alex.moskalyuk

If you always wanted to start a holy war, but don’t feel strongly enough about anything to start bashing your opponents, consider keyboard layouts. Go through a random selection of 100 engineers or computer scientists, whose professional or academic life involves using computers daily, and you’ll discover at least one supporter of the Dvorak layout, ready to prove why it’s faster and more efficient. However, is QWERTY better than Dvorak? Or is Dvorak better than QWERTY? The answer to both questions is no.

To generate your own optimized layout, Microsoft has this Keyboard Layout Creator utility that I just noticed recently. Before that I was always carrying a copy of Keyboard Layout Manager, not to change the QWERTY setup, but to have my own Cyrillic keyboard.

Some users (including yours truly) today received some free Gmail invites to pass on. Looks like there’s a cottage industry in process - a Gmail invite going for $36 on eBay currently.

If you go to https://gmail.google.com, the secure connection is supported all the way. Try that on Yahoo! Mail and you get the “name invalid” error, and even if you tell IE to ignore it, you are brought into the login screen that’s secure, but then Yahoo! takes you back to non-secure mail.yahoo.com, and you’re given a warning from IE about this mishap.

Hotmail’s secure connection is broken the same way, with “name invalid” error first, and the a redirect to regular, non-secure, Passport login.

I was browsing Addison-Wesley Web site to see what new releases they are coming out (I asked the publicist about upcoming project management titles, and they don’t seem to be currently working on any) and noticed this interview with Hoglund and McGraw in MP3 format. Will listen to it when I get home, Gary McGraw was also interviewed here, since Addison-Wesley asked me to be a reviewer for his book.

I have finished a project management class that my employer requires for most of the engineers here, and the class counts toward the PMP certification. So I started paying attention to many new things. For example, this Business Week article talks about the project management style and time allocation at Google:

Google’s managers rarely tell engineers what projects to tackle. Instead, execs keep a “Top 100″ priorities list (which today numbers more than 240 items), and engineers gravitate to issues that interest them, forming fluid working groups that can last weeks or months.

Hey, that’s smart.

Justin Rogers is the wizard man. He already wrote his sixth article in the series, I’ve just started with the first one, basically copying and pasting his code into VS.NET, and got a simplistic wizard app to work right away. Will read all six of them at home tonight.

Russian Yandex, the leading search engine for the Russian-speaking part of the world, started offering unlimited mailboxes for the users of Yandex Mail. The interface works only in Russian, which cuts out most of the Internet users.

The size of the e-mail box will remain fixed, according to Yandex. Any time you need the extension, you go into their control panel and add another 20 MB chunk. Not sure why they do this, I guess there’s some kind of tracking involved and prediction algorithm will compile the purchase order for the guy in charge of the hard drives. Also prevents you from abusing the service and sending your Britney Spears MP3 collection to all the users of the service as spam. The max size for the message is 10 MB, that naturally includes the attachments. Write to Elena Kolmanovskaya (klm [at] yandex-team.ru) to ask why no English interface was included, although I have suspicion the might not be prepared for global market and competing with the likes of Google. Currently Yandex Mail has 3 million users.

Which brings up another question - imagine the quantity and quality of spam with Google’s 1 GB and similar offerings through the ripple effect. If you are in the business of selling organ enlargement supplements, and before you were limited to text-only and HTML offerings since Hotmail/YahooMail/MSN/EarthLink would reject anything above the reasonable size not to overload the customer’s inbox, Google’s 1 GB offer allows the spammer to send an MP3 file or even a small MPEG/WMV video that would advertise the product. If the attachment fits the policy (which could be as lineant as 20-25 megs per attachment), then your mailbox could one day become stuffed with all sorts of audio and video and clear text messages telling nothing. The spam filters (at least the current ones) would not cope with them, the users, getting the messages like “Here’s Jim’s party from last Friday”, would probably have no qualms about opening a “safe” WMV file, leading to the new era in spam.

The e-paper is coming to reality in the form of 6 inch screen with higher than usual 170 dpi and $318 price tag. It runs a customized version of Linux, and coming under Sony brand supports MemoryStick. The British journalists claim that three AAA batteries keep it up for 10,000 pages, but it’s not too clear whether they’ve actually verified it, or just read the press-release. The same article in Guardian talks about having to use some proprietary DRMed book library to download the titles for Librie, so TXT, HTML, PDF or LIT are probably out of the question. Have to appreciate the Guardian’s support of the user: “Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months”. Thanks, indeed. The manufacturers are hoping to sell 5,000 of these a month as their best-case scenario.

The New York Times article on US competitive proficiency in science and engineering is worth just quoting in its entirety. Even though Chinese outnumber Americans only 4 times in population size, Chinese schoolkids outnumber American high school students 120 times participating in Intel’s science fair. Which brings up a problem of where the innovation will come from in the near future, and according to the author, the top management at Silicon Valley firms is on red alert.

Mark Anderson constantly keeps asking on what would happen if you would see the mergers/collaboration projects started between Chinese/Taiwanese hardware manufacturers and Indian software companies. The answer in Silicon Valley and other high tech hot spot area is generally a somewhat worried look and inability to provide a good answer.

The PC Magazine reviews 14 digital music players that can play MP3, WMA or AAC files. The editor’s choice among the models compared includes Apple iPod Mini and iRiver iFP-390T. The editors decided to conduct a single review of both Flash- and HDD-based music players. Of special interest is the battery life test as well as sound quality test. Even though the entire article is published online in HTML, the summary of the features is available in PDF only.