Before I say anything, please note that I’m coming from an Android background, and more specifically the shitty HTC-version-of-Android background. Before this phone I had an HTC Desire HD. Well, in the last days before the iPhone I had to force myself not to throw it away. My Android story is that I bought the HTC a little over 2 years ago to replace my… wait for it… Windows Mobile phone. This is Windows Mobile, not Windows Phone… you know… the archaic stylus-based version with 5×5 pixel buttons. It was again an HTC (Touch Diamond 2) and it was my first encounter with smartphones. The HTC Desire HD was my first encounter with Android and although I loved it in the beginning, after 2 years I started to experience THE issue with Android, which is lack of updates. HTC decided that my hardware was too incapable to run their Icecream Sandwich and stopped providing updates. While newer and better versions of Android were released, I was patient with my 2.3.5 Gingerbread and quietly wept every night. This all made me switch to Apple. And before you ask “Why didn’t you just root and use Cyanogen?”, I will say: Why do I have to? I paid a big pile of cash for a phone, I don’t want to waste another night of my life redoing everything from scratch. Having the ability to root your phone is one thing, having the necessity to do it is another. I don’t want to be forced to root. Plus, Cyanogen with Android 4+ is still not officially available at the time I write this.

If you haven’t realized it until now, I’m not a fan boy, I just like technology and base my choices on facts and experience. Now, on to the iPhone.

This thing is great. Even though I’m comparing it to a very old HTC, I cannot help but wonder how awesome the display is. Once I look at the iPhone, looking back at my 22″ monitor feels like the right half of this (in other words, painful):

Retina has spoiled me. The iPhone is also super-fast. iOS is very good in terms of user experience. I haven’t had a dealbreaker issue until now. Did I mention that the iPhone is very fast? Here is the list of my top pros and cons:

Although there are some things I don’t like, I wouldn’t go back to Android. For me, the huge Apple ecosystem and the very good user experience are the two most important factors in a phone, and I would trade the ability to do some customization for them. After a while you get used to the iOS way of doing things and you form habits. That’s a good thing, because most apps try to conform to those habits, and you know how to use them before you’ve tried them. While Android also have some UI Guidelines for developers, in reality the marketplace (Play Store) is one big mess, where each application introduces its own UI, and there is so much diversity, that at some point you just give up.

I am very happy with my first week with the iPhone. There are definitely things that can be fixed, but I’d bet Apple will do that at some point. My hopes for cleaning up the Google Play Store are just not helping. Oh and here’s the answer your other hypothetical question about why I didn’t get a Windows Phone: I like shadows and rounded corners more than single-color squares and sharp edges.

(Photo credits: http://www.apple.com/pr/products/iphone/iphone.html, http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/7/2851127/new-ipad-hands-on-preview)

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I am a big fan of Tarantino as a director and this movie did not disappoint. All the graphic deaths, tense dialogue and twists you’d expect from Tarantino are delivered, together with a modern reading of the Western genre, which appeals to a 21 century crowd. Nowadays, I already expect each new Hollywood movie to be pure crap and I’ve started watching independent cinema more often. Django Unchained is the gem which still keeps my hopes for mass market films high.

Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio all perform marvelously, but the best actor in the movie is Samuel Jackson in the role of a black servant who’s ready to obey his slaver till death. Apart from the great actors, which is the single most important ingredient of a good movie, Django Unchained also has much to offer in plot and dialogue. Sweeping political correctness under the rug, as each self-respecting playwright should, Tarantino manages to transport you to the slavery era in America like no one else.

However, the skill which makes him such a great director is not that he can please the critics or drive them mad. It’s the fact that he can make a good movie, which appeals to the standard hollywood crowd, and still avoid cliches. Even those of you who’d prefer an action flick with a love story happy ending, even you will not be disappointed. Find Django Unchained in your local theater and watch it.

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In 1991 I celebrated my 7th birthday and started school. There was no Facebook and Twitter, the Web was just getting started in some remote part of the world, there were no digital cameras and most people in my country didn’t know what a computer is. At the time Bulgaria was preparing for the country’s first democratic elections after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. I vaguely remember my parents talking about it and how they went to the polls. People had their hopes high and were singing a song in the streets I’ll always remember. The lyrics were: “45 години стигат, времето е наше (45 years are enough, time is ours now).” I remembered all this by looking at the pages of a 1991 magazine I bought on EBay a month ago. Here’s what it looks like.

Disclaimer: This blog post contains pictures of Rollingstone Magazine from January 1991. I don’t intend any copyright infringement, I’ve included them as reference. All rights of the magazine content are held by Rollingstone Magazine and the respective authors.

The reason I bought the magazine is Slash on the cover. For me, that’s the man who created the best guitar solos in the world, so no wonder I bough it.

Although at first I just wanted to read about Slash, that issue quickly became a trip back to 1991 for me. Apparently at the time they had the movie Green Card in theaters, and there was a full page ad about it.

It seems the economy wasn’t in any better shape, too. Confirms my theories that according to media, we’re always in some crisis.

State of the art technology was Digital Audio Tape Recorders. Another ad.

The article on Slash was awesome. I didn’t regret buying the magazine at all. It was an interview he gave a little before Guns n’ Roses released the Use Your Illusions album. I read somewhere afterwards that this particular interview was one of the reasons the relationship between Slash and Axl worsened. I have no idea why. There’s nothing so revealing about Axl in there.

Eight grand in 1991 got you a Plymouth. Of course you’d have to be blind, because I don’t see how anyone could buy such an ugly set of wheels.

Although CDs already existed, Sony was still trying to sell its tape cassettes. It’s Metal-SR after all. It gives you a wide dynamic range. What-eva.

Now, if you think Microsoft is the pioneer of word processing, think again. I don’t know if at the time Word was just an idea in Bill’s head, but people were selling high-tech typewriters. If you don’t know what a typewriter is, ask your dad.

What self-respecting magazine wouldn’t include classifieds? Not Rollingstone, that’s for sure. You could find anything there. From birthday wishes and inventors, to striptease clubs and phone sex.

And to finish up with my 1991 review, I’ll give you the charts at the time in the US. Remember Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer? They were kicking ass.

All I can say after reading the whole issue is that 1991 was an awesome year. It may sound unlikely to you, but people had fun without our digital gadgets and being connected all the time. They probably hung out more often, and I think they definitely created better music than people do today.

So next time your internet connection is slow or your iPhone’s giving you trouble, remember 1991 and go do what you want to do in person. And listen to a piece by Slash on the way. You’ll thank me later.

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At the time I was working on a student project and all I needed was some source control. A project hosting service would provide much more than that, which I didn’t take into account at all. Now when comparing similar services, issues like integrated bugtracking, the type of source control system used and availability of private repositories are much more important to me than they were in my previous review.

Here’s a list of what I want no matter what:

• Private repository (at least one).
• Support for a distributed version control system (Git or Mercurial).
• Integration with a bugtracker.

So the the following are four more project hosting services for anyone who needs an integrated solution with private source control hosting:

Bitbucket

This is my personal favorite. Lately I’ve been reading about distributed version control systems (DVCS), like Mercurial and Git, and growing fond of them. I can say that I switched to using Mercurial for all my personal projects. Bitbucket is a service that gives you unlimited private and public source repositories based on Mercurial, with an integrated bugtracker for free up to 5 users. They also have other pricing plans for larger projects, but this is the best free offer you will find on the market. I’ve been using Bitbucket for a while now and these terms are new, after today they announced they’ve been acquired by Atlassian. Definitively a good bet.

Kiln

A work of FogCreek software, which you’ve probably heard of (Joel Spolsky). Kiln is a system implemented on top of Mercurial, which adds some advanced features (not listed because they are irrelevant in the comparison). One good thing is that it integrates very nicely with FogBugz, a top-notch bugtracking tool. Please note that what I’ve used is the so-called “Student and Startup Edition”, which allows for unlimited space and number of repositories for 2 users. They provide a standalone Kiln client, but any Mercurial client should work (if you want tighter integration with your IDE for example).

Project Locker

Up to 3 projects, 500MB, 5 users – free. That’s their offering. The difference here would be that they offer Subversion and Git hosting, rather than Mercurial. If that’s the type of source control you’d rather use, maybe this is a better option for you. Github might actually be better known, but as of now they don’t offer a private repository for free, and that’s one of my primary concerns. The con I find about Project Locker is their speed and the clumsy and unfriendly web interface. They also only provide TRAC for bugtracking, and put ads on those pages when you browse, which is probably understandable, but still a downside.

Beanstalk

This is what I used before I switched to Project Locker. The two are probably comparable, Beanstalk have a free account for 3 users, 1 private repository and 100MB of space. Subversion and Git are supported, but space is definitely a limiting factor here. The web interface is wonderful compared to Project Locker, but I wouldn’t use this for anything else than a test project simply because of the 100 MB limitation. Please note that they also don’t provide integration with a bugtracking service.

I’ve been researching services similar to the ones above for more than a year or two now, and the ones I mentioned are what I consider the best at the moment. Please share your comments if you’ve used some of them and have any particular impressions or know about another one I probably haven’t heard of. Until the next edition of such a comparison, happy coding.

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When you go to the Favorites tab, the current location within the CHM is selected automatically. You only need to click the Add button and it’s added to the (initially empty) list of topics. Next time you open the CHM, just go there and open the topic you last saved. Neat.

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Treating all customers the same and treating every customer well is putting a bottom limit on frustration – you can’t go too bad if you do it. Treating customers differently gives you the opportunity to make your best ones love you.

In college I only studied Intro to Marketing for one semester, and it was far from my main focus. What I noticed, though, is that all textbooks and materials tell you that the customer is always right, you should always listen to the customer. Well, not always. Not if this customer makes you spend double the effort on him just to not hate you. Instead, you can devote this time to invent something for the customers that love you. As Seth Godin says, they will talk about you and bring many more after them.

Where I come from, in elementary schools they treat all students the same. They put a bottom limit on quality. They ensure that every student is educated and literate. What they don’t ensure is that schools produce geniuses and achievers. For this to happen, you need to remove the top limit, you need to give students the freedom to explore, the resources and the attention.

In my daily job I sometimes come in contact with customers who always complain about something and want a solution ASAP. They threaten to abandon your product and go to the competition. I say let them go. You have two choices to spend your time – convince them they are wrong and your product is good, or work on the product and make it awesome. You could also work on a program to provide benefits to your VIP customers (the ones who love you). This second choice would be a much better investment than the first one.

This could probably be applied everywhere people are involved – HR, education, communications. Don’t introduce bottom limits. Remove the top limits instead.

UPDATE: Here’s a very good article by Seth Godin that I think relates to this post.

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Blogging entered my world about two or three years ago. I remember looking through a book in the student library at AUBG, titled Essential Blogging. I had no idea what the book was about, but looked at what the authors had to say and developed an interest in the topic. I started reading blogs sporadically, not following any of them consistently. Then I found out about RSS and Google Reader. I started filling up the list of my subscriptions and have been reading continuously since then.

I entered the blogging world about a year ago. Blogging was so cool that there was just no way I wasn’t having a blog. So I started one on blogspot.com and posted some student life stuff that no one cared about, including me. This effort failed miserably and I stopped writing, deciding to be quiet until I have something meaningful to share with the world. The next step was when I started a Bulgarian blog with a friend of mine. The goal was to post only humorous and meaningless content, probably in order to be cool.

All this time I was trying to figure out what is the purpose of my blogging and what I want to achieve with it. I started using hosted solutions at first, then read some more about optimizations and interesting things you could do with a self-hosted blog. I did that for both Naliven Bozdugan and the one you are reading right now, changed the templates, included categorization features and bookmarking. But until recently, I had no idea where I’m going and only blogged because I liked it.

Yesterday, thinking about what is the next step that I should take (for this blog), I came to the conclusion I’d been searching. It might have been Seth Godin that brought this to my mind, it might have been Dimitar Nikolov, I’m not sure. But what I realized is that I want to take a stand on issues. I blog, because I need to express my opinion, my mood and my feelings. I need to know what my opinion is. The thing is, a lot less people are interested in me as a person than I wish. So the only thing that would make someone drop by and read what I have to say is my opinion. I saw in this an opportunity to find the person I want to become through writing. There is nothing wrong with blogging about a problem I’m not sure how to solve, just the opposite – I think that writing about uncertainty and controversy would be helpful in making a decision or finding an answer to a question.

The end result of all this would hopefully be a clearer mind for myself, and more interesting content for you. I don’t want to make predictions about how it will turn out, let’s just hope that I am right and everything goes as planned.

Oh, and I need a logo for this blog, but I don’t have any graphic design skills. I also don’t know what would be the general idea of the logo and I haven’t written enough content to be able to tell from that. Ideas are welcome.

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I wish we had more stations like this in public places. Could this be a viable business model, or is it worthless, having in mind the efforts put into standardizing mobile phone chargers?

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Anyway, installing programs has always been one of the worst experiences ever while setting up my work/fun environment, on any platform. Linux makes it easy for you to install distribution packages, but I still haven’t spend the time to figure out how to uninstall them. What happens to all dependencies that you didn’t note down when installing? Do they remain in the system?

Since program installation is usually the first impression that software makes in a user, I think every software developer should spend the time and make it as perfect as it can be. This is clearly not only my opinion, but in this post I wanted to mention two features of software installations in general that I find wonderful, and cannot figure out why there are people that miss to put them in.

1. “Don’t create a Start Menu folder” option

2. “Create a Desktop icon” and “Create a Quick Launch icon”

First, I have so many things in the Windows Start Menu, that I probably never open it. I don’t need more things there by default, and I need an option to control this when installing software. Second, I extensively use the Quick Launch toolbar, and if the installer puts an icon there for me, that would be great. Obviously the FeedDemon installer made me happy and the people from NewsGator did their job. Why don’t the others do it? Why don’t you do it every time?

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