Alex Stetsenko

Apparently there is a very straight forward way to figure out an idea for your next startup. 🙂

P.S.: Now it makes sense why this special agent is called Oso. 🙂

And here is a little more serious write up about the buddy system at SlideShare Engineering Blog.

It seems majority of Google Reader subscribers migrated over to Feedly after the former was shut down over a month ago. While Feedly is indeed a nice and well thought app, I still felt it was an overkill for my mere need of staying up to date with several blogs via RSS.

After trying a few more competitors, I finally settled with The Old Reader: simple and familiar UI, easy export, and also important – no unnecessary bells and whistles. On top of that guys at Cerca Apps already had their first beta of the unofficial client for Android rolled out.

The problem with Google Reader going away seemed to be solved almost seamlessly. Well that is what I thought until couple weeks later The Old Reader went public with Desperate times call for desperate measures blog post. Turned out the team behind The Old Reader simply could not handle current exponential growth since the site was created well before announcement of Google Reader shut down with intention to run it for “friends and family”. There was a call for help though and therefore a good chance that things will not be back to square one.

As of now things seemed to settle down. The site was migrated to a new data center to serve current needs better and, of course, faster.

Kudos to Dmitry and Elena and others involved for keeping The Old Reader up and running!

An ex-colleague of mine, @shaded2, has been working tirelessly to bring Astrid Android app back as Tasquid Tasks.

While currently it is mostly stabilized fork of the original open sourced Astrid, it does have a new name and logo. Based on current plans the next upcoming feature is adding an alternative (open source) website backend for Tasquid to sync with (since Astrid.com is not available anymore).

Stay tuned – hopefully Tasquid will keep up with Astrid’s original level of awesomeness!

JavaScript (of course nested objects would require more efforts)

var data = { one: 'first', two: 'second' };
var result = '';
for(key in data) {
    result += key + '=' + data[key] + '&';
}
result = result.slice(0, result.length - 1); 
console.log(result);

jQuery (api.jquery.com/jQuery.param/)

var data = { one: 'first', two: 'second' };
var result = $.param(data);
console.log(result);

YUI (yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/api/classes/QueryString.html#method_stringify)

var data = { one: 'first', two: 'second' };
var result = Y.QueryString.stringify(data);
console.log(result);

It’s been a while since Android is out but apparently there is still no way to connect an Android device to a Mac OS computer without extra efforts.

If you ran into this problem then look no further as Google has an official Android File Transfer desktop app. No need for any third party solutions.

P.S.: It is interesting how it says: “For Mac users only. You don’t need extra software to connect your Android device to a Windows computer.”

Another win for SAT Vocabulary as it has been selected to be listed on YesCollege.com among other sites and apps for ACT/SAT preparation.

It’s #59 out 100 but still a huge success for the app!

Figuring out how to apply unique index on a case sensitive varchar column turned out to be only a part of the solution.

Another thing to take into account is sorting. Once a column is case sensitive, ORDER BY starts working in a bit different way:

Abc.txt
Bcd.txt
Cde.txt
abc.txt
bcd.txt
cde.txt

To address this ORDER BY should look as follows:

SELECT name FROM file
ORDER BY CAST(name AS CHAR) ASC, BINARY name DESC;

In this case the result set is sorted “as usual”:

Abc.txt
abc.txt
Bcd.txt
bcd.txt
Cde.txt
cde.txt