Nikolay.Samokhvalov.com

Google, Where Is Your Quality? (Cannot Use GMail Any More!)

Июл 7th, 2008 | In English, Web 2.0 |

GMail is my everyday tool since Summer 2004, when it helped me to forget worrying about how many different computers I use, to feel comfortable using either one of my laptops, or my PC or any of my workstations. It’s cool because I can boot fresh Ubuntu installation (using Ubuntu CD as a LiveCD) and feel myself not bad.

But now, GMail becomes completely unusable for me. Spam, spam, SPAM! GMail antispam system seems to be not working any more. Russian spam is not under its control for months, look at my primary @gmail.com account:

But the next page of my Inbox shows that English spam is not being filtrated properly too!

You see? Only one real message for entire page!

That really hurts. I’m considering migration to Yandex or even to Mail.ru for my personal account, but I really don’t know what to do with many hosted (Google Apps, I use it for samokhvalov.com, for example) installations. I feel myself really bad using those accounts but currently don’t see any suitable alternative

Definitely, the main GMail’s problem here is inability to fight with Russian spam. I even don’t consider here the main problem of any more or less good antispam system, False Positives. No, I get used not to wonder when somebody asks why I’m not answering . “You’ve sent me a message? Oh, really? Sorry, it must be f*** Google antispam… Please re-send it, and I’ll answer ASAP!” Errrr, my Spam folder has too many messages, I have no time to find not-spam there!

And you know what? I will not press SPAM button anymore, I do not see that it helps to improve anything! Before, if I messed Archive and Spam buttons I always corrected myself. But for what?.. I don’t trust such pages: http://www.google.com/mail/help/fightspam/spamexplained.html at all.

Google, Where Is Your Quality?

Chicken chickens chicken?

Май 20th, 2007 | In English, PostgreSQL, XML type |

Preparing slides for our (with Peter Eisentraut) talk at PGCon-2007... My friend and colleague just dropped me a link to the video of some presentation. Here it is:

Nice exemplar of really good talk, isn’t it?

XML and Relational Databases

Авг 23rd, 2006 | Databases, In English, XML |

There is a wide hype about XML support in relational DBMSs nowadays. The basic feature of newest IBM’s system DB2 version 9 (a.k.a. ‘Viper’) is native XML storage support, they use a lot of XML-noise in their marketing program, write a lot of technical articles, attract scientists eyes and ears at conferences [1], etc. Actually, not only IBM’s developers do a lot of work trying to achieve a good support of XML in their DBMS products. Microsoft and Oracle obtained pretty good results during several years of XML type support development and I’m sure that Open Source people may learn many good things from that work. Well, what it all for? Is it really necessary to have abilities for working with XML in relational databases? Let me give several examples and decide yourself, yes or no.

I will give a very simple classification. It is based on dividing all major cases to as little as two parts, by direction of XML data flow (сan you suggest simpler way?). Then, I provide two types of examples, business-to-business (“B2B”) and ones from web development world (“webdev”). As for webdev, it’s pretty clear that any web developer can imagine plenty examples in addition to mine – and there is no strange here, because XML is widely used by web developers and actually, Internet is “native land” of XML.
At the end, I’ll give two remarks, which, I suppose, are pretty essential and should be taken into account if we want to talk about XML support in relational databases today.

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