Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

Does OpenDocument Format has future

Yes, but now without OpenDocument Foundation. A few weeks ago ODF announced it’s course shift away from ODF format. As it appeared it was not just shift, or to say it brought down the house along with it… The OpenDocument Foundation has disappeared, taking with it its Web site and having deleted pages Google had been hosting for it, including news on its Compound Document Format translator project. (link) There is no official statement about the event, but there are some clues in Sam Hiser’s Blog and RedmondDeveloper’s blog. Now OpenOffice, StarOffice and Symphony are on their own with OpenDocument Fellowship. Will they survive as a team behind ODF or will they move on to some other format? Will Microsoft prevail with their OOXML? Or a Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Bringing RISC technologies to your Windows XP

Technology progres  is not staying on the same level, but going forward with rocket speed. For a few years everybody is talking about RISC technologies and how they are being incorporated in the modern processors. CPU is not the only place where it works well. GPU cards (video cards for your PC) are taking advantage of it for some time already and now a next step has been made – public API to reuse computing power of GPUs. This a very new thing (9 months is not a long time), but it already start to stir software comunity. Is factor of 25 in performance increase sound good? But lets come back to this later. It is not yet widely known, but Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

1and1 internet service quality.

If you search for discussions about 1and1 hosting service you might find much of diverse information and opinions. And I wrote about some of my experience in the past as well. This blog and *.dragonsoft.us domains are hosted by this provider for last ~5 years. It was great at the beginning, there was some sluggish service in the middle, but it seems to be coming back. I have almost completed a migration of domains and updated a design of the web-site at this point but in the mean time there were a few questions during this journey which require a little more then just having an access to FTP and databases. There is the thing about standard packaging – you might loose some flexibility Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

GPS or Merry-Go-Round. Part II

I have started to talk about mobile GPS solutions some time ago and there is more about my experience. 2. Mount My BT-359 works just great and helps me on the road several times already. Keep in mind if you want to feel comfortable at all time then make sure you have enough juice in your batteries before the trip otherwise you might be stuck in the middle of nowhere and would have to use “old” ways to navigate. As I mentioned before I am using Dell Axim 51 (now an obsolete device since Dell stopped production of it, but still working for me just fine) and I started to look around for something I can use to mount it in Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Diving at Maui

Week before our departure, I have finally had time (and reason) to finish my PADI certification. Time was spent not without a joy by itself and it did paid it back in full during a trip. We were on the beach almost every day and there were several group of people who were taking diving lessons. Well, not a best way to spend time on Maui. If you have an option to take diving lessons before the trip, take it. You do not want to spend several days in the water (see a group of small spots in the water near the beach) just to able finally go to the diving trip. Take lessons with your local diving shop at time convenient to Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Web-design: Through the thorns to the stars – I

Well, a new design of my web-site is coming together (preview is available here. It is for IE 7 and FireFox only at this point.) and going through few quirks many questions occurred. How was it? This is my story. Ok, original code and layout did come to life back in early 2000 and main purpose was to have a web-site to collect Wise scripts written by me and contributed by others. Over last 7 years many things have changed and many new ideas were introduced. Technologies, new browsers, new styles and ideas flooded the web and one can find so many styles and ways of creating web-sites as many web designers (and not only) are around. First thing first. Old version has been using frames. Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

To be or not to be – Steve Jobs about Philippe Kahn?

It is interesting how life is spinning sometimes… Few months back I was doing some research about what-is-he-doing-now about Philippe Kahn and I stepped on some of the historical facts about him on Wikipediaand on Internet. One of the things was when he was talking about earliest days of camera phones. Then it resurfaced as this article. And… I was doing some browsing today and this comment pops-up on Google. It seems to me that Steve was very upset about Philippe’s claim(s)… Believe NOT. This is not Steve’s blog, but a post on “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” – a satirical blog about Apple‘s iconic chief executive and purporting to be penned by him, and being published in association with Forbes.com starting Aug. Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago