Sometimes the fact, that Mozilla apps are not integrated into OS X well enough is a good thing: I am using SSH tunnel to my work corporate proxy server rather than buggy and slow Cisco VPN. After I get tunnel up, I fire up Firefox as my browser and Postbox as my mail client - both use localhost:8888 as a SOCKS proxy. Works brilliantly, and in the meantime system is still connected to the internet directly, so I can see my home network without any issues and experience no delay related to sending data through the VPN. 

By the way, did I ever say - Postbox works really really well, and can be compared only with Apple’s native client? Well, it doesn’t use OS X’s system-wide proxy - but, as I just said, it’s not always that bad!

Another idea, this time for Twitter/FireEagle mash-up. Out there in a wild there’s a number of apps, which can update your FireEagle location, or Twitter status/location, or both, or take it from one and put to another… What I here suggest is a most simple thing you can probably imagine.

It’s simple, really: a service which monitors your location on FireEagle and Twitter and why should we limit us just with two services? Any location-based service which has an open API will do. Whenever it detects that you have updated a location on one of the services, it broadcasts it to all others - so you can you use favourite Twitter client (say, TwitterPhone) to update your FireEagle location, and keep your Twitter location up-to-date whenever you launch Yofe on your iPhone. 

Anyone wanna take it? :)

An idea for geo/twitter mash-up for #openhackday - a service, which geocodes all tweets and places them on a map. Seriously, it may work - Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a perfect tool for doing it!

An extended idea – display the map with bubbles, size of the bubble indicate number of tweets, clicking on the bubble fire up the feed of tweets geocoded to this location.

Dear Flickr! May I please have a feature of finding all photographs I taken at specific place and within N metres/kilometres/miles of it? If you won’t do it, dear Flickr, I’ll do it myself and earn tons of cash – so don’t blame me for that please!

Right now I am tagging my photographs for that: for example, photographs taken at Sa Foradada – this tag is set automatically as long as GPS coordinates reverse geocoding works smoothly, but for certain places it doesn’t, so I need to tag it manually or add a locality into IPTC data.

So, finally, dear Flickr – please do it for good!

Another idea for geolocation-related service. C’mon, I give it out for free!

1. Using GPS-enabled communication device, defining zones - “Home”, “Work”, “Parents”, “Tesco over the corner”
2. Assigning each zone some tasks:
   
   • “Home” -> “Pay the bill from nPower”
   • “Work” -> “Talk to boss about holidays”
   • “Parents” -> “Ask if they’ll take our cat for two weeks”
   • “Tesco” -> “No sugar at home! How can I drink coffee now?”
3. Well… start walking! As soon as you get into one of the zones, your GPS enabled device will blow up with a burst of reminders.

Few issues though, one of them - constant checking of GPS location may be too battery-consuming. Possible workaround - do a geolocation of several levels:

1. Most rough - GSM-based positioning
2. If we understand, that we’re somewhere in the area of one of the zones - try to use wi-fi geolocation
3. If we’re really close to the zone - do a beep
4. If wi-fi positioning isn’t available - use (A-)GPS.

This way it may save awful amount of battery power while still providing good positioning.

Anyone up for doing such thingie? :-)

Probably it’s a first time since I’ve left my university when I’m looking to something math-related (in this case - classification algorithm) and understand, that my knowledge of math is clearly not enough. Feels very strange and awkward.

I totally love chaps from g2recruitment(dot)com - sorry don’t want to put a link on them. Once, very long ago, I was looking for job and I was stupid enough to send my CV to them. Bah - that was a major fuck-up on my side.

Since then, every day they are sending me email with various positions, 99% of them are absolutely, totally irrelevant to what my CV says (I bet they didn’t read it and just done some automated keyword matching). Best of all things is - in order to unsubscribe of this spam, I should login to their system and unsubscribe manually, and since I forgot my password, I cannot do it - because password recovery simply doesn’t work; idiots managers answer about 1/10th of my “UNSUBSCRIBE!!!” emails stating that they can’t really do anything with it.

What a crap they are! I hope I’d never search for new job with this guys :)

Still thinking about the education, MSc and all that kind of stuff. On one hand, I’d really love to go and obtain a degree not only because of degree itself, but to put all what I know into some form of system before it gets too late (and I finally forget everything I studied for almost 6 years). On the other hand, not much courses I’ve seen are of real interest for me (do they really think they can tell me something about database design? or about “C++ and object-oriented programming”? then I can only recommend them to go and think again).

For sure you haven’t seen many people with three or more hands, but in this particular case, on the third hand if I’m allowed to say that, is the price of this education - Natalie’s studying now, although her employeer pays 50% of her education fees. Ah, forgot to mention - for overseas students fees are normally 4 to 6 times higher (and I am just that - overseas student for chaps at unis). which doesn’t help at all. For example, the one I’m really interested in is £7764 p.a. - and it’s not the cheapest one.

Finally, on the “fourth hand” (OK, let’s admit I’ve created a four-handed monster here), if my dear employeer agrees to pay for me (hypothetically) it practically binds me and grounds at where I work for next couple of years. Not saying that it’s bad (I can’t be fired in this case either), but should something go very wrong… (but they won’t pay anyway, so nothing to worry about).

Recently I’ve realised how much am I obsessed with \LaTeX - while it’s not that easy to use as, say, editing TWiki, it has it’s own benefits:

1. Most important - you can edit everything in your favorite editor, and not on the web page. It means a lot to me :)
2. Second thing, which arguably may be more important than the first one - you can check in \LaTeX source file to CVS, SVN or whatsoever. So, when you see some code which is 5 years old, and it is totally impossible to find the twiki page which descibes how it works - ./doc directory is likely to be there, as well as ./src - which makes life significantly easier
3. And finally, it just looks good. I mean, you don’t do anything to make it look good and readable just because this is the way it works, you don’t need to mix up text and HTML, you just convert it to PDF and you can read it.

Of course, you can’t use \LaTeX for everything, as for rapidly changing documents, discussions and stuff like that Twiki is certainly way to go, although for something which you write once and it won’t be changed until next major refactoring of the functionality (such as - description of the algorithm, mathematical model underneath it, etc) - there couldn’t be better solution, I guess.

How extremely surprising to see people on these Web 2.0 social networks, who you haven’t seen for ages, literally - haven’t heard anything at all for last 5-6 years (which, being a quarter of my age so far, seems very impressive to me). Found my pre-pre-pre-previous boss, I thought that company is null and void long ago - but looks like it’s not, and they are doing pretty well.

I didn’t include this company into my CV anyway, as being just a Jnr C++ developer doesn’t look good… but damn, all of started with something small, didn’t we? So I might reconsider :)