kharkovyy [dot] com » Sites

my site, the iPhone version

Andriy — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:27:27 +0000

Since I don’t feel like posting anything useful, I figured I should at least share that my website now can be accessed via shiny new iPhone interface.

Since this site doesn’t really see ton’s of traffic, this upgrade is mostly for me, so that I can do entries from my phone without having to load the whole thing. But, if you are one of the “lucky” ones that has an iPhone I’m sure you’ll appreciate the new improved loading speed. Of course, once the 3G iPhone comes out ( as rumored that will happen on the 9th of next month) then you don’t have to worry about this nonsense as you will be able to browse most everything at the new and improved speeds..:

facebook clone

Andriy — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:31:54 +0000

I miss the days when there was only one social networking website I didn’t want to be a part of. Now with myspace, facebook, linkedin and others I find myself logging in to ten different websites just to answer to messages from my friends,…. but if only that was it…
…as the internet becomes cheaper and more importantly, more available across the world, I am once again, presented with forceful “encouragement” to join numerous social networking websites to keep in touch with people that I have largely lost touch with from my past.
Of course as they say..”curiosity killed the cat“, so as a well behaved consumer I login to these websites and create accounts to once again “keep in touch”

Well interestingly enough, the latest social networking website that i have been “encouraged” to join by some relatives from Russia turned out to be anything but, Russian.
Well the website itself is in Russia (i suppose) and it has a Russian name ( www.vkontakte.ru ) but there’s just something on that website that looked entirely too familiar…..

Basically it looks like the guy that owns that site took facebook.com code and translated it in Russian.

Good for him, looks like he is taking advantage of seemingly non existent copyright laws. Even if Facebook wanted to prevent him from blatantly stealing their code, i doubt there is much they can do.

(click the thumbnails for larger view)

as though world needed more proof

Andriy — Fri, 25 May 2007 12:33:23 +0000

It’s basically common knowledge that Microsoft has lost the online battle, in fact in my eyes Microsoft never really came to be a player in that market. M$ search engine is crap and i haven’t used hotmail since late ‘99. Although there is a handful of applications from Microsoft that I do use, generally Mac and Google are integral part of my daily routine.

So last night i logged in to my web server and started looking through some stats and noticed a very interesting thing. There were several hits that came to my site from Microsoft’s “live” search engine. What was interesting to me and basically the reason for this post is that both of the hits from Microsoft’s Live search engine that led persons to my site were for keywords that DO NOT exist on my site.

First query that my site showed up under was for word “bingo” and second was just yesterday for “betting”. The most interesting of it all is that neither of the words exist on my blog. You can search for yourself by typing either of these two words in the search box on the right.

So case in point, if you use Microsoft’s Live search engine you are most likely wasting time on browsing through irrelevant sites, use Google.
I’m sure the user that searched for those two words was extremely disappointed to come across my blog…

google desktop for mac, finally!

Andriy — Sun, 20 May 2007 17:20:41 +0000

For a while there it seemed as though Google was neglecting mac users by releasing most of the applications on windows platform and very few applications for mac. Well it seems as though Google is redeeming itself by attempting to catch up.
Today i installed Google Desktop for Mac and I am pleased in the way it’s working. Although all of Google applications for windows were sort of working like the Mac OS, on windows they never really worked as intended [what a surprise]. I had Google Desktop on my windows laptop but after a short while i had to uninstall it as windows was not working well with the “global search” feature.
Mac OS already has a very nice Spotlight feature and as Google Desktop was being installed I thought that it might be a little redundant to have both things sucking up my computers processing power doing exactly same thing. But now after some time using Google Desktop for Mac i can see that these two features while resembling each other in many ways are a nice supplement for one another. Spotlight does a fantastic job in finding stuff on the computer itself while Google Desktop does the same for the web stuff, emails and anything also i do on the internet.

Because for me using a computer means using google, I am very happy with this application.
I don’t really have time or patience to write a full-fledged review of this program and i’m sure there will be plenty of people doing that anyway. But one thing i would say is if you have a Mac you should consider installing this application, it will simplify your life, i promise.

next era of searching

Andriy — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:04:56 +0000

Today "personal" section of WSJ had an interesting article about new ways some of the internet giants are developing and integrating features into their sites. Specifically site dealt with how sites like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask use spinoff sites to test features without putting their existing formulas at risk. Of course I had to test these sites out and I was surprised with… Microsoft’s creation. That’s right, thumbs up to Microsoft for Ms. Dewey. Microsof’s www.msdewey.com uses pre-recorded video clips of actress playing Ms Dewey to entertain while you search. Needless to say she is quite entertaining. In fact once i started entering various search queries into the search box and she started saying stuff I stopped focusing on how useful the query returned was and started focusing on what sort of silly things i can get her to do.

And yes, Isaac and I just had to enter in some questionable queries just to see her responses, which are quite hilarious i must say. So here are some screen shots and enjoy.

Edit: However despite Microsoft’s Ms Dewey being entertaining, Google’s SearchMesh.com still takes the top for usefulness.