Large Hadron Collider, Universe and Everything

11 September 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

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?

Ruby: Hash#fetch and More

10 September 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ ruby

Sometimes you rediscover little features that make your life whole lot easier. Today when reviewing the code of my co-worker I stumbled upon the use of the “fetch” on the Hash object. Check it:

h = { :existing_key => "value" }

h.fetch(:existing_key)                  # returns "value"

h.fetch(:some_key)                      # raises exception
h.fetch(:some_key, "default")           # returns "default"
h.fetch(:some_key) { ...some math... }  # returns some math

One other related technique is:

h[:existing_key]                        # returns "value"
h[:some_key]                            # returns nil
h[:some_key] || "default"               # returns "default"

Armed and ready!

P.S. Thanks for a great tip, Craig!

Wordpress: "Unable to Locate WordPress Plugin Directory"

10 September 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ wordpress

Automatic plug-in updates are cool, but only when they work. I made attempts to understand what’s wrong with the “update automatically” feature several times, and always hit the same message after entering my FTP details: “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory”.

As a computer geek, I know why it needs FTP, but it wasn’t really clear what exactly it was looking for in the root of the FTP directory and why it didn’t find it. I figured that my server setup is a bit different from what they expected, and scanned the sources for clues.

Apparently, they are looking for the wp-settings.php file which is sitting in the root of the WP installation. So when they find the file, they know where to start looking for plug-ins folder. In my case, it was light years away from the FTP root, so here’s what I did:

Created an FTP user specifically for the blog
Made the root folder of the blog be the home directory of this user
Fed the user name and the password to WP when it asked for the FTP again

All went very nicely and hassle-free. Now you know what to do when you see “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory” when attempting to update your plug-ins automatically.

Self-modeling when learning a language

28 August 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

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?

Ferrofluids at work

20 August 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

You have to see it. I’m quite used to technological “miracles” with magnetism like that, but let’s face it — it’s absolutely gorgeous.

What adds some oil to the fire is that it wasn’t developed in super-secret laboratories by an army of rocket scientists. It’s the artwork form of a mere mortal like you and me. To me it proves the concept — far not everything is already invented and, what’s more important, a single mind matters.

Thanks to Sachiko Kodama for several minutes of aesthetic pleasure!

Giving Twitter another spin

20 August 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

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. :)

New Limitation of Flickr?

8 August 2008 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ personal

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…

Firebug works on Firefox 3 now

30 July 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology

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.

Conditional Function Definitions in IE5

23 July 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology

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!

Timeout When Publishing New Posts in WP

23 July 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ wordpress

By no means this is a usual thing, but since there’s very little information (in fact only one link that gives no real answers) on what to do when you see the error below upon publishing a post, I decided to share the solution:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/…/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 170