Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

I was looking through some old papers while cleaning out the closet and found this list that Milla made for my mom when she was visiting. I quickly jotted it down for future reference. Here it is in no particular order:

In San Francisco

• Golden Gate Bridge
• Golden Gate Park
• Twin Peaks
• Legion of Honor (beautiful place!)
• Embarcadero
• Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf
• Ghirardelli Square
• Palace Of Fine Arts
• Lombard Street (the curvy one)
• Alcatraz
• Treasure Island
• Chinatown
• MOMA (Museum Of Modern Art)
• Broadway
• North Beach
• Coit Tower
• City Hall
• The Marina
• Union Square, Downtown

Outside San Francisco

• Sausalito
• Hearst Castle
• Reno
• Winchester Mystery House
• Napa, Sonoma (wine tasting, beautiful nature)
• Stinson Beach
• Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea
• Berkeley, Telegraph

…

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Updated: December 19th, 2007

If you haven't heard yet, there's a cool useful little device that you can buy for about $20, called the Kill-A-Watt. You plug it into the power outlet, then plug something into it and observe various fun facts about the plugged in device, such as the power consumption, voltage, amperage, etc. I started plugging things in and recording power consumption that you can see below. Here are the results I got so far (updated often):

• Vizio P50 HDTV 50" plasma
  • standby: 0-1W
  • on – perfect white screen: 450W (OUCH!)
  • on – bright screen: 350-430W
  • on – medium brightness: 250-350W
  • on – dark scenes: 200-250W
  • on – perfect black screen: 185W
• Torchiere floor lamp with a 300W bulb

…

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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!

read more | digg story

Are you dead yet?…

Tonight, we dine, in de_dust! …

Updated: March 19th, 2008

I don't know about you but I've had a lot of problems making screen work nicely with YaST. Both putty and SecureCRT had major problems displaying YaST's ncurses interface. The screenshots below depict the problem quite clearly. If at this point you don't see anything like this, you are most likely not affected and can go get a beer.

If you are seeing similar problems, here's the fix. After digging around a bit, I have discovered that the problem was incorrect data encoding. My character set was set to KOI8-R while ncurses expected UTF-8. Here is how to change the corresponding setting in putty:

… and SecureCRT:

Now restart YaST and voila:

P.S. You may be wondering why my screen …

Updated: December 16th, 2007

The next Terminator is coming. Who's excited?

Here's the plot: After the drastic effects of Terminator 3, the story continues as John Connor and soon to be wife Kate Brewster realize they must create a resistance organization with Earth's remaining survivors against the army of robots slowly being built up by Skynet. As they are building this resistance, one survivor happens to be a traitor in disguise, and has a secret that nobody would ever come to suspect.

The good news is that the movie is now in pre-production, the script is done, and shooting should begin in 2008. Terminator 4 will come out in June 2009 if everything goes as planned.

The bad news is that Arnold will not …

Updated: October 28th, 2007

The saddest part of growing up for me is probably the realization that games don't entertain me nowadays as much as they used to. OK, maybe not the saddest, but it's up there along with having to "work", not being able to "get trashed like there's no tomorrow", and behaving like "an adult".

But where was I? Oh yeah. Even though graphics and realism improve every year, my desire to play anything goes down at the same rate. Valve seemed to know this quite well, so it promised to do everything in its power to satisfy me.

Enter the long awaited Portal. Combine the Halflife 2 engine with the power of a portal gun and brain busting riddles, add …

Updated: March 19th, 2008

cpan is a perl module manager. To get into cpan, login as root and type in

cpan

Install a module:

cpan install MODULE

Upgrade a module:

cpan upgrade MODULE

Reinstall a module or force install in case of failed tests:

force install MODULE

See a list of upgradable modules:

r

See cpan configuration (that's the letter 'o'):

o conf

Update an option in cpan configuration:

o conf OPTION_NAME OPTION_VALUE

It is always nice to:

upgrade CPAN
install Bundle::CPAN

If there's an error making a Perl module, it can be caused by a missing make path in cpan configuration. In …

Updated: October 22nd, 2011

sysbench – Linux test bench. Easy as pie to test CPU, memory, threads, mysql, and disk performance.

Full description is available here: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/docs/

install mysql, mysql-devel
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sysbench/sysbench/0.4.12/sysbench-0.4.12.tar.gz
tar xvzf sysbench*gz
cd sysbench*
./configure && make install

mysql tests

This will run 10 separate consecutive mysql tests using an InnoDB table type, each with 100 mysql threads, doing a total of 1000 various SQL operations per test. Then it will print the total time they took to finish:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test \
  --mysql-host='HOST' --mysql-table-engine=innodb prepare
 
time perl -e "foreach(1..10){print \`sysbench --max-requests=1000 --test=oltp \
  --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS 

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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Pure awesomeness.

Part 1:

David Blaine Street Magic #1

Part 2:

David Blaine Street Magic 2
…

The DailyMail reports on some crazy ocean foaming in Sydney. What exactly are they talking about? Perhaps the pictures will explain better (or not).

…

At the recent Seattle Conference on Scalability organized by Google, Cuong Do, an engineering manager at YouTube, talks about YouTube's growth over the past 2 years and the scalability problems they have overcome. All in all, it's a very interesting presentation that I can recommend to anyone remotely interested in large-scale projects, such as YouTube.

One interesting fact that Cuong mentions is that the pre-Google YouTube tech team consisted of only 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects, 2 developers, 2 networks engineers, and 1 DBA. It's quite impressive that such a small team managed to maintain and scale such a widely popular service.

Here's the presentation (52min long):

…

Updated: January 18th, 2009

In this article, I will show how to resize a VMware disk if you didn't make it large enough when it was created. Furthermore, I will show how to resize partitions following the disk augmentation using OpenSUSE 10.2 as an example. You will even be able to resize the Linux root partition (/) that is mounted and is normally unmountable.

The story: this is simple – you made a VMware disk without thinking ahead and now it ran out of space. Here you have a few options, the most notable ones being create another disk and mount it or grow the existing disk and …