

It's a really nice feature for the Ribbon (the new MS Office interface) to have. Great stuff, guys at MS.
Cons for Word 2007 Shortcut feature: some of the shortcuts are with
really strange letters, some of the things don't display shortcuts, for
example, some stuff in the status bar.

There's Adobe Flex. There's Microsoft's Silverlight. There's Java's JavaFX. Maybe there are others.
These are platforms that would allow developers to put real applications in the browser. And not just the request-response model (http) and the async calls that javascript allows (ajax) and the modification of the DOM tree - SPI (Single Page Inteface - no wikipedia page for it). Or another way to put it - allow real applications to the user, while the browser is only the transport. The code is compiled, object-oriented, which makes is most-importantly much faster.
Pros: faster, a lot faster. developers write in real languages (javascript is a developer hell) - Silverlight is managed, Adobe's ActionScript is ECMA (which is not very promising, I don't know it in much detail, so I can't say), JavaFX is Java. The GUI definition is largely XML in most platforms.
Cons: plug-ins. Not standard. Different user interface and different rules for every platform. Compatibility issues with browsers, operating systems, elevation of rights (admin rights for install, elevated rights for execution).

Most modern web apps (gmail, youtube) exploit the browser to it's limits, my firefox just can't keep up (here and here).

What google thinks: make a browser that fixes all of the problems with the current browsers: most importantly speed, malware issues. Unfortunately developers will still have to write javascript. Fortunately, I'm not one of them. Fortunately, the model will stay open (html, javascript are no one's). Fortunately, the well-known rules of html/javascript pages will stay the same.

Their presentation of their new browser, called Chrome, is very ambitious:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover#PPP1,M1
If they can do what they promise, I'm going to use it, I promise.
They hit exactly where current browsers fail (or at least with me) - speed, saparation of different pages (for some time I've been wanting to create multiple firefox processes, but don't know how), separation of plug-ins (to know who's fault it is), sandboxes, minimized rights, incognito mode.

I don't know much about Google Gears, but for offline reading of my feeds, it dissapointed me all the times I tried to do it.

Multi-angle camera of his freestyle swimming:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ax77_hHq9Dc
(Michael Phelps, american swimmer, born 1985, won 8 golds in Beijing)

It's pretty nice - navigates through the tabs in the task bar.

As opposed to the previous gloomy post, here I'll tell you (my dear single reader 🙂 about a great day I had a few days ago.

It all started at 8 in the morning: the phone call confirmed - the weather was great. Then a drive from Varna to Russalka (one of the best resorts on our seaside ever) - the trip was great - village roads light on traffic. I arrived in a sexy small bay with a motor boat (I don't know what that's called) on it and a really small island 10 meters from the shore. After a two-hour wait (I was late) I got on the wet suit and the oxygen bottle and my coach and I made a really nice trip around the island - up to 8-meter dives.

I tried to schedule a 25 meter dive - no luck. I had to have a special certificate.

Then with the pass for the diving I was free to do anything inside the resort. Now is the time to say that Russalka is a closed resort. Once inside everything is free - I had three cokes. It's very beautiful. (No camera sorry, I swam with my phone). I almost read Truman Capote's Summer Crossing.

Then on the way back I decided to go check out cape Shabla. Pretty nice place. Pretty close to the border with Romania. No more than 20 minutes there.

On the way there I stopped at Kamen Bryag and checked the ancient Tracian fortress Ajla. An amazing elevated view towards the sea. So pretty. Again 20 minutes there only.

Finally I arrived at Kaliakra - this is by far the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life. Especially on sunset. The sea looked so powerful and mighty.

The day finished at Slunchev Bryag after a two hour drive at a Roger Sanchez's party. My car got towed and they gave it back for the humble price of 60 leva 🙁 and a 800-meter, 15-leva taxi trip.

I got to bed at 6:30 after the same 2-hour drive after the party.

A great day.

I just got the video from the paintball game "Operation Chicago".
I appear in 0:28 and 0:34 (the skinhead guy with the light green camouflage). In 0:34 I get my ass kicked by cross-firing machine guns (I'm behind a pretty thin tree).

 

Sony Ericsson K750i was my phone for quite a while. This is a thank-you note to the creators of that amazing machine.
Yesterday the latest accident finished it. This time for sure. It doesn't want to switch on. It's not showing any sign of life.

This phone made amazing pictures,
most of my public images are made with it. It was the best of its time.
There are still phone that can't match that. The iPhone's camera, for
example, sucks. With a really steady hand one could make night shots
too. I had a 2GB flash card of the awful sony format - memory stick.

The opera mini made it a decent browser. I could read mobi.capital.bg and mobi.dnevnik.bg in the restroom. BTW mobi.dnevnik.bg is boring as opposed to mobi.capital.bg.
Opera mini, BTW, is an example of a perfect minimalistic software. It's amazing. Great job.

I could use the phone with a bluetooth GPS
until I lost the GPS in Amsterdam. The software choice wasn't that
great, because I only had Java and no operating system. Here's the
place to mention Nav4All
- an amazing map software with routing (navigation) maps for Bulgaria.
Once I ended up in a construction site in Sofia, but I hear these
things happen to every map software. Nav4All used internet for
downloading maps, and that made it quite a drag.

ReaderManiac made the phone an electronic book reader. Again
an amazing software - I was planning to write an article about it, but
maybe some other time. I read like 10 books on it. See the read books section
(phone pages state that I read this on the phone). Navigation was
amazing. Different font and sizes, great software. It even told you
when to rest your eyes. I could supply Cyrillic fonts.

Lacking an OS made the phone very stable and pretty fast. It crashed only once a few months. I hate the so called organizers - Windows Mobile sucks big time.

The 2GB flash made the phone an excellent mp3 player.
While snowboarding at -20 degrees Celsius it was working flawlessly.
The earpieces weren't that well attached but the quality was quite
satisfying.

A business phone: when it said that the battery was depleted it could work for at least a day at heavy use.

Negative sides:
the jacks got pretty dirty and the earpieces and the usb connection got
interferences. The screen wasn't as bright as the new phones. The
inside of the protective glass (plastic) in front of the screen got
full with sand and dirt and it was quite hard to clean it up. Thanks,
Steen. Ugly flash card jack (memory stick duo), ugly earphones jack
(something SonyEricsson). Nokia beats it here..

Update: I'd like to thank the mobile-review site for the outstanding reviews they make. Here's the one for K750i. Surely, I'll consult them for my next phone too. Also, their news page looks quite deserted, I really hope, they would continue to write good reviews.

So chronologically:

First
while free-riding (snowboarding outside the track in fresh snow) I
dropped it. After 80 minutes of heavy ringing I found it pretty wet
under 20cm of snow still working and most importantly ringing so I
could find it.

Second, I swam with it in a pool for at least
half a minute. After a complete drying it continued to work but with a
few minor quirks. Battery swelled up few days later and nearly blew up
the whole phone. The new battery didn't charge correctly. The quality
of the talks went significantly lower.

Third, yesterday I was
with the phone in the sea for around 10 minutes. This was the end of
it. It didn't show any signs of life after that. I did everything I can.

It's over.

Thank you, SonyEricsson people. This is was an amazing example of equipment.

Unfortunately
SonyEricsson does not have a decent model with GPS. And that's what I'm
looking for. I'm planning to have an iPhone (my roommate has one, it's
a decent thing, but not for a primary phone) and maybe a Nokia with a
GPS. My friends say E71, although ugly, is a pretty good one for
business purposes. Both suck at pictures.
Maybe N82 too. We'll see.
Update2: BTW, mobile-review guys give a pretty bad review of the iPhone. They're right, I also strongly dislike Apple and its "closed" approach, but the article seems a little prejudiced. It seems personal. A red (bad) point for them.

Any other suggestions?
I'm looking for a GPS, decent mapping software with maps and
routing/navigation, wireless, a decent camera, fast interaction, no
Windows Mobile, a lot of space, decent mp3 player, sturdy....