Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

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 …

I tried to figure out how rails reacts to the fact that memcached goes down. Unfortunately there is no god documentation about this besides saying that everything will be fine. Also there are couple misleading posts in different forums saying that rails will never rediscover memcached server that went down and came back again. Here’s what is actually happening…

Ever used default_scope in RoR? Ever regretted you had ever read about this feature after you wrote tons of code and later realized you can’t access the records you need in a convenient way when necessary? Try googling “how to override default_scope” and you will find tons of advices how to do it with model.send(:with_exclusive_scope) { super }, but no real way how to cancel it completely for a model when you really need it (like in tests for instance). Here is a simple solution and a few advices regarding this misfeature:

I don’t know exactly what causes the problem, but I’m unable to download anything from HP (Hewlett-Packard) website. I tried downloading using multiple FTP clients from different platforms and it appeared that Safari under MacOS can download the files, while Firefox under both Windows and MacOS can’t. Right now I tried to get the same file from two XP computers using FireFox and one was able to download the file, while the other one wasn’t. It’s not about firewall settings and not about passive/active mode. If someone knows the reason and how to fix the problem I’d appreciate a comment on this post.

If anyone else is experiencing the same problems use the following solution: copy the URL of the link you’re trying to download the file from (in FireFox right-click on the link and choose “Copy Link location”), paste the link into the browser’s address line, replace “ftp://” with “http://” and hit enter. This will download the file using HTTP protocol.

Domain Name Wire revealed all details about pizza.com domain sale. Here is the source: “National A-1 Buys Pizza.com”. So the real domain owner was Chris Clark and the domain buyer is National A-1 Advertising. Hopefully this answers all questions.

So far the changes on pizza.com website are hardly visible. From what I’ve noticed they removed my name, link to my website and the topmost banner. That’s it. No content updates, no new functionality. Hopefully there is some work in the background and A-1 is cooking something special for pizza lovers. Otherwise that would be really sad story – I had so many plans about new functionality for the website…

BTW, one more funny link: He’s All Over the News, and he e-mailed me. :) Anyway, I’m very grateful to “itstimetoeatpizza” for his offer, I believe he would be a great moderator, unfortunately I’m no longer related to the website.

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 …

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’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.