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Whole last week we spent under the warm sun of Egypt: swam in the Red Sea, traveled a lot, socialized. What I would like to show you is our little photo-report — a Egypt set on Flickr. Almost every image is accompanied with the comment — a story, a history note or just an observation.

Kate and I hope you’ll like this little fraction of the journey and share our joy. Leave comments, ask questions, do amends to history notes.

Everyone is welcome!

P.S. Sheriff, Aladin, Amir, and Ibrahim — you, guys, are the best. We enjoyed your trips and greatly appreciate your help with tea issues. Hope to see you some day again!

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.

The default Rails framework seems not support the foreign keys in database migrations and that’s a big omission. You are bound to deal with raw SQL to add these or end up with complex (and often ugly) code to emulate them.

Recently I found a very nice plug-in that adds foreign keys functionality to the migration classes. The syntax looks native and doesn’t stand out prominently. It is also clever enough to recognize some basic intentions, like ‘user_id’ being a reference to the ‘users’ table etc.

Check their other rails works too. They look handy!

It appears Skypecasts aren’t dying, but having some tough times there. Yesterday I had some great fun in one general chat room: met a few new people, showed some of my urban photography works, shared views on modern music influences. Today, I wasn’t able to stay in a room for more than 14 seconds; it simply kicked me out of it and dropped the call all the time.

It said my Skype required an upgrade. I did that, and it didn’t make it any better. Let’s hope these are temporary problems. After all, it’s a great invention and a great tool for English learners, like me.

The second issue is that it seems they don’t have a Skypecast support in Mac clients. Is that correct? I can see that the Mac version of Skype is currently at 2.6.0.something and it’s definitely not enough. There’s no such feature in it, and clicking on a “join the skypecast link” brings up a please upgrade now message, but the upgrade itself doesn’t bring all necessary functionality. Does anyone have success with this?

You know I hate politics and even try to avoid monitoring what’s going on there on the big scene. I don’t have any bias towards any races or religions, but what I’m going to say really makes me think something isn’t right. Look, it can’t be a coincidence. I joined two or three rooms yesterday and always, I mean it — always, there was some Arab guy who joined the group and turned his Arab music to outloud everyone. Needless to say that was clearly the end of all conversations and made people upset. I’ll leave it to your own judgment now…

Have a nice day and let me know if you have any answers to my questions or comments. I would love to hear from anyone of you.

I can’t get an idea of what’s going on there with Skypecasts. Can somebody enlighten me? I have recently got a headset and decided to have some fun with public chat rooms in Skype, but what I saw didn’t please me at all. There are four to six rooms running at any given moment with almost all of them having no participants. I mean half of these rooms never responded to my call, and the other half had a host user only, which isn’t fun, is it?

Some time in the evening yesterday I finally managed to connect to a group of English learners (they appear to be the only active users of Skypcast these days if I get it right), but after five minutes of me sitting there some weird talkative aussie broke in and scared all the participants off by making fun of them and asking stupid questions. I like one part though… Here’s the short script:

• aussie: … yeah, that’s my name “… Dandy”. You know that Crocodile Dandy? I’m his brother. I wrestle crocodiles.
• one Canadian: well, that’s cool. *I* wrestle polar bears.

The point is made. Am I missing something or this appears to be a dead branch and isn’t worth monitoring?

May 20, 2007 is an official birthday of the MIDI controller we were struggling over with my farther since September 2006. In fact, it was he who struggled most of the time elbowing his way through the technical obstacles. My part was only in the original design and programming of this babe. Just have a look. Isn’t it beautiful.

Let’s admit it, the front panel looks gorgeous. I was planning to use the device with Ableton Live and it drove the design almost completely. There are eight channels with five knobs, three buttons, two LEDs and a slider for each. All elements can be flexibly assigned to any controls within the application. Originally, I planned the yellow knobs for sends, red for EQ and green for panning, but as I play on I feel that the function may change sometime soon.

The top row of buttons with LEDs (right below the knobs) is mutes. The LED is shining when the channel is not muted and goes off when it is. The bottom two rows of buttons is somewhat really specific to Ableton Live. The green row arms the loop in the session view and the LED starts blinking until the loop is started. Once it is, the LED goes on. The black buttons turn the loop in the channel off.

If you were looking carefully, you could notice that there’s a ninth row with two buttons in place of a slider. This is the master row which has all similar controls. The only difference is that these two new buttons are cursor up / down in the session view of Ableton Live and select the scene, whereas the bottom-most are scene arm and disarm instead of corresponding loop arm / disarm in other channels to the left.

The right-most section with the display and keyboard was intended as a simple programmable sampler, but as I continue to play I find millions of new applications: programming the main section events, recording the turns of controls and replaying them, modifying the way knobs report their changes, changing the ranges controls work within and many more. The usage is limited only by my imagination.

Now let’s get a bit closer. You can see in the picture how carefully the front panel is crafted. There are actually two front panels one over the other. The bottom one is the part of a frame, has all the screws and strengthening the device being made of steel. The top layer hides all the details from an eye and gives a pleasant look to the thing.

The components used are very fine and were purchased from one well-known electronic components store. By the way, these very sliders are used in extremely popular Allen & Heath Xone mixers. Buttons with 1 mm dive and noticeable triggering can be pressed in any corner equally well which is crucial for the night club rushy situations. What I’m really worried a bit about are these ultra-bright LEDs. The blind me if I’m not careful enough. Just kidding.

The rear panel is really-really simple. It has a power socket and two MIDI connectors (in and out). You could notice in the first picture, there was TC Electronic Konnekt 8 sitting to the right from the console. I bought it a little while ago to have MIDI in / out slots for my console and to produce a very clear and powerful sound I certainly couldn’t get from my laptop with on-board card. Konnekt is talking to the laptop over an extremely fast Firewire interface.

The case, housing the components, is built from an ultra-light bullet-proof plastic and covered with an extremely scratch resistant spray-paint.

This is another little closeup for your viewing pleasure. The caps are easily replaceable and I’m already thinking to try some other. My fingers tend to slid off these if I turn them too fast or several at once. But anyway, these are insignificant details.

I hope you enjoyed this little walk through. Let me know what you think of the console and if you would like to have one. We are currently considering building custom consoles, so if you like this one and want to have your own (not necessarily with this design), drop me a line.

See you in the club!

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to Twitter, registered, but then… I don’t get the idea. To me, saving every minute and organizing my entire life to make more room for personal stuff, this is an ordinary waste of time. I guess, I’m too practical for this and share the opinion of David Peralty up to the last word. However, I know thousands of teenagers would love it from first sight if they knew it was there. They always look for some chat boards, forums, and IMs to kill time.

Check out this post from Blogging Pro:

I just joined Twitter about an hour or two ago (my twitter), and my second impression is that it’s slow moving. I can get a whole blog post or two done before Twitter updates a preference or posts a message. My first impression, before I even signed up was “this is rediculous!”

I really don’t get Twitter. To me, it is like updating my instant messenger status information on Google Talk and whatnot, something I forget to do regularly, leaving my friends to wonder, “why has David been sleeping for four days now?”

(from: Twitter: Useful or Not?)

I was wondering what’s the real place The Technology occupies in our life. Try looking for “eclipse” in a search engine of your choice, and the first thing comes neither “solar eclipse” nor “mind eclipse”. It’s Eclipse IDE, which is of a specific interest only to a technically inclined fraction of the civilization. The fact it comes ahead of everything else pushes towards an interesting conclusion: people around the planet are interested in “natural” eclipses less than techies in their project. And this fact unavoidably wraps up into something really puzzling when it comes to techie-non-techie interactions.

When somebody asks me what do I do for a living, I usually answer “programming”. I know the following “what exactly are you programming?” is almost certainly the end of the sensible conversation. “A feed reader” collapses the most minds. It takes some long seconds to an average non-techie to adapt to a new unfamiliar and threatening environment making an attempt to digest the words; the brain work is almost audible. To lend a hand of help I would try giving some bonus clues: “RSS”, “web logs”, “news columns”… oh, news columns — the sparkling pleasure on the happy face — “So you are a journalist or something?” Well, sort of…

You see the point? The technology is all around us, it evolves and concurs new territories. Still inperceivably little fraction of it is used and understood to a reasonable extent by ordinary people. You have a question and the answer makes you even more frustrated, puzzled and confused than before. In order to understand the front page of the site-about-an-eclipse you need at least ten years of schooling and then some high schooling and after that it’s still not guaranteed you’ll be able to grasp all the nuances. If it not kills you, then most certainly make you late for dinner.

Sometimes I wonder how it feels: to surf the Web and realize no matter how hard you try there’s still not a chance to catch the meaning of the most things you see. It explains why people find forums, social bookmarking services and numerous portals so awfully attractive. They are familiar, sociable and outgoing. They are like safe and shallow waters of quite bays where ship wreck isn’t a real threat and comes only in the darkest nightmares…

It has been an incredibly nice day today — warm and calm. As usual, I was sitting before the window and enjoyed it so much I can hardly put it all in words. Right now the sun is quickly hiding behind the horizon and the towering skies explode with color in a hundred layered shades: glowing pinks, deep purples, pure creams — the whole spectrum on a scale you even cannot imagine. Ten minutes is all that’s left before it disappears, but what a beautiful aftertaste of confidence and piece stays. The day is rushing to its end, another is coming…

Installed another anti-virus today, the fourth. The behavior of my poor Windows box has come out of control lately. At first, it was quite subtle, and the computer obeyed my orders. Reluctantly though, but still my actions meant something. Suddenly things started to worsen dramatically. Soon I ended up with the couple of nice blue screens, followed by minor data losses.

None of the installed anti-virus packages, I run at least twice a week, showed any signs of malware, except for the usual handful of tracking cookies in my browser. It’s quite irritating when you feel having absolutely no control of your own computer: the network indicators blink, the hard drive crunches like crazy, the memory is full of … and to complete the picture you are totally abandoned desperately clicking and pressing all alone. It lives its own life and I quite happy for it, but to tell the truth, my plans are a little bit… different.

After a quick lunch I decided to take a moment to run all of the checkers once again. When all of them reported a green light, I took it all in my hands: opened the processes list and started identifying what’s running module by module until several suspicious processes were spotted and recorded. Then Goodling their names, I learned they really were Trojan downloaders what perfectly explained the naughtiness of the box.

Information of this sort is usually provided by the producers or malware removers and in this case it was Prevx1 who seemed to know a lot about my troubles. I will put it shortly. It found and removed about 10 severe problems, and passed the control over the computer back to me. Phew, now I feel at home again.

Psshh… It’s watching you reading from my system tray.