Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

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]…

Updated: June 1st, 2008

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

Updated: June 1st, 2008

Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas

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Read the rest of this article »

Apparently it's not straightforward to install SOAP::Lite, even using CPAN.

Check this out.

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cpan[1]> install SOAP::Lite
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
  Database was generated on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:29:45 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.66)
Going to read /root/.cpan/build/
............................................................................DONE
Found 149 old builds, restored the state of 109
Warning: Cannot install SOAP::Lite, don't know what it is.
Try the command
 
    i /SOAP::Lite/
 
to find objects with matching identifiers.
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9713)

By now I think most everyone has used Google maps and seen the street view feature. Lately the maps team has been doing an amazing job covering the bay area, so now you can literally walk the streets for hours.

Virtual walking aside, there are some really creative uses of this feature posted in this video by the Google team today. I never myself thought to check my own street for street cleaning signs – saves a trip downstairs! Or look at the toll road prices (like the Bay bridge toll). Or at least watch people falling off their bikes. Anyway, just watch the video (thanks to zefrank for posting it).

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Updated: October 6th, 2009

I'm sure most Perl coders have to face this annoying problem at one point or another: how do you consistently get the return value out of a system call, be at executed via backticks or system()? Backticks return the output of the program with no error code in sight, while system() returns the error code but prints the output instead of putting it into a variable.

The best solution I could find to this problem to date was posted at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=19119 and involved opening a piped filehandle. It worked quite well but always felt like a hack (which it was). Having used the new Perl 5.10 for a few months, I was shocked today to find this new variable that …

This may not be very obvious but this is the command line to list files within a tar.gz archive on the fly:

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tar -tzf file.tar.gz

-t: lists files
-f: instructs tar to deal with the following filename (file.tar.gz)
-z: informs tar that the it's dealing with a gzip file (-j if it's bzip2)…