Ihar Mahaniok - personal blog

Change is coming..

2010-04-28T11:53:00.003+02:00

Just 1 day left till Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is released.

UPDATE: and now it is out. I've upgraded my main desktop, and though there are no obvious significant changes from 9.10, it is good - the software packages are updated and the boot time is decreased.

BarCamp CA 2010: How to search

2010-04-18T04:56:00.001+02:00

I'm in Almaty now, at BarCamp Central Asia 2010. The first day was great - interesting talks and very interesting people.

As I've promised, here are the slides of my talk "How to search and find" (in Russian). But, as a sad twist, my blog (as all blogspot blogs) is not accessible from Kazakhstan, so to get here people would need to use proxies. :( It's much more difficult to search in the circumstances when some of the sites are blocked, and overall internet access is quite slow.
The same slides should soon be linked from the official site of the BarCamp to be visible directly.

Help Haiti

2010-01-14T21:03:00.002+01:00

Copying help request of Jessica Pfund, Google GIS Specialist:

Hello fellow mappers,

Yesterday, a large 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Several thousands of people may have died, and relief efforts are now
in full action. We have shared Map Maker data for Haiti with the
United Nations in its raw form and continue to make Map Maker data
immediately available through the Google Maps API and this Mapplet.

If you have any local knowledge of Haiti, please help us in improving
the maps of this region. It will assist relief workers in saving
lives. For more information on the earthquake, resources and ways to
donate, see: http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/

Jessica Pfund, GIS Specialist for Google

Here is a link to Haiti in Map Maker. I have also translated this post into Belarusian.

A bit about cellphone contracts and insult of simlock

2010-01-06T19:02:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, Google announced Nexus One. It is truly great phone; I have been using mine for almost a month and I'm more than happy. All other phones, including iPhone 3GS, feel very slow in comparison. Though I won't go into detail about features - I suggest to check out review on TechCrunch.

More interesting for me is that Google is tackling the issue of cellphone contracts. Nexus One is being sold only unlocked; you can get the discount on the phone price if you sign up for 2 year contract, but you will still be free to use you phone wherever you want.

Most cellular operators try to do their best to acquire new customers and tie them to long-term contracts. In US and many Western countries, they found a venue to do this: subsidized phones. The operator buys the phone for $600, sells it to you for $200 - it pays you $400 indirectly - for the pledge that you will pay them $2800 over two years (prices taken from AT&T/iPhone). Sure, it's a great deal for operators, and in many cases good deal for customers (though not with Nexus One). There are two big problems, though.

First: even though you, as a customer, realize that operator will be willing to pay several hundred for you to become their customer, you are severely limited in receiving this bonus; you have to choose among the phones on their shelves. I wonder why; I guess many people would be happy to lock themselves in for 2 years in exchange for hard cash (though I personally would prefer contract freedom). So if you choose the phone which your operator doesn't sell (which in my case was almost always the case during last ~7 years), operator keeps your bonus.

Second: if you are lucky enough to have your phone of choice offered by your operator of choice, you will get it with insult included - simlock. Selling simlocked phones is completely pointless - it doesn't affect the monthly bill, which is to be paid for X years anyway (unless ETF is paid). It is annoying and very limiting for the customer, and can become expensive if he travels (he'll have to pay roaming or buy a new phone abroad). It is insulting, since selling simlocked subsidized phones every 2 years suggests that I can get along with the same phone for 2 years (since it will be quite difficult to sell).

I have never bought simlocked phones. I don't think I've ever used one phone for longer than a year. And before coming to Switzerland, I have just heard something about operators being nasty, but didn't experience it first hand. You know, with all grand difference in economics and market between Switzerland and Belarus there is one area where Belarus is miles ahead - cellphone contracts.

In Belarus, you sign unlimited contract which you can cancel anytime without any ETF. There is minimum monthly payment for the service, but you are free to stop paying whenever you want, and cell operator will just stop the service after some time; and if you resume paying, they resume the service. In fact, I am still under contract on Velcom in Belarus (I visit Belarus for a few days every several months); every time I leave the country, several days/weeks later enough unpaid debt accumulates so they turn off the service for me (and they stop counting, so I don't pay for the time out of service); and when I arrive next time, I pay off the debt and the service resumes immediately.

In Switzerland, the situation is bad. It's in fact even worse than in the US. You can only sign yearly renewing contract; it means, you have to stay with operator for 12 months or you get to pay high ETF. And next year, it automatically renews for 12 more months, unless you cancelled it in writing at most 60 days before first year ends. How nice is it, huh? You still can get your "bonus" in form of simlocked discounted phone, though. Or you can go to prepaid, but there is not a single prepaid plan in Switzerland with data included or affordable. And there is no competition, since all three mobile operators behave the same.

I really hope that Nexus One and subsequent phones will improve things. If data-hungry phones will be sold unlocked, the operators will have the incentive to provide either nice prepaids with data or flexible contracts to lure the customers. And if the best phones will be sold unlocked, it should give incentive to other phone manufacturers to push for "never-to-be-simlocked" models.

And we can dream of the better world (hopefully in a few years), when the phones are never simlocked, you are free to switch cell operators whenever you want, and operators reward you for loyalty instead of paying you for privilege to handcuff you.

Installing and updating software

2010-01-04T17:45:00.002+01:00

UX (User Experience) in software made major leaps since 1990s. Back then computer users needed to be quite tech-savvy, and nowadays pretty much everyone can figure out what to do.

But there is one area where UX deteriorated significantly. It's installing and updating applications. I still remember the time when to "install" something I needed to stick a floppy into FDD and press "Enter" in Norton Commander. But now too often I have to spend 5 to 30 minutes to run a program.

Especially bad it is on Linux, even though some Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have grown to be almost casual desktop systems. There is quite big paradigm difference between Windows and most Linux application installation. On Windows, if you need to install a new app, you are supposed to go to the app's website, download installer executable and install it. In Ubuntu (from now on, I will focus on Ubuntu distro instead of Linux in general since I have more experience with it), you are supposed to use Synaptic or command-line apt-get to get the software from repository. Repository vaguely resembles smartphone application catalogs such as Android Market, where you can find most applications for the platform; the biggest difference, though, is that while on smartphones developers submit their apps and updates to the catalogs, on Ubuntu distribution maintainers take care of new software and updates. Another difference is that while every smartphone platform has one major repository regardless of version of the handset, every version of Ubuntu has its own separate software repository, which in general case only has the software versions that were released prior to that Ubuntu release (and only maintenance updates are getting into older repositories).

The result is horrible - you are either stuck with old version of the application, or have to jump through hoops set up by app developers to get the newer version. Here are some of my worst experiences in the quest for the newest versions.

Openoffice.org. My work desktop has only OpenOffice.org 2.4 available in repository, so I have to go to the website for the 3.1 version. I click "I want to download" and a big button "Download now!", which gives me 175Mb file OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz. The fact that it is archive rather than normal Ubuntu .deb installer is already suspicious. I double click it and see bunch of files:

I can vaguely guess that "setup" is executable file here, so I should extract this stuff somewhere, go to terminal, change file permissions, and run this script. Probably many other OpenOffice users won't really figure this out.
I go back to OpenOffice.org website and see that they gave me "OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 for Linux". Folder "RPMs" shows that they didn't pay attention that I use Ubuntu, the system that prefers .deb packages to .rpm; also, they gave me 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I go to "Other versions" and download "Linux 64-bit DEB" package (which they should have given me in the first place). Alas, it's again .tar.gz with myriad of files and "update" (but no "setup") file in the root.
Psi. I've just installed the newest Ubuntu 9.10 at home, and wanted to set up my favorite IM application - Psi. The repository (while being the newest) had only version 0.12, while the website already has version 0.14. But unfortunately, the Psi developers rely so heavily on the repositories maintainers, that they do not even offer Linux binaries for new versions at all. So the only solution is to download sources and compile them, which is complete non-starter for most users. I compiled them and installed, but now the Psi launcher on the task panel has generic icon, because the authors either didn't include the app icon in the sources package, or hid it too well.
The crown for the funniest update check goes to VLC media player on Windows. Every time I open a movie to watch, it pops up a question "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?". I click "yes" and proceed to watch a movie. After I close VLC, and open a new movie, it asks "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?" again! There is no button "Yes and never ask me again". And, funnily, the installed version of VLC is still 0.9.9, and somewhere on my hard drive there is a distributive of 1.0.3.
The crown for the most difficult install goes to OpenTTD. While they provide a normal .deb installation file, installing it with a double-click is not enough; to launch the game, you need to download two more separate archives, and spend some time figuring out where to extract the files from them.

These are just the most recent annoying examples. There are much more. E.g. if you happen to use Ubuntu Hardy (the latest LTS release), then you are stuck with Firefox 3.0, while FF 3.5 is available for a long time already, and for the web browser being up-to-date is absolutely crucial. Ratio of Linux software that is distributed in haywire way, making every user to spend 10-30 minutes on figuring out installation, to the software that is installed in one click, is staggering. Windows software has its own problem of updates - most of Windows software never checks for its own updates, and the apps that do check are doing it in the most possibly annoying way (remember Java, Adobe Acrobat and Apple software updates).

I can only be happy that more and more of apps that I use are on the web, where installing and updating are non-issues, and my tool for accessing them, Chrome, is always up to date.

Flight over Switzerland, part 1

2009-09-08T09:50:00.003+02:00

In the last weekend of summer (at least summer as we understand it, that ends on the 31st of August), we flew over Switzerland in a small 4-seater Piper plane. During this trip I filled up 8Gb card with ~600 photos, and since then I am enjoying the process of filtering, cropping and geotagging.

So, here is a little teaser. More photos coming, to the blog and to the Picasa album.

Brugg, AG

Aarau AG, Rohr AG, Rombach AG and Aare river

Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant

Sempachersee, Sempach LU, Sursee LU

Zugersee, Cham ZG, Rotkreuz ZG, Zug ZG

It seems that plane photo trips became my summer tradition - in 2008, I also took a few photos of Alps from above.

Belarusian lake Narač as a heart

2009-09-05T00:17:00.003+02:00

The biggest and most prominent lake of Belarus, Narač, strikingly closely resembles a heart.. and its winter photo resembles a broken heart.

It's no surprise that local folklore has very touching tales about this lake's origin - about a hero killing a dragon, and a heart-shaped lake signifying his love to the girl that he saved from the dragon.

This lake stays my favorite, and huge variety of Swiss lakes can never hope to reach this level.

Google Map Maker launched for Belarus and Eastern Europe

2009-08-18T01:00:00.003+02:00

Today, Map Maker was launched for European countries: Albania, Belarus, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. If you don't know what is Map Maker and what's possible with it, check this post about Map Maker graduation and this video

This is very exciting for me, since it means that my hometown of Minsk can be properly mapped finally, and I myself can take part in it. Also it signifies the first official launch of the Google product translated professionally into Belarusian; before today, there were only volunteer translations for search and few other products. Even though these professional translations needed a bit of checking and adaptation to the real product :).

I write more detailed about the launch in my Belarusian blog; if you read Belarusian, check launch announcement and first advices. More posts are coming there soon.

Money is the root of what?

2009-08-01T13:06:00.004+02:00

I am reading now "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Somehow I managed to not come across this book earlier in my life, and so far (~50% complete) I feel that this is the most important and worthwhile book. This is a book about Capitalism vs. Socialism, or about Reason vs. Stupidity, or about Strength vs. Weakness and so on.

There are many quotes that are worth sharing, but this speech seems the best.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia.

"Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

This book is for me the second pillar of books about socialism / communism. First book is "1984" by George Orwell, which was emphasizing political and personal sides of socialism. "Atlas Shrugged" is speaking about economics of socialism. These books are more worth to me especially because I was born in socialist country, and up to this time Belarus still has too much socialism left in everything. They should be a warning to those westerners who have never experienced socialism first-hand, to understand well what they might be voting for in the elections.

Interesting, that Ayn Rand could write this book specifically because she is Russian. She was born in Czarist Russia in 1905, which was pretty much capitalist; survived 9 first years of post-revolution years, when communists destroyed pretty much the whole economics of the country by seizing factories and all production from those who was capable of running them; left to the US in 1926, lived through Great Depression, World War II and post-war rise of American economics. Ayn Rand published "Atlas Shrugged" in 1957.

The only thing that seems wrong in the quote above is about gold. "Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold" - in 1971, Gold standard ceased to exist because it was limiting possibility of creating wealth in the world. Everything else holds true even 52 years after.

Thanks for this book, Ayn. I still have 550 pages to read :).

HTC Hero experience

2009-07-12T09:07:00.003+02:00

I own HTC Magic - thin and stylish Android phone that I won in internal contest (more about this in a later blogpost); it's exactly the same phone that was given away on Google IO.

But recently I got all envious about new HTC Hero - first Android phone with proprietary custom UI. Take a look at the UI:

The UI is done solely by HTC, not by Google. So there was no way for me to test it before official release, or to even see anyone with such phone in the office.

But.. it is Android. And I have Android phone. So I went to the famous xda developers forum where Android hackers hang out, and found what I needed: Hero firmware image for Magic phone by Qteknology. There was actually another one from Fatal1ty, but I was more interested in the first one because there was multilanguage version with Russian.

So, I downloaded the image linked there, copied it to the SD card, renamed it to update.zip, turned off the phone, booted it in recovery mode (pressing Home button, turn it on, then in recovery mode again keeping home button down press red button shortly to see options), wiped and reflashed the phone. Turned on.. and amazingly everything worked :). With big letters HTC on the screen, it loaded, and I had Hero.

It was yesterday. The day after, I can recap what's good and what's bad I had. Reminder: this is very specific to the actual image that I've downloaded on my Magic; experience on real HTC Hero device might be different.

It's slow. It's slow and unresponsive almost to the point of being unusable.
Pressing home button always results in "Loading..." for 10-20 seconds. When I have incoming call, and press green button, it takes 5 seconds till it picks it up. When I want to call someone, it takes me a minute till I can press the green button. I can only hope that actual HTC Hero device is much snappier and there is something fishy with Hero-Magic port; actual Hero has more RAM (288 MB vs 192 MB), but CPU is the same. I have used "set CPU" app that is included to overclock, but it didn't help.
Soft keyboard is great.
HTC has rewritten on-screen keyboard completely; it looks nicer, and spelling correction is awesome. Thanks to it, you never need to care whether you have hit the correct keys on the super-small on-screen keyboard or not. E.g. you type "Grlkp" and it corrects it to "Hello". This is so much better than what I have on generic Android UIs, where I have to be super-precise and slow to type what I want, that it offsets all the slowness.
Russian keyboard.
I don't know when Russian keyboard comes to generic Android, and don't really understand why should it take so long. But with the fact that I send a lot of SMS in Russian, and need to search in Google and Gmail in Belarusian and Russian often, this is must-have for me. And it sports the same awesome spelling correction system - imagine typing "Мпвмтб" and getting "Спасибо"! That's how it looks:
The screenshot is from very good hands-on review on mobile-review.com (check here for Russian version)
Contacts management system is also rewritten to accomodate social networks.
Now right in the Contacts app for every person you can see all SMS and e-mails between you, facebook updates and photos of this person. The big downside is that the phone doesn't want to use your Gmail address book by default; when you add new contact, you can choose whether it should be stored on the phone, Google or SIM, and default value is "phone". It is also very buggy; most of contacts don't have photos attached (even though they are set in my Gmail address book), and there are plenty of "Unnamed" contacts on top of the list. It doesn't have any way (apparently) to sort the contacts by "popularity". Nice touch: after incoming call from unknown number, pop-up suggests you to add a new contact.
Dialer is very nice.
It allows you to choose contacts by using quasi-T9; e.g. to call Sheldon you'll type "742" and it will filter the contacts whose first letter is one of "pqrs", second is one of "ghi" and so on. Much easier than using full qwerty onscreen keyboard.
The desktop is divided into 5 virtual screens, not 3 like generic Android.
More space for shortcuts and widgets - and many widgets are full-screen.
HTC widgets are very nice.
E.g. full-screen Twitter gadget, Music player gadget and so on; it is much easier to switch between gadgets with a swipe of the finger rather than open up an app with a shortcut. With all the slowness, if you are on the home screen, switching between screens and gadgets is instant.
Music player has a filter by composers!
Very rare feature for mobile players and very useful for Classic music lovers. Also, there are no problems with encoding of tags. The only not so nice thing is that it seems to be unable to load album imagery.
Social features seem to be unfinished and rusty.
E.g. you can set up only three types of accounts: Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Clearly not enough for me. There is a separate app for Twitter but none for Facebook. Facebook experience is scattered across device: you can see per-person Facebook info in their contact cards, and you can see your Inbox somewhere (I don't even remember where anymore), but not your news feed. On the contrary, all twitter activity is inside an app (and gadget), but you can't see it per-contact. The app doesn't show the usernames and userpics - you won't believe it, but it is true - it just shows you the stream of latest tweets and you won't have a clue who wrote what. Twitter gadget shows usernames and userpics but lacks a "refresh" button, and poses as "web" client on updates.
Russian UI is unfinished.
There are English strings here and there. Is it an issue specific to this firmware image?
Camera doesn't work.
Every time I start Camera app it crashes. This is clearly a specific issue of this image on my Magic.
The default setup is strange.
E.g. there are Stocks and Weather apps pre-installed, but there is no Google search gadget on the home screen.
Flash doesn't work.
I didn't investigate it deeper, but Flash was supposed to work on Hero and apparently it doesn't.

Overall, I was pleased with it; if not for a slowness, I would stick with it. Important: if I am not mistaken, the Hero is not being sold yet; so by the time when it actually comes out something might be different, and there will be for sure no problems specific to the ROM loaded on my Magic.

For now, I will go back to Cupcake, just because I need to be able to answer calls immediately. But it's really great that thanks to Android architecture I can get a taste of quite different phone experience on my own device.

Update: someone posted a video of Hero UI running on Magic.

Vögele, customer service and breaking the rules

2009-07-10T10:57:00.004+02:00

Today I was amused and happy to find out that people actually can be smart and nice enough to break rules.

I came to Charles Vögele (fashion chain) shop in Oerlikon, Zürich, to return a suit, a shirt and a tie that I bought in another Charles Vögele shop a week ago. Back then, we were in a hurry because the shop was closing, and took the clothes with the idea of trying at home and returning later if they don't really fit. Since then, knowing that they don't, I bought another suit, so I had to return this one. And this is what happened.

Me: Hello, I would like to return this.
Cashier: Uhm, sorry, this was sold with a reduction, so we can't give you money - we can only exchange it for other clothes. Please choose.
Me: No, I don't want other clothes. I need money.
Cashier: Uhm.. I have to call someone who knows English better..

She calls another attendant and tells her in German (surprisingly easy to understand) what the fuss is about.

Attendant: Sorry, we can't give you money for the suit, it was on sale, so please choose something else.
Me: No, I really need money.
[... half a minute later]
Attendant: Ok, I need to call the shop's boss.

Less than a minute later, a boss comes. Quite pleasant smiling well-dressed man in his thirties.

Me: I'd like to return this.
Boss: Sorry, but this was on sale; could you please choose something else?
Me: But I don't have time, I have to go to work now.
Boss: You can have another week to choose something else.
Me: I don't have it, I fly to another country tomorrow and will be away for two weeks.
Boss: I see.

He tells something to the cashier. She gives me a form to fill in and - I get my money back. In cash. I thanked the boss and left.

I really didn't expect this level of customer support here. The shop leader went out of his way, broke the rules, to make sure that I will leave happy. And even though I paid them with credit card, they gave me back hard cash - this transaction cost them around ~3.5%. Also, nobody really cared that I bought the stuff in another shop. And all of this took less than 10 minutes!

Astonishing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of this guy, the boss of Oerlikon branch. He had his options: either to stick by the rules, which would make sure that I would never visit any Vögele shop again (and probably write a very angry bashing blogpost), or to break the rules, and make sure that I will walk out happy and leave more money on my subsequent visits to the shops (and his branch as well). I wonder, did he hear that United breaks guitars, or this is just normal for Swiss customer service?

Thanks. You saved my day - I believe in humanity again.

Why your website needs Analytics

2009-07-09T00:41:00.006+02:00

You have a website or a blog. Do you know how many people visit it? When? From where? Do you know what and how they are doing? What type of browsers do they have?

Apparently, not every blog or website owner does. So here is the short explanation.

Web analytics software allows to log every visit to your website and present data about visitors in useful manner.

What can you do with it?

Know how many people actually use your site.
Do you know it already? If you don't, than why? Do you have a site for yourself or you intend to reach at least someone? This is the most important metrics of success of your site and especially the changes on it. Did you do a redesign? Did you fire one of the writers? Did you start a marketing campaign? Did you write super-successful blog post? You can notice the result of the change on this graph. See the example:
The visits pattern was steady (with regular drops on weekend), and then something very positive happened in July - and site has gotten much more traffic.
Know where people are going on your website.
That's how I know, for example, that my most popular blog post is about blind search (and it got three times more traffic than second most popular post about Microsoft IE8 campaign).
Know where people are coming from.
This is how I know that a single link by dolboeb gave my site twice as many visits as a link on a homepage of BarCamp Baltics (it was there in February, gone now). And that's how I know that people are really interested in how is Chrome doing on Linux, since they are searching for [chrome linux status] and arriving on my post (sadly, not very informative for them).
Know how well is your site connected and how sticky it is.
Do people just arrive at your site and leave in horror or do they surf around and read your stuff? I know that my visitors leave the site after the first page in 82% of the cases, and spend 1 minute 20 seconds on it on average.
Know who you visitors are.
I know that my visitors are definitely not an average folk, since only 11% of them use IE, and full 20% use Chrome; 12% of them are visiting site from Linux. I know that 19% of them are in Russia, 15% in Belarus and 13% in the US (and 25% of those in the US are in Mountain View, California).
Know what you can and what can't do on your website.
I know that less than 15% of my visitors have resolution 1024x768 or less; therefore, I could widen my design to accomodate Google Moderator iframe in the post about tech press rating. It's a pity to see some sites that still use less than 800px width, even though just a few users really need this.

This is just a short glimpse into what you can do with analytics software. As anyone who is in PR. advertisement or sales knows that knowing your customers (or, in this case, readers) is a key to reaching goals.

Ah, and the actual practical info. The screenshot above is from Google Analytics; I use it since I started this website and happy with it. To use it, you need to be able to inject a piece of JavaScript into template for every page of your site (this is why you can't use it on LiveJournal, and one of the reasons why I had to move away from LiveJournal). There is other analytics software around - like WebTrends (or see the long list), but I didn't try those and can't say much. Whatever you choose, make sure that you are interested in your website - otherwise, why should your visitors be interested in it?

Technical press - what to read and trust?

2009-07-08T16:58:00.009+02:00

There seems to be plenty of online press these days, especially about technology and Internet. They publish news, rumors, opinions; bashing someone and praising someone else. And when there is another such article is sent around, there will always be someone who says "Ahh, but that's written by X, and they are not reputable at all". On the other hand, if you want to read the most reputable or interesting one - how do you find it?

So, why don't we use the power of Google Moderator, a platform to rate opinions and questions based on votes, and see what does the majority of you think.

Please vote up the sources that you recommend, vote down the sources that you don't, skip those that you don't know. And add new sources (by clicking "Submit a suggestion" down there) if they are not in the list. Note: you need to Sign in with your Gmail (Google account) credentials; it's valid.

Some rules for additions: add only English-language sites; don't add news aggregators, just original news sources; don't add "general topic" sources, add their technology/internet section; make sure you follow the format "Name of the site - URL - short description" (description can be omitted). If you see this post in Google Reader, click through to see embedded page.

The direct link to the Moderator rating page is http://bit.ly/techen. For Russian-speakers, there is http://bit.ly/techru for Russian-language press (and notice that in the embedded Moderator you can click on "Russian" in the left navigation).

Important: the rating is better when many people vote. Please share the link to this post, or direct link to the Moderator page, or embed it into your blog posts (see FAQ answer 11).

Reading and sharing

2009-06-20T21:38:00.004+02:00

As information geek, I feed on information. One of the best tools to get the information so far is Google Reader. If you use it, you might know nice Trends page it has - and I want to share some trends about what I read, what I share, who reads my shares and shares of whom I read.

It tells me, that "From your 396 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,855 items, starred 11 items, shared 148 items, and emailed 2 items." I don't know if it is much or not, but given that I read stuff even in public transport I believe that might be more than for many others. It seems, that I share only 3% of stuff I read, not much :).

Feeds

Most popular is my filter on Google-related blogposts at important tech blogs, "Google collected", which I created using Yahoo! Pipes; this pipe, together with official and unofficial Google blogs, allows me to know what's new at or about Google. You can subscribe to it or modify it here. 6 of top 10 feeds are shared items' feeds of my friends, I will speak about them later. Bash.Org.Ru is Russian blog of funny quotes (non-technical mostly). Roem.ru is most interesting Russian technical blog, which covers some inside stuff there. And "Наша Ніва" is the only readable Belarusian newspaper (but their RSS feed is really crappy - items are cropped short and not separated by topics).

People

This is a chart of my friends (and me), sorted by number of subscribers. It's unclear how this number is computed exactly, but for me it's probably just a number of my Google Talk contacts that are using Google Reader. I would like to introduce and recommend some popular people in this list; but since Google Reader still has "obscure" shared URLs, I will not give them; you can see them for those who are on Friendfeed, clicking on little RSS icon under their name, or ask them personally on Twitter, or add them to your Gmail/GTalk chat contacts. All of them share really interesting stuff (though sometimes in languages you might not know..), and I highly recommend them.

Starting with my colleagues at Google:

Bradley Horowitz - VP of Product Management for Google Apps. You can find him on Twitter and Friendfeed; see his shared feed. Now you know whom to ask about that new Gmail feature :).

Jeff Huber - SVP of Engineering; also on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Fernando Delgado is PM for Geo in Zurich; he was the one who wrote the recent post on official Geo blog on "What's here". He is also a good friend and poker player :). You can find him on Friendfeed.

Meder Kydyraliev and Loic Guelorget are Security Engineers in Zurich; Veselin Raychev is a Software Engineer here too.

Some selected others:

Yelena Mursya Jetpyspayeva - awesome girl and someone special :). Besides that she is journalist, blogger, editor, specialist in new media, and organizer of BarCamp Central Asia. She is also on Friendfeed and Twitter.

Petr Didenko - Web Evangelist at Microsoft Russia. Unfortunately, I have only one Microsoft guy in top 20 of Google Reader friends.. is it because it has word "Google" in it? :) His Friendfeed, Twitter.

Aija and Maksim Berjoza - wonderful couple from Riga, organizers of BarCamp Baltics. On Barcamp in 2009 I met Yelena, in 2008 I met Petr. Interesting, that Aija seems to underutilize her subscriber base most - having 131 subscribers she shared nothing in last 9 months. Maksim is on Friendfeed and Twitter.

Slaver Radionov has several blogs in Belarusian and Russian. Works as web developer, even though he graduated in History. On Twitter.

Igor Kandyba is author of the most interesting (or the only?) blog about web technologies in Belarus.

Sorry to those whom I didn't include, I still recommend everybody on this list - you can just search for their names in Google to find contacts. And there are even more - more than 70 people are sharing in Reader with me.

Shares

So, why did I take my time to describe those nice people who share interesting items with me? Look at what I share:

Really, most of the stuff that I share comes from my friends: 14 of 19 feeds that I shared from are my friends' shared items (some of shared items feeds for unknown reasons don't have "Items shared by..." in the beginning, just the name). Apparently, they give me the most interesting stuff to read. They basically help me to filter, to see gems in the vast ocean of information; I am, anyway, subscribed to just 396 small rivers of it, and I can't fully process even these - while out there there are myriads more. Cool, keep sharing going! You can also subscribe to my shares here, and give links to pages of your shares in comments (get it here).

And yes, I am very curious: share screenshots of your Trends pages :).

Microsoft's hilarious IE8 marketing campaign

2009-06-18T14:23:00.012+02:00

Frankly, I would never believe that it is not a fake if I saw just a screenshot. But you can see it live on http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/ (if it shows 404, just try again. :) ).

So they claim that Chrome is "tarnished". If you visit this page with other browsers, you'll find out that you use "old Firefox", "boring Safari" or "that browser" (if you use Opera, or FF on Linux). That's the way to appreciate competition! :)

The funniest thing in this marketing campaign, of course, is that they are willingly detach their browser (and their website) from the rest of the web. "It's a cleverly concealed webpage that only Internet Explorer 8 can view" - do they ever follow standards in their website or browser development?

And if you end up on the IE8 page, you will see something even more hilarious. The "Browser comparison chart" from Microsoft point of view:

Thanks, Microsoft, for giving me a good laugh! Such a bunch of overlook and lies bundled together on one page; seriously, it looks even more like a self-criticising sarcasm on their side, without even a try to make it look trustworthy. Starting with omitting Safari and Opera, just "forgetting" ticks for Privacy, Reliability, Ease of Use and Developer Tools; putting them in the wrong column for Security; telling the users that they don't really need Customizability and Performance at all because IE8 sucks in this, lying about Web Standards support because they couldn't find out how to tell users that they don't need them; adding "nice" but purposely vague lines like Manageability to get more ticks for IE8.

I wonder, when will Microsofties realize that they actually have to clean up their karma to get any success and devotion? So far they seemingly deliberately turn people away.

UPDATE: One of Mozilla developers responded with a very clever pun: go to http://www.tengrandisburiedthere.com/ and zoom in.

UPDATE 2: Apparently, there was enough of outcry for Microsoft, and they modified the promotional page to remove insults and cloaking.

Blind search engines comparison on real queries

2009-06-13T18:22:00.012+02:00

Just in time for Bing launch, one of Microsoft engineers has built a "Blind search" engine, which allows to compare search results from Google, Yahoo! and Bing without branding (and without all helpers, like "universal" aka News/Video/Images, or spelling correction, unfortunately). The concept isn't new, but I don't know other public implementations.

So, I first tried to enter a few common test queries - like+ vanity and navigational queries. Thankfully, all engines are pretty good at that already, and I was getting pretty even results. So, I have tried real stuff - the queries from my Web History, which stores what I was searching for. It will give some insight into my search habits, but that's side effect :).

So, here are the queries. I describe in detail only difficult queries, on which it was possible to differentiate the engines. Easy queries, on which all engines performed well, are provided below. Important: all the results are taken on June 13, 2009; if you try to run the queries later, the results might be different.

[sign up for wave] - the purpose of this query is to find a Google Wave sign-up form for developers. Google shows the form on top position, and other results are generally on-topic (about Google Wave), while Yahoo! and Bing show stuff about Wave church and other offtopic. Bing shows blog entry that has a link to actual sign up form on pos. 5. Win for Google.

17 more queries under the cut...

[10 minute wave] - I was searching for a shortened to 10 minutes version of Google Wave IO session. Google shows the video on top position, and second result is embedding the same video. Bing and Yahoo! show complete offtopic. Win for Google.

[zoho ceo about microsoft] - there is a famous post written by Zoho CEO, "Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters"; I was expecting to find it with this query. Google shows the result on top position, Yahoo! on pos. 4, nothing on Bing. Win for Google.

[pizza casa zurich] - searching for the page of "Pizza Casa" restaurant in Zurich. www.pizzacasa.ch in top pos. on Google, and not in top 10 on other engines. Win for Google.

[media barcamp] - I was searching for the web page of Media Barcamp that happened recently in Lithuania (which is www.mediabarcamp.com). None of search engine in blind search shows it, so it is a rare bad Draw. Interesting though to notice that it is only because blind search shows US-served results; searching from Switzerland on Google shows the site in top-10, and searching from Belarus or Lithuania (or with Belarusian/Russian UI anywhere) shows it in top position; European Bing and Yahoo! still don't find it. Still, I would record this as a draw, since we are comparing blind search results.

[adobe browser shots] - I wanted to test a new service from Adobe that allows to see website's screenshots from different browsers; but I didn't know the exact name of the service (which is Adobe BrowserLab with official website at browserlab.adobe.com). Yahoo! is the only one that showed the official webpage in top 10; all results of Google were helpful and ontopic (and snippets showed the name of the service), while Bing had useful snippet only on pos.3, with other results being completely offtopic. Win for Yahoo!

[russian google blog] - I was really surprised to see the results for this query. I needed an official blog of Google Russia; I got it on pos. 2 on Google, and nowhere on Bing or Yahoo!. Win for Google.

[disabling plugins in chrome] - I was wondering if I could disable some nasty plugin in Chrome which previews media files in a tab, instead of downloading them. As it turned out, there was no way to do this. Google showed in top position the open issue in Chromium bugtracker, which says in snippet that I can't disable plugins. The same snippet is at pos. 3 on Yahoo! and pos. 5 on Bing. Top result on Bing is offtopic, and top result on Yahoo! leads to the same question on support forum, but unanswered. Slight win for Google.

[zurich card] - I was searching for information about ZürichCARD, which is a discount and travel card for Zurich visitors. Google shows official website of the card on top position; Yahoo! shows it on position 3, and Bing thinks I am speaking about insurance, credit or phone cards. Win for Google.

[фидо twit] - I was checking if I remember correctly how to write "twit", which was analogue of "ban" in Fidonet (фидо = Fido in Russian). Google shows all 8 results about twitting in Fidonet/BBS, including encyclopedias and references on positions 6 and 7; Yahoo! shows topical answers with useful snippets on positions 1, 3, 5, 7; also, Google and Yahoo! returned results in Russian, which is correct for this query. Bing! shows 10 English-language results, which are completely offtopic (mostly swarmed with Twitter-related stuff). Slight win for Google, complete loss for Bing.

[estonians on twitter] - I wanted to check if it is true that Twitter is not popular in Estonia. Bing! shows TIME magazine results on top which has nothing to do with Twitter, and then shows twitter.com/evgenymorozov, who is not Estonian in any way. All engines show at least one Estonian account on twitter. I don't know what would be the best canonical answer to the query; but among the links I see in blind search, only http://wefollow.com/tag/estonia is useful - it reveals the list of 78 Twitter users with >12000 followers who associated with Estonia tag . This link was shown only on Google, position 7. Win for Google.

[женские голоса] - it is "female voices" in Russian; I wanted to find out what female singing voices exist. Top two results on Google speak exactly about voice ranges and their names; while both Bing and Yahoo! show me no answer (and quite high amount of commercial spam for such non-commercial query). Win for Google. Btw, I tried also Yandex for this Russian-language query, and it is quite good - good results are on positions 1 and 8.

[пять диезов] - this is the name of Belarusian musical band "#####" (5 diez) in Russian. All search engines show some pages that mention the band; but only Yahoo! and Google show the link to the official website www.5diez.com. Google shows it on pos. 6, Yahoo! shows it on pos. 7. Slight win for Google. By the way, Yandex shows it on position 2.

[5 диезов] - slight varition of the previous query. Google shows link to the official website on top pos., Bing shows it on pos. 4, Yahoo! doesn't show it. Clear win for Google. (For Yandex, it is also on top)

[Warholl] - I was searching for info on Andy Warhol, but managed to misspell his name. Here we can see how deficient is representation of blind search - it hides "Did you mean: warhol" link that appears on Google results page. So, Google shows results mostly about people named Warholl, and link to the Andy Warhol museum on pos. 7; Yahoo! has the same problem (and the same spelling suggestion), but no museum page. Bing not only suggests spell correction, but auto-corrects and shows only results about Warhol (including Wikipedia and museum page as top results). I count this as a win for Bing since it founds what I was looking for better, but with a disgust - since Bing interferes with my query formulation and makes it almost impossible to search for actual Warholl (["Warholl"] and [+Warholl] don't help, only [warholl -warhol] allowed me to get rid of Warhol).

[air france flight] - I wanted to find out the latest info about flight missing in Atlantic. Yahoo! shows offtopic apart from pos.2 where Wikipedia result shows up; Bing shows offtopic apart from pos.1 where old news (from 01 June) about the flight 447 is shown; Google has offtopic on pos. 1 and 3, but other positions are taken by news from Jun 3 and Jun 4. Google and Yahoo! show news universal on top, and Yahoo! also shows related search suggestion for [air france flight 447]. Win for Google for understanding my query intention.

[cosenza networks] - after skimming through a post in my Google Reader about a map of Social Networks popularity in the world, created by Cosenza, I wanted to find this map. Google shows it in top position, While other engines don't even find vincos.it, official blog of the author. Clear win for Google.

[амніставаны пашкевіч] - query about recent event in Belarusian; Google shows links to good news posts on pos. 1, 3; Yahoo! shows news from nn.by on pos. 2, and Bing shows the link to the overview page on buntby.com on pos. 1 (from which you need to click through to get to the news item, which is actually a copy from nn.by). Win for Google.

So, total count on difficult queries: 15 for Google, 1 for Yahoo!, 1 for Bing, 1 draw. If we include Yandex for Russian-language queries, it steals one win from Google.

Some queries from my web history where search engines got similarly good results: [canton zurich tourism], [gm delisted], [Елена Бэсеску], [thalys], [create syndicated in livejournal], [google ion], [cagliari belarusian], [snowman unicode character].

By the way, since the Blind Search is created by a Microsoft engineer, I can guess they might be collecting submitted queries and use this data to improve their search engine quality. So may be this queryset will give different results after some time :).

You are welcome to give your own examples of difficult queries in comments.

Uladzimir Katkouski - pioneer of Belarusian internet

2009-05-26T00:48:00.013+02:00

Гэты пост па-беларуску / In Belarusian

Two years ago, May 25, 2007, Uładzimir Katkoŭski, also known as rydel23, passed away.

Uładzimir was one of the pioneers of Internet in Belarus and in Belarusian. His blog on Livejournal, rydel23 had 600 readers in mid-2005; he was the most popular blogger in Belarus. In late 2005 he managed to create the first popular bilingual (English and Belarusian) standalone blog - br23.net. His blogs still have >500 subscribers, two years after his death and almost three years after the tragic accident.

One of the most famous Belarusian poets, Ryhor Baradulin, whose poems I was reading in school textbooks, wrote a short poem about Uładzimir.

Read more under the cut...

On August 12, 2004, he created Wikipedia in Belarusian on be.wikipedia.org domain (which was overtaken in beginning of 2007, when Uładzimir was in coma). Today our Wikipedia has almost 20000 articles.

When Google, one of the first companies to do so, opened up UI for volunteer translations, Uładzimir has made a lot of effort to translate it - and thanks to him, we can use Google in Belarusian for a lot of years already. Unfortunately, the launch of local google.com.by domain (with Belarusian as default language) was too late for him to see...

He has created pravapis.org, the central resource for everything related to Belarusian language and spelling - including all different versions and scripts. Unfortunately, this website is down now. One of the first versions is still available on Geocities - but not for long, since Geocities are closing soon. Another his site that ceased to exist is Martyrology of Belarus, which served as online memorial and information hub devoted to victims of Stalinism in Belarus.

Tragic road accident happened on June 15, 2006. That was a date when digital Belarus lost the biggest engine. But, the good thing is that his work is being continued by others - Wikipedia grows every day, more and more programs and services offer Belarusian UIs, volunteer team makes sure that new features of Google search are translated in time. I am personally doing what I can to get more search features available for Belarusian UI, and to make other products get this UI as well.

Uładzimir was interested not only in Belarusian things; his well-known avatar has both Belarusian and Albanian greetings. His wife Jonada is Albanian; they both spoke excellent Albanian and Belarusian.

I knew Uładzimir a bit. He was the one who invited me to contribute to TOL, media NGO, thanks to which I have participated in very interesting project, learned some journalism, visited Prague, Almaty and Vilnius, met dozens amazing people.. thanks to whom I have visited barcamps, which opened a whole new world to me. And in the very end I can thank him for being happy now.

We started to communicate over Internet, obviously. We worked together on Wikipedia, read and commented each other's blogs. We spoke on the phone about the TOL project. And when I was coming to Prague to TOL workshop, I planned to finally meet him.. and literally a few days before I came there the accident happened. Then I was still sure we would meet soon..

Huge thanks to the family of Uladzimir. Thanks to them, his livejournal and personal blog are still open and available. Thanks to them, Uladzimir got a great tombstone; that's the only tombstone I know that features online username. They even established Uladzimir Katkouski prize for the best content site in Belarusian.

Rest in peace.

Photos are taken from Wikipedia: here and here.

Short Easter trip around Switzerland

2009-04-19T01:19:00.010+02:00

Last weekend, three Belarusian friends of mine visited me from Germany. We had three days, a car, and plans to see Switzerland. In the end we saw some very famous landmark and some interesting places.

We started with Zurich, which has not only lake with swans, but also it's bar-on-the-channel Rimini:

Went to Luzern, and saw there not only the saddest monument of all times, but also this touching street ad:

After that we tried to went up to Pilatus, only to find out that the world's steepest railway was closed till May:

Three more cities, few more photos and videos, and much fun under the cut...

Visited the most disappearing waterfall ever in Lauterbrunnen:

Bathed in snow in Mürren:

Saw the most beautiful Swiss lake:

In Lausanne, the city with beautiful cathedral, and the smallest city with metro in the world, we drove that completely automatic metro train:

We crossed the border to France to stay in much cheaper hotel. We went by old border controls so fast that there are no photos at all.

Put the hands on the Broken Chair next to the UN building in Geneva, city of vintage Mercedeses:

Walked under the fountain, which discharges 500 liters in a second with a speed of 200 km/h:

Went to Bern, city, where the Lithuanian flag waves over the main street, to walk on the edge of the bridge:

And peeked into Ferrari engine:

All other photos are in my Picasa album:

Photos were shot by me and my friends: Nastya, Hanna and Jura.

BarCamp Central Asia '09

2009-04-18T15:50:00.006+02:00

Yesterday, BarCamp Central Asia 2009 has opened in Almaty. And even though I was unfortunate not to be there, thanks to Google Docs and video chat in Gmail, I managed to present from Zurich almost like if I was there. It was great, and my kudos to Yelena and Stanislav for making it happen :).

It was very unusual experience and it was great. Thanks to all who attended! You were great, tolerating all technical glitches. :)

Here are my slides:

If you did not have time to ask questions during my presentation - you are welcome to ask them here :). English or Russian - both are welcome.

HTC Dream / G1 around the planet

2009-03-13T09:06:00.006+01:00

There is a general perception that HTC Dream aka T-Mobile G1, the first phone with Android operating system, is being sold only in US. But this is not true.
It is being sold now in different countries. Prices for the purchase with a contract are listed.

USA: $98 on Amazon
UK: Free from T-Mobile
Australia: Free from Optus
Singapore: $38 SGD, ~$24 USD from Singtel
Germany: 1€ from T-Mobile
Poland: 1 PLN from Era
Austria: 1€ from T-Mobile
Netherlands: Free from T-Mobile
Czech Republic: 1 CZK from T-Mobile

All those offers come with 2-year contracts which cost 40-60 USD monthly. Exceptions are Poland, where you can get 1 PLN price only with 3-year contract, and Czech Republic, where 1 CZK price is with ~$110/month contract.

On March 15 HTC Dream will be sold in France by Orange. No information about the price yet. Also in March it will be introduced in Spain by Telefonica.

So, 11 countries (9 - already, 2 - to launch in coming weeks). With localized experience, for sure. If you are interested anyhow in mobile Internet and improved user experience, and are in one of these countries - you are lucky. :)

photo from Wikimedia Commons, some data from Wikipedia article

Small global city - Zürich on the map

2009-02-18T00:17:00.007+01:00

Thanks to the new feature in Google Maps, I saw Zürich in unusual way.

Here is the result of query [Bar Zurich] and some my labels:

All red dots are bars. You can clearly see two main nightlife areas. Interesting that without proper understanding of scale it is not obvious how small everything is :). Just for data point - from my place to the furthest nightlife area (known here as "Niedersdorf") takes ~20 min by public transport. Taxis rip off ~25 CHF (21 USD) for the same trip. From the office we usually can walk anywhere in the center without taking transport.

And here, all the red dots are restaurants:

And this is the smallest city in the list of Global Cities. Cosy. :)

Chrome on linux status

2009-02-13T21:03:00.002+01:00

Conversation between Chromium developers last week:

---
>>> Just wanted to give a quick update on the progress we've made over the last week in the mac/linux porting effort. I'll let the linux folks followup with exactly what they have working ...

>> We have a 511mb executable that brings up an empty window.

> SHIP IT
---

That's in the spirit of "Launch early and iterate" :)

First photos from BarCamp Baltics '09

2009-02-07T13:12:00.003+01:00

BarCamp Baltics 2009 is a nice venue to meet old friends, make new connections, hear something new and have fun.

Follow barcamp live in twitter here.

Welcome!

2009-02-05T01:07:00.008+01:00

Hi.

My name is Ihar Mahaniok.
I work in Google as a Software Engineer, currently in Search Quality department. I am lucky to work in Zürich office.

I am originally from Minsk, Belarus, my heart is there forever (as are most friends).

I am opening this site now, in February 2009 - in English and Belarusian. I can not promise huge activity here; but you can follow my web-updates elsewhere. Friendfeed-widget to the right shows last few items. I use Twitter for microblogging, Livejournal for blogging/discussing with friends in Russian & Belarusian, share interesting stuff in Google Reader, upload my photos to Picasa Web albums, and note my travels on Dopplr. If you are interested in my education and previous job information, check my LinkedIn profile - though I don't expect to update it soon :).