bits of life and business

A-380

lenkov — 2011-08-16T16:00:07-07:00

Live video feed from the tail of A-380....

My Desk from BGSite 2010

lenkov — 2010-11-13T03:24:06-08:00

My deck from Startup/2010 in Sofia, Bulgaria

lenkov — 2010-10-17T04:25:07-07:00

Wait for the slides to load. Click on the slide to advance!

New SK home page

lenkov — 2010-03-17T14:55:15-07:00

We just release the new SiteKreator.com home page and at the same time we replaced our 6-years old home-grown image editor with the leading web-based (flash) image editor: Picnik (recently acquired by Google). To illustrate this with a single image, I applied some Picnik-effects over the the new SK home page.

Clone SK competetition

lenkov — 2009-12-15T23:03:55-08:00

There are at least 31 wanna-be developers from India who believe they can create a full-blown clone of SiteKreator (with improvements) for $5,475 in 60 days (avg).

Good luck -- I have my bloodsucking lawyers on stand-by.

SiteKreator for SEO-obsessed users

lenkov — 2009-09-18T19:06:43-07:00

For the few ppl out there who still believe GOOG will bless them with some place under the sun (on the first page of search results) without contributing to the $21B Adwords revenue, we released few neat SEO-related features:

http://sitekreator.com/sitekreator/pc_url_8221583

In the same release our clients outside US will be able to enjoy the last published date in their local time zone.

Also now the resellers can finally copy an entire web site:

http://sitekreator.com/restutorials/pc_url_8221592

Enjoy!

Santa Clara, CA

SiteKreator's one day release cycle

lenkov — 2009-02-19T23:20:36-08:00

The guys at SKMurphy were too impressed by our daily release cycle, so they decided to do an interview with me on how we actually do it.

As the interview is quite lengthy (I can't imagine this is just part one of two), I'm gonna summarize it for people who are short on time and long on imagination.

Take advantage from having the team located in two time zones: You get 12h development window and 12h for review/QA on each daily release (aka "Follow the sun" model).
Automate the testing to the extend where you can increase the chance of catching a problem (usually by 1%), but increasing the data-set over which you run the test (usually by 100%). For SiteKreator we do brute-force screen capture and compare on massive scale in all possible browsers.
Involve the users in testing the features they requested. This builds a great community, while at the same time lowering the development cost and increasing the final quality.
Have one-click deploy and one-click roll-back in case the shit hits the fan.
Roll-out big changes in stealth mode and do bucket testing with real users before the full roll-out (this way you control how much shit should go to exactly what part of the fan).

And here is one bonus tip, who did not made it to the interview:
6. Take care about the design (UI) and usability before or in the worst case during the development.

Santa Clara, CA

Next Office 2.0 Conference

Lenkov — 2007-03-21T16:35:22-07:00

So Office 2.0 is like Web 2.0, only is more useful for business. Or Office 2.0 is like an online version of the Microsoft Office, only it has neat collaboration features. The truth is that nobody really knows what Office 2.0 really means, incl Wikipedia.

This Friday the gals at DealMaker Media are organizing a great event called "Why Office 2.0 matters?" where we all will find out what Office 2.0 really is and does it really matter?

It will start around 8am in the Microsoft Campus in Mt. View. Be careful, not to leave your notebook unattendant there, as you may find it later preloaded with Windows Vista, which for sure won't be the best thing that could happen to you. After switching to Vista for recording some educational movies for our new design Aurora, Sergey (our lead designer) is rebooting his $2K Core2Duo box few times a day ...

Back to the conference, I'll be presenting our new design Aurora around 11am in the Galileo room. The motto if my presentation is:
Aurora makes the good web design less elitist and more accessible.

In order to prepare for the presentation I took the weekend off (Imagine -- not working on the weekends), but this time I was completely off the gird. I just used the mobile google maps on my Nokia E60 to find my way to the hotel in Tahoe, and that was it. This end up being so disturbing for my two year old Dell, so its battery completely died, just by staying couple of days suspended.

Also I was very proud when I saw how the gals at DealMaker media used SiteKreator to create two of their web sites: DealMaker Media and Under the Radar in just a few days. Wow, our tool can really be useful for someone who don't want to crunch HTML all day (and night) long. There were just some problems with the blog, but we are working on them. For example the blog archive will very soon will be available.

Santa Clara, CA

And the winner is.....

Lenkov — 2007-03-09T20:19:00-08:00

3Tera AppLogic with which I have been involved for the past 3+ years finally got a world-class recognition. They have been selected as Category Breaker by Network World and also listed in the The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07 next to Amazon by ComputerWorld. All this within a couple of days.

Congratulations are in order to the entire team who made this possible!

Still alive after the new SiteKreator release

Lenkov — 2007-02-25T08:56:40-08:00

Today I deleted my blog! I was actually trying to delete a post, I added for tesing, but after sleeping 2-3h a day for the past week (around SiteKreator 2.2 release ) I accidentally click delete for the entire blog, and then quickly confirmed "Yes, I'm absolutely sure". After spending half an hour reading the MySQL manual (which are great) I was able to restore the blog (or at least I think I am). This reminds me how badly we need to hook-up the roll-back to the last published version feature in SiteKreator....

Also today I got an interesting email from a person working in one of SiteKreator's main competitors (pretty major one, but not M$) asking questions and reporting problems in the new version. I couldn't imagine having a greater joy in live than seeing people working for your competitors using your product instead of theirs.

And lastly I'll be presenting at Under the Radar > Why office 2.0 matters on March 23 at Microsoft Campus in Mt. View. Drop me line if you want to get a discounted pass.

Sofia, Bulgria

First Encounter with Windows Vista

Lenkov — 2006-12-04T04:11:39-08:00

After reading David's excitement from dropping Ubuntu for Vista, I decided to invest some time to check the "latest and gratest" Windows. I didn't wanted to risk any of my existing machines (most of them couldn't run Aero anyway), so I decided to get a decent hardware for this experiment. I got:

ASUS P5B Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz w/ 4Mb cache (Conroe E6600)
2GB DDR II 1000Mhz CL4
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT
320Gb Barracuda 7200.10 SATA disk (3Gb/s)
Philips 200W 21" monitor wide screen (1680x1050)
Windows Vista (BillGates Edition)

This baby scorred 5.4 in Windows experience test (whatever that means)

The first thing I've noticed was that Vista didn't recognize my wide screen display. Even after installing the drivers from Philps the best I was able to achieve was 1600x1024 (instead the panel's native 1680x1050). I spent few hours trying to fix that without any success, so I'm going to change the monitor to something that's supported by Vista.

I did all my tests on this very blurry display (sooo bad -- it made my eyes hurt)

I'll start with the facy stuff (as the list will be shorter):

Task switching with [Win]-[Tab] is great - you get live preview of all windows.

The sidebar (which appears to be available for WinXP as well) is also cute, especially if you haven't seen Yahoo's widgets (konfanulator) or Apple's dashboard.

Live preview of running apps when you roll-over them on the task bar.
The "start search" in the new start menu is very usefull for finding documents, but I couldn't make it to find applications like cmd.com. It looks like a bad mimic for apple's spotlight.
The new Open/Save dialog have nice features (but it takes some time to get use to it)
Folders show preview of what's inside them, which look nice but it's quite unusable even when you use the largest possible icons.
Integrated WebEx killer (Windows Collaboration)
Integrated Picasa killer (Windows Photo Gallery)
Integrated Adobe Premier killer (Windows Movie Maker)

Now let's look at the bad side of Vista:

I get very annoying popups every time when you start some application that Vista doesn't like (Windows Needs your permission to continue). What's more annoying is the flick of the display when this message appears. It looks like it's changing the vidoe resolution or something like that, but my display shuts down for 0.5 sec and than it comes back. And this appears even when you try to start the device manager or create a folder inside the Start Menu.

If I try to delete application from the task bar, I get the message that has the name of the app twice (did someone tested this at all).

Yahoo Mail is not very happy from Vista

The integreation of RSS feeds between IE7 and Outlook 2007 really sucks. On startup Outlook, ask you to accept to import the RSS feeds. You get one long flat list of RSS feeds. On the top of that there is no real way to remove them, unless you don't remove them one by one (Poor RSS junies like me who have 200+ feeds). And even if you try to import OPML file manually, you again get a flat list (of course you can create the folders manually, but what's the point of OPML then)

I couldn't make the Weather gadget to work.(it says "service not available" and there is no help what so ever)
The RSS gadget looks cute, but it's completely useless, as it allows you to look at either all your feeds or just one feed. And all the feeds need to be setup in IE7, which as I already mention has limitations (can't work with pass-protected feeds).
Also there is a folder in the start menu called "maintance", which I tried to rename to "Windows" several times without any success (no error message -- it just doesn't do anything).

Verdict

it's good to play with (if you can find the right hardware for it), but I won't put this on my business notebook. Still Microsoft is too much focused on copying what every one else is doing, instead of invote. And having the inside look at how Microsoft developed something as simple as shutdown interface, I doubt we will see something better (if anything at all) from Microsoft in the future. Maybe I should consider making the switch. Only that all Apple notebooks are very havy (2 X my current Dell X1), which makes big difference when riding Yamaha YZF600 with over 160mph on I280

Lenkov

Sofia, Bulgaria

Update [Dec-07-2007] After I changed my monitor to Nec 2070WNX, this totally changed my view on Microsoft Vista. Now it's possible to read what's on the screen.

Sexy front-end to MS Live search

Lenkov — 2006-11-19T02:53:27-08:00

Today I was introduced (thanks Garnet) to MsDewey - a new frontend to live.com search. It's probably the only search engine that loads about 8Mb in flash video before it can answers your first query. And all this, so the accress Janina Gavankar (a blend of Indian and Dutch descent) to make jokes and comment on your search. The results are not quite usefull, and are hard to navigate, but the movies are fun to watch. Unfortunatly at some point they start repeating. Here are some of the keywords on which Janina seems to react:

Janina Gavankar, Britney Spears, Microsoft, Linux, Google, Storm, halo 2, Blow up, nude, blow me, Jesus, cunt, video games, dominatrix, arts, gmail, terrorist, how to run, iPod, eminem, yo mama, 911, Ricardo, Bruce Willis, Use gun, Ferrari, twins.

You can try some of them few times and you may get different results. Also if you stay idle for a while, Janina will start bitching at you. This is all very funny, but its usefullnes is about the same as of hotornot.com (which became a hit around the end of the bubble).

Also today I've learned (thanks to Kali) a new linux sheel hotkey Alt-[dot]. It brings the arguments of the last executed command. Also I've learned (thanks to Toni) an alternative to Ctrl-R: Alt-P and Alt-N, and also an easy way to make file system snapshot with rsnapshot.

Too much conferences

Lenkov — 2006-11-10T02:44:29-08:00

Today I swung by the Web 2.0 conference to meet with Michael from Freshbooks. I was just about to pay three grand to get in, when I read (thanks to Matt) the top 10 lies for web 2.0 and decide to pass it on. I was already conferenced a lot from doing about 50 demos of SiteKreator and participating in two panels at ISPCON. One conference at a time is just about enough.

TechCrunch Effect or DDoS

Lenkov — 2006-11-05T23:12:15-08:00

Today SiteKreator was mentioned again on TechCrunch, and I was expecting the usual spike in the traffic (which is getting smaller and smaller with each appearance probably because the same people are reading TechCrunch). There was a spike, but surprisingly not from TechCrunch. Most of the hits came from netvibes.com, del.icio.us, bloglines.com and many others.... So nowadays the TechCrunch effect looks more like Distributed DoS attack, only in a very mild form. It still remains a mystery to me how Michael manages to sell the ads on his site when the majority of his 120K+ users are protected from them by their RSS reader.

Santa Clara, CA

Who do you call if you need customer service in India?

Lenkov — 2006-10-26T10:42:31-07:00

Check this out:
http://www.callcentermovie.com/

IE7 :: The empire strikes back - will MS take over the browser market (again)?

Lenkov — 2006-10-24T23:53:56-07:00

After 5 years of silence Microsoft finally released a new version of it's Netscape killer: Internet Explorer 7. After I ditched IE in favor of FireFox few years back, I was curious to see what the dark side had cooked.

The download was about 3 times bigger than FireFox, but the installation was easy and preserved all my settings (not that I have any except the delicious buttons). Unlike FireFox I had to reboot so the new IE takes effect (which makes me think that they still keep some good part of it in the Windows kernel)

I've noticed that it wasn't easy to change the default search engine (which of course was livesearch). I had to do it about 10 times, and even after that when you fire up IE, it again asks me am I sure to keep my current search provider (you betcha!)

I've noticed that they added very cool way of adding a new tab, but it seems the tabs are way slower than in FF. I have to wait for a couple of seconds before the new tab become available for me to start entering the URL. This alone can be a reason to stick with FireFox if you are a heavy tabber (50 tabs a day x 2 sec x 365 days gives a good 10h per year which I have a better idea how to spent)

IE7 has a way of setting multiple home pages that will all open (in different tabs) when you press the [home] button. Very neat in case your workday starts always with the same sites, and I haven't seen this elsewhere (will this count as innovation?). Also with a single click you can preview thumbnails of all tabs. But by some reason this feature wasn't working well when you use HttpWatch add-on. The zoom feature is also well done, and surprising enough the text is mostly readable on smaller than 100% zoom (very good anti-aliasing)

While navigating back and forth I found an interesting add-on HttpWatch. I'm actually in love with it more than the browser itself. I was able to profile any SiteKreator page and to see exactly how long does it take for each file to load, which is especially useful when you are running global content delivery network (CDN) and on a single page you may get files from a different geographic location.

The new IE comes with a new very smooth font rendering (ClearType), turned ON by default, which sometimes gives very good results

but sometimes is really bad, especially for small fonts. See the red around the double L? Urrgghh!

I don't know how many years will take so these people will understand that under certain font size any anti-aliasing reduce readability. To turn it off, go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced Tab > Multimedia > [x] Always use ClearType for HTML (let's call this easy accessible)

It took me quite some time to find a way to delete the temporary internet files (something I have to do on regular basics in order to profile the loading speed of SiteKreator). I found it under Internet Options > Browser History > [Delete] > [Delete Files], but in old IE6 fashion it took the usual 30 sec to clean them up. Again, if you have to do this 5 times a day you are looking at 15h a year in cleaning up temp files. Also the popup where this magic button resides is really challenging to close - these usability guys are really getting expensive if the $280B Microsoft can't afford one.

I'm happy with the real estate management in IE7 -- almost the entire space is available for the page content, but it's hard to find the buttons for reload and stop (especially if you are use to find them on one and the same place in any browser).

The integrated RSS reader works fine (I wouldn't say great), but it has problems loading a feeds that are password protected.

At least I was able to import my RSS feeds from Thunderbird and to preserve the folder structure (which BTW, doesn't seems to be possible if you import from one Thunderbird to another).

So I think it will take more than what IE7 has to offer if MS wants to gain back some market share. I think I'll continue using FireFox, and will switch to IE only when I have to profile something with HttpWatch (until the guys at httpWatch release a FireFox extension).

Santa Clara, CA

The future of the off-line Web

Lenkov — 2006-10-22T00:33:04-07:00

Something I wrote after the office 2.0 conference, start happening even faster than I expected. Today I learned about scrybe, that will release AJAX calendaring application that can work on-line as well as off-line. Behind the cool clip they posted on YouTube, I see a lot of similarities with the Laszlo's calendar application which I remember from DCamp unconference in May 2006. I am curious to find out how they will resolve conflicts from mixed on-line and off-line usage. Also it will be really cool if they could provide export to my cell phone instead to paper, or even better real-time sync between the web application and the cell-phone over the air.

At the same time Adobe is working on a framework for creating PC (desktop) applications using AJAX and Flash. What's wrong with running a local web server (which probably will come as part of Vista anyway and it has been part of most Linux distros for a long time already)?

Santa Clara, CA

Internal Server Error day

Lenkov — 2006-10-21T16:33:54-07:00

Today is my Internal Server Error day. Both my new NAS device and the MS upgrade site are giving it to me in big quantities.

NAStories Chapter I - the struggle of spec-believer

Lenkov — 2006-10-21T02:30:48-07:00

We needed to add few more TB of storage in one of our datacenters, so I did a quick research for the find the optimal price performance. We ended buying Infrant ReadyNAS 1000S, which seems to one of the expensive one in this class, but offers impressive feature set (like PC-less rsync to remote storage) and very good performance (read: 30+MB/s, write: 17MB/s).

By some reason we weren't able to reach these results (without jumboframes the best we saw was read: 19.8MB/s write: 3.6MB/s), but the device died while we were trying. At some point I noticed that one of the "the world's most reliable server-class SATA drives" WD5000YS was reported to be off-line. I went to the datacenter and unplug/plug it back in, and since then I can't open the admin area. After long waiting I get Internal Server Error:

Office 2.0 Conference

Lenkov — 2006-10-18T21:58:57-07:00

Office 2.0 conference took place on October 11 and 12 in San Francisco. Ismael did incredible job organizing the event, and the iPod nano was the best swag I ever got. Most of the visitors were people from the industry, a few VCs and some press. It was a good place for networking, especially if you don't go to STIRR or the New Tech Meetup that often. The network connection was kind of slow -- it seems there was just one T1 for 450 people, while on DEMO we got 45 Mbit for about the same crowd. After few attempts to do my usual "build-a-design-quality-fully-featured-business-web-site-in-5-minutes" demo and it took me 30 min, I decided to change my presentation and to focus on the conference web site, which was built using SiteKreator. This significantly reduced the number of "clicks" in my presentation, so I was able to finish it in 5 min (but even if I wasn't it seems that the moderator Michael Arrington was falling asleep, so there wasn't anyone to kick me from the podium )

From the companies presented at the show I didn't found anything I should write home about. I was surprised to see WebEx and BEA to present new products at this conference. For the companies of their size, it's normal to expect them to be 2 years behind the curve. I wasn't sure what WebEx were presenting, but the portal tool BEA was showing was cool.

From the rest of the companies, I've spotted the following trends:

Office Suites: Google Docs, System One, thinkfree.com, Joyent, iNetOffice.

Tools to create web sites: SiteKreator, Synthasite

Online DataBases: Caspio, CogHead, dabbledb

Blogging/Wikis: Attensa, Blogtronix, atlassian

Development tools/platforms: 3tera, ActiveGrid

I'm very happy for my friends at Joyent for getting the best of the show award (also from Zoli). I think they deserve it, just because Office 2.0 is not about creating an online clone of MS Office, but providing very simple, yet powerful collaboration tools that improve everyday office work. Every MS Office clone out there is slower and less convenient to work with than the original MS Office.

SiteKreator also got some award for Office 2.0 Setup, whatever that means.

My videos and photos from the event are here

Coverage:

CNet's video on Work 2.0

CNet's demo rundown
Zoli's Additional award

Brian's PR2.0 coverage and more

Business Two Zero