Boris Smirnov's Little Blog

iPhone Connection

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:29:32 -0500

Now I that I have iPhone, hopefully I can post here more often. Somehow this tends not to stick and ihave long breaks in between posts…

Have not posted anything for a while

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:46:35 -0500

Have not posted anything for a while, due to being busy and distracted. Would like to get back once again and revisit this. I had a few interesting projects lately and good things are happening.

After almost 2 years I finally starting to like working with .NET, or rather figuring out how to do things my way easily.

Have been using plurk pretty consistently as well so I have been micro-blogging in a sence, just not in tumblr.

More later…

Photo

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:22:06 -0400

Website to Kiosk

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:18:49 -0400

I am working on a website project right now that due to the lack of time available will also be used as a content in a kiosk. I see a bunch of problems of using a regular website for in kiosk mode without specifically programming/adding kiosk functionality, but it this case it needs to be done and we have to make best of what we have considering that.

One of the issues with that is that links that link outside of the section of the website as well as external links need to be controlled and/or disabled so the visitors of the kiosk would not wander off from the original page.

It is pretty easy to identify those links using jquery, which is already on the page. The question is what is the best thing to do here, from the point of usability. I thought of 3 options.

1.    Remove/hide the text of the link
2.    Leave the text but remove hyperlink
3.    Send the link to another page that would suggest that visitor should visit the webpage online to see the content of those links. This could be done through thickbox kind of effect or a tooltip kind of effect.

It seems to me that methods 1 and 2 present usability problems where links inside of paragragraphs when hidden or removed can create confusion for the user. For example if the link said to see something click here and it is removed then the text stop making sense. I believe 3 option is the best one for us andrather then going to another page I would use a thickbox or tooltip message telling user to visit website online to see the concontents of the link.

Can you offer any comments suggestions ?

Felon - mini review

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:45:24 -0400

Just watched this movie over the weekend. Really enjoyed it. Good story good actors and good acting. Somewhat unusual and surprising role for Val Kilmer.

Recommend it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117385/

A step towards sostainable energy in every home.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:24:36 -0400

This is exciting. This article on MIT website is about the new way to use solar power, or rather a way to use it more like the plants. During the day using the power of the sun and with some basic accessible materials splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen storing them and at night when sun is down reversing the process and combining it back into the water using a fuel cell.

This is quite wonderful news and an idea that could bring energy independence to any home. I am just affraid that somehow the big guys who would loose money on this would prevent the widespread use of the technology or find a way to make it prohibitively expensive.

Sources:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

When windows crashes…. This is my computer after I told it...

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:09:00 -0400

When windows crashes…. This is my computer after I told it to restart it self and helped to kill bunch of precess. The window of Apple Update, which I dislike very much would not close for about 5 minutes and computer stopped reacting even to Alt+Ctrl+Del. It was wonderful…

X Files: I want to believe - Mini Review

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:44:00 -0400

Like someone said “I want to believe” it is good. When asked how good of a movie it was I tend to say:

“It was an ok movie, but it was not a good X-files movie”

I am somewhat of an x-files fan and just watched the whole 9 seasons of the show last summer over a period of a couple of month and enjoyed it immensly. The show never really went bad after being on for so long and the last episodes of last season were quite good.

Since the mythology of the show was so good, one would expect the continuation of that and tying up of the loose ends or something of the sorts. Aliens or Sully’s and Moulder’s superi-ntelligent child, supersoldiers there are many cool things…No you get none of that… Instead, what you get is an extended “moster of the week” type episode which was not even all that great.

It was about psychic convicted pedophile preist that has some kind of connection with one of his past victims and that victims partner trying to save him by killing people and attaching the head of dead guy on to them, it does not sound like a very good idea. But they pulled it of considering that.

It was okay for a strange detective movie, and it was good to see the M&S dynamic but I am afriad it was not good enough. And some of the themes in the movie were, to say the least, weird. I will not go into detail. I also heard somebody say that the phrase “i want to believe” was said too much through the movie, though I have not noticed.

Anyways, I am somewhat disappointed but it is not unbareble.

Batman Dark Night - Mini Review

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:43:10 -0400

Movie was quite good. Well developed charachters, good storylines, good acting. I am still convinced that Christian Bale is a best batman yet.

The movie was quite long and could probably have been split in two. I found it to be almost too long for my likes, but there was no time wasted the whole time it was action packed and kept me entertained.

I did have a couple of complaints the main one being the unrealistic make up of Harvey Dent/Two Face. I think they over did it with this one. I like the older more subtle version. The idea of somebody with face that badly burned walking around does not make sense, and the eye without an eye lid would very quickly dry up and be disabled. It might be a bit silly but it is how I felt.

Other then that movie was quite good and not disappointing. Joker is quite a different fish from the old movie, but I hear it is quite accurate to the comic book. I never read it so I wouldnt know.

Overall the movie is worth seeing.

MTA's systemwide nonacceptance of credit or debit...

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:35:00 -0400

Wha… Does this happen ? Apparently… It took me an hour today to get from port authority to my work which is aroun 85st. There were some train delays it seems but thats not what slowed me down.

I was trying to buy a metro-card and the lines were unusually long. After staying online for about 10 minutes and getting to the MTA vending machine, I try to get a card using my credit card…watch “Processing…” for about 2 minutes then says cannot process… I try to run it as debit card, same thing…try again…same

I figure I will try another machine… Leave the line go back to the end of another. Stand in line for 10 minutes… while I am almost at the machine… one of the MTA employees is saying that there is a system wide something-rather so you cannot use neither debit or credit cards, only cache… well, thats a bummer, because all I got it my card…

And, couple of weeks ago I lost my wallet, this is a new card, and I do not remember the pin. Because being INGDirect, they send you a pin on peice of paper. I called my home to see if the peice of paper could be located…nope could not… Then I call ING direct and thankfully they tell me that pin is the same on the new card as the old one… that helps…

I ended up getting a 20$ card… but when I was standing online for the third time there were people trying to use their cards over and over again. I actually told one guy next to me that the machines were not taking the cards. It just crazy that they barely announced it, I am lucky to have heard it my self. The lines move slow because people do not know it is not working and keep trying to use their cards…

Talking about usability…

Young Members Project

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:29:15 -0400

Wow it has been busy couple of month at work, and it is not about to get better. I am about to finish a project for the Young Members section of the website where I am integrating the Flickr API into the website. This was a trip this whole thing..

First I thought I would just use JQuery and JSON to pull in data from flickr and then use couple of JQuery plugins to format it and turn it into a slideshow with a film-strip-type navigation. Results ended up being less then satisfactory as the page would load very slow and there were strange other problems which there was no time to solve.

Then tried using JQuery .NET API implementation, it seems to work well but there is not enough documentation on it, forum folks on Codeplx are helpful though. So thanks to them. In the end this seems to work better and faster and I like it, and I was able to concentrate on interface implementation on front end, less client side code. Looks nice and the folks up stairs like it, just need to do a few more tweaks.

Another funny thing that I ran into was that we are using the collection to group sets on flickr, and while the collections feature was implemented like 2 years ago, Flickr API was not updated to accomodate for that, so I cannot pull in the photo sets from the collections and this kind of mkaes the whole collections thing pretty useless. To work around this we have to put a tag-like string into photoset description and then only show photosets that match the criteria, there are probably better ways to do this and it might not be efficient, but it works for a time. Problem is if you want to add descriptions later. Well we will figure something out later then.

It has been a while...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:54:36 -0400

It has been a while since I have written on tumblr. Somehow I fell out of the wheel. There is a number of things that has been happening since February. Here is a partial list:

I have been reading some books on social/web networking with people and Php5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice.
Working with some API’s for work (Flickr, YouTube)
Getting deeper knowledge of Drupal on the side and C# and .NET for work.
Finishing a couple of drupal website as freelance projects.
Working on a couple of personal pet projects. One is a local community website.
Went to blogger meetup in NJ and Symantec web meetup in NYC which was at the Met.
Missed a drupal meetup and was sad about it. Planning to go to next one.

Going to blogger meetup sparked the interests to rekindle the fire of blogging. So I will try to get back to this.

Also I have gotten into plurk.com lately and recruited a bunch of friend, this thing was working so well for us and today it has been down for like 5 hours. Thats just sad…

Noteworthy Parable...

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:56:00 -0500

I once heard some type of paradigm or principle mentioned by Edward Tufte on one of his lectures about how when organization creates some hirearchical model such as website for itself it tends to replicate the hirearchy inside of that organization. I further draw this parallel into what humans create and look at the computer.

Recently, since my computer died, I have said a number of times. My computer died, my computer gave up its ghost. Then considering that it was probably to power surge or overheating it was almost like a stroke or heart attack.

The computer has a motherboard, which is akin to nerves system. It has power supply that pumps electricity through the computer which is akin to heart. It has a central processor which is like a brain. It has memory, short term - RAM, and long term - Hard Drives. It has something like elimination organs, fans to take out the heat. It has input and output like eyes and ears… This could be expanded further quite a bit.

So while a human machine is infinitely more complex , we have build a more primitive version of ourselves to serve us.

PC Death

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:07:05 -0500

My computer gave up its ghost last week… It was bound to happen one of these days, there were symptoms that pointed to that, nevertheless it was a bit unpleasant.

Out of the death came out search for new system. I almost bought an 24” IMac, was getting ready to, but in the end I was convinced to go with better computer for half of the price. I also played around by putting Hackintosh OSX on the new computer which works pretty well.

There is still some setting up to do but it is good to get done with something like that. Get a new shiny computer and oportunity to reboot and rebuild your working environment.

Photo

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:07:33 -0500

Watching presentation on popfly and silverlight

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:46:01 -0500

Watching presentation on popfly and silverlight

Silverlight Thoughts

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:24:00 -0500

So far I have had mixed expirience with silverlight. While I like the technology in some ways I found a lot of problems trying to jum into using it. There were problems getting it to work in my visual studio and browsers. Then I found that some of the Quickstarts were not working and even example code.

I like some of the features and it seems that overall the Silverlight is pretty cool, but since it is young there are some problems and wrinkles that make it quite unready for prime time. However some companies like Netflix are already using it.

"By three methods we may obtain wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation,..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:23:00 -0500

“By three methods we may obtain wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is bitterest.”

- Confucius

Photo

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:07:03 -0500

January

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:22:33 -0500

Year started with a few vague goals on my part. They are sort of like ideas that I would like to implement. Not much of a resolution because they are sort of amorphous flowing one into another. Basically I would like to stream line a few things, put a better portfolio together and give a few things to the digital world. Place to start, maybe a template or theme or two and some other freebies of the type. I started a work on some of that.