Roman Kirillov’s blog

OH during the component-based software development lecture

— I am personally not convinced with EJB-QL approach and I don't see why you should be unless you love to embed SQL into your code, then surely you can say "Yay! I love it" — otherwise, as I said, I am not convinced. 

Flash must die and Flash eventually will

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is "good enough" for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

I would only say I am not surprised at all by this step — given amount of pressure Apple has pressed on Flash-based content (and obvious progress of JavaScript support in modern browsers) it is not surprising.

© The Register — http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/02/virgin_america_html_flash/

British Piracy Bill May Kill Most Small Public Wi-Fi Connections

The new Digital Economy Bill, a piece of copyright crackdown legislation, would hold owners of open Wi-Fi connections in Britain liable for any form of copyright infringement conducted on their networks.  There would be zero exceptions for individuals, businesses, public locations, libraries, universities, or small businesses.That could essentially kill the popular open Wi-Fi movement by making it too dangerous to businesses and universities to offer open services to their customers.  Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University states, "[The bill could] outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses.  This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in."

Very disturbing news articles from DailyTech and Telegraph — namely these two:

• British Piracy Bill May Kill Most Small Public Wi-Fi Connections
• Internet piracy measures 'will cost consumers £500m'

If this is indeed the case, Orwellian future is closer, than we used to think. 

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, told the Times newspaper: “It is grossly unfair that Labour expects millions of innocent customers to pay extra each month because of the actions of a minority. By their own admission this will make broadband unaffordable to tens of thousands of people, which flies in the face of Government policy to increase take-up in disadvantaged communities.” ISPs have been vocally opposing the Bill for some time. BT described the measures as a “collective punishment”, while Carphone Warehouse called on the entertainment industry to pay for the measures, rather than consumers.

Google's commercial — very nice and probably didn't cost a penny

Click here to download:

video-1.mp4 (12893 KB)

OK, granted — probably they did pay a great deal of money for the idea
to that guy (or guys, for all it worths) who invented and wrote a
script. However, filming was probably the cheapest in the history of
TV commercials ever. Like it. A lot.

Digital Image Processing, Playboy and The Most Famous Image in Computer Science

Have you ever seen this girl? Odds are — if you've ever dealt with image processing as a computer science discipline, then you had — in fact, many times. 

On iPhone Unlock: official + unofficial = ?

Awesomely stupid gamma-code encoder

Coded while professor explained what is the gamma code. Horribly inefficient but apparently works.

#
include <memory.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h> 

int binlog(int number)
{
    return log((float)number) / log(2.0);
}

int main()
{
    int value = 26;
    char buf[0x100];
    int i;
    int position = 0;
    
    memset(buf, 0x100, 0);
        
    printf("%d\n", binlog(value));
    
    int power = binlog(value);
    
    for (  i = 0; i < power; ++i )
    {
        buf[position++] = '0';
    }                         
    buf[position++] = '1';
    
    int remains = value - ( 1 << power );
    
    int tmppos = position;
    for ( i = 0; i < power-1; ++i )
    {
        buf[tmppos++] = '0';
    }
    i = 0;
    while ( remains != 0 )
    {                                       
        printf("Remains: %d\n", remains);
        buf[tmppos-i] = '0' + (remains & 1);
        remains >>= 1;
        ++i;
    }
    

    printf("%s\n", buf);
    
    
    return 0;
}

Developing using Eclipse CDT, remote Linux server and rsync

For quite a while I used to have a huge pain in my arse — namely, programming in C++ for Linux on my Mac.

I think I said this before, but I like IDEs — especially, I like Eclipse: it saves my time and allows me to develop stuff much faster and more efficiently, it is also great when you’re learning some new code (and if you have a very large project at hands, that means pretty much all the time).

The problem was, I should still build the project on Linux. That means I was doomed to put all the sources on the network drive, which was accessible both from my Mac and from Linux server, and build it all there. Not convenient and slow. Very slow, in fact — builds were taking ages and ages. Other guys were using stuff like vim and emacs, and I didn’t find it useful at all: these tools are old, and give you next to none help when it comes to writing the code. So I kept struggling with using Eclipse in this hostile environment, until I come out with the idea, which is best of all described by these few lines of Makefile:

build: 
       rsync -rvz . my.dev.server:/path/to/project 
       ssh my.dev.server 'cd /path/to/project && build' 

test: build 
       ssh my.dev.server 'cd /path/to/project && make test' 

Now, when I finish editing the files (or want to check something) I simply do on my local machine:

 kirillov:/local/source/dir $ make test 

And voila — all sources are synchronised, built and tested! An extra benefit of this approach is that I have no object files, .d files, executable files and other useless stuff in my dev-folder (and, consequently, visible in my project). An only downside is, if your source tree is very large, rsync can take a good deal of time (that is why I’m syncing only my subproject in my real Makefile).

SSH tunnelling, VNC and Mac OS X

That said, one can do almost anything as long as this anything is not writing a lecture (which that specific one should be doing — at least, theoretically). 

Woman & Man: an information exchange

via pixdaus.com