Yippy!
My favorite website Goggle Suggest now works in Safari!!!
Link
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Russian Lawyer Tries to Stop The Simpsons in Russia
WWW.GAY.RU have reported that a Russian lawyer Igor Smykov continues his attempts to make illegal the showing of The Simpsons on the territory of the Russian Federation. He filed an appeal with the Moscow City Court (highest municipal court) to overturn the ruling of the Hamovnichesky District Court. The appeal refers to the ruling of the Hamovnichesky court in which it found against the plaintiff Smykov in his complaint against RenTv, that is airing The Simpsons on the territory of Russia. Smykov claims that The Simpsons is promoting drug abuse, violence and homosexuality. Smykov wants The Simpsons to be marked as Adult Audience Only and demands 300.000 rubles (~10000USD) of compensation for the emotional distress.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
New DirecTV TiVo! software in depth (well, kind of)
As I have promised earlier, here are some thoughts on a latest DirecTV TiVo! software upgrade.
It does seem to make my Hughes box to run a little bit smoother and faster when performing functions like navigating the menus and settings. The speed improvement is especially noticeable when in the Season Pass Manager. Subjectively it seem to process the requests to change the position of the multiple shows on the priority list at least twice as faster then before.
The ability to show the list of the episodes of the same show in the folders is mildly convenient. It have almost compensated to some extent the pain of not being able to sort Now playing list by the expiration date, as it was possible before through the Slow-0-Record-Thumbs Up hack.
The DirecTv style guide is redrawing much faster as well, while the TiVo style program guide is faster still.
There were some minor tweaks with the icons that indicate the format of the sound and the video of a particular show.
Now, about the video quality. I am not sure if this would be obvious to the owners of the Standard definition TV sets, but if you own a HDTV set and use an S-video output to get the picture to the screen you might notice an improvement in the image clarity and detail. It might be just a trick of my imagination, but shows like Queer as Folk, or anything else that was shot in HD seem to look better then before even when received by non-HD TiVo.
It does seem to make my Hughes box to run a little bit smoother and faster when performing functions like navigating the menus and settings. The speed improvement is especially noticeable when in the Season Pass Manager. Subjectively it seem to process the requests to change the position of the multiple shows on the priority list at least twice as faster then before.
The ability to show the list of the episodes of the same show in the folders is mildly convenient. It have almost compensated to some extent the pain of not being able to sort Now playing list by the expiration date, as it was possible before through the Slow-0-Record-Thumbs Up hack.
The DirecTv style guide is redrawing much faster as well, while the TiVo style program guide is faster still.
There were some minor tweaks with the icons that indicate the format of the sound and the video of a particular show.
Now, about the video quality. I am not sure if this would be obvious to the owners of the Standard definition TV sets, but if you own a HDTV set and use an S-video output to get the picture to the screen you might notice an improvement in the image clarity and detail. It might be just a trick of my imagination, but shows like Queer as Folk, or anything else that was shot in HD seem to look better then before even when received by non-HD TiVo.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
One positive thing about USSR.
There was one positive thing about the USSR. We did not have religious nuts running the country. Yeah, yeah, I know what you going to say - first learn how to speak the god damn English and then critique. But come on! Where is the bloody separation of the church and the state here?
Link
Link
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Encoding of the MP3 tags on Mac Os X
After I started to use Mac OS one problem was constantly annoying me.
iTunes would not properly interpret mp3 tag info of my Russian songs, that I had to copy from my old Windows XP machine.
Instead of the song name in Cyrillic i would see a pseudo-Unicode gibberish. I tried to reimport, tried to rewrite iTunes library file.
Nothing would work. Luckily, after a long search online I have found a reference to the Unicode Rewriter on one of the Mac Os Hints (link) forums.
This java program worked beautifully. Check it out.
iTunes would not properly interpret mp3 tag info of my Russian songs, that I had to copy from my old Windows XP machine.
Instead of the song name in Cyrillic i would see a pseudo-Unicode gibberish. I tried to reimport, tried to rewrite iTunes library file.
Nothing would work. Luckily, after a long search online I have found a reference to the Unicode Rewriter on one of the Mac Os Hints (link) forums.
This java program worked beautifully. Check it out.
They've Done It Again! Yet another poorly designed service from Microsoft.
I am going into the deeper examination of a new Microsoft service - MSN Virtual Earth. After playing with it for a while yesterday and today I came to the firm conclusion that it's just yet another poorly designed product/service with no other reason to exist but to show them (Google Maps) that Microsoft can make draggable web maps too.
User interface is awful, map's behavior is disgusting - it literally runs away from you, some areas of the map are blacked out and you need to reload the page to see them.
Scratch pad is absolutely useless other than for jumping from one place to another. You cannot, for example use the items in your scratch pad to create a route and driving directions. If you click a Drive To or Drive From Link in the small pop-up place tag (that is of course if you are able to keep that pop-up up at all), you are send to the different web page (maps.msn.com). And guess what, you will need to enter the Start or Finish address all over again even if you have it in your scratch pad on MSN Virtual Earth. After you do that, the directions are shown not on the MSN Virtual Earth map, but on the handicapped maps.msn.com.
When using the Google Maps you are always in the same window, on the same page, and if you chose to find the driving directions and click From here or To here in the pop-up location tag, you'll actually be able to enter the destination address right there, and see the results eight on the draggable Google Maps with all of the benefits of the satellite imagery and street overlay graphics (that are pretty accurate I might add).
So, yes, MSN Virtual Earth has higher resolution of the outdated satellite photos, but Google offers a pleasant user experience of a product/service that actually works.
Yay!- maps.google.com; Boo!- MSN Virtual Earth.
User interface is awful, map's behavior is disgusting - it literally runs away from you, some areas of the map are blacked out and you need to reload the page to see them.
Scratch pad is absolutely useless other than for jumping from one place to another. You cannot, for example use the items in your scratch pad to create a route and driving directions. If you click a Drive To or Drive From Link in the small pop-up place tag (that is of course if you are able to keep that pop-up up at all), you are send to the different web page (maps.msn.com). And guess what, you will need to enter the Start or Finish address all over again even if you have it in your scratch pad on MSN Virtual Earth. After you do that, the directions are shown not on the MSN Virtual Earth map, but on the handicapped maps.msn.com.
When using the Google Maps you are always in the same window, on the same page, and if you chose to find the driving directions and click From here or To here in the pop-up location tag, you'll actually be able to enter the destination address right there, and see the results eight on the draggable Google Maps with all of the benefits of the satellite imagery and street overlay graphics (that are pretty accurate I might add).
So, yes, MSN Virtual Earth has higher resolution of the outdated satellite photos, but Google offers a pleasant user experience of a product/service that actually works.
Yay!- maps.google.com; Boo!- MSN Virtual Earth.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Plane lift-off in SFO on MSN Earth
So here we can see a plane lifting-off in all of it high resolution glory.
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