Ilyia Kaushansky

Essential Applications

- Mozilla Firefox - An alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox is more secure, faster, but most importantly - it's plug-in architecture allows the browser to be extended in some very powerful ways.

- Vim - Text editor for programmers. I still do most of my coding in Vim. It doesn't have as many programmer friendly features as many popular IDEs such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio and others, but it's blazingly fast. And that's why I still use it.

- Miranda - Universal instant messenger. Why install MSN, AIM, Yahoo IM, Gtalk, ICQ, when you can install Miranda and talk to anyone who uses any of the above IM clients ? (To be quite honest, ever since Google integrated chat right into Gmail, I don't really run Miranda either. Most of the people I talk to have Gmail accounts, and so Gmail chat is sufficient most of the time).

Essential Firefox Extensions

- ScrapBook: Save web-sites on local drive for offline viewing

- IE View Lite: Adds an option to view a page in Internet Explorer. (Firefox is good for 99.9% of the websites, but for the 0.1% of web-sites that do not display properly in Firefox, this extension is key)

- FSLT: When you close a tab, brings focus to the tab that was viewed just before that.

Essential Web Sites

- Gmail: Free online email with over 2GB of storage.

- Flickr: Online Photo Hosting. 25$/year(unlimited) or free (if will only upload up to 25MB of pictures per month)

- Google Video: Free video hosting. Additionally, helps kill those boring hours: tons of fun videos to choose from.

- Bloglines: Online RSS feed reader. This is the 2nd web-site I visit every morning(the first one is Gmail)

- Google News: News aggregator.

- Googe Maps: Whenever I need to look up directions

- Del.icio.us: Stores all your bookmarks online, and allows for easy discovery of related pages.

- Yelp: Reviews of pretty much everything in San Francisco.

Essential Blogs

- Google Blog. Google releases new products and introduces new features almost on daily basis. The only way to keep up with all this is by reading Google blog.

First it was Leninade, and now it's Borsch: Google cafeteria never ceases to surprise me !

Borsch is a soup we often used to eat back in "the mother Russia", but it's not every day(or should I say every year), that you get to eat Borsch here (unless it's a Russian restaurant, your wife is fresh out of Russia, or you still live with Russian parents). So imagine my surprise when I come in to work in the morning, and see a fresh bowl of Borsch just waiting to be eaten. And so I did! Cool!

Lately, whenever I want to look up information on a famous person, a city, or any other known entity my first destination is Wikipedia. Gotta love that resource !

I just wish Google and other search engines would rank Wikipedia entries higher. Not only would the users be redirected to great information, but that would also spark more additions to Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is created by users like you and me (all information on Wikipedia is entered and edited by simple users), and so the more people know about it(and understand how it works), the more people edit Wikipedia, and so it becomes more accurate and bigger.

Last weekend(March 4th) I went to New York for a Paul van Dyk party. The whole thing was a little nuts: I arrived in New York at 8PM saturday, partied, chilled with friends, and was back in SF late Sunday night. Sleep wasn't on the agenda.

The party was pretty good, though I think I'm starting to grow out of Trance. Paul van Dyk played a really good set(he was on for 6 hours), but I wasn't really feeling it. By the end the set, I actually wanted to leave, and that doesn't happen very often.

Nevertheless, I thought the trip was a success. I got to see friends whom I haven't seen in a while(they made the trip from Toronto), so overall I'm very happy.