Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: September 16th, 2012

Recently I read an article on the Six Revisions blog that discussed 10 seemingly simple improvements to the twitter interface. They included such things as nick autocomplete, mentions, groups, and more.

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

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Updated: July 1st, 2010

From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?

Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the

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Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, it’s a new fad. It’s like you’re not cool anymore if you don’t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldn’t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone else’s ideas – it doesn’t mean

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This is a great read by NY Times. An article on 6 pages rarely gets my full attention but this is one of them (though I detest the usage of "basement hacker").

Basement hackers and amateur mathematicians are competing to improve the program that Netflix uses to recommend DVDs — and to win $1 million in the process.

"THE “NAPOLEON DYNAMITE” problem is driving Len Bertoni crazy. Bertoni is a 51-year-old “semiretired” computer scientist who lives an hour outside Pittsburgh. In the spring of 2007, his sister-in-law e-mailed him an intriguing bit of news: Netflix, the Web-based DVD-rental company, was holding a contest to try to improve Cinematch, its “recommendation engine.” The prize: $1 million.

Cinematch is the bit

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Updated: July 30th, 2021

The Idea

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest

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I’d like to share this relatively new video that shows Google Android’s mutli-tasking capabilities and the seamless integration of these capabilities. Hey, it’s got a copy/paste too (eat that, iPhone!). Android is an OS that’s got a clue. I applaud Google developers for thinking ahead.

You can view more videos from the Android/Google developers here….

Updated: September 5th, 2008

So Google Chrome – Google's attempt at an open source browser, came out yesterday and I took it out for a spin. At its heart is the Webkit engine (also open source) and Google Gears, powered by SQLite (can MySQL rival SQLite in applications like this?). Here are my thoughts.

• Fast – Chrome loads extremely fast, blazing even. Granted, my Firefox would probably load fast if I didn't have any addons as well. Sites like Amazon or Digg load very fast. New tabs open instantly.
• Slow – http://www.blinkx.com/videos/channel:itn, seems like the combination of flash and html (or JS) on one page makes scrolling and redrawing quite slow.
• Very fluid design – I love how the tabs flow around

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1. I want to download and play FLVs on my computer.

2. I don't want to use some crappy FLV player that only plays FLVs and has an interface from either 1995 or 2034 – I want to use my favorite player, like Media Player Classic.

3. Yes, VLC plays FLVs but it can't fast forward or rewind them. Yes, mplayer plays FLVs but I want a GUI. Yes, mplayer supports GUIs but they all pretty much suck. I don't particularly like VLC's or mplayer's interface – want to fight about it?

Enter the latest version of ffdshow. ffdshow is a decoding filter – think of it as a set of codecs for your media players. It supports …

Updated: September 16th, 2012

According to Wikipedia, in April 2008, the number of videos on Youtube was 83.4 million (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#cite_note-5). However, the link in the cite note now displays “*” video results 1 – 20 of millions, without showing the real count.

Here's one way I found to get an estimated, but relatively accurate, number of videos on the popular video sharing site Youtube. The idea is simple. Get this feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/* and parse out the number inside the <opensearch:totalresults> tag.

So here it is: the number of videos on Youtube is currently fluctuating between about 141 million and 144 million. The number goes up and down, which points to the fact that these are estimates.

That's a whole boatload …

Updated: August 20th, 2009

If you haven't heard of Digsby yet, you have probably been living in some kind of a virtual cave or have no friends. Digsby is a multi-network instant messenger application, similar to Trillian, Pidgin (GAIM), or Miranda. I said 'similar', so what makes Digsy special? Reviews I read so far don't give the real reasons and don't dive into the features in depth. Instead, you get a standard load of marketing BS and in the end to you, the user, Digsby may end up being "yet another IM program." Some reviews describe certain features, but so far I haven't seen one that highlighted THE MAIN REASON why Digsby is different. And may I preface it with: finally somebody got a …

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/11192901@N06/1317037389/ and http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/i-see-something-called-internetpic/. …

Updated: July 30th, 2021

When I was working in Radioshack 8 years ago, I remember selling the newest craze: gigantic wireless headphones that were awkward and bulky. The only thing you could do with them is pose as the Verizon guy, running around screaming "can you hear me now?" If you stood at the wrong angle to the receiver, the signal cut out, or even worse, terrible interference turned the most patient people into fiery monsters. I suppose the quality and size of wireless headphones improved over time but they're still unusable in real life because they're completely immobile.

Recently Logitech released a bunch of semi-compromises, like these FreePulse loop-around headphones for $79.99 with a questionable rating and OK reviews, mostly due to crappy …

Updated: June 1st, 2008

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of JavaFX, a Java-based mobile platform but didn't provide any concrete timelines, so I was excited to hear the more on the subject. With Apple iPhone's advent last year and …

Updated: January 4th, 2009

Here are some quick links for now: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/05/23/mysql-clusters-improved-release-model/, http://johanandersson.blogspot.com/2008/05/mysql-cluster-62-officially-released.html, http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/improved_release_model_for_mysql.

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to …