Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

I’ve lost an important email recently. Some internet beast in the mail food chain swallowed it silently and never released. After some investigation I found that the party responsible for this evil act was in gmail. And 15 more minutes invested into reasearch revealed a few interesting facts about how Gmail teats spam:

1. Google’s spam filters are notoriously bad. Go to gmail.com, hit Spam “mailbox” (it is typically hidden under “More” arrow and check out how many non-spam emails are there. I had two dozen emails sitting there.
2. Google’s spam filters process all emails in a centralized manner meaning there is no way to disable them. Don’t look for this option in the settings – it’s not there. In fact it’s not anywhere!
3. And on top of this Google’s spam “mailbox” automatically purges emails older than 30 days

So to sum up all this GMail randomly destroys your emails and doesn’t bother about notifying you about that. So here is a workaround for this:

Suspicious reviews

Of course many sellers also figured out the power of good amazon rating and no wonder that some of them try to play it. Hopefully this post will help you to identify fake reviews and save you some money.

I recently switched to a different computer and got all gems in the system updated approximately at the same time. Not sure what exactly lead to the problem, but debugging the app in NetBeans became impossible because it stopped stopping on breakpoints. To add some confusion, breakpoints were still working in tests, as I discovered later, just not when I was doing something in Firefox. I tried all recipes including

• Upgrading Netbeans to the most recent version supporting RoR (Netbeans sropped Ruby support and the latest version still supporting it is 6.0.1)
• Checking the extended attributes of all folders. Apparently in MacOS if the project folder has an extended attribute NetBeans can’t debug it. Every time you use “extended” HFS+ features like changing background color of a directory in Finder MacOS adds an “extended” attribute to that folder. You can see it but running “ls -l” and noticing “@” character in the file permissions.
• checking if rdebug is running fine. I used telnet and wireshark to see the communications between rdebug and NetBeans and saw all breakpoints set properly.

So nothing helped until …

• Build the sketch
• Find /tmp/build*.tmp folder. There should be one, if you see multiple then rm -rf /tmp/build*.tmp and rebuild the sketch. Only one build folder should be in the /tmp (for simplicity
• run avr-size /tmp/build*.tmp/[sketch_name].elf
• sum of data and bss values if the number you’re looking for

Here is some information for those looking for a high-end HT. My requirements are:

• At least dual-band (tri,quad-band is a plus), including 144 and 440 bands at minimum
• Good wideband receiver
• All-mode receiver
• Convenient control
• Weather proof
• Ruggedly built
• Having a lot of features, leaving a lot of space for experimentation
• Major brand
• Price should be “reasonable”. It’s clear that an HT with the features listed above won’t be inexpensive, but I want to avoid paying extra for features that I don’t need or paying for something I can get cheaper in a different radio.

These are very expensive requirements and only a few HTs fit them. There are three major companies that produce something that fits most of the requirements: Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu with the following models:

Icom		Kenwood		Yaesu
Icom IC-91A, from $320, dualbander, upgradable to D-STAR	Icom IC-92AD, from $540, dualbander, suports D-STAR	Kenwood TH-F6A, from $304, legendary radio, excellent scanner, tribander, superwide receiver (0.1MHz-1.3GHz), 5W on all three bands	Kenwood TH-D72A, from $485, dualbander, has GPS and APRS support	Yaesu VX-7R, from $320, quadbander, waterproof	Yaesu VX-8DR, from $410, quadbander (with limitations on 220 and 50), advanced APRS support, GPS and Bluetooth upgradeability, WIRES, tree receivers, stereo WFM

Gmail glitch

So yesterday I sent an email from that GMail web interface corporate account using “clean” browser and it again got sent from my personal mail account!! How is that possible?!

Here is another part of the mystery. I keep Thunderbird downloading my corporate email for archival purposes and it correctly downloaded that email as outgoing from corporate account! Even better, the From field in that email contained my corporate account, not personal. I think that proves it’s GMail crazy and not me :)

My best guess is that GMail uses some superadvanced magic for detecting multiple mail accounts belonging to the same user and something is wrong with it. Like when I was sending email from web browser and Thunderbird was downloading emails from my personal account at the same time something glitched in the spell and it sent my email from worng account. That’s definitely poor design and I wouldn’t expect such thing from Google, but … who knows.

No solution to this problem so far, I would appreciate any suggestions.

Blinkx is a powerful audio and video search engine. It’s main competitive advantage is a speech recognition engine. What that means is if someone says “hot dog” in your video blinkx will hear this and show your video when someone will be searching for hot dogs on blinkx website. Cool, right?
YouTube is … well, you know what youtube is.
How to merry these two awesome technologies? Unfortunately not that simple. The only way you can submit your video to blinkx is using “media rss” feed. I’ve heard some time ago youtube was providing media rss feeds for all channels, but for some reason stopped doing that. So here is how you can do it despite this inconvenience …