May 2012
1 post
Ten first things I install on a virgin Mac OS X
Quicksilver — first thing I install on a fresh Mac. Launch apps, browse through address book, send files from Finder…
iTerm — version 2 adds split panes in full-screen, which is just awesome.
zsh with oh-my-zsh — of course. You’ll need git for oh-my-zsh, so see below…
Homebrew — the package management system of choice.
MacPorts — a more traditional package management system...
March 2012
1 post
1 tag
February 2012
1 post
1 tag
January 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Platform-as-a-Service evolution (pt 2 of 2)
It occurs to me that the situation in the infrastructure-as-a-service space today is somewhat similar to the beginning of the microprocessor era. Processors are designed for the end user (programmer), provide a rich variety of functions and hide a ton of machinery behind invocation of simple commands (think about all of the complexity that is required to deal with binary-coded decimals, for...
Platform-as-a-Service evolution (pt 1 of 2)
At Grid Dynamics, we often help our customers building products that can be broadly categorized as software- or platform-as-a-service offerings. One of the key design decisions that has to be addressed early on is how the underlying infrastructure should look like.
The mainstream solution is to use captive hardware — rent a datacenter, fill it with blades, connect blades to a SAN, install F5s on...
December 2011
1 post
1 tag
+Comments
Finally configured Disqus, so the posts are now commentable.
It’s been three months since the last update, but I have a two-part post on SaaS/IaaS impedance mismatch in the queue, so stay tuned.
September 2011
5 posts
Adding hard drives to Windows in VMWare Fusion
My MBP has two hard drives: one is a small 128G SSD, and another is a much bigger HDD. Naturally, I need both for Windows that I run in the dual-boot mode.
Supporting two hard disks in Boot Camp is straightforward; Windows was able to identify my drives so I just mapped the HDD as /opt with the device manager. However, I wanted the same experience within VMWare Fusion. Adding a raw partition as...
1 tag
Priests of big boxes
When I talked about the big black boxes earlier, I mentioned that we learned pretty well how to sell and buy them and why selling technology is different. What about buying technology?
If we look back, business machines such as Burroughs arithmometers were literally boxes on cast iron legs. Those were probably served by a technician who was responsible for data input and output, and a support...
In or on the cloud
GoGrid is arguing whether we should say that something is running in or on the cloud.
Of course it’s in the cloud. For me, it has nothing to do with grammar: when you’re in the cloud, your part of it, while when you’re on, you’re like a cupid hoping that his platform is solid enough to withstand his increasing weight.
The big black boxes
It is interesting how the big self-contained boxes of software slowly give way to more modular, flexible, library-ish solutions.
We had monolithic servers — now we build boxes from commodity parts and pair Linux kernel with a bunch of packages. We had Apache — now we embed our web servers within the application. We had Oracle — now we handle transactions within app tier. We had hardware network...
August 2011
2 posts
Get out and talk to people (literally)
Over the last month I’ve been asking different people to help me with market research. We would spend an hour or two over a cup of coffee, me listening frantically taking notes.
It was a first experience of that kind for me, and I was actually pretty scared asking the guys that I did not know too well to spend time helping me with a personal thing. What surprised me is how many people...
Cars and car factories
Why do we compare software systems to automobiles?
Cars contain thousands of details. They are produced en masse, according to the blueprints that are developed over years. Changes are expensive. It could be appropriate for the software circa 1970, but not for the modern systems — and it is definitely not the best metaphor to keep in mind while designing one.
If anything, modern software...
July 2010
2 posts
Scribble, the markup language
Have stumbled across this post on LtU today.
You know, I am writing this post using Markdown, a nice markup language created for the purposes of formatting plain-text writings. Using Markdown, I can create hyperlinks, lists, insert images etc. HTML can be use to achieve the same purpose, but Markdown is better for several reasons:
It is not as bulky as HTML when you write;
It is not as...
1 tag
Writing paralysis
I have to admit that blogging regularly is harder than I imagined. My impression was that by putting myself into an “intermediate” format (not exactly Twitter, not exactly a full-featured blog) it will be easier just to write stuff that matters for me. However, the net outcome is that unlike on Twitter, I still worry too much about whether the stuff I write will be interesting to the...
April 2010
2 posts
Dictionary Processing
We all know that reductionism is quite widespread in the programming community. It’s easier to debug the program when you have a small number of moving parts and well-defined rules of composing these parts into something bigger.
For one thing, famous LISP (which, apocryphally, stands for LISt Processing) tried to reduce every computation to list manipulation. Lists were used as a basic...
Next (?) layer of virtualization
For some time already I’m considering different platforms for implementing an app that will run within a browser. This peculiar piece of software has to perform weird things with the user’s workstation and basically requires running native code with administrator privileges. Naturally, I was looking to sandbox it somehow to limit the damage done if a defect crawls in. Runtimes like...
March 2010
1 post
1 tag
blogging reboot
Dear friends,
A while ago I decided to re-think my “social media strategy”. Today I got LJ, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Flickr and a number of other services I rarely use. This armada is tiresome and impossible to manage. I want to cut down on the communication channels and find a way to use them more efficiently. Here are the first few steps I intend to make.
Tumblr...
September 2009
1 post
Great Works in Programming Languages →
August 2009
2 posts
Manageability - Top Ten Obscure but Useful Java... →
Hydrogen Atom Orbital Viewer →
July 2009
1 post
pdftk - the pdf toolkit →
May 2009
1 post
Sorry I'm Late - Rumplo, A Place for T-shirts →
October 2008
1 post
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Y combinator in Java and in Scala
August 2008
3 posts
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http://dearadobe.com/
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Grid Dynamics Demonstrates Linear Scalability up to 512 Nodes with GridGain Software on Amazon EC2 Cloud
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It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn’t travel faster than light. Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor…
July 2008
3 posts
Font Conference - CollegeHumor video →
History Topics Index →
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Adobe today reminds me a bit of Apple in the mid-’90s. Tremendous engineering and design talent in the company. A loyal base of users built over 20 years. But management that just doesn’t get it at…
June 2008
1 post
Atomic Tarantula →
May 2008
14 posts
who said you can't inherit circle from an ellipse? →
1 class Duple(val first : float, val second : float)
2 3 class DiagDuple(val sole : float) extends Duple(sole, sole)
4 5 class Ellipse[-F <: Duple]
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блин, я жрать хочу :(
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My great uncle Jeremiah once told me these wise words: “If you give a man a painting, he will enjoy it for one day. But if you give a man a canvas, he will draw a giant penis on it.”
…
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Frese gives a rule: “You make about 3-4 errors per hour no matter what you’re doing.”
APS 2008: Can we learn from errors? What if we’re running a nuclear power plant? c’mon, you haven’t seen
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что же мне использовать в качестве вилки-то
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приобрел себе миленькую флешку выглядит как кусочек от их старой модели в синем корпусе, которая достойно прослужила мне много лет интересно, есть ли сейчас на рынке девайсы меньшего размера?
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via kirilik
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‘install google notifier’ грузит двухметровый инсталлер, который лезет на веб, забирает оттуда сам нотифаер размером 600к и гордо кладет его в /Applications блять, будущее наступило
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We overflowed a long at Google once. Nobody thought that was possible, but it actually happened.
Dynamic Languages Strike Back bwahaha
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видел объяву: ищут программиста в компанию “медиа нет си”. нет си. блеск.
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Когда Главный Программист решил наказать возомнивших о себе. Он на Вавилонской конференции лишил их всех языков, кроме Си. Разве что предания смутные остались… БЭЙСИК 1 “У попа была собака” goto…
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Четвёртый базовый элемент микросхем, предсказанный ещё 37 лет назад, родился в лаборатории Hewlett-Packard в группе под руководством Стенли Уильямса. Придумал его в 1971 году Леон Чуа из…
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The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers…
April 2008
17 posts
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альберт хоффман умер.
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щас понял, что жабберовский список контактов мне нахуй не нужен 90% времени. надо как-то вытащить его на дашбоард.
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В то время как весь мир пытается бороться с глобальным потеплением, снижая выбросы парниковых газов, Италия вместе с другими европейскими странами переводит электростанции на использование угля….
EasyRGB - Color mathematics and conversion... →