Back from RUSSOFT Forum 2007, which happened this week in St. Petersburg. Some quick observations:

• Most people agree that services business sucks yet all but few are doing exactly this
• The reason for this controversy (in my opinion) is that product business is way riskier and there is no venture and seed capital culture in Russia to back up that risk
• Product Engineering services (ie build the products for others) are accepted as a nice compromise — you do the product and don’t risk that much
• The biggest Russian software companies have around 2500 employees, while Indian ones — 100000
• The quality of marketing of even the biggest Russian software companies leaves much to be desired — brochures are lousy (even though paper quality is good) and most powerpoints are to be nominated for “The Worse PowerPoint” contest
• The following things are proudly made in Russia: voice codecs or/and audio processing code in Apple iPod, Adobe Flash player and ~100M mobile phones (by SpiritDSP); BlueCat Linux (by Auriga); TrustedOpinion.com (by Reksoft); comapping.com (by Lanit-Tepkom); HotWire (by Luxoft)
• All people in the forum could be divided into two categories: those, who think how to compete with India, and those, who think how NOT to compete with India. I belong to the second group (if you are a software developer from India I would be interested to hear your opinion regarding Russia)

I had an extremely realistic dream last night. It was so life-alike that I thought it was real. Then something strange started happening, some things went different than they should and I started questioning myself — “if this reality or a dream?”. I couldn’t wake up so it was an important question. I decided I should perform a series of reality tests… and all of them passed. It was the reality.

“Wow”, I thought, “I could write a nice movie plot based on this experience”. The very same moment I awoke.

If you want to challenge your dream, try to monetize it.

I tried Safari for Windows, which was one of the news at WWDC yesterday. I must say I was deeply disappointed. It’s not that the browser is bad. It’s ok for the first public alpha. The problem is mismanaged expectations.

Download page says not less than “The world’s best browser. Now on Windows, too“. The press-release screams “the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use web browser“. That promises for something. I would suggest Apple PR people to try the product first.
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We have been working on it for a while and I’m glad to announce that we released the first public beta of human translation plug-in for WordPress. The plug-in allows blog visitors contributing translations to their language of content they like. AJAX interface is used to display translation without reloading the page or making visitor leaving the site. I installed the plug-in on this blog so you can try it now. If you want to try it on your WordPress blog, post a comment here and I’ll send you instructions.

Thanks Brian for such an interesting project and Alexander for the hard work.

We have lots of features lined up to make it really useful tool for community-driven content translations. If you are interested in this topic the best way to keep track of the latest updates is to grab the RSS of Worldwide Lexicon blog.

Today I stumbled upon Meebo again and a tiny text at the bottom saying “Passwords encrypted with 1024-bit RSA keys” caught my attention. ‘Interesting’, I thought, ‘what kind of RSA-code they are using’, and clicked on Firebug icon in Firefox status panel to check out their JavaScript source. Here is what I found:

I’m not sure if it works but I’m impressed. Out to publish some job ads in this site’s source code.

(Update: It seems that it does work to a certain degree.)

Michael Schwarz explains how you can do this in his blog post.

First of all you need the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, which is a free download available at the Microsoft Download Center. Next we need the DLLs that are referenced by the Silverlight project. They are included in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha plugin download.

After the installation of both files you will have the C# compiler available in you local Windows folder and the Silverlight files in c:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight.

That’s actually all tools you need. Read Michael’s post for the detailed explanation or download sample project including magic build.bat file here.

It’s great because a) you don’t have to download ‘Orchas’, which is not a small file by all means, b) you can build Silverlight .NET applications without buying expensive development tools (you can buy them later if you decide to go pro and don’t mind spending ~$800 to make your job easier).