Other Stuff Blog

Tablet PC Actually Works:

“All my Mac friends are going to have an heart attack, because I am about to say something even I did not expect myself to say: I like Tablet PC!

[…]

Thanks to Activewords, Feed Demon and BlogJet, I have been able to do all the familiar tasks with remarkable ease.”

Ray Daly just wrote me and said that HTMLjive, the first JavaScript-based HTML editor, celebrates 10 years today. Wow! Remember those days?

Read post in his blog…

Bob Walsh doesn’t like Yahoo Hosting with Movable Type:

Life is too short to spend your time waiting for pages to load on the order of 10-20 seconds a page when attempting to work through web hosting control panel; it’s too  short to wait two days for a email tech support request promised in 5-6 hours; it’s too short working with a blogging platform that I thought would be even better than TypePad, but isn’t.

Scott Hanselman included BlogJet in his 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List:

BlogJet - I freaking love this little guy. Works great with DasBlog, supports spellcheck, file upload, makes clean HTML, and includes Music Detection support as well as posting of Audio to your blog.

Thanks, Scott!

Side note: It’s very cold here in Moscow region today… -33 Celsius (it’s about -27 F). Oh…

No, it’s not usual, as you may think (we usually have 0 – minus 20 Celsius on winter).

My car failed to start today… I wish I had this little pony that I saw once from my window:

(And no, seeing pony on the streets of my town is not usual too ).

Nick Bradbury released FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 – the new version of the best news aggregator (in my opinion).

I really like the new version! It’s a huge impovement over 1.5. Now we have tree (at first I didn’t like the idea of trees – I liked the original implementation of feed management better, but since now I’m subscribed to lots of feeds, I find it very useful). I also like the updated Surfer style.

Nick, thank you again for great software!

We have new CDs now:

(To add CD to your purchase when ordering, just tick add/remove check box near “Backup CD” item.)

You know what? PayPal doesn’t accept payments from many countries. When you use PayPal’s system to accept credit cards, people from these countries just can’t pay.

For example, I’m in Russia. I can’t pay for, say, Flickr Pro account, since they accept payments via PayPal (even credit cards are processed by them), and PayPal doesn’t accept money from Russia. Or Mint (developer said that it’s not in his plans to accept payments without PayPal).

Now, everyone  (BSA, RIAA) talks that there are tons of pirated software, music and videos in our country. Since I’m a software developer, I know – this is bad, bad. bad. But how the hell we are supposed to pay if you don’t want accept money from us?

I want, I REALLY WANT to buy music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Can I? No, they don’t accept my money. Same thing with music stores included in Windows Media Player – we have only one such store, which has only Russian pop music that suck.

Think! – Internet, Visa, Mastercard is all about going global. How are you supposed to go global if you restrict people from buying your stuff?

Think again! – there are tons of credit card processors that don’t exclude countries. Use them. Don’t use PayPal. Or use it as an option.

P.S. I accept PayPal. This is for your conveniece. I don’t want to exclude PayPal customers from purchasing my product. But since I can’t accept it directly (remember, I come from “bad” country), I use SWREG to process my PayPal payments.

Check out:

• Mémoires, the easiest Mac diary software.
• Cathodique, standalone YouTube player for Mac.
• BlogJet, blog client for Windows.

Update: PayPal now accepts payments from more countries, so this article is old and not relevant.

I know, Aussies can’t imagine Christmas in winter , but here’s what we have here in Russian village:

I heard that in this year we have the highest snowdrifts in history – 39 centimeters (15.35 inches).