Maxim's blog

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Books

• Free Software Free Society – Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Edition
• Free as in Freedom (2.0) – Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution

Web development

• Adding Touch to A Web Site Using the jQuery SwipeTouch Plugin –
• Build a Neat HTML5 Powered Contact Form –
• CSS3 Tutorials and Resources –
• HTML5 Rocks – New Tricks in XMLHttpRequest2 –
• Load Google Maps API using jQuery Deferred –

.NET software development

• The Ultimate List of Freely Available .NET Libraries –

Science

• The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science – by Mother Jones

Software

• 27 Notepad++ Plugins, and Which You Really Need –

Software development

• Migration from a Commercial Search Platform (specifically FAST ESP) to Lucene/Solr –

Web

• First Orbit – A real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin’s original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard.
• No more addresses: Asia-Pacific region IPv4 well runs dry –
• Privacy and Security Fanatic: Julian Assange: Facebook is a “spy machine” for US Intelligence –

Web development

• 28 Useful Plugins To Enhance Your Tables’ Efficiency –
• A User-Centered Approach To Web Design For Mobile Devices – Smashing Magazine –
• Dynamic Source Code Viewing with jQuery – Display source code of your JavaScript and CSS files on the page with this simple JavaScript code
• Editable lines in Google Maps using the Javascript v3 API –
• Optimizing the asynchronous Google Analytics snippet – Mathias Bynens impoves the asynchronous version of Google Analytics tracking code
• Serving small static files: which server to use ? – Comrarison of Nginx, Varnish, G-WAN, Apache Traffic Server and Lighttpd web server performance
• Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3 – by Smashing Magazine
• Useful JavaScript and jQuery Tools, Libraries, Plugins – by Smashing Magazine
• Weekends are for hacking – Play with some interesting JavaScript libraries. By NowJS Blog

 

 

There are some things which were common in the past, but become obolete today due to their side effects.

Shoe Fluoroscope

Some shoe stores thought that by installing X-Ray machine in their store will improve sales by allowing customers to get better fitting shoes by looking at your feet inside shoe using X-Rays. More than 10.000 such devices were installed in stores in US and UK (which were called Pedoscopes there). By 1960s, when side effects of radiation become known, they were prohibited and were quietly removed from stores. More info on whis could be found at Wikipedia.

Shoe Fluoroscope, manufactured circa 1938, manufactured by Adrian Shoe Fitter, Inc. that was used in a Washington, DC Shoe Store. This machine is currently displayed at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.

Heroin as over the counter cough medicine

If you think that addictive drug heroin was always considered harmful, have a look at the following photo. From 1898 through to 1910 diacetylmorphine was marketed under the trademark name Heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant. Bayer marketed the drug as a cure for morphine addiction before it was discovered that it rapidly metabolizes into morphine. (Source Wikipedia)

Pre-war Bayer heroin bottle, originally containing 5 grams of Heroin substance.

Old advertisement for Bayer pharmaceuticals.

Doctors advertising cigarettes

I ‘ve wrote about it earlier. Doctors, dentists and even kids (!) were used to advertise smoking:

Starfall.com is, in my view, is one of the best online resources for kids. Interactive games teach kids how to read, find missing letters in words and shows how to pronounce works and phrases. My 5 years old daugther loves this site and was practicing on it within last several weeks. All you needs is browser with Flash and speakers.

 

.NET software development

• Monad Tutorial, Part 1 – Monads as Deciders / Identity Monad. Video tutorial on Vimeo

News

• Million-song dataset: take it, it’s free – Freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks

Software development

• ShiftEdit – Online in browser IDE with HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Python language support. Can upload files to server via FTP or SFTP.

Web

• C3?s High-Definition 3D City Maps Are Pretty Sweet –
• How To Back Up Your Gmail The Easy And Cheap Way – Lifehacker shows how to make your Gmail inbox by getting all messages via POP using Thunderbird or command-line fetchmail

Web development

• 10 Tips for Decreasing Web Page Load Times –
• CSS Floats 101 – The float property is a valuable and powerful asset to any web designer/developer working with HTML and CSS. Tragically, it can also cause frustration and confusion if you don’t fully understand how it works. Test or refresh your knowledge as Noah Stokes explores float theory and behavior, and guides us through common float-related coding pitfalls.
• CSS Typography: Techniques and Best Practices – second part of a three-part series of guides on CSS typography
• Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Installation – Imrove comments, SEO, application performance and lots of other wordpress features using these quite popular plugins
• Introduction to the Nmap Security Scanner on Vimeo –
• Loads.In: Test How Fast A Website Loads From Over 50 Locations Worldwide – Another online tool to measure page loading time
• Mozilla releases first stable version of Open Web Apps –
• Scaling A JavaScript Codebase –
• Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic – Nettuts+ video shows how to improve your WordPress powerd blog performance
• Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know – Smashing Magazine article explains how to setup Wordress to make development and debugging of plugins easier
• The Font-Face Rule and Useful Web Font Tricks – A brief overview of available font formats and their history and practical usage of them on your website by using @font-face CSS property
• Using Deferreds in jQuery 1.5 –

In Ubuntu 10.10 it’s super easy to install newly released Firefox 4. All you need is to add firefox-stable repository. Just run these commands from command line.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If you are using same web based application quite frequently, you may like to use a keyboard shortcuts for some operations to make things faster.

Here is en example how to use jquery.hotkeys plugin to create a navigation menu or selector which could be changed using keyboard keys instead of mouse. (more…)

A 10-cent pill doesn’t kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a new study from Duke University.

If you live in Sydney, it’s worth visiting Star City, especially a tram stop located inside this building. A vending machine here offers same Pepsi Max cans for three (!) different prices: $2.20, $3.50 and $3.80.

Did the machine owners read that study?

I’m using Panoramio photo sharing service to publish my geolocated photos, so people can view and reuse them according with Creative Commons license. On 22 February 2011 I’ve noticed a sudden spike in number of photos viewed, three times higher than average. It made me wonder what caused such sudden change. And the reason was earthquake at Christchurch on that same day.

Since I had only 50 or so photos of Christchurch out of 1700 photos published, so I’ve decided to check these photos. As you can see, the photo made in Christchurch city centre was viewed 38 views on the day of event and had steady deceasing trend afterwards. Before events it averaged 0 or 1 views per day.