Facebook has recently released a new tool for accessing its vast amount of data. The name of the tool is the Graph API. The Graph API allows you to literally interact with any Facebook object, including users, their photos, posts, groups, pages, as well as connections between object, i.e. listing people’s friends, group members and page fans, etc. Moreover, this interaction isn’t only single-directional, in fact you can also modify object, add and delete them. More...

• You can become a successful developer without a degree
• University broads your mind
• What about a scientific career?
• Students life is just fun

It’s a popular and ranting debate whether one has to take a degree or not to become a successful programmer. One side of the debate always say that you can do without having a degree and people come up with examples of people who for some reason didn’t obtain a degree but became quite successful.More...

Recently I have received a nice present from Microsoft (yes, I do receive some cool stuff from them, since I’m a Microsoft Student Partner) – a Microsoft webcam.

I must admit I’m not an expert in web cameras, although I’m using my laptop built-in webcam very intensively, since I’m living in the UK now away from my parents who are in Russia and whom I call each day with Skype. Anyway, the video quality of my built-in web camera is pretty awful, but I wasn’t aware of that before, I mean there was a noise and the video at times wasn’t very smooth, but I didn’t pay much attention to that.

However, after unpacking and installing the Microsoft camera, I was simply blown away by the video quality. They claim this camera supports HD with 720p, but since I’m not in the HDTV bandwagon, I can’t tell you what it is, you’d better ask Wikipedia about tis. Anyway, the quality is superb, moreover it supports different resolutions up to 1280x720. More...

Recently I was looking for a free backup tool that would keep my important documents online and in case any problems with my laptop, I could easily recover them.

I could use my own hosting space, but I thought it wasn’t convenient to manually upload the documents I was constantly working on. So, I decided to look for some automatic solution. Basically, I need the following things:

• Ability to save the data online
• Ability to perform automatic synchronization, i.e. when I change a file on my local computer it should get automatically updated on the remote storage and vice versa.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is an indeed great application. But when it comes to adding a new e-mail account one can simply feel frustrated, simply because every message received from that account will still be stored in the default account. I remember I was having a hard time after switching from Mozilla Thunderbird to Outlook when adding my e-mail accounts.

Hopefully, there is a workaround More...

I must admit perhaps I was too rude when I was describing the glitches with IE8 Beta 2 usability. First of all, it was beta which purpose was to demonstrate new features and gather feedback, but no to present a completely finished product. Second, it were my own thoughts, but still IE remains the most popular browser on the Net and people must find it useable, since they use it.

Anyway, Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 is available now, which means that there won’t be any new functionality in the release, however if they find any bugs in the current RC, they will fix them and make RC2 available for public.

So, if you want to submit any bug report of feature request, I strongly advice you take part in the Microsoft Connect program that allows you to send feedback about their beta products, including Windows Azure, Windows 7, IE8 and many other products. Just navigate your browser to connect.microsoft.com, sign-in with your Live ID and choose an appropriate program. It’s advisable to search through the database before submitting your bug report or a suggestions, because it’s likely that other people have already spotted that bug and complained about it or came up with the same feature request.

Participating in such programs and sending feedbacks allows Microsoft to make better products that you will like ;-)!

Well, it’s been a very long time since I posted anything. That’s certainly wrong. I must correct myself ;-)!

Anyway, I want to tell you that I had a great opportunity to visit a meeting of Microsoft Student Partners from Russia in my city. I must admit it was an incredible event. I met so many people who are really passionate about technology. They are eager to tell people about great technologies, as well! It’s a great think that we can gather all together and get to know each other :)! I must thank Microsoft for that :)!

Well, I apologize for not posting anything for such a long time. Anyway, I’m happy to announce that I’ve become a Microsoft Student Partner. I took an active part in the Microsoft User Group in my university that was organized by other Student Partners. I decided to apply for this program and my application was accepted.

Now I’m responsible for organization of student IT events related to Microsoft products. It’s very challenging and interesting activity. And I’m happy with it now.

You can learn more about this program on this web site, you can also apply for it there.

There is a preview version only, but the release version will come soon, I think it looks very promising.

Here is a quote from their blog:

Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.

More...

Everybody knows the benefits of the open source software. Of course, the main benefit is the availability of the source code and the licence that allows us to perform he modifications and to distribute the derived product. The availability of the source code makes us think that the source code should be perfect. However this is not always true. More...