Hello,

My name is Bogomil “Bogo” Shopov.

I just started my own business in the heart of Europe – Prague. I love social media, communities, web technologies and the open web.

I have an idea  how to help me to promote my small company and to make something good for yourself.

It’s easy:

For every re-tweet I receive on a certain tweet:

• I will run 1 meter  during Prague GrandPrix. (I never ran more than 500 meters in my life. It’s a huge challenge.)
• I will put your twitter username on a t-shirt and I will run with it. (I may use more than one)
• I will donate $0.05 to one of the these foundations*:

How to participate?

To be a valid participant to this fun action and to make my fat ass run 10 000 meters, please take just 2 actions:

1. Retweet this message. (<- click here)
2. and add as comment here at this blog your twitter username.

That’s it!

*If I get more that 5000 participants, all of you will be able to choose the foundation/charity by voting.

Sponsors

Do you want to join this campaign as a sponsor? Please contact me using the “Contacts” link in the main menu. You can sponsor the little campaign by adding $0.01 (or more) for every tweet AND a tweet from your company account.

Yes Forever!

Note the date. This was published on April 1.

From today I will not be an active Mozilla contributor anymore.

I’ve spent last couple of years contributing to Mozilla project by translating and localizing content, organizing events, migrating businesses and individuals to open web tools like Firefox, Thunderbird and Bugzilla, talking to conferences, universities and user groups in Europe about Freedom and open web and free culture, organizing fund-raising campaigns, supporting couple of forums about Mozilla technologies, evangelizing developers to write addons and jetpacks and many many more thing, but I don’t see my impact:

1. The Firefox is still the slowest browser in the world on my favorite Windows.
2. The only e-mails i’ve got from Mozilla are about – “donaaaate more moneyyyy, Bogo”
3. Most of the people within Mozilla doesn’t care about community at all.
4. Month after month the things community suppose to do are more that previous month. I have to quit my job in order to drive with the same speed as others.
5. Most of the people in the World still think Google Chrome is a good browser and Google respect their privacy.
6. They still don’t want to hire me

This is enought!

Au revoir Mozilla.

The new feature

The good part of this is thanks to my Mozilla experience I was hired by Microsoft OpenWeb team as a consultant and  I will try to convince Firefox users to download the new Internet Explorer with “The FX migrator” tools – to transfer ALL of your Mozilla data to Microsoft platform, including your Thunderbird and Bugzilla data and to use the new Microsoft Open Web Cloud provider for storing your data.

Au revoir Mozilla and Thanks for making me leave

Click on the image to see it big

Click here to read it.

It will be online every Wednesday and will be accesible via http://javabytesweekly.com/.

Actually I have 3 editions so far. Why don’t you check it:
Issue 0, Issue 1, Issue 2

What is LiveRebel about, dude?

LiveRebel 2.0 is an out-of-the-box solution to end slow, inefficient production deployment processes that often happen at 3 AM by overworked operations staff.

With LiveRebel, now every single update is:

• online
• transactional
• 100% reversible
• fully automated
• instantaneous in case of minor updates

What does this mean to you?

It means that when something does go wrong, as it inevitably does, there is a panic button to press that will make it all better.

It means that because your application stays online, your updates can be done during the day and businesses don’t have to hide from their customers or lose a cent of revenue.

LiveRebel 2.0 now supports multiple update strategies:

1. Hotpatching strategy updates the application instance in-memory, without pausing for a moment.
2. Rolling restart strategy takes each server down at a time for update, but the users don’t notice a thing as they are automatically routed to instance with their session.
3. Offline update strategy will take all servers down and do a clean restart, the user requests will still resume when servers are up.

How to install it?

Nice walk-through is available here , but it’s simple. Just 3 steps:

• Download the archive. It comes with 90 day evaluation license.
•  Unzip it
•  Run the command center

Here’s is a very short video, that shows the install process:

More info and screenshots?

Click on the image to see more.

/The Troll Dad/

I was inspired by Lydia‘s talk during FOSDEM to share some thoughts about using trolls as a marketing asset.

Define

I am sure you know what is a Troll, but anyhow there it is, directly from UD:

A dumbass who makes idiotic posts in message boards newsgroups for the sole purpose of pissing people off, often lacking in intelligence. Sometimes compared to people who pass you by on the sidewalk then grab you in inappropriate places.

More “official” definition, can be found here at Wikipedia.

Trolls in action

I know couple of companies that are feeding the trolls, yes they have special policy and people to do that.

The reason is quite simple:

• More trolls
• More “discussions”
• More page views,
• More banner views,
• More money in company’s pocket.

Trolls & flame-wars

I know some companies that are publishing flame-war blog posts to attract more trolls why?

• More trolls = more content
• More content ==  more developers to fight for their positions
• More developers == more leads
• More leads == More sales
• More sales == More money in company’s pocket.

That’s it.

пидорась == faggot
IT отдел == IT crowd/department/section

The past
I remember when I was younger and I was writing some bytes for living. I still know that there are just 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

WTF?
I was wondering all my life why the heck we need a marketing and community management droids at our team. We create a kick-ass products that we can sell them via our web-page using 33 lines of HTML code an an Paypal account.

I am on the dark side of the force now and I know why.

The truth in 5 points*

If there is no marketing droids:

1. Less people know about us – our clients are our friends and peers and visitors from Google are welcomed too.
2. 1 = Less money – well, I don’t have to explain this, do I?
3. 2 = No salary++
4. 3 = No beer money NOR I just got an invitation to work for another company that has a great marketing department.
5. R.I.P  GPWGFTCCW (Great Product with great functionalities that can change the world.)

If there is no community management guys:

1. No community around us = We have to test our product by ourselves in any possible OS, CPU, RAM, ….
2. No community around us = How to know what to improve and what the clients really need from our products?
3. No community around us = How to get ideas for new products?
4. No community around us = How to find someone that will tell you honestly “You’re wrong”
5. No community around us = How to find someone who will help you with documentation, bug hunting, beer drinking, and to cheer you up – “You’re good. I love your product.”

* I am so sorry, but someone should change the ordered list to start from 0/zero/. Starting from 1 is so lame.

1. There is an online streaming that can be watched from here

2. Follow #mozilla tag to follow what is going on right now at Fosdem – including nice quotes, slides and some hacks like this one:

Hacking the #Fosdem‘s “O” – Hack it and tag it with #fosdem-hack and get nice #Mozilla t-shirt (draw). – See more here

3. if you are here, please stop by our booth and get some buttons and join our effort to make the web better.

The Idea
The idea is to control slides only by moving my hand, without any devices in it.

The plan:
0. My web-cam should detect my move
1. After detection an event should be triggered
2. As a final action the slide should move to the next one

Motion detect

$ git clone https://github.com/sackmotion/motion.git
$ cd motion
$ ./configure
$ make & make install

Configure it

Motion comes with a great almost working config file, so just copy it to make it “official”:

$ cp  /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf

Open it, search for those values, edit them and read what are they for:

;on_event_start value
event_gap 60

to become:

on_event_start xdotool key Right /OR xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Right/
event_gap 1

Event triggering

You may need to install xdotool using your package manager. This tool allows you to emulate keyboard action in different combinations, but I will need to emulate pressing the right arrow key.

How it works:

When web-cam detects movement an event emulating ‘right arrow’ key is pressed. Since I am using HTML5 DZslides from here, this allows me to move to next slide only with moving my hand in front of my webcam.

Run

Run it and move your hand in front of your camera. You may want to turn on the logging to see the motion detection and the event detection if it’s not working at first.

$ motion

If you have any questions, please let me know.