Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: July 26th, 2008

One of my most favorite movie series is not over yet. This is excellent news!

Producer Frank Marshall revealed plans to begin shooting a fourth Jason Bourne movie next Summer, for release in 2010. Universal announced the project back in February, with director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon set to return. Marshall also confirmed that they will probably be creating an original story for the fourth film.

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Updated: June 26th, 2008

I am usually very skeptical towards new startups, as most tend to do one thing and not so well or many things even less successfully. Zoomii, however, is what I found very useful. It creates the kind of feeling that you get when you're in control, when you can see at a glance what's going on. Zoomii is a virtual bookstore, with an Amazon backend. They took a different approach and made everything very visual, just like in the brick and mortar store – and I love it.

You can browse the latest releases or the top sellers, or perform a search and get hundreds of book covers, uncluttered by any text (until you click on any of them). …

Hey, it's Matt again from www.wherethehellismatt.com and his 2008 video is absolutely stunning. In short, Matt goes around the world and performs a little dance, purposely bad. The scenes from his videos were already amazing enough but this one absolutely tops them all. This my most favorite video in a long while.
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. Be careful, you may turn all teary-eyed for a minute, even if you're a guy – yeah….

So the Comcast installer just left, and I'm sitting here in my new house, on the floor, with no furniture, testing how fast the internet actually is (because who really cares about other stuff?). Comcast Blast is supposed to be 16mbps down and 1mbps up (2 if you're extremely lucky). I'm still collecting my jaw all over the floor though, because these are the speed test results:

That's a 3 mbit per second upload = 375 KB/s. Wow, Comcast, just wow. I know there are many people having complaints about service but after being a customer for 8 years, I really am happy with everything. Blows the puny DSL away….

If you're like me, most of your WordPress plugins are checked out into your plugins directory from the official WordPress SVN repository or some other one. I haven't updated any of mine for about a month and wanted to sync up everything quickly (including SVN externals). Here's a short command I ran to achieve that:

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cd YOUR_BLOG_ROOT/wp-content/plugins;
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec svn up {} \;

What this command does is finds the top level directories in your WordPress plugins directory, then applies the "svn update" command to each, one by one.

The result is something like

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Updated: August 20th, 2009

If you haven't heard of Digsby yet, you have probably been living in some kind of a virtual cave or have no friends. Digsby is a multi-network instant messenger application, similar to Trillian, Pidgin (GAIM), or Miranda. I said 'similar', so what makes Digsy special? Reviews I read so far don't give the real reasons and don't dive into the features in depth. Instead, you get a standard load of marketing BS and in the end to you, the user, Digsby may end up being "yet another IM program." Some reviews describe certain features, but so far I haven't seen one that highlighted THE MAIN REASON why Digsby is different. And may I preface it with: finally somebody got a …

Updated: January 4th, 2009

I want to get opinions from outside of my daily circle of people on the best server hardware to use for MySQL. I remember from the conference somebody (Pipes?) mentioning a particular Dell server with multiple disk RAID10 that could supposedly be had for about $6k but I completely misplaced the model number (Frank, did you get my email?).

I know that a multi-disk RAID array with a bunch of fast disks (15k RPM?) is probably the most important method of improving performance, followed by the amount of RAM, so I'm trying to find the best combination/balance of the two. However, server prices on the Internet range so much that I don't even know where to begin to tell a …

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/11192901@N06/1317037389/ and http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/i-see-something-called-internetpic/. …

Updated: July 30th, 2021

When I was working in Radioshack 8 years ago, I remember selling the newest craze: gigantic wireless headphones that were awkward and bulky. The only thing you could do with them is pose as the Verizon guy, running around screaming "can you hear me now?" If you stood at the wrong angle to the receiver, the signal cut out, or even worse, terrible interference turned the most patient people into fiery monsters. I suppose the quality and size of wireless headphones improved over time but they're still unusable in real life because they're completely immobile.

Recently Logitech released a bunch of semi-compromises, like these FreePulse loop-around headphones for $79.99 with a questionable rating and OK reviews, mostly due to crappy …

Doctor to his patient: "Sir, you have to stop masturbating."

Patient: "Why, doctor?"

Doctor: "Because it's preventing me from examining you."

[translated from Russian: http://anekdot.ru/an/an0806/j080605;1.html]…