Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: July 1st, 2010

From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?

Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the

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As Matt Cutts (Google's SEO and search quality expert) wrote in his blog entry a few days ago, Google PageRank updates are underway. Google updates PR (Page Rank) quite rarely – every three months or so, and it's the most important thing a website operator should be concerned with when it comes to site promotion and popularity.

I'm happy to report that Beer Planet's PR went up yet again on this update, from 3 to 4 and my buddy Thaya's PR went up from 2 to 3. He's been blogging a lot more about WordPress, and I think he'll surpass me very soon, thanks to his ingenious plugins.

Is it time to check your site's PR? You …

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.

read more…

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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One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of JavaFX, a Java-based mobile platform but didn't provide any concrete timelines, so I was excited to hear the more on the subject. With Apple iPhone's advent last year and …

Christmas Tree in Kharkov, Ukraine 2007-2008
YouTube – Новогодняя елка в Харькове 2007-2008

I've never seen a tree this cool, even in US. Makes me kind of proud of the city where I grew up. Check it out….

Updated: December 17th, 2007

An adorable group of orphaned baby owls have been adopted by a silly-looking stuffed toy owl, after they were found on the brink of death in the wild. You have to see the photo to believe it – you will die of cuteness!

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Are you dead yet?…

I've recently installed eAccelerator on the web server that hosts this site and I wanted to share some of my impressions after a few days.

• What does it do? Nobody put it better than the eAccelerator team itself: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times."
• Does it work? Hell yes. beerpla.net loads on average twice as fast as before. The results are consistent, so I'm very

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Today the server went offline while I was at work for no apparent reason. Further investigation uncovered the perpetrator. Here he is, eating the power cord.

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Updated: January 27th, 2007

Updated: July 15th, 2006

Well, the site is fast again (as fast as it can get on Dreamhost). As many Dreamhost users know, sites hosted with them are often slow to load with a high initial lag. I'm hosting 3 sites with them, and there are speed problems with all 3.

So after looking into it some more, I discovered that the problem is not the servers used (they are actually dual core 2+Ghz Opterons), and not the amount of RAM (4GB), or server load (usually 1-3, which for a dual core system shouldn't be bad at all). It is actually the nfs (network filesystem). All of Dreamhost files are sitting on nfs, which is mounted on the hosting servers. The problem with …

Dreamhost is being very slow right now, each page takes 40-100s to generate. I'm trying to resolve it but with their endless deals they've got their hands full of so many customers that I don't know if anything will happen any time soon. 🙁…