noizZze

Let me ask, are you scared or excited about the first successful test runs of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland? Do you even know about the project? Because if you don’t, it’s about the time to learn the details and make up your mind.

There are two large camps of scientists out there. Both agree that LHC is the end of the world as we knew it, but each groups sees it from two radically different perspectives. First, believe that we are on the verge of a tremendous breakthrough and vigilantly developing the exploration plans for dark matter, mass and gravity. Others are concerned and scared to death by the idea of inducing a black hole that will grow rapidly to consume the planet and finish our existence.

I’m a practical person and my firm believe is that it’s our chance to make a huge step towards the exploration of the universe, building incredible devices and evolving in millions of other ways. On the other hand, the perspective of Big Bada-Bum isn’t that pleasant. On top of that, it’s a morality question - are these scientists in power to decide for the rest of us whether to ruin Earth or not. Many of us still have unfinished business here.

Opinions?

Recently I’ve been thinking, when we learn a language (those who never tried, stop reading ), we pick up constructions and turns of phrases from native speakers. Usually, we choose someone we like and model ourselves after them in speech. I find that frequently do I use constructions that do have equivalents in my native language, yet that I would never use, like “no-no-no, …” which I can easily shoot in English, but would never utter in Russian.

Is that a personality switch? Is that an OPPORTUNITY to change (for the better)?

It’s curious, but when I wrote that, it gave me that feeling of vast opportunities you get on a fresh start. It literally gives you a chance to start from scratch since what we say is almost everything that people use to make an impression of us. It’s a chance to defeat your bad habits and migrate them later to your other personality. Meta-physical…

Opinions?

Today, I decided to give Twitter another try. I know many people who use it and some use cases look quite reasonable. Many topics may not deserve a post on a blog or an article on a site, but will fit nicely into a short twitter message. Many posts on a blog may not get as many comments from your friends as on twitter since saying anything on a blog implies careful crafting of a message. Twitter, on the contrary, aids almost chat-like experience and quick response times.

Another important aspect is that many people and organizations start to take Twitter seriously as a source of public opinion on products, events, people. They build comprehensive data mining systems around Twitter public streams and that’s basically is a good thing since the information you publish gets to a wider range of people in one way or another rather than to your direct followers only. Give it a thought, and let me know what you think.

In a mean time, here’s my twitter page — spyromus.

Feel free to say hi.

Yesterday I received this from Flickr:

Hi Aleksey Gureiev,

You have 197 photos stored on Flickr. Once you hit 200,
you’ll need to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account or you’ll
only be able to see your most recent 200 photos. Nothing
will be deleted, and if you upgrade, you’ll have unlimited
space for all your things.

Perhaps you’d like to purchase a Flickr pro account? Its
unlimited and you get video and stats too!

You’ll even get 3 months free for purchasing before 30
September 2008!

Quite a surprise isn’t it? It’s a dishonest one. I started working with Flickr when there was only a limitation on the number of named sets and the monthly upload volume, and published links to my pictures in many places (forums, sites). Now there are two choices — upgrade or leave. Which one do you think I will choose? There are too many places on the internet including my own site where I can have a gallery of images to stick to their sick greediness.

I’m working on the personal gallery right now…

Previously I wrote about a disappointing misunderstanding between FF3 and Firebug that rendered the first useless in my daily life. The latest release of Firebug (1.2 Beta) seems to have fixes to all problems that I encountered and my yesterday’s JS / CSS debugging session went smoothly. So it seems it’s a FF3 party time.

It looks like all cool kids except for IE5 know what to do with this:

if (some_condition) {
  function f() { alert(”true”); }
} else {
  function f() { alert(”false”); }
}

When calling f(), Firefox and Safari will show “true” when some_condition was TRUE at the load time, and “false” when it evaluated to FALSE. IE5 pays attention to the if-else construction (and no code will be executed in the else-block if the some_condition is FALSE), but it DOES redefine the function. Yes, even though it’s in that block that’s not being executed.

Be careful!

A minute ago I got this spam letter with the list of vacancies:
 

ИНФОРМАЦИЯ О ВАКАНСИЯХ!!

 

- ГЛАВНЫЙ БУХГАЛТЕР, з/пл от 60 000 руб. в месяц;

 

- БУХГАЛТЕР, з/пл от 35 000 руб. в месяц;

 

- СЕКРЕТАРЬ, з/пл от 24000 рублей в месяц;

 

- ПРОГРАММИСТ 1С, з/пл. высокая;

 

- КУРЬЕР, з/пл от 17000 рублей в месяц;

Information about available positions:

- Chief accountant, salary from 60000 rubles / mo

- Accountant, salary from 35000 rubles / mo

- Secretary, salary from 24000 rubles / mo

- Programmer 1C*, salary is high

- Courier, salary from 17000 rubles / mo

Last year we had a bicycle trip to Mangup that I covered with Google map routes, bells and whistles. This year we had the same trip but in a different company. Nonetheless, it wasn’t less interesting. I took less pictures as the nature of that region was already covered, but focused on the trip, the air and views.

See some interesting stuff in my Flickr photostream.

Dreams eventually come true and I finally converted to Macs. I still have my 5-year old HP Compaq nx9005 with Win XP and Ubuntu running to my side for various tasks (like verifying the web sites I work on in IE), but all my ongoing work and music experiments shifted to a great Macbook Pro MB134 from the Apple’s latest line.

APPLE MacBook Pro MB134, 15.4″, Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2x 2.5GHz), 2×1024MB, 250GB, DVD±RW DL, nVidia GeForce 8600Md GT 512MB, 15.4″ WXGA+ (1440×900), LED-TFT, DVI, Gigabit-LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, 2xUSB2.0, ExpressCard, WebCam, OSX 10.5 “Leopard”

There’s not much to say other than that I, as all migrants, feel like a huge army of nurses taking care of me all the time; so smooth Leopard’s interface and laptop hardware are. All these Spaces, Dashboards, Expose, Stacks, iCals, Frontrows and others feel like from a future. Even Rails, Apache, and PHP5 are pre-installed!

Well, hooray!

Kate prepared a mind blending surprise for me today. When I got back from my streetball game a shiny new black iPod Nano 8Gb was sitting in its stylish leather jacket on my table. Ahhhhh. I love you my dear. She is full of surprises, isn’t she?

The screen of my first iPod Nano 1Gb was crashed half a year ago. I was walking out the house holding it in my jeans pocket and metal railings of the outside staircase served just right to make an iPod Shuffle out of my old nano friend. It played like that for a day or two, but then battery problems became obvious. Eventually it ended up on the book shelf. A sad story. Well, anyway…

The kind is dead. Long live the king!