Taras Filatov's blog: think globally ;) (now in London)

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Taras — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:00:54 +0000

London evening – St Katharine’s dock

Taras — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:37:19 +0000

A great idea for a pleasant evening in London is to arrive to London Bridge or Waterloo, walk along Thames to Tower bridge, cross it enjoying the scenery and then turn right to a secret place called St. Katharine’s dock. Go to Dickens Inn and have pizza and wine there. Enjoy the place.

Most of waiters there are Russian speaking in case it helps

Living in a cradle

Taras — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:46:43 +0000

Have you ever thought of leaving the cradle?

Thanks to iPhone

Taras — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:52:35 +0000

Thanks to iPhone I’ve grown a successful company during credit crunch, built up a great team, met a number of fantastic people, worked on many world famous projects, had tons of fun – and this goes on.

RIP Steve, the man who knew how to win perfection.

Always do your best

Taras — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:53:29 +0000

Just remembered

once my aikido sensei Alex from Southampton University dojo answered after I said on something “I’ll do my best”, he looked surprised, and said:
- always do your best!

I miss aikido – need to get back there as soon as possible.

M&S currency exchange rate sucks

Taras — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:31:35 +0000

Some people think Marks & Spencer or Thomas Cook have the best currency exchange rate. It’s far from true – there are of course high street kiosks with 9% commission and crap rates but in London Oxford Street you can just go across M&S to an Arabian shop where there is a currency exchange booth with much better rates. Exchanging 2000 euros into pounds for example you would save more than 100 pounds in comparison to M&S.

Director’s laptop

Taras — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:35:21 +0000

Was fed up by employees teasing me on “director’s laptop” – standard old white MacBook.

Well it’s been doing (and still doing) a great job. But I decided to get myself a top notch one so that employees are happy and the company hierarchy is back in order. In the world of IT I’m alpha male again

MacBook Pro i7 2.7, 8Gb RAM, 512 Gb SDD

Installed Lion yesterday (well it rather installed itself), everything flies.

another 10km run

Taras — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:48:22 +0000

Second 10km run felt much easier than the first one.
Shall try 12-15km next time.
Gotta find some solution against blisters though.

boost your PC / laptop with an SSD drive, also: finding cost effective upgrade for MacBook Pro

Taras — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 22:50:45 +0000

We have conducted a simple experiment at Apple Store today:

Experiment
1. launch iTunes and iPhoto apps at Macbook Pro latest model (with new i5 / i7 processors, Thunderbolt etc
2. do the same at Macbook Air with worse processor (the model hasn’t been updated with latest Intel processors and Thunderbolt yet) but with SSD hard drive (those who don’t know about SSD, well imagine having a USB stick instead of hard drive)

Results
Where for Macbook Pro it takes about 6-7 sec to launch an app, Air launches it in 3 seconds, 2x times faster despite MacBook Pro has a better CPU.

Concusion
It is worthwhile to use SSD, fast files access gives a real performance boost when starting the system or launching apps and obviously when doing all I/O operations.

The prices for SSD are still high, according to Apple UK, when buying a new MacBook Pro, you may choose SSD instead of standard HD, and the prices would be the following:
128 Gb = 240 GBP (standard HD +200) = $380
512 Gb = 1040 GBP (standard HD +1000) = $1660

The trick is that you don’t have to buy SSD from Apple and you can find it cheaper elsewhere.
For example, a quick Google search finds the following:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160569907280&clk_rvr_id=243588984540&item=160569907280
APPLE TOSHIBA 512GB SSD for MACBOOK Pro imac and PC
The cost is 518 GBP = $827, the difference to Apple’s price is $833!

So – SSD is a great thing and must be used where possible. However it is economically justified to purchase SSD elsewhere and replace standard Apple’s drive with it.

Here is a video of how to replace standard HD with an SSD drive in your MacBook Pro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3RS-GGsCI

Age of SaaS, age of cloud

Taras — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:00:47 +0000

I’ve just noticed how without hesitation I pay hundreds of dollars for various cloud services and realized that it is indeed the age of cloud and all things SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Few quick examples, in our business (Injoit and QuickBlox) I use:

Google apps for business for mail, documents, and internal websites
Basecamp for project management
FreeAgent for corporate accounting / invoicing (works for UK)
Dropbox for corporate files exchange
Salesforce for CRM
Zendesk for customers support

Will recommend everyone using these systems. It is convenient and makes sense. I pay for them light-heartedly as they provide the convenience, functionality and added value which makes life of my team easier and allows them to do more in less time.

I also hope the subscribers of QuickBlox, our PaaS (Platform as a Service) for mobile apps businesses, will sport the same attitude and appreciate the great functionality our system provides.

image taken from: http://www.trigent.com/technology/cloud.htm