random stuff vol.1

Congrats to Michael, Eugene & Ivan (Moscow SU 2): #9 kinda sucks, but what matters is going to Alberta.

Firefox 3.0b1 rocks. URL autocompletion that treats your input as a substring of a target URL (not a prefix!) is very useful, full page zoom looks nice and you can even copy-paste multiline URLs into the address bar. Cool.

Recently I started using a daily checklist of about a dozen small action items that should be performed on a daily basis (like “remove 5 files from the backup of the old home directory”, “read at least 15 pages of something useful”, “do some physical exercises” etc). Looks like I can as well add "explore some new Google product" to the list: I recently started using iGoogle, Google Apps for your domain, Webmaster tools and Adsense mostly out of curiosity and got totally addicted. Launching a small Adwords campaign is in progress. Anyway, the points are:
• my new primary e-mail and jabber accounts are vladimir [at] rychev (dot) com
• sorry for the ads: it was too tempting to try setting them up

And since this post is evil enough already, let's finish it appropriately: can somebody please share some karma with me on habrahabr? I sometimes feel like posting something to some public blog there, but my current 2.74 karma doesn't allow that.

Google Maps: Terrain tiles

The Terrain Maps went live!

Here comes the new generation

The kids whom we taught programming at school totally kick ass: #1 and #13 in div2 on the last TopCoder SRM, #4 among the best Russian school teams — really cool. Congrats!

And the previous generation will compete on Wednesday: half of our office moved to St Pete as the judges, coaches and participants of the Northeastern European Regional Contest — the ACM ICPC semifinals. Good luck to Michael and Dima (too bad two MSU teams can't advance to the finals).

10.5

Upgraded to Leopard. Painful. Ukelele fails to make a new layout, Xjournal crashes upon login, Firefox displays question marks instead of Cyrillic in the input fields, Adium shows garbage, Software Update fails to connect — and these were just the first random apps I launched, so it looks like much fun in the next few weeks. Frankly, I didn't expect that from Apple.

Ah well, at least I can configure the whole thing from scratch. It takes some time but always brings up some cool stuff (it's GimmeSomeTune for me today).

ru-marketing rocks

Anticipating Android

Downgrading, jailbreaking, activating, hacking, upgrading back, jailbreaking and activating again, installing the installer, unlocking and localizing the iPhone was not that hard after all. Huge thanks to Yulia and Petr for the great pre-birthday present, the transatlantic delivery and several useful hints :)