Just married

cmd+1 vs Yandex maps

I love mac shortcuts. Nobody ever thinks about sharing them across applications. After you get used to cmd+<N> for navigating to the Nth tab of Firefox, you get much fun in Safari, where it opens the Nth bookmark by default. But that's nothing compared to Yandex maps. You carefully zoom into the location you wanted to find and share, press cmd+1 to get back to your mailbox in the first tab and find your map zoomed out to the furthest zoom level. I used to do it 2-3 times in a row – imagine that your computer reboots after Alt+Tab and you'll know how I felt. Anyway, didn't they test maps.yandex on real mac users?

Speaking about Yandex maps, I wonder how their tiles really work. If you look at Moscow, you'll see the static street labels and smooth map scrolling. When you come to Samara, you see that the map is a 10x10 grid and the scrolling is quantified to these 1/10 steps. And the street labels travel across the tiles when you scroll! Pretty annoying, if you ask me – you don't drag a static map any more, it's changing and you have to concentrate on it. On the bright side, the labels do their best to fit in the screen (at least they try to). St Pete used to be like Samara a couple of weeks ago, and now it's a static map. Did they decide to get rid of the jumping labels? Then why does it take so long for all the cities? And how does it actually work? I guess they don't render tiles on the fly, so it means they have 100 potential tiles for each place on a map and the 10x10 grid of small tiles helps save some disk space if most of these 100 are identical?

Social networks

Removed my profiles from moikrug and vkontakte: it was fun, but managing the same friend network in four places is pretty strange when you think of it. So I guess I'll stay with LinkedIn, feel free to add.

Update regarding vkontakte (01/2011): wow, people keep hitting this post when searching for "delete vkontakte account". The comments below are outdated, and the up-to-date instructions are here. They're basically saying that you can't delete your account permanently, and instead you should
- change all your contact info to meaningless placeholders
- go to "Мои Настройки > Приватность" ("My settings > Privacy"), select "Только я" ("Only me") wherever applicable and hit "Сохранить" ("Save").

That doesn't really help from e.g. friendship requests from friends of friends, but oh well.

Honeymoon is coming!

Got the tickets to Cuba today. Our nabaztag is now reading weather forecasts for Havana, Yulia is exploring the travel guides and I'm looking forward to learning Spanish in a week (the week before wedding, to make matters more exciting).

moskva.fm

moskva.fm is ubercool. I don't know who are these guys and how they do it, but they get 40 Moscow FM radio stations, identify all the songs on air, save them and let you listen to all these songs in any order. They also keep all sorts of charts for those 40 stations, so you can pick a nice one to listen in your car. Looks like it's gonna become a #1 source of random music for me, good-bye last.fm.

Hello world [identity #4]

I'm almost fed up with Livejournal. Too much downtime, too many dirty deals, broken promises and imposed services. I used to be pro-SUP, but these counters and OpenID hacks were too much. And now they just use your passwords – really, the next stop is leaking protected posts, so I guess I'll quit before it happens.

Well, declaring was the easy part, now let's see how easy it will be to live without hundreds of readers and posts for custom friendgroups. On the bright side, nobody reads this blog, so I can post pretty much anything here. It's always fun creating a new identity – and it is just time for that.