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Now this is really crazy (in a positive sense, certainly). I knew Australian Government to be liberal and modern and up-to-date (relatively to some other places on this planet), but this news caught me by an absolute surprise.

Check out Thinking Home Business and this post where Des Walsh says:

The Australian Government Consultation Blog Discussion Paper is, as the name implies, an invitation to public discussion about the potential value for government and the community in having a government “consultation blog”, what such a blog might contain, how it would be managed and so on.

The paper is available as a downloadable PDF and you can also read it on the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) website.

The paper provides some background on “the new internet environment”, covering the evolution in the way people communicate online and spelling out some challenges for government in seeking to participate more fully in this environment.

(from: Government Consultation Blog Discussion Paper)

This provokes some ideas. Definitely. Here in Ukraine I don’t feel myself as a part of the country. They do something on their own, we do something on our. This innovation AU authorities are planning makes me want to get there badly. It’s not that I fancy going to the blog every day to speak to the governors, but to me it shows that they are open, and most importantly, open to innovation — new ideas, new approaches.

Just another illustration I was holding up for a special occasion is an upgraded process of visa applications processing. In the past there was an option to lodge applications through the form on the immi.gov.au site and send electronic copies of documents, and it was available only for the onshore applicants. This month I discovered that it has become available to offshore people (not all types of visas yet). Today people can scan their documents, fill the online form and upload it altogether in hour instead of waiting days for the regular mail delivery and waiting in huge queues for the officer to be assigned.

Moreover, there’s one further step taken. If you send a color copy of a document, it doesn’t need to be certified, yet if you send a black & white — it needs. Isn’t it beautiful!

As the result of this improvement, the processing time decreased substantially. I’m not sure about exact times for the whole process before and after, but I do know that it took almost 6-10 months only to get an officer assigned to you before; now it’s only 2-3 days.

Well, let’s see what’s next!

Yesterday it was a huge day for the local Crimean (Ukraine; is where I live) club community and youth. It is the day when the global Crimean club radio was brought up on the air.

Happy Birthday to “Aesthetics” Radio!

Crimean clubbing youth had several centralized portals and resources where they discuss events and collaborate, but never before did they have any common radio where DJ’s and musicians from all over peninsula and outside could exhibit their sets, compilations and compositions.

Here’s the link to the playlist with two channels (64kbit and 128kbit).

There’s the public calendar of the radio that I started to provide a more convenient and flexible way of presenting the radio program. Feel free to choose the events or subscribe to the calendar as the whole to monitor interesting events.

Here’s what is on the air today and tomorrow:

Tuesday:

• 10:00 Nick Motorin (Minsk) - “PreParty Radio Show” (multystyle)
• 11:00 Eltech (St. Petersburg) “Muhomor” (deep, tech, minimal, breaks, Guest mixes)
• 13:00 Mel.Ti (Sevastopol) – electro house breaks
• 14:00 Somov (Sevastopol) – “Короткое замыкание” (electro/electrohouse, progressive house)
• 15:00 Белов (Simferopol) - “Dark side of house” (house)
• 16:00 Rush (Sevastopol) - “Rush Hour” (progressive)
• 17:00 Pchel (Sevastopol) - “Jungle Ground” (drum&bass)
• 20:00 D-Plexer (Simferopol) - “Техносфера” (techno)
• 21:00 ZAPADLIST (Simferopol) - “Rudeboy’s time” (drum & bass)

Wednesday:

• 10:00 ОЛЕХ (Simferopol) – “Шнайдер Шоу” (chiptune, nintendocore, 8bit)
• 11:00 Frost / Mandela / Discoden / Haze (Simferopol) – “TechDance” (deep, electro house)
• 13:00 Сладкевич (Simferopol) - garage
• 14:00 Fila (Minsk) - multystyle
• 15:00 Max Hydra (Lugansk) – “Электростатика” (electrohouse, minimaltechno)
• 16:00 Matveev (Simferopol) – “Night Impulse” (multistyle)
• 20:00 VeekTOR (Simferopol) – “FreeZone Show” (electrohouse, house)
• 21:00 NaDi (St. Petersburg) - “Girls Power” (tribal/progressive/house), “Sweet Dreams” (deep house/deep progressive)
• 22:00 Gato Cavalli (Ivano-Francovsk) - “Фарш для мозгов” (drum & bass)
• 23:00 Gul4atai Open Mind (Simferopol-Kharkov) - experimental

Found the mention of that NetBeans 6 Beta supports Ruby on Rails and apparently is considered to be superior to Aptana, RadRails and others. I’m currently an Aptana user, which is Eclipse-based by the way, and pretty satisfied except for several things: code completion never works, popup documentation never works and the subversion integration is … a huge room for improvement.

At this very moment of writing I’m downloading the Beta 1 version of NetBeans 6 for a quick try. In fact the test run is scheduled for the morning, and I just wished you guys to know what’s going on. If everything is true what’s in the review I pointed out, and it all works even half as smooth as the guy describes, I leave for it without a bit of hesitation.

Let me know if you have any ideas on this.

Yesterday after a 10 days of waiting for all necessary documents to be signed and delivered, I finally sent them to ACS. It’s an additional package they requested consisting of the certified copy of my birth certificate, and certified copies of reference letters from the previous and present employers and partners.

The story with the birth certificate is crazy. Here, in Ukraine, it’s prohibited by the law to certify any copies of passports either local or international. So initially, I sent a simple photocopy of the document. After four weeks of processing an ACS officer contacted me with the request to send a certified copy even though I clearly stated it’s against the rules here and can’t be done. I realize they have their own regulations that I need to obey, but how on earth I am supposed to get these documents without breaking a law. Is this what they want from me? To start a new life by breaking two or three laws in my previous?

Fortunately, when I was mulling it over it conjured up that they accept birth certificates as an alternative way of identification. That worked. I translated the copy and certified it all over. One other funny thing to notice is that one notary, when asked for an advice with certifying the passport, suggested having a quick journey to a neighboring Belarus where they can certify my passport and papers without a question. Odd, isn’t it?

Another, no less amusing, story is with my reference letters. The originals are all in English, inasmuch as all my partners are English-speaking. Local laws state that a notary can’t certify a document in a foreign language. It means that even though the document flies to another English-speaking country, it has to be translated into Russian, the signature of the translator should be certified and only then the copy of the document itself can be certified. Now this is weird. Is it harder for them to place a stamp on the paper if it’s not a government document? I don’t know, but it seems to me that all notaries can’t see farther than their own noses and are extremely rigid thinking strictly inside their boxes.

On Tuesday the documents will arrive to Sydney. Let’s see how it goes now.

If you do any CSS coding for IE, you probably know that the beast arrogantly ignores the min-height property. Our best friends Firefox, Safari and Opera like it and so do we, CSS masters. For quite some time it was a burning question how to hack a stylesheet to make the ugly do what is required.

There were myriads of solutions with JavaScript, child selectors (that IE is far above of), and other wizardry. I was using them myself and they worked but so complex they were and hard to remember that I developed a habit to avoid min-heights — this powerful feature of CSS. Today I stumbled upon a small and elegant solution by Dustin Diaz, the author of a killer book on JavaScript Design Patterns. The solution itself looks as simple as this:

Elegant and keeps everything together. It’s only a shame that it took me a couple of years to find it. Thanks Dustin!

This question pops up every now and then, and every time I spend time mulling it over. The apparent reason that I come up with is that I use the blog as my personal notebook. Every time I find something interesting and non-trivial I confront a dilemma: to put it in my desktop jots keeper, or quickly put together a blog post.

Recently I decided to try something new with my blog and started publishing almost ever single finding that helped me or someone I personally know. The bad interpreter thing, rails exception handler, whatever else deserving a word goes directly to the pages of this site. No matter how small the finding is, if I feel the need to take a note, it wins the elections.

An added bonus of this approach is that I’m building a searchable database of tips and tricks that I personally can get back to no matter where I am.

Certainly, nothing new… Just to shed some light on what’s going on.

If it ever happened to you to see a message like below starting your shining Ruby script from the Unix shell, you probably know how disappointing it can be.

Yesterday I wrote a highly useful helper tool on Ruby, but every time I tried to start it without explicitly mentioning a Ruby interpreter in the shell command, it gave me the above error. Truth be told, it looked confusing; it almost melted my brain. The script had the correct shebang! pointing exactly to the interpreter, and I could invoke it manually using that path, but for some mysterious reason it refused to work alone, like this:

After a grueling scanning of forums I managed to find a blurry explanation and a dirty trick to fix this quickly. The thing is, the trailing ^M codes in code lines make the shell through out the error. The only way to fix that is to remove all these codes. Doing so manually is a pain, I know, hence the little shell command that I would love to share with you today.

Assuming the script name is “script.rb”, it looks as follows:

The code dumps the script file into a pipe to the ‘tr’ command that cuts out all ^M’s and routes the output back to the script file. Hope you’ll find it useful.

Handsome guys from Rails Envy do a series of hilarious videos under the common “Rails vs. …” theme. I checked their latest “vs. PHP” and “vs. .NET” videos yesterday and have been laughing since then even when I slept.

If you have a healthy sense of humor, you are a Rails fan or simply ready for light critics, go ahead, check it out:

• Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
• Ruby on Rails vs. .NET

Also check their earlier flicks:

• 1 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs. Java
• 2 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Migrations
• 3 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Organization
• 4 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Changing Database

Don’t take it serious. I mean guys are having fun and exaggerating it a bit, but it looks like true more or less. Enjoy!

Found this one. It sounds like a great idea to use a notifier in the production environment and get all the errors and unexpected situations in your mailbox.

Before now, I was sitting in the environment logs forever trying to find my way through tons of debugging records, now it all becomes a bit more straight-forward. Check it out:

Exception Notifier