Amazon announced international version of Kindle!

Amazon-Kindle-2-Pictures

Good news for all ebook and Kindle fans who live outside US. Amazon decided to sell its Kindle for the rest world. Its price is very attractive – $279 (about €190) plus shipping. Personally I like Kindle. In my opinion its design is perfect. The rest ebook readers look not so nice but they provide more wide functionality such support Russian language or FB2 book format.

In any case, the possibility to buy Kindle officially outside US sounds very good. Will wait a bit till it’ll support Russian language and then will buy it.

Additional mysql server UTF8 confutation

I spent a few day with patching LinuxMCE database connection to pass UTF8 option to the server. But without luck. However I found a way to configure mysql server to skip client’s request about charset and send all data in the defined one. To do that just add following lines in the my.cnf file under mysqld section:
[mysqld]
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8; SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci;'
default-character-set=utf8
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake

The option init_connect replaces setting ‘SET NAMES utf8’ from the client and skip-character-set-client-handshake tells to server to ignore charset sent by client and use it default one instead.

I tested this approach with LinuxMCE and it works. The Russian text is displayed on the Orbiter correctly. I tested it with Perl as well and found that Perl script still should set option mysql_enable_utf8 to true.

[via Saiweb]

Traffic jams map with camera view from Yandex

logo
Russian company Yandex which offers a lot of useful services and has Google’s vision of the web business (IMHO) recently announced Moscow map map with traffic jams and live cameras view! That’s really cool service and I didn’t see anything similar before. Additionally there are panoramic views. Similar as Google has.

I’m waiting when the live cameras will be added for St. Petersburg. Or at least panoramic views. Sometimes I’m missing it.

Next generation of Nokia Internet Tablet

Nokia Internet Tablet

The next generation of Nokia Internet Tablet will sport 3G HSPA, a TI OMAP3 processor, OpenGL graphics accelerator, and will run Maemo 5 OS the first release of which SDK was done recently. Supporting of 3G network will give more choices for people to stay online.

[via The Nokia Blog]

KDE 4.1 useful tips and tricks

Preface

When I tried KDE 4.0 first time a few monthes ago I was very disappointed. The system was absolutely unusable. Mainly it was the reason why I didn’t upgrade my Fedora to version 9. But after 10 was released I decided to make an upgrade. I thought that KDE 4.1 should be better. It’s really better but to setup my accustomed environment I spent two days including GNOME configuration because I couldn’t work in KDE. So, I decided to write that post to share my experience and use it my myself what I’ll setup another PC.

Continue reading KDE 4.1 useful tips and tricks

E65, alarm and blocked navigation buttons

When I got Nokia E65 last year I faced with strange problem. After alarm was triggered the navigation buttons (including Own key were disabled). To make them work the phone should be restarted. Recently I found solution to solve that (thanks to forum on allnokia.ru). Using Tracker – advanced and fully customizable desktop application we reassign navigation buttons to the same actions. After that all buttons work correctly till Tracker is run.

Sure it isn’t a perfect solution but at least it works 🙂

Nokia announced Qt Extended mobile platform

It seems that Nokia is going to produce a competitor of Android platform:

Nokia announced today the launch of Qt Extended 4.4, a complete mobile and embedded development platform based on the open source Qt toolkit. It is designed with a modular architecture that provides building blocks for assembling a Linux-based software stack for various embedded devices ranging from phones to set-top boxes.

Nokia already has a good experience with open software – see its Internet Tables family. Not sure who will be a winner – Android or Qt Extended. But any competition is definitely good for growth of mobile devices industry.

Google Chrome: hot or not?

Today Google is not just the best search engine in the world. It provides hosting for domain mail, on-line office, web mail service, RSS reader and much more. That’s why nobody was surprised when Google announced its web browser Chrome. Taking into account the quality of existing services people expect Chrome will be faster, more stable and more user friendly then Firefox or Opera. And it seems that their expectations come true:

I would say the greatest advantage of Chrome over Firefox is its ability to handle tabs in independent processes which means a browser or plugin bug, or an incorrectly coded web page can’t take down the whole browser, but just that tab or plugin alone.

and more:

It scores a 79/100 in the Acid 3 test (ahead of Firefox 3 (75/100) and behind Firefox 3.1 nightlies (85/100)). In the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, it clearly beats Firefox 3.0.1: 3700ms vs 5100ms in my Dell Inspiron 6400 (2GHz Centrino Duo, 2GB RAM).

I was a bit disappointed Chrome’s licence agreements:

11. Content licence from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

I don’t write something special. But I’d like to grant all right to Google for all my content. I don’t know why but Google fixed the agreements:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

P. S. I think that it’d be much better to release Chrome for Linux first and use invitation for beta testers. In that case Google would receive more professional feedback.