Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

I’m moving to another place. Right the next day I submitted the notice to the leasing office my kids, being under great impression of “Blue’s Clues” TV program, started playing clues. Soon they invented that the best clues can be made with marker on walls. I spent about 1 hour trying different substances on the walls, but the wall-marker combination was much stronger then Soap, Magic Eraser, OxiClean, rubbing alcohol and other pretty powerful substances. Only in a few weeks I recalled what I was studying on chemistry at school and solved the problem in seconds.

After a hard day of development and testing I’m proud to announce Web interface for routerbot It greately facilitates roubot teleoperating. With this interface you have to use telnet and ssh no more. Instead, you just click on colorful arrows on a webpage and see the robot doing exactly what you clicked. Another interesting feature is that the web interface simplified programming.

Many people are dreaming about consolidating all media files (video, music, pictures etc) in a single place. For some it is a huge full of DVDs, CDs and photos. Others buy hardware media servers and store all files in them. I chose a solution based on Archos 605 WiFi and a Linux Server running UPnP Media Server. Here’s how it works …

Couple days ago I became happy owner of Archos 605. Here is a short review of this wonderful/horrible device and explanation why most people won’t like it.

I’ve got new Archos DVR Station recently. The nice thing about it is a cool remote with tons of different buttons that provide full keyboard+mouse functionality for Archos 605 PMP. Unfortunately the remote appeared to be dead. I was almost ready to pack it and send back to the store when recalled a situation happened a few years ago. Some device I was 100% sure is ok didn’t work with brand new batteries. The problem was too short “+” tip on the battery. Some devices (like this Archos DVR Station) have weird profile of battery holder that prevents the “+” tip from touching the contact spring. The solution is quite simple - use some sharp tool to pop the contact spring out the plastic “niche”. Alternatively you can just buy a different type of battery with longer tip.
BTW, the batteries that have this problem were “batteries.com” brand, but I saw couple other brands with the same problem.

Thanks to N2H Global Translator now you can conveniently translate this blog to couple other languages using free online translation services. Just click the appropriate flag in the top-right corner of the header and get the page in the “language” of your preference.

Unfortunately the quality of translation for many languages is still poor, but at least you can get an idea of what this blog is about. I checked the quality in English->Russian translation, laughed for a few minutes but decided leave it as is. I’m just thinking if the translations are always funny or they can be offensive sometime? Please let me know in comments if this happens, I would really appreciate that.

Last 12 months I was working on an interesting device that provides the network security features many companies and families are dreaming about. You probably already have heard about different threats out there like internet predators, viruses, spyware, dangerous websites, confidential information leaking from your business and others. Also you probably tried to find answers to questions like

• Is my office network used appropriately? Do people really use it for work and not something else?
• Are my kids safe in the Internet? Are their virtual friends really friends?
• Why is my internet so slow?
• Who in my network is using the internet most, when and what for?
• How can I prevent my children or employees from browsing inappropriate content, wasting time in chats or games?

Finally, you might want to get answers to the questions immediately and you don’t want to spend a lot of time configuring every single computer in your network, installing software and other techi stuff … So the answer to all those questions is one small box called MineStream Defender and here is what it can do …

Here is a typical wireless video camera you can find on ebay and also available from many other e-stores. What do you think about it? Pretty cool - for just $30-50 you can buy ability to see all uninvited intruders crawling towards your house in the night darkness. However before you keep dreaming take a look inside this piece of electronics …

You ran ./configure and got “configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables”. Here is how to fix it …

I was recently installing squid at home as a single caching proxy for all computers in my home network. The simple way is just running squid on your linux router as is and configuring every single browser on all computers in your network so they access internet using squid. That’s doable, but boring. The more interesting way is setting up transparent proxy so all your http traffic goes through squid automatically. I’m not going to explain how to setup the transparent proxy as there are tons of articles in the internet about that, for instance:

• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-setup-transparent-proxy-squid-howto.html
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TransparentProxy.html
• http://www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Transparent_Caching/Proxy

The documentation is very straightforward, and has just one problem: it is outdated and doesn’t work with the most recent versions of squid. I’ve read several instructions and was always ending up with these error messages:

Here’s how to fix the problem …

I just noticed that my video about domestic router turned into robot got its 1000th viewer. This is my very first youtube video and I’m very proud of that.

If you’re thinking about what to do this weekend, building a robot for your kids could be a good idea. This is not very difficult and the result is really amazzzzing. You will get a robot that can be teleoperated via WiFi (i.e. you can control it from almost anywhere in the world) or programmed using shell script for the price way less then an average robot you can get in a hobby store.

More details about the projects are here: http://andrey.mikhalchuk.com/category/robots

I’m getting really nice emails with congratulations on selling pizza.com. From time to time I’m also finding posts and articles about how lucky I am. Thank you very much!! The only problem with that is

I’M NOT THE OWNER OF PIZZA.COM DOMAIN!

Never was and most probably never will be. I’m the one who made the http://www.pizza.com website (design, programming, system support etc) as a hobby project, but this is it.

Anyway, thanks to everyone - I’m forwarding your really nice emails with congratulations on selling pizza.com and posts and articles about how lucky I am to the real (former) owner of the domain. I’m sure he is glad to get them - he is a really nice guy.

Pizza.com had already beaten many records and who knows how many more it will beat in the next two days. So I decided to gather most interesting links about the auction in one place.

Here is the list of the most expensive domain names ever. The list should be up to date April 1, 2008 and it is completely serious.

A year+ ago I’ve got my Motorola RAZR V3T (free with 2-year subscription from T-Mobile). Almost immediately I ordered 1Gb card that would fit more information and music. Of course I chose the cheapest one. At the moment the best offer was 1Gb Kingston card. Unfortunately when I inserted the card into the cellphone it did not get recognized by the phone. It appeared that only “compatible” MiniSD cards could be used with the cellphone, but that “compatibility” cost twice more. So here is how to make your “incompatible” card work with that cellphone.

Well, looks like yes, it will be. In the first day the price went above 600′000 and in the beginning of the second auction day it became almost 1mln. You can find more details here.

So you did something and your windows explorer is now displaying thumbnails without labels?

Here is how to cure it: switch to any other view mode and then switch back to thumbnail view while holding shift key. Nice! How many tiny features like this one windows hides inside?

Ok, here are the promised details. Pizza.com will be sold on http://sedo.com. The auction starts on March 27th 8pm CET and will last for 7 days. Everyone is welcome to bid.

It is now confirmed that pizza.com domain will be sold on an internet auction. The auction will start by the end of March and last for several days. I’ll post more details when available.

I prepared a page with my favorite software review. Most (if not all) of the utilities are for free and I hope you will enjoy those useful tools.