starter

Vista battery saver

Very useful utility for Windows Vista is now available from codeplex,
Vista batter saver is a great utility that saves you tons of battery life by disabling Vista battery-draining features, give it a try. It also comes with another small utility that tracks your battery usage and helps determine what besides the obvious applications and features like Aero and sidebars has impact on your particular system, so give it a go

Walk from your house

In the suburbs it's easy to live in a place where there is no real possibility to get around without owning a car, but how do you quantify the measure of it? One website does just that with walkscore.com. Enter your address and get a score of ease of access to grocery stores, restaurants, shops, etc. Very cool to see your neighborhood from this point of view and a very good tool for somebody looking for specific things in their new home. Our score is 74 out of 100 which isn't bad for 'burbs. It's very walkable: it's possible to get by without owning a car, although I would recommend having one for sure :)

Bryan Brothers Racquets

I don't understand what the Bryan Brothers are playing with. Clearly they switched to Prince at the US Open, their dad made a big deal about it, blah blah, but in Davis Cup I saw them playing against Spain with their old Wilsons. However this week they are back to playing with Prince. So what's happening? Are they choosing racquets based on their opponents or they just forgot for a minute that they are now Prince boys?

Windows XP Tweaks

Today my computer had a strange problem. Basically something got corrupted on my system and the minimized windows no longer showed up in the taskbar. They were still in the Task Manager, but not on the taskbar. A little research and I came across wonderful site by the name Kelly Corner which has tons of useful tweaks and fixes for Windows. Use Kelly's Taskbar Plus script to fix your windows problems.

Walking in slow motion

I would like to learn how to walk in slow-motion. I think it will really intimidate my opponents when I walk onto the tennis courts. Trouble is I have no idea where to start and how to actually do it. Probably a better solution would be to play some kind of Jedi mind trick on my opponent to make him think that I am walking in slow-motion when I am really just walking normally.

Eastern European Encodings

Man, this is really bothering me. Couple of days ago I was reading something on the internet about an app and people complained that their version of encodings was broken or something, anyways it seems they talked about something like Bosnia is now a different country and Herzegovina is this and Serbia is that and now they don't know the encodings and Cyrillic this and Latin that, etc etc. Then yesterday I am on the msdn blogs for something totally separate and run across an entry on the BCL Team blog titled "New .NET 2.0 Security Patch Changes Some Culture Names on Windows XP/2003/2000 [Justin Van Patten]". Was I surprised to see a table of encodings there that talked about exact problem these pppls where having just 2 days ago and now I cannot remember what that was all about but this entry would sure be useful for them, so click on the link above to learn more.

IPod Shuffle - the painful saga continues

Ok, so the latest problem with the Shuffle was when I connected it to my computer and the message was "The iPod is not formatted properly" and iTunes was asking to Restore to Factory settings. Well, let's do it, I thought, clicked the Restore button and...nothing happened.
Seems like a lot of people are having trouble with their Shuffles falling out of favor with their respective iTunes. So, here is what worked for me after a *couple* of tries:
Setup:
Windows XP SP2
iTunes 7.3.1.3
iPod Shuffle 2 Gen

Here is what to do:
1. Download iPodResetUtility from apple and install it.
2. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and click on "Disk Management" under "Storage".
There you will find your iPod listed as a drive. Right-click on the iPod icon, Click on "Change drive letter and paths..." and change the letter on your iPod to something else! (I tried to change it from G to I for iPod and it worked fine, but it really does not matter. For the rest of the exersize we will pretend you changed it to I).
3. Once you have done this, go to Start -> Run and type cmd
This will open a Command prompt. at the prompt type "format I:" without the quotes. The prompt will ask you for volume label, type something like "myipod", it does not matter. Once you are done, go to the next step:
4. Set the On-Off switch on the Shuffle to OFF.
Disconnect it from USB drive you had it plugged into.
Go to Start -> All Programs -> iPod -> iPod Reset Utility, launch it.
5. Connect your iPod to a USB drive on your computer that is either in the back or the front of your ACTUAL COMPUTER BOX, NOT YOUR MONITOR OR KEYBOARD. Once plugged in, switch the On-Off switch on the iPod to ON.
The Reset Utility should recognize your Shuffle and ask you to Restore it. It's all in the hands of the Reset Utility from here.

Enjoy!

p.s. I don't know why some of the things have to be the way I described them here, for example why going to command prompt instead of right-clicking to format worked for me and right-clicking did not or why the On-Off switch had to be off before connecting and switched to On afterwards, I just know that the sequence of steps described above seemed to get the job done under my computer environment. I am very curious as to what other people have found to work or not to work restoring their iPod Shuffles.
Also, as a follow-up take a look at this article from Apple Support that talks about not being able to recognize iPods when it's letter is same as a mapped drive on the network

Recruiters calling...

Recruiters have started calling me. The wild part is that they are calling on my work line while I am at work, want to talk to me about "Great opportunity in Atlanta Area" and ask for me by name. So, I wanted to know how they get my name, started asking some of them, and the answer was "anonymously referred". Well, in actuality it turns out that they simply go to my LinkedIn account, look at who my current employer is and call the main switchboard. Not the smartest way to get business, but still pretty clever.

The BlackBook

Last weekend we saw the Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, pretty decent movie which keeps you guessing and on the edge of your seat for very fast 2 1/2 hours. History, suspense, action, sex, the story of war that makes for a pretty good thriller.
And a wonderful thing happened, my wife and I really talked in depth about this movie afterwards, re-thinking its details and nuances, and we rarely discuss Hollywood junk.
Zwartboek

How to recover songs from iPod part Deux

So, the impossible happened: my computer crashed, hard drive died and all my "important" data lost. And by important data, I mainly mean songs that I download and don't have stored on the cd's and not things like irreplaceable family pictures, past projects, any financial data, or something really important (you back up all the really important stuff somewhere else, right?). And then I remembered that songs that were on my computer are also for the most part stored on my iPod. When examining closer, I noticed that iPod actually renames mp3 files when stores them to some weird 4-letter word, like QWER.mp3 in folder F03. Strange, but probably some sort of copyright deterrent or fast search help or maybe its for the Shuffle Songs feature. So, iPod has some sort of mapping file where they store the actual name of the file and the file on disk. Clearly, the iPod folks did not care about the filename as it's stored on my computer and only worried about what? the ID3 infos? Hmmm...
Well, what's a programmer to do? I surely was not going to sit in front of my computer and manually rename each file and place them in the corresponding folders sorted by Artist and Album. Who do you think I am? Data entry person? No way! Well, i did find a shareware utility ID3 - TagIt which had some sort of batch rename mode, but the UI and directions seemed way to complicated. So, scrap that idea.
If you can't rip it off the internet, write it yourself and even more so, just make it do exactly the thing that you want it to do. I don't really need any of the advanced features right now like connecting to the FreeDB database and so on, I just wanted to read the ID3 info and then rename the file based on the combination of Song title, track number and place it in the / folder. Organized, clean, simple. Very well, what I got is a tiny app that has a browse to... button, OK and Cancel button and that’s it. Find the top-most folder of your music, it will recursively walk all folders inside it, pull out all mp3 files and place them somewhere within the specified destination directory. If the ID3 info is not found, it will place it at the root and you will have to manually play with it.
Next version should theoretically check for folder validity, warn that the destination folder is not empty, show the progress bar and actually interrupt the process when the cancel button is pressed, but for about 25+ minutes of coding, this ain't bad.
Just in case anyone is interested, I am attaching the source written in C# without any warranty here as a .zip file. The attached project is a 2005 version, you may want to download the Express Edition from Microsoft.

Also, I zipped the .exe using .NETZ library, a C# solution for distributing .net executables, the big advantage is that you can zip your .dll’s, .exe’s, and resources as one small executable and distribute it to clients as one file, very useful.

Our iPod Shuffle and a Good Samaritan

I love my Shuffle, it's perfect for when I run at the gym (don't really like listening to music when in a park), does it's thing and nothing else therefore it's light, compact, and easy to use. The only thing i wish it could also do is add songs from multiple computers (Shuffle only works with a single iTunes playlist since it does not have it's own concept of playlists, just a list of songs that are on it - more of a reason for it to be able to talk to multiple iTunes, i don't want it to sync, just be able to add songs. So anyways, Tuesday I was at the gym, and thought I lost it, since it is really small, it is really easy to misplace it so I am always very careful where I put it after a run. This time I was not so careful, and it was gone. Now the interesting part. Today (2 days later) I was ready to go and buy another one thinking that I have suffered enough without it, but had distant thought to go back to the gym and ask at the front desk if somebody had turned it in. I must admit that I personally would not turn it in. Finders keepers. To my huge surprise they had it at the front desk in the safe. Somebody DID turn it in. I was very happy to have it back with all my songs on it and still fully charged, saved $80. But how unbelievable that somebody turned it in. Just amazing.

Recent visit of Religion to our home

We live in Atlanta, GA and our Russian community is more virtual then physical, in the sense that we gather on our Forum website and an occasional lake picnic but don’t really live together like past era immigrants in New York or Chicago. So imagine my surprise when a couple knocked on my door and started speaking in broken Russian about injustices in the world and other things. To my question “How did you know we speak Russian”, the man with a Bible in his hand answered that he looked through a phone book and by our last name thought that we might. What a crock of crap! Our last name is not Davidoff or even Smirnoff, and not even Russian, so where did he get this idea? This man clearly lied to me holding his Bible in his hand. I should not be surprised but for those that believe every word they hear just because somebody is holding the Good Book in his hands, beware! Actually there is a woman in Atlanta who has addresses of Russian speakers that I believe she acquired from one of the Immigration Services and she directs these door-to-door salesmen to these addresses. I guess if they recruit you into their church and later you find out they used a “small” lie you just forgive them for the greater good.

Free Dwayne "Dog" Chapman

Dwayne Chapman and his relatives have been arrested for bringing to justice a rapist from Mexico. Free him now, federal marshals and let the man do his job of capturing the true bad guys!

Madonna in Russia

[RUS] After her concert in Russia, Madonna used a computer program to translate her thanks for the Russian fans which shortly appeared on her website and made Russian news. Please pay special attention to the Russian translation:

Thanks to the 50,000 ecstatic Russian fans who attended my Confessions show in Moscow! The show was a blast! I'm on the way back to the hotel now and I just wanted to let you know that everything is ok. The security staff did a wonderful job of making sure the show was safe! Thanks Russia!

Спасибо 50.000 ecstatic русских вентиляторов присутствовали на моих исповедях показывают в moscow! Выставкой был взрыв! Я нахожусь на дороге back to гостиница теперь и я как раз хотел препятствую вам знать что все одобрено. Штат обеспеченностью сделал чудесную работу делать уверенной выставка был безопасен! Спасибо Россия!

Image courtesy of madonna personal blog

UN Resolution on Israel - Hizbullah

Today I feel cheated. The United States together with impotent United Nations and Condi Rise, for whom until this point I had tremendous respect, have sold out Israel and concocted a completely pro-Hezbollah seize-fire. I am not even saying pro-Lebanese because there is no Lebanese interest served in having a radical militia within its borders and as a part of its government. Now there are talks that the guerillas will not even disarm, just will not show their arms in public. I guess they are trying to pass some “concealed weapon” laws. I can almost see how the Lebanese premier is negotiating with Nasrallah. It probably goes something like this:
LP: “Nasrallah, please give up your weapons”
N : “No, my little weak friend, I will do no such thing”
LP: “But…but…I thought we agreed to live in piece”
N : “We are going to live in piece, by the way, I will need to live in your home while you rebuild mine that was destroyed by the Israelis…mmmOK?”
LP: “But United Nations….United Nations”
N : “You still here? I will also need some trucks and planes to bring in more rockets from Syria, but let’s keep that on the down-low…mmmOK?”
…
How is this cease-fire good for Israel? In no way, no how. Just as the IDF was about to really push on the Hezbollah and hopefully render it unconscious for years to come, this stupid anti-war on terror resolution came in. So, who is the winner in this conflict? Lebanon? Israel? Not likely. The pressure put on Israel from the UN and the US must have been tremendous for her to stop the offensive. Why did they stop when the goal was so close, the Litany River within the arm’s reach. Oh, wait, in the Middle East everything is within an arm’s reach. We often forget here in the US that the distance we drive to work here every day, in Israel is enough to go from West of the country all the way to the East. Slight exaggeration, but you get my point. So when the Katusha rockets fall on Israeli cities its really because they are within the arm’s reach from the Hezbollah positions and pushing back the terrorists from Israel’s borders was fundamental in achieving victory in this chapter of the conflict. Now the US and the UN only made it more difficult for Israel to defend its borders. I mean if the Hezbollah is going to be mixed in with the Lebanese army south of the Litany and on top of that the stupid blue helmets are going to be there, how will IDF distinguish and be able to target the terrorists? On the other hand, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government. If a part of this government attacks another country, doesn’t that mean that the whole government is attacking that country? So, in my humble opinion, Israel was more that just to bomb Lebanon and did not do enough of that. Until the Lebanese protest Hezbollah like the Americans protested the KKK in the 60’s and 70’s, the Lebanese are responsible along side the terrorists. Isn’t Lebanon a terrorist-harboring state? So, wipe away your tears, Lebanon and start acting like a big boy.
By the way, Israel has no leverage left to get back her kidnapped soldiers. I fear the worst fate for them.