Virology p2 / Week 6.

Well, I would've not done it today if i was not looking forward to write this post.
In short, I scored 15/15 on week 6 quiz on my 2nd attempt. =_=

New Year's resolutions. 1,5 month late :D

So. Life happened and my laziness got the better of me. Kinda sad and pathetic. Well, to beat the tides, I am starting a NEW series of posts, which I decided to tag "Deed of the day".

The idea is to mark for future reminiscence one or several things I did on a certain day, that I can be more or less proud of. You know, to not feel like a complete useless and meaningless person.

Rules are fairly simple:
1. The posting can be done afterwards (next day, for example) or the same day.
2. The deed must be committed exactly on the day in question. No future planning "I will...".
3. Things I do as part of my job routine do not count. I might do my "proud thing" during working hours, but it must be out of scope of my position's responsibilities.

There. Lets see how fast I will get bored of this one.

Virology p.II, Q 5 and one other thing.

My most notable event today is that I completed quiz 5 for "How Viruses Cause Disease" by Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D.

I got a score of 14.23 out of 15.00 on my 1st attempt, which is fairly good, I think.

Also, I read a book called "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". It was supposed to blow my mind, but I found it pretty bland. Meh, I just was not impressed with all this autistic mode of thinking everybody supposed to find so very shocking - I think along similar lines myself and its called "logic", nothing special about it.

Code school hatesplosion.

First off, little introduction into what is what. "Code School" is a nice web site that provides you with video lectures and auto-validated test problems on several IT subjects regarding web-development. They have free "take-a-tour" courses and the rest of their content is available for subscription fee.

I must say, while their topics are by no means comprehensive and "full in-depth" analysis, they do provide their clients with good foundation on basics of things like HTML, Javascript and CSS.

Now, few weeks ago I joined the club and became a member of "Code School", eager to get me some of that sweet knowledge. I obtained several great new insights into nature of technologies behind WWW, and enjoyed most of the courses, but some other courses they provide were... not so well composed. :(

There was one so BAD in particular, I exploded into a raging rant after I finally managed to finish it. Naturally, the "Code School" team did not post my review, heheheh. Their entrepreneurial prowess vastly exceeds their integrity, it seems.

FastFind Enhanced. A plugin for Far Manager.

Sooo...

Haven't written for a while, due to depression and shit. But don't despair, my avid readers, I am too much of a coward to actually leave this planet yet. Personal psychoanalysis aside, I have news!

I managed to finish one of my many projects, the "FastFind Enhanced" plugin. And what a fine job I did. Not only does it work, but has readme, help system, config menu, internationalisation (translations) - the full set of a grown "serious" project.

No more delays! Here's relevant links:
Download page (PlugRinG)
Far Manager discussion thread for this plugin


I'm quite proud of this, actually. Almost like I'm a real boy developer now.

Sadly, my overpedantic intelligence keeps me on the ground too firmly. This is no big achievement, any way you look at it, its actually shameful if you think how long did it take me to make the thing. Well, I learned a thing or two while creating it, and the results are quite useful (I use it myself every day), so time was not entirely wasted.

FAR Manager. Macros and whatnot.

Edit: This article's updated variant has been posted to an appropriate  forum. 

Gather round, boys and girls, for I am about to tell you a story.

Macro in your FAR Manager? It's more likely than you think.

    The "macro" term is used loosely in Far to describe a broad range of user-made modifications of the application's behavior. For the sake of simplicity, let me divide them into several use cases:

Red Planet (2000). Producers ran $100 short.

Just watched the subj movie. The plot is cheesy and technical details in film are laughable, but that is not why I write this.

It is, yes you guessed it right, another example of a bad Russian language in a Hollywood film. I know, i know. You are probably tired hearing my complaints on the topic but this one is REALLY outrageous.

As the story evolves, the crew is stranded on a planet with no means to go home except for old Russian mineral probe, which was unable to return to Earth automatically, but can be kick-started manually. And on the way to their only hope of survival crew members go in jokes of how this vessel is crap because it was made by silly "russky". (Jokes on them, plan worked, happy ending, bitches).

What really pisses me, is that producers of the film can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on CGI, and fail to invest $100 to language-proof one of the main plot devices. This level of negligence is staggering.

Starting with the audio interface of the probe's control system (WTF is this doing there anyway? The probe is designed to be unmanned) that speaks in horrendous 3rd generation emigrant accent. And ending with unreadable text strings on screen that are composed of random letters, some of them even are not in a Russian alphabet.

 

 And  where they got words right, they put them upside-down, like at the green button below.