Alex's blog

Synchronizing time of Windows Server 2003

2008-01-16T12:10:00.000+02:00

Before, in my plain old WinXP machine, there was a special tab in Date/Time settings for time synchronization with external time server. On Win Server 2003 it is not present any more. Some people say that this tab appears after some time, but it didn't work for me...

Finally, I was able to configure the time synchronization. This ans this links were helpful.

Mano disertacija

2008-01-06T09:03:00.000+02:00

Wow, pagalaiu mano disertacijos pagrindiniai darbai užbaigti. Pažiūrėti į mano 4+ metų darbo rezultatus galima čia. Puslapis angliškas, bet pati disertacija parašyta lietuviškai.

Kartais net nesitiki, kad tai jau gali gretiai pasibagti... bet pasibaigti turėtų. Ginimas paskirtas 2008 m. sausio 25 d. Palinkėkit man sekmės.

ParSol - C++ library for semiautomatic parallelization

2007-11-09T13:44:00.000+02:00

First of all: it's been a looOoong time since my last post. But I'm in a last days of finishing my PhD paper, so I believe I can be excused. People of all the Earth, pray for me :)

Now to the topic - finally, the result of my 4 year effort of doctoral studies went online. This is a C++ library for semiautomatic parallelization of data parallel algorithms, also suitable for parallelizing of iterative solvers of systems of linear equations. The efficient sequential code may also be produced using this library.

The library itself may be found here. Welcome to check it out!!!

pthreads-win32 DevPak installer for Dev-C++

2007-09-07T00:39:00.000+03:00

After successful installation and usage of pthreads-win32 in my mingw32 projects, I've decided to automate this process. The result is DevPak installation package that will add pthreads functionality to your Dev-C++ installation in seconds.

The package may be downloaded directly from here, or, if you want to read more about it before downloading, from here. Currently, there's no package to get via webupdate, but I hope this is a synchronization issue and will be resolved in due time.

After installation, you may (try to) compile your pthreads dependent programs (the ones that use ). During linking, add -lpthreadGC2 option to the linker. This package contains version of pthreads-w32 that does NOT support thread stack unwinding after call to pthread_exit.

humyo vs. mydatabus - online file storage

2007-08-30T17:44:00.000+03:00

I believe that online file storage has a future. There're many online file storage providers, however, choosing the right one is not a simple task. Of course, many things depend on what what you expect from online file storage. I'll tell you my experience. Here's what I look for:

Free to use. I can live with adverts, and some sane restrictions on my free account. But it should be free and remain free. I am not a heavy online storage user, and I don't want one day to come and find out that my account and data are gone because I missed the payment.
Plenty of storage. Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it? Now, when several GB account is not a miracle, this was the main reason why I dumped Microsoft's Live Drive, providing only 500MB per user.
Web access. Almost everyone has it. Who hasn't, out of game for me.
Security. These days, it is a must. That's why I look down upon services that use HTTP and FTP (otherwise excellent drivehq goes here). Also, this is the reason I don't look at such things as rapidshare. I just need another kind of service.
Protocol support. Web access is fine... as a last resort. However, for a day-to-day life, I'd like my online storage to be mapped and conveniently accessible with my favorite file manager. And I use both windows and Linux machines. Solution - to support standard protocols, such as FTP/SFTP/FTPS/WebDAV/..., or at least provide some proprietary way to accomplish this task (but proprietary solutions usually support Windows only, as for xdrive).
Other bells and whistles. Lots of stuff goes here. It is user experience, direct web download, sending file my mail, direct links to files, and so on.

Until now, I was a sole mydatabus user. It was not the perfect solution for me, but, summing up all the pros and cons, this was the best I could get. I used it for online file storage and synchronization, leaving image galleries to picasa, windows backup to mozy, and quick sharing of small files to googlepages. Now, a new player appeared on my horizon - humyo. Here is my opinion of it.

The name of the game. While mydatabus brings some associations with file storage, humyo associates with noting. Absolutely nothing. But this is the matter to get used to, I believe (like google).
Storage, filesize and bandwidth. This was the thing that caught my attention. While mydatabus gives its users 5GB of storage, 250MB max file size and 1GB/day bandwidth for shared files, the parameters for humyo are unlimited, unlimited, unlimited, in respective order. To be honest, traffic of 1GB/day is something I'd probably never reach in the foreseen future, and I didn't fill up my 5GB yet (but it is just a matter of time). But the 250MB restriction annoys me from time to time (not often, though).
Business model. To put it in another words, is this service going to stay the same in the foreseen future, or it may disappear tomorrow? While I can't say for sure, at least I understand mydatabus. They have ads, they have premium accounts. They use Amazon S3 for storage, it is cheap and going to stay for long. I see things going on there, new features are added, technical support is operating. Also, I see more and more restrictions appearing on free account. However, humyo is a dark horse here. They say about some unlimited storage, but I'm afraid to believe such thing from a company nobody knows. They say about selling some premium accounts... hm, maybe, but with all the unlimited stuff they offer, why should many people need one? They don't even have ads...
Web interface. Both are pretty good, both are heavy javascripted. Mydatabus has more bells and whistles (which I don't use, to be honest), but humyo works faster on opera (my observation). One thing that annoys me on humyo - it is difficult to see long file names, especially.if.they.don't.contain.spaces. Hint windows as in mydatabus could be superb.
Security. humyo is a winner here, whith its full https support. mydatabus supports https for login page only. Still better than nothing...
File access. In mydatabus, if my file is not shared, only I (and mydatabus) has access to it. In humyo, I was pretty sure about the same, until I tried to search for some file and found files that I didn't have. I wonder, if others can do the same thing on all my files? That would be VERY bad. Also, in mydatabus I have a place where I can see all my shared files, and manage them. I'd like to have something like that in humyo VERY MUCH.
Protocol support. Both suck here. Both promise to have something. While support in mydatabus told me about their consideration for some open standards, humyo says something about a proprietary solution for windows only. That would be a minus, on my opinion.
File upload. humyo is a winner here, by all means. The absence of restrictions and file drag and drop support in java version just rock. Some things I've noticed:
1. ETA could be shown in upload window of java applet
2. When uploading files, is it via http or via https? I want my security!!! (it is https in mydatabase/s3, by the way)
3. When java is uanavailable, there could still be support for uploading several files at once, not only one.
Direct links. Both have it in one way or another. Both have it rather difficult.
Other stuff. Both have direct web upload. mydatabus has file e-mail feature, and humyo does not. That is the one that I use. The upload/download/connection speeds are fine in both, didn't measured them up.

So, what is the conlusion? I didn't find out all the details of humyo, but it seems very promising, and even superb to mydatabus, especially if some features could be added. But until it proves to be commercially stable in the long run, i'd be afraid to trust in it completely.

Computer people - greatest sadomazo's?

2007-08-29T14:00:00.001+03:00

What is sadomasochism? It is when one person likes to inflict pain, and another - to suffer it. How far can it go? Well, when one wants to torture to death, and another wants to be killed that way... Bizarre how it seems, it is not completely out of place, alas.

When speaking about such cases, two of them come to mind, at least. One of them is the case of German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who ate his sweetheart Bernd Juergen Brandes in 2001, on mutual agreement. Another one is the case of Sharon Lopatka. She looked hard for someone to kill her in a painful way, and, finally, Robert Frederick Glass made her dreams come true in 1996.

What struck me in those cases? Well, let's see what those people were:

Armin Meiwes: computer technician
Bernd Juergen Brandes: computer software engineer, worked for Siemens in Berlin
Sharon Lopatka: Internet entrepreneur, website owner
Robert Frederick Glass: computer analyst who worked for the Catawba County, North Carolina, government. He was a productive worker who was responsible for programming tax rolls and keeping track of the gas consumption of county vehicles

See any trends? Being a software engineer working in computer industry myself, I do. Surely, in both cases people found each other on internet, but internet is not just for programmers, is it?

Mano baitai

2007-08-22T15:18:00.000+03:00

Šiandien mane aplankė mūza :) Taigi:

RAM'o baitai buvo du,
Vienas dingo - nerandu.
Man su vienu baituku
Kompas stabdo - negaliu.

Tarp procesų ieškau šudo,
Mano rankos tai nužudo.
Vistiek stabdo kompas mano -
Vistai reikia daugiau RAMo...

Partial template specialization for functions

2007-08-18T10:11:00.000+03:00

This post contains highly technical stuff !!!

Recently, I had to create template function with the same name and arguments that would behave in some general way for all data types, except complex numbers. Something like

template<class T> void X(const T& t) { ... }
template<class T> void X(const std::complex<T>& t) { ... }

Nice how it looks (IMHO), such approach does not work. The reason - in C++ template functions do not have partial template specialization. They have overloading. So, basically, I've just created two different functions, and left it up to compiler to choose best one. Since in first case parameter T may as well be complex number, compiler's choice was not what I expected.

The solution: C++ template classes do have partial specialization, use them. The following code would work:

template<class T> struct Y {
static void Perform(const T& t) { ... }
};
template<class T> struct Y<std::complex<T> > {
static void Perform(const std::complex<T>& t) { ... }
};

And You may wrap it into the function, something like

template<class T> void X(const T& t) { Y<T>::Perform( t ) };

Mass pinging hosts with the help of standard binutils

2007-08-16T14:37:00.000+03:00

To quickly perform mass pinging of hosts on a local network, if you don't have any special tools, the following scripts may be of help:

---- SCRIPT 1 : pingnet ----------
#!/bin/sh

for(( i=0; i <= 255; i++ ))
do
  ping -w 1 "192.168.0."$i
done | `dirname $0`/hostalive
----------------------------------

Give that file rights for execution. You may want to correct "for" condition and address beginning, depending on your network configuration. dirname is standard utility. hostalive is another script, which parses the output of ping and makes a conclusion whether the host is alive or not. For that task, sed is used:

---- SCRIPT 2 : hostalive ----------
#!/bin/sed -nf

# get IP address
/^--- / {
  s/^--- //
  s/ ping.*/ /
  h
}

# is it alive?
/^rtt / {
  g
  s/$/OK/
  p
}

# is it down?
/ 100% packet loss/ {
  g
  s/$/DOWN/
  p
}
----------------------------------

Give this file an executable permissions as well, and put it into the same folder as pingnet. Now you may run pingnet, and with a bit of luck you'll see something like that:

192.168.0.0 OK
192.168.0.1 DOWN
192.168.0.2 OK
192.168.0.3 DOWN
192.168.0.4 DOWN
192.168.0.5 DOWN
192.168.0.6 OK
192.168.0.7 OK
192.168.0.8 DOWN
192.168.0.9 OK

CSS image map

2007-08-13T11:24:00.000+03:00

You know what client-side image map is - you assign a map to an image where you specify links for some regions on that image. Different from putting an anchor on image, user gets to different places depending on where on image (s)he presses.

It appears that the same effect may be achieved with HTML + CSS. I've tried it only with rectangular regions. Why reinvent the wheel? Well, CSS allows much more customization of what you do: compare the same task implemented using image maps and CSS. Actually, the studying of the sources of those two pages is the best, but here are the ideas behind CSS implementation:

Image map is a bunch of links on the image - so you'll need a bunch of links as well, on something as well. I used anchors on div, but I think anchors on paragraph would also do. But anchors are a must, if you want :hover event to be detectable on most browsers and not use JS. Some people use similar technology to represent various lists graphically, by putting <a> into <li>.
Now comes the CSS part. Image for an image map will go as BG image for div. Make div position absolute. For all the links, make their position absolute and display block. If the position of div starts at (0,0), you may use same coordinates as in image map, which is great, since there's is a software to create image maps. Note that in image maps coordinates are left right top bottom, while in CSS it is left right width height.
The core is done, some polishing follows. I wanted selected area to differ, so I added a BG image for a:hover. Since I didn't want to create separate image for every link, I've just created small gif with every second pixel transparent. It creates an effect of pseudo transparent shadow on top of real image. Using png image with alpha channel looked better, but not all browsers support it :(
The contents of the link should be empty, otherwise it will clutter the image. Don't worry, links will be clickable, since their size is set explicitly. However, such a map will be unusable on text-only browsers. I've put a contents of links in span, which I made invisible in CSS. So, in browsers that support CSS, we have clear view, while text-only browsers produce a list of nice links.

Changing all HTML tags to lowercase

2007-08-10T11:50:00.000+03:00

I'm a big fan of VIM text editor. I use it for editing HTML files as well. While I am not going to argue or prove that VIM is the best HTML editor ever (I use it a lot for HTML editing, but not just VIM), there're things where VIM shines. Really.

One part of converting from HTML to XHTML is changing all the tags to lowercase. If you open your HTML file in VIM, this task may be done with this piece of VIM magic:

:%s/<\/\?\zs$\a\+$\ze[ >]/\L\1/g

Note that this will change tag names only. To change tag attributes to lowercase as well, use this command:

:%s/$<[^>]*$\@<=\<$\a*$\ze=['"]/\L\2/g

Pop-up menu from button

2007-08-09T14:34:00.000+03:00

Recently I had to create a pop-up menu when pressing a button, as shown on the picture.

Here is the code for this task to complete in Borland Delphi.

case PopupMenu1.Items.Count of
0 : // no menu items
begin
  MessageDlg( _( 'No items to show' ), mtInformation, [mbOK], 0 );
  exit;
end;
1 : // only one item - execute
PopupMenu1.Items[0].Click;
else
with BitBtn1, ClientToScreen( Point( 0, Height ) ) do
  PopupMenu1.Popup( X, Y );
end;

BitBtn1 is the button to be pressed, PopupMenu1 contains the menu items to pop up. If there's no menu items, a message is shown, if only one menu item, it is launched by default, if more - popup menu appears.

Forwarding Remote Desktop Connection via SSH

2007-08-08T17:45:00.000+03:00

A problem: there's a remote Windows machine A which you need to access. You don't have direct access to that machine, however, you can SSH to some server B which does have access to A.

Solution: since Remote Desktop Connection uses single port 3389 for connection, it is just possible to make local SSH forwarding of, say, your port 3389 to the A:3389. Then use your Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to localhost (assuming that you don't have RDserver running on your current machine), and you are done. Right? Not always.

For me, the solution above worked if my current machine was a linux box. Also, I know some people, for whom this solution worked on Windows machines too. But for me, the scenario above produced complaint from standard Windows Remote Desktop Connection client:

The client could not connect. You are already connected to the console of this computer. A new console session cannot be established.

I've found the solution for this problem here. The idea is that if you use putty as your SSH client, the current version allows to bind local ports not just to localhost (127.0.0.1), but also for something like 127.0.0.2 (127.*.*.*). The configuration of putty connection should look like this (substitute target for the name of your machine):

Now, the connection configuration for RDC client must look like that:

Well, that's all. You should be able to connect to machine A now from your Windows box.

Иван Купала - lietuviskai

2007-08-07T10:09:00.001+03:00

Vienu metu man labai patiko rusų grupė "Иван Купала". Žmonės sumaišė senas rūsų liaudies dainas su šiuolaikiniais bumčikais - ir laimėjo.

Neseniai išgirdau kažką panašaus, tik lietuviškai. Žinoma, liaudies dainos irgi lietuviškos. Atlikėjai Rasa ir Jonas. Albumas "Saulala Raudona". Šaunuoliai!!!

Last.fm'e reikėjo užsiregistruoti - patingėjau. Bet kelios jų dainos yra Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGkojFAV_DM

Using internet browser as calculator

2007-08-06T11:19:00.000+03:00

Most modern internet browsers support JavaScript. JavaScript may be executed in various ways, one of them - through pseudo url javascript:some_code. If this JavaScript code returns some value, the contents of all current web page is replaced with the result, converted to text (Safari on Windows v. 3.0.3 does not support this, apparently...).

Since JavaScript has means to perform mathematical operations, the internet browsers may be used as calculators. For example, to calculate 2+2 you could enter the following URL: javascript:2+2

Some more advanced math is possible, but it is not as straightforward, because advanced math functionality resides in JavaScript object Math. For example, to calculate number Pi, you should enter something like that: javascript:Math.PI , to calculate e¹⁰, you need the following line javascript:Math.exp(10), and so on.

P.S. And, speaking about browsers and calculators, don't forget about calculator built into google search engine. Just try googling for 2+2 ;)

Lietuviškos radijo stotys internete WinAMP'ui

2007-08-04T13:23:00.000+03:00

Čia yra playlist su Lietuviškomis radijo stotimis internete, skirtas grotuvui WinAMP.

WinAMP'e reikia :

pasirinkti "Add new URL",
nurodyti šį adresą: http://100files.googlepages.com/radio_LT.m3u
Pasirinkti, kokią iš 40+ radijo stočių klausytis :)

Daugiau info galima rasti:

Installing the BDE

2007-08-02T11:44:00.000+03:00

Recently I had to install the BDE (Borland Database Engine) for an old software.

There's a stand-alone BDE updater named bde511en.exe, which is available from this page. Note that you'll have to scroll till the bottom of the page. However, this one is good only if you already have some older version of BDE. You may have it installed with some old installer of BDE-enabled application.

If You want to install BDE on the fresh machine, BDEInfoSetup.zip will help. It is available from here. It will install you BDE version 5.2, the last one at the moment. Theoretically, it is possible to check updater page if some new versions are available, however, since BDE is not developed any more, this will probably be of no help. After install, you may need to run bdeadmin.exe to set up aliases. BDEadmin should be available here:

"c:\Program Files\Borland\Common Files\BDE\BDEADMIN.EXE"

Also, at about.com there's a paper on how to install BDE manually. I've never tried it, actually, as long as the internet is available and installer is accessible online, but it could help in some situation, i guess.

ReportManager version incompatibility

2007-08-01T09:41:00.000+03:00

There's a freeware report generator ReportManager, that I do use a lot. Starting from some version (don't remember which, but 2.6a has it), the generated report files are incompatible with the older versions (again, I don't remember till which, but 2.4e has this problem).

After some investigation, the problem seems to have a fix. Report files are essentially a Delphi forms (a kind of resources for Borland Delphi programs), in plain text. The incompatibility is originated by 2 new properties of report parameters:

ErrorMessage
Validation

After all, these properties are good and extend the functionality of ReportManager. Besides, RM is free, so you can just download the latest version and be well off. However, if you don't use these new features, and want your report to work with older versions of RM engine, just open your *.rep file in any text editor (notepad will do, but I personally prefer VIM), and delete all lines that look like

ErrorMessage = ''
Validation = ''

in VIM, this could be done with the following commands:

:gl /^ *ErrorMessage *=/ del
:gl /^ *Validation *=/ del

Submitting your googlepages for google search

2007-07-25T13:16:00.000+03:00

Hm... It looks like googlepages.com pages are not automatically indexed by Google. That's rather strange, because it's the same Google, after all, isn't it? BTW, blogger blogs are automatically indexed.

But anyway, You want your great home page page to be findable? Follow these steps:

Submit your site for indexing. It may be done in general way here, or, if you have google account (and you do), you can do it through webmaster tools. I personally like the latter way, because it is much more flexible in all aspects.

Well, that's pretty much it, now wait, and after a while (may be weeks, actually) your site should become searchable. If you added something like http://example.googlepages.com, sooner or later google bot will index your home page and all the pages linked from it.

Is there anything else you can do? Keep reading.
If you added your site, after it is indexed, you can view various statistics on it, plus manipulate in some may how google bots process it. However, in order to do it, you need to verify the ownership of the site. There are two ways to do it: including special meta tag into the header of home page, or uploading special file to the root folder of your site. The first way will not work, because in GPC you have no access to the header of home page, but the second way should work fine.

Pay attention to the following things: first, google gives only the name of the file to be uploaded. Uploading empty file did not work for me, uploading valid html file did. Second, after verification is successful, keep that file on server. I've removed it right after passing the verification, and after a while had to verify the ownership again, with the html file of the same name.
One final thing. After You submitted http://your.page.googlepages.com for indexing, only home page and pages linked from it will be crawled. So, in order for some page of yours to be indexed, it should be linked from somewhere. So, don't forget to make a link to every page of yours somewhere! Or - use site maps. Sitemap is a special file listing the available content of some website. You may add sitemap to your website from Google webmaster tools.

The good news is that googlepages automatically generate a sitemap for your site, which is situated at http://your.page.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml . The bad news, however, is that everything is included there, and you have no control over it. That also means that everybody, just by downloading your sitemap.xml, can get access to all the contents you've put there. Keep this in mind - googlepages.com is not for sensitive information. So, assuming that everything you put on your googlepages is for public, just add the default sitemap to webmaster tools, and You'll be fine.

If you want some customization, however, there's no rule prohibiting you from creating and uploading your own sitemap under different name, and adding it instead of sitemap.xml.

Bažnyčios Pergalė pamokslai

2007-07-23T23:21:00.000+03:00

Pagaliau mūsų bažnyčios "Pergalė" pamokslus galima paklausyti (ir parsisiųsti) on-line. Aišku, puslapis, kur yra nuorodos, yra laikinas (nors nėra nieko pastovesnio už laikinus dalykus, ar ne?), tačiau patys pamokslai (ir visos nuorodos, atitinkamai) artimiausiu metu niekur keltis nežada.

Pamokslai yra MP3 formate. Vienas pamokslas trunka apie 50 min ir užima apie 15.5 MB. Kokybė tokio tipo įrašui tikrai gera. Girdisi pamokslas originalo (anglų) kalba su lietuvišku vertimu.

Kol kas patalpinta 16 pamokslų - pabandymui. Jau yra įrašyta žymiai daugiau, ir kas savaitę įrašoma dar po 3. Taip kad naujų pamokslų tikrai netruks - tik spėk klausyti :)

Official Blogger Song

2007-07-23T12:50:00.000+03:00

Maybe old news for someone, but I've found it amusing. The original post where I found it is here at digital inspiration. Cool cool cool.

The song itself is here:

I'm a baby blogger

2007-07-20T08:39:00.000+03:00

Being baby blogger that I am (about 1 month old), I came acrosss the site of John Chow. I liked it, honestly. Out of all the things he speaks about (his site is about making money on blogging), two seem actual for me as a newbie blogger:

Be passionate about what You write
Keep writing periodically

The second comes out of first. If it works, go learn various money making techniques :)

The worst forum I've ever seen

2007-07-19T15:27:00.000+03:00

There's a latvian singer Laima Vaikule (used to be one of the most popular singers in soviet times).

She has an official website with a forum. Theoretically, the forum is in russian, but it does not matter - 95% of the messages are pornography spam (in english). The worst forum I've ever seen. Pity, pity, pity - the well respectable singer and person should not allow something like that to be associated with her.

yet another 31plus :)

2007-07-16T16:14:00.000+03:00

It looks like I'm not the only one associated with the name 31plus.

Have a look at this: http://31plus.net/. Making customized clothes for dolls... I don't know if I'm fascinated by this (my 5-year old daughter may be), but this is a unique occupation, for sure :)

HTML image mapping free software

2007-07-09T13:27:00.000+03:00

I was in a search for free HTML image mapping software, and found GeoHTML, version 2.1.

Generally speaking, I found it useful for my purposes. It is freeware, allows saving/loading of image mapping projects (for mappings that are too big to be done in one time), opens existing html files with image maps, has layers, and its guidelines saved me a LOT of time.

The greatest complaints (IMHO), are

The software looks abandoned (latest version as of 20 March, 2000), however, image mapping didn't change much sinse that time, does it?
Works only on Windows, linux version could be great. I wonder if it would work under Wine...
Copy/paste does not work when entering parameter values!!!

Also, if you open existing HTML file with map image without width and height specified, it assumes them to be 0, and this is not what you want.

It seems like the authors tried to to create a full-blown HTML editor from it (You can set maaaany image map tag parameters from this tool, and it even has a complete HTML reference build into it). The result is a capable, but way to complex for a novice HTML designer software. And even if you understand all those tweaky parameters, entering them into simple edit box is not the best thing the industry can offer.

Besides the GeoHTML, I also had a quick look at Handy Image Mapper and Meracl ImageMap Generator. Although the latter comes quite high in Google search rankings, I'd recommend against it. It is old, buggy, and installs a lot of stuff on my machine that I feel very uneasy about. I liked Handy Image Mapper, it is simple (although featureless) and user friendly. It is, in fact, so simple and intuitive, that writing about it is like writing about notepad.

So, the final conclusion is:

If you need to use client side image maps with one or two areas in your pages, go get Handy Image Mapper. You won't regret it.
If you need to create complex maps occasionally, and are not afraid of complex software, GeoHTML is for you. However, don't try to solve all the problems with it. It is great for producing many areas with coordinates, but I prefer to do other stuff (like setting titles and hrefs) with other, more suitable software (vim and aptana for me).
If you are working with complex image maps on a day-to-day basis, maybe you should search for some professional tools?

Bookmarklets

2007-07-06T15:17:00.000+03:00

I've created and added some bookmarklets. You may find them at http://alex.jakushev.googlepages.com/bookmarklets.html. See there for more info.

Currently, there are 2 bookmarklets to simplify navigation. More may be added later.

transvestitofobia

2007-07-03T17:40:00.000+03:00

Accidentally found this website - online shop for trans(-genders/-vestites/-sexuals/...).

Not that I'm planning to become one, but it got my curiosity. Especially I was stunned by this. Until now I was sure that I'm able to distinguish male from female, no matter how disguised he is. I am not sure any more, and I don't like it. I really don't like it.

Timer script 2

2007-07-03T17:01:00.000+03:00

Added newer version of previous timer script. The new version is available here, or there's a direct link from my home page.

Visually, it is almost the same, except that now several timers are possible. Inside, however, there's a complete redesign, using such JS features as closures, prototypes, constructors and so on. The definitive guide book rocks!

Learning JavaScript

2007-07-01T14:00:00.000+03:00

JavaScript is not just a browser's language, although this is the field it is most popular in. JavaScript may also be used to automate Windows tasks (through Windows Scripting Host), there are some server-side JavaScript, and so on.

Deciding to learn JS, I've set to find good resources to learn from. Here's what I found (that is good for me):

w3schools tutorials: This is a good starting place to learn a bit about JS to get you starting
JavaScript - the definitive guide: I've got this book and look no further. All You need to know about JS is there. Note that I'm a professional software developer. For me, it is more important to understand the core, then I'll be able to apply it. If you need a cookbook, You'd rather look elsewhere.

Why 31plus

2007-06-25T14:27:00.000+03:00

Hi, this is my test post.

I'm new to blogging, and, frankly speaking, I don't know if I'm going to cultivate this habit in a long turn. But who knows :)

So why 31+? Well, because I'll be 31 next year. Now I'm 30, but 30plus is already occupied.