Declaration

Ugh. This blog is dying without comments. Sadface.
So, look around and you if like anything, feel free to ask.
Also, I will gladly take your notes on grammar and stuff, since refining my English skills is one of the purposes of the whole blogging business.

Also, please use THIS  post for random questions, suggestions and proposals, and keep other posts' comments subject-related

Only two things are infinite...

 Was traversing through some very complicated code today. Insane mess of programming patterns multiplied by object-oriented ego. Its like a fucking zebra. Some parts are brutally complicated and others are just silly. Like this:



    protected function callbackExists($names = array())
    {
        $exists = array();
        foreach($names as $name)
        {
            $return = (bool)$this->getCallBack($name);
            if($return)
            {
                $exists[] = $return;
            }
        }
        if($exists)
        {
            return true;
        }

        return false;
    }

Seriously, if I had a dollar every time I see "if (X) return true; else return false;" idiom...

Existential sadness and stuff.

As the situation in Russia is becoming more and more grim every day, I begin to doubt I will ever will make it out. The plan was to get working experience and save some money and in about 1-2 years start my journey to greener pastures. Alas, the timeframe might be requiring reconsidering.

The economy of the state is degrading, making my earnings and savings less valuable every week. At this rate 50 rubles for a US dollar by the fall is a realistic projection. Which effectively will cut my finances in half. Politically and socially, our ruler is simply insane. I watched the news yesterday - big mistake. The rhetorics, the craziness of it all... I feel if I do not spring from this place within a year, I might be never able to.

Other news. I am getting closer to finishing my virology p2 course. Completed quizzes 10 and 11 today - which means there is only one quiz left and one final exam after it. I am looking forward to earning this certificate - I believe I can go for "with distinction" as well.

One more week of my life is gone, so is one more year.

So, so. I am pretty sick. Its the third time this season. Sad.

Luckily, it is 3 day holiday - I might be OK to go to work on Tuesday. My killing head aches and fever did not stop me from ACHIEVING. So here is my report on my deeds of today.

1. Coursera. Quiz 9 on Virology p2. It was pretty easy. I still don't quite understand mechanics and model behind "Muller's ratchet" effect, but I decided to just roll with it. May be it will hit me some day.

2. CodeSchool. "jQuery: The return flight". I've earned this badge today. The concept of promises and Deferred is kinda brittle in my head, but I think I got the gist of it. Damn CodeSchool. 1000 rub per month is not to be given lightly. I really should intensify my progression though the courses there and save some money.

Node.js

Well, this weekend was no different from the other ones - a huge disappointment. As per usual, I had numerous plans as to what I will do, and practically none of them came to fruition.

I suck. I suck very much. I managed to get one thing done though - I have completed a CodeSchool course, namely "Real-time Web with Node.js". Took me half a day and did not teach any immediately applicable skills, but I got the gist of it and some modern web technologies along the way. All in all - not a complete waste of time.

I feel like time is running out for me, and I am too slow, barely advancing anywhere. Of course, it is not objectively truth. Looking back at the last months I can see how significantly my situation had changed. Yet somehow, I expect even more of myself - and thus am dissatisfied. v_v

Virology p2 W 7

Yes, it is another report of me successfully completing a quiz. My "deeds" are fairly shallow, not to mention boringly look alike. And I am quite sure i butchered previous sentence with some very horrible English.
:( FUCK. I need to pull it together and do something else than my usual "one more quiz" routine.

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.

 

Some can do it.

Well, well. As many of you correctly pointed out, I should not  have been all negative babbling how badly Russian language is portrayed in English video production. There is indeed a bright exception to generally practiced ignorance of proper articulation of foreign languages.

Here and now, I present you...
Ksenia Solo

Few times she speaks Russian in "Lost girl", she does it next-to-perfect. Thanks to Slavic origins.


Ain't she cute?  Personally, I like her character, Kenzi, much more than the protagonist (Bo) in the said show.

When stupid is funny.

 Look what I found in my mail box today!

russian-in-english

I've decided to start a series of posts about use (or, rather, misuse) of Russian language in English media, specifically in movies and tv shows. This one is the first of a kind and all of them will be tagged "russian-in-english".

Our first item comes from "Sanctuary" - a very fine piece of science fiction known for its low budget CGI, but otherwise nice. Apparently, there is a lost Russian vessel frozen in ice somewhere in Barents Sea and the crew went crazy and shot each other, but not before putting a strange label on the white "first aid kit" box you see on the left side of the screen. The weird part is that they decided to transliterate from English instead of translating! So yeah, the sign actually says "first aid kit", with all Latin letters replaced with Cyrillic ones of similar sounding.

Sanctuary US S04E07 "Icebreaker"

Nikita S02E09 "Fair Trade"

The second one comes from the latest revision of "Nikita", the show that is riddled with horrible "russky" voicing. Russian voice actors are so bad there, I usually have trouble understanding what poor background characters are trying to say. Anyway, this time filmmakers did pull their shit together and gave a good try to produce a single episode without a fuck-up. Well, they almost did it. Dreadful "russian" speaking is still there, but at least they got most of the signs right. Except for the one on the picture (it is off by a single letter!), of course. Better luck next time, people.

I was pretty awesome today. Fixed my LCD.

This post was going to be about me trying drugs for the first time last Friday, but on Saturday something more important happened.

My BenQ 19" LCD monitor broke, it was switching off by itself after I turn it on and was making annoying high-pitched sounds while going between on and off states. I applied my "Educated Guess" ability and surmised that some faulty capacitors in powering circuit are to blame - a problem I am totally qualified to deal with. Disassembling the monitor (the plastic back panel) was troublesome since i never did it before and i had to take advise from YouTube for this, but the rest was pretty straightforward. As i expected, three capacitors were inflated and had to be replaced.

So, I bravely ventured out on a quest for required circuit elements and soldering gizmos. Long story short i ended with a simple 40W soldering iron (which is a bit too much for electronics btw), a bunch of soldering supplies (solder, flux, etc..), a solder sucker, a capacitance meter, a multimeter and new capacitors, of course.

Desoldering bad capacitors with the pump was a breeze, soldering in new ones took some efforts, but eventually the job was done and I am writing this post on a fixed monitor, happy as an elf on a tree.

P.S. all the equips together cost me around $40, the price of fixing LCD alone was below $1, if you are interested.

I got a job!

My days of unemployment are over, it seems. As per usual, the initiative was not mine. My dad reached out and pushed me into job interview, which resulted in being hired.

Well, can't say I'm excited much: salary is shit, work is low-tech IT mostly and on top of it they forced me to continue my higher education (remotely), and I must pay for it myself, of course. So, basically i will work for food till summer, which beats sitting flat with no job at all, but only by little.

As of right now, I've worked for a full week. Was bored most of the time and feeling incompetent for the rest of it. I seriously lack in "handy" skills, like drilling and screwing and soldering, but I'll catch up no doubt.

On the "plus" side the repair shop i work at is located within 15 minutes of walk from my home and i can have lunch at my place. Also, people at work are very nice and my boss is kinda cool old dude. I'm not very social person myself and often get uncomfortable in a new environment, but not there. I "clicked" in perfectly.

Hand made!

So-so. Few days ago a rush of creativity came over me, my hands were itching for action. Here is the result, it took me 9 hours over two nights to make this crappy picture, but I'm still proud of it.

Man on a photo is John Wells who told me he is not red-haired "down there". Too bad, John, I'm sucker for ginger. :-)

Grey (Flash game).

Ok. After some emotional downtime I'm back to blogging. Almost got over the idea someone someday would comment.

(link)

This little game is nothing special really (click an icon to go check it out) but it reflects my mood exactly - sadness and tragic inevitability.

It takes only few minutes to finish the quest, and almost all of that time you kind of know it is not gonna be happy end, but still something inside of you makes you go all the way.