Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in vadim's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
7:57 pm	Arrived in America I arrived in Florida yesterday. Flight went well without delays. Woke up early, went to the airport, checked in my baggage and had plenty time to have breakfast at the airport. The first flight was to Miami and took 8 hours. I had time to read a book and go through half the music by Depeche Mode. An interesting thing was that I got a metal fork, knife and spoon. The knife had a bit of dried salad stuck to it, and the cutlery was in general dirty looking. I've got to say that whoever made the cutlery deserves an award for the amazing achievement of making a metal knife that cuts worse than the plastic ones I was used to getting on flights. The arrival to the US went pretty well. I got through the passport control,I got asked what I was coming for, and had to go through the security check. The TSA is certainly more annoying than the spanish controls, but fortunately it wasn't TOO horrible. They required me to take my sandals off, and to x-ray a folder with documentation I was holding. The second part was a flight from Miami to Florida. After the doors closed, the pilot anounced "The doors are closed. If your flight plan didn't include Florida, now it does". Dylan, Spoony and TJ picked me up. We went to eat and then to his house. It took some effort to stay awake until about 00:00 american time (this is 6 AM in my usual timezone) despite having had 3 cups of coffee. Woke up today at 7 feeling perfectly fine. No noticeable jet lag, but I'm sure it'll be a lot worse when I return home. Current Mood: awake (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
3:57 pm	Chani visited me Chani came to visit me on 17th-19th. I was afraid of screwing up in some horrible way, but fortunately it all went fine :-) She arrived feeling quite sleepy, so we spent the day staying at my home. Conveniently, my brother is now in Ukraine visiting some relatives, so she could use his room instead of having to sleep on the sofa. It seems that both my spoken English and my ability to understand speech improved at least a bit. I remember trying to talk to an English person some years ago, long after being able to talk to people in it online, and failing horribly at it. Fortunately this time it went quite well, and we were able to understand each other without problems most of the time :-) The second day we managed to tear ourselves from the computers and went out to the center of Madrid. Having left home a bit late, we first went to a vegetarian restaurant. That's where I discovered that while I normally don't have much trouble with English, my vocabulary for food related terms is really lacking. After some quite unsuccessful attempts to translate the menu, it turned out that just the menu of the day was written in Spanish. The full menu was in English, but that presented the opposite problem: while I didn't have to translate it anymore, I didn't know what most of that was. Ended up asking for gazpacho (typical Spanish tomato soup) and spaghetti, which was good. Then we went to the Retiro park in Madrid. This is a big park, with many monuments, fountains and gardens to see, as well as some poor guy in a Mickey Mouse suit hanging out near the entrance in this hot weather for some reason. Unfortunately once inside there don't seem to be maps anywhere, so we mostly walked around at random and missed a few nice things, like the Crystal Palace. There's a lake in it, and we got into a boat and rowed around the lake a bit. As expected, having tried rowing 20 years ago wasn't good for anything, and it took me some time to manage to do anything useful, but fortunately, Chani is much more skilled at it :-) After that, we walked around the park some more, then went to the nearest train station. The Atocha station in Madrid has a really nice tropical garden in it. We took some photos of the interesting trees, birds and turtles there. We both were very tired at that point, so we went home. I really enjoyed this day :-) The last day we didn't really have time to go anywhere. After catching up with online things and packing, there wasn't much time left, and we had to allow for about an hour and half of traveling on the underground. Unfortunately the place where I live and the airport are on opposite sides of the underground map. We arrived early and ate without hurrying in a cafe. Then unfortunately it came time to say goodbye. Chani gave me a strong hug :-) Now there's one thing that's not nearly as good online. These have been really pleasant 3 days :-) It's really great to have been finally able to meet somebody I've known online for so long, and to see that we get along in RL just fine was even better. It's hard to tell from such a short time, but Chani turned out to be amazingly like-minded in RL. It's a pity her visit had to be so short, and I really hope we can meet again :-) Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
12:12 pm	MS software Crap. All crap. Today I got a call from our web developer. Apparently, the MS SQL server stopped replying to the web server's requests, but he called the company, and everything works fine there (we have a VB interface to the DB), except for the web server. So, I log in remotely and take a look. The firewall is okay, the computer is reachable, the SQL server is up. I take a look at the log. 2005-08-24 01:11:37.10 spid3 SQL Server is terminating due to 'stop' request from Service Control Manager. What the heck!? 2005-08-24 01:12:26.06 spid5 Clearing tempdb database. 2005-08-24 01:12:26.13 server SuperSocket Info: Bind failed on TCP port 1433. 2005-08-24 01:12:26.13 server SuperSocket Info: Bind failed on TCP port 1433. 2005-08-24 01:12:26.13 server SuperSocket Info: Bind failed on TCP port 1433. 2005-08-24 01:12:26.90 server SQL server listening on Shared Memory, Named Pipes. 2005-08-24 01:12:26.90 server SQL Server is ready for client connections So there we go, for some bizarre reason it restarted at night, when nobody is in the company, and came back up without being able to bind to the TCP port. Since the web server can only use TCP (firewall restrictions), and the LAN has full access, which allows the use of named pipes, it explains the problem. Restarted the server, works fine now. Of course, authentication auditing is not enabled, so I still haven't the faintest idea if somebody rebooted it remotely, or what. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 8th, 2005
6:50 pm	Shopping Nobody in Spain can figure out how my last name is written when they hear it, and often not even the first name, so I started using client numbers and such when I can. Typical conversation with a shop: Me: Hello, I'd like to check the status of my order They: What's your last name? Me: I'm client #02... They: Ok, Mr. Vadim Tro... um... Me: Yeah, that one They: Wow, complicated last name. Then the usual business follows. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 8th, 2005
11:51 pm	More coding Been coding almost the whole day today. My little program has progressed a bit. Managed to get the keyboard state through GAPI, solving all the problems. Now Foxglove can move around, fly around the screen, and sleep on the ceiling. I also added support for mirroring sprites, so now walking backwards uses mirrored images instead of just walking backwards. Hit a few more complications: While drawing with System.Drawing appears to work well enough, inverting a sprite pixel by pixel (since the compact framework doesn't have the image flipping methods) is oddly slow. This means I should probably switch to the GAPI for drawing, or maybe just cache all the inverted images. Considering making a game similar to Lost Vikings from it. Basically, in those games you had 3 vikings, and had to use all 3 of them to get through the level, by combining their abilities. Sounds quite fitting for my sprite set. I'm thinking Foxglove could have a different "vision" based on echolocation. Got to figure out something to do with that. Posted in the forum, wonder what they will say. (Comment on this)
12:41 am	Another day in Russia Been doing some official stuff in the morning. Since I am without Internet access until about 10PM - 12PM, I had to spend the rest of the day somehow. The previous day I had the good idea of saving a sprite sheet I had found by randomly browsing around, so I started working on a little game for the Pocket PC PDA I had brought with me. Nothing very impressive so far, but this is what it looks like: Moves around, and can fly. Will also make her stick to the ceiling and sleep there tomorrow. Some other improvements are needed. For instance it captures the normal keyboard events, which means that the movement is subject to the keyboards repeat delay and repeat rate. Got to try the GAPI and see if it has anything for that. Other than that, I'm not really sure of what to do with this thing. So if anybody has any ideas, I'd like to hear them :-) I was thinking of maybe trying a Lost Vikings kind of thing, using other characters. I'd ask in the place where I got it, but new accounts have to be approved by the admin, so I can't yet. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 5th, 2005
10:51 pm	I'm in Russia! Well, finally something more or less worth blogging. Trip went well, although I had 3 very annoying people behind me who just had to laugh during all the 4.5 hours of the trip. Arrived at 6 AM Russian time, without sleeping at all, and had to visit a government office the same day, which turned out to be closed. Ended nearly dead by 6 PM, so fell asleep and woke up at 6:30 AM. Not a very good sleep schedule. Woke up thinking, "wow, there's a lot of room for computers in this room", as the room is indeed a whole lot bigger than my spanish one. Since it's been 8 years since I was here, I had to remember a few differences and adjust to the new situation. Namely: It's really quiet. There's no hot water in the whole building for a week. Repairs or something. There are no WiFi access points anywhere either, and this is a big building in the center of Moscow. Internet access is 33K, and only works well early in the morning or at night. There is food not available in Spain. Mmm, kvas and cranberry juice. Not much changed in the house after 8 years Been in a government office to get my password. Funny stuff, nobody knew where they had to go, so after a while when new people started coming in and asking who was the last one in the queue, everybody just started laughing. Rather weird. Looked around a bit in the house. Stuff that was there 8 years ago is still mostly there. Some stuff is new though. Found books about the Khmer and Vietnamese languages, as well as "Internet Explorer 6 for Dummies". Yikes! Overall things are going well. Rather bored from the lack of easily available Internet access, but I have the laptop and games, so it's not bad. Coding a bit to pass the time, TV looks very unappealing. Maybe they still have decent cartoons though. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 3rd, 2005
12:00 am	Going to Russia for a week Tomorrow in the afternoon I'm leaving for the airport. I'm going to fly to Moscow, and will stay there the next week, as I've got to get some documentation in order, and it seems that the only way is doing it personally there. I should be back the 11th. While I'm gone, it's unlikely that I will have Internet access from there, unless I can find some wifi AP to connect to, but I don't think that's too likely. So, expect me to vanish completely for a week. I'm going to bring my cell phone, but I'm not sure if I'm going to use it at all, as the roaming charges are probably going to be quite scary. If anybody needs anything from me, send mail to vadim_tr, at the yahoo.com site, and I'll check it if I can. My server is still broken, as I still don't have all the components I need, so my vadim.ws addresses will almost certainly go down shortly after I leave. While I'm there I'm planning to write some code, mainly work on the .net version of Nornimator and continuing my work with AC, so I think I should get at least something useful from it :-) Current Mood: excited (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005
11:43 pm	Damn you, Murphy! Something always has to go wrong. Here my server has nearly died, so I've been getting hardware to replace it. Some nice hardware, too. I decided that this time I want good stuff, so I got a good motherboard, a good silent case, ECC RAM and a Pentium M CPU. Components: Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe board. 1.7 GHz Pentium M CPU Pentium M adapter to use that CPU in the board instead of a P4. 1 GB ECC RAM, in 2 sticks to get dual channel. ATA to SATA adapter to finally get rid of those awful cables. Arctic-Cooling Silentium T2 case. The plan is to build a powerful and silent server. The Pentium M consumes very little power (up to 20W), which is ridiculously small compared to the > 100W that are used by modern CPUs. It also has the ability of slowing the clock rate down, but I'm not sure it'll work on this board. The board has a feature that turns fans on and off as needed, which should come useful with this CPU, because unlike in a laptop it's going to have a nice big heatsink, so I expect it to be able to work without a fan some of the time. And, the case is especially made to be silent, and indeed it works. It's got 4 fans with a rather curious shape, which seem to not make any noise at all. At least I can't hear it. And it comes with a drive cage for the hard disk. I already have a hard disk I'll use there, which I also picked for being especially silent. I also got two sticks of ECC RAM. Two because I want to have dual channel, since the board supports it, and Intel CPUs love having lots of bandwidth. And ECC because I'm really sick of having hard to troubleshoot memory problems, so what could be better than RAM that continously tests itself? Resuming: All this nice, and rather expensive stuff should finally give me a computer with decent performance, stability and which doesn't sound like a jet. In fact I hope not to hear it at all. But of course something had to go wrong. I got the board, RAM and case today. Brought them home, opened them up and it turns out one of the fans in the case is seriously broken. Either the shaft snapped, or there isn't any, because the blades aren't firmly held in place, and fail to spin at all. To make it more annoying, there are two fans connected to one cable, which means I have to get both replaced or mess with wiring. So it seems I can't just replace the fan, I have to get a whole new case, which might mean an additional delay before I can finally assemble the stuff. It's not the first time that something like that happens to me with this shop. In fact it happened way too many times. But unfortunately this is Spain, a somewhat technologically retarded place, and that means that getting unusual components is pretty hard. In fact I had to make some compromises because I couldn't find the components I really wanted. So annoyingly enough, I'll have to stick with them for a while. Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
Friday, June 3rd, 2005
3:20 pm	Got the manga! Well, that didn't last for long. Finished all the Chobits manga in just 2 days. Great stuff anyway though :-) Overall impressions: Manga starts a lot faster, and doesn't have the obviously extra stuff, such as the MMORPG, shopping and beach episodes. Can't say I miss them much though, although the ghost episode was pretty cool. The ending is a LOT better. The anime one had this really awful moment I just didn't understand, and overall it didn't make a lot of sense. Now the manga one seemed to be a lot more logical. I get the impression that the manga translation has been toned down a bit from the original. At least some googling seems to indicate that. Got to read it again. Thoughts: If I ever see something like a Persocom being made, I'll make sure to get one that doesn't use a hard disk as storage. Hard disks are eeevil. Or in the worst case, RAID-1, daily backups, and of course ECC RAM. Hard disks sound like an awfully bad thing to use for a Persocom, too, as they don't like vibration and movement much. Wonder how long such a complicated mechanism would last. While Chii seems to have some quite impressive hardware, I doubt it'll last for a lifetime. Wonder if anybody will be able to replace anything in such a unique model. Maybe Freya is still somewhere and usable for spare parts? Thinking more on that, all the possible ends seem depressing. If Chii breaks she probably can't be fixed, being so unique. If that doesn't happen then Hideki will get older until he dies, while Chii in theory could live forever assuming maintenance is possible. No happy ends indeed. Interesting possible future on the long term: Human reproduction rates fall enough to make the world human population go down. Meanwhile, Persocoms will learn to build, maintain and fix themselves. The future: Small human population, and lots of nearly immortal robots :-) I'd have that annoying reset button removed somehow :-D I could live without the "full functionality", but the possibility of a reset is just too bad. Current Mood: thoughtful (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 25th, 2005
8:54 pm	Order placed. Delivery in T -5 Whee :-) I think this should give me stuff to do for a while. Let's see, all 8 volumes, 192 pages each... 1536 pages total. Lots of fun, with extra amusement added by the parents when they find how much stuff I ordered. Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
3:00 pm	Chobits! Finished watching the series two days ago, and it still doesn't want to get out of my head. Really cool stuff :-) How strange, from the description I never thought I'd like it. Now I have this sudden urge to order the manga from Amazon. And probably will order all of it at once. And then get something else, perhaps Angelic Layer (is it any good?) Update: Is it just me, or Amazon has somewhat insane discounts? There are discounts on: Volume 1 + Volume 2 Volume 3 + Volume 1 Volume 4 + Volume 2 Volume 5 + Volume 2 Volume 6 + Volume 2 Volume 7 + Volume 2 Volume 8 + Volume 2 Current Mood: bouncy (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 8th, 2005
11:13 pm	How to drive your neighbours mad Get some wireless headphones, and use them often. I just realized that somebody in my building must really hate me. I don't know who it is, and they probably don't know it's me, but somebody has wireless headphones too. Sometimes when my transmitter is off I hear their music and TV. Sometimes there's interference. However, since I use mine pretty much all day they must have heard all of my weird stuff so far. Some of it has to be maddening. Here's an example of what they probably hear: Lots and lots of anime, in Japanese. Ranma, Inuyasha, Fullmetal Alchemist, Kenshin, etc. Music. Sometimes the same track repeating over and over for hours, when I take off the headphones but forget to turn the player off. Various interesting styles, such as Metal Opera, game soundtracks and .mod files. I considered playing say, the same Aqua or Vengaboys song during the whole day to see where will the screams of frustration come from, but I'm not that evil ;-) Games. Hours of "We're all heroes, you and Boo and I. Hamsters and Rangers everywhere rejoice!" and "Sarge does what Sarge does best" repeated 200 times a day, battle sounds and such stuff. Recently a young guest added to that the sound from some Barbie game that I found rather painful to listen to. Computer sounds. In KDE there are sounds for when windows are open, maximized and minimized. Weird stuff I decide to play out of curiosity, such as the really awful episodes of Dragon Quest dubbed in Spanish. That stuff is plain painful to watch, and hearing it is not much better. Sound from Flash movies, such as "Magical Trevor", and "badger badger badger" sometimes playing for hours too. Latest addition: Disney cartoons. In English, so they probably won't get anything. This has been going on for a few years. I still don't know who's the neighbour, but with all the stuff they have to hear I'm afraid to ask ;-) Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005
5:40 pm	Quiz Hehehe, that was a fun part of that episode :-D Dance the night away by karchan85 Name What you Look like The Music The Music in your Head Quiz created with MemeGen! And, BTW, I cheated. There are *lots* of them, and I haven't seen them all yet. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 25th, 2005
10:22 am	The president of the American Library Association doesn't like bloggers Quote: "It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief." Article It's some very strange stuff. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
10:05 pm	Quiz You scored as alternative. You're partially respected for being an individual in a conformist world yet others take you as a radical. You have no place in society because you choose not to belong there - you're the luckiest of them all, even if your parents are completely ashamed of you. Just don't take drugs ok? </td> alternative 83% Middle Class 50% Lower Class 46% Upper middle Class 29% Luxurious Upper Class 25% What Social Status are you? created with QuizFarm.com Current Mood: tired (Comment on this)
Friday, January 7th, 2005
9:20 am	Copyleft Commies Bill Gates gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". People on BoingBoing seem to have liked the idea, so they created some very amusing logos: One of those is definitely going to be my desktop background. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
6:34 pm	Whee, gifts :-) Here in Russia we get gifts for the new year instead of Christmas, so I just got all of mine. Lots of nice stuff. For myself, I got a nice big illustrated hardcover edition of LOTR, in English, and a game, Ground Control 2. Not much of a gift though, I suppose, but lots of fun :-) Helen sent me a really nice book, "Hackers and Painters", by Paul Graham. Haven't read all of it yet, but it is very good :-) Mom gave me "Wilt in Nowhere" by Tom Sharpe, and "Digital Fortress", by Dan Brown. Tom Sharpe writes really hilarious stuff that I recommend to everybody. There are several in the "Wilt" series, and all of them are great. Dan Brown writes good novels with unexpected twists, and that seem to never fail to generate huge flames on USENET when they contain references to religion. Mom also gave me a coffee grinder, and a decent amount of good coffee. And indeed at last I can brew something that tastes good. Yay :-) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 25th, 2004
1:34 pm	Most bizarre dream ever I almost never have dreams (or remember them), but this one I did remember a bit, and it was *bizarre*. Looks as if I was on drugs or something. This one featured a CC-created game with an intro so weird that I can't even describe it. Dali would be proud, though. Now, the end sequence was something. It was seen from high up. Dragons flew towards an evil looking city, perhaps Mordor. They passed it and continued flying. Then I saw a whole country (can't really tell which, or even if it was modern or not) gradually turning into having the same evil, black look. About everything was made rough black stone. Then a monument in the form of a huge (building size), black head of GW Bush popped out of the ground. Then I woke up. Current Mood: giddy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 18th, 2004
8:19 pm	Christmas I suppose this must be somewhat strange, but I find I actually don't like it. Although I do like winter a lot, Christmas turns out to be a rather annoying part of it. What's not to like? Well, let's see. Rampant commercialism. I can't go anywhere without having to see thousands of adverts for crappy toys. Prices go up. It's impossible to order anything for quite a long time. Travel is even more difficult. Going to a mall is madenning, since they'll be playing the same songs for the 2^32th time. It also began early in December, which makes little sense. I have to carefully check the door to see if there are children waiting to sing carols (usually badly) when I open it. I rarely keep spare change, which makes it makes it annoying as well. Unfortunately I'm not yet arrogant enough to close the door, although I suspect many of them know I'm looking and not opening. TV is even harder to watch than usual. All of the movies about Santa are shown again, just like the previous christmas and the one before. This is complemented by lots of bad movies for children. Mind you, there are a few decent ones, but 90% of everything is crap. Christmas gifts. I don't mind gifts of course, just the ones that are obligatory. I end getting gifts from people just because I show up at the party. They probably don't even notice my existence the other 364 days of the year. Same goes for having to pick gifts for people who I've seen maybe twice. It's also kind of weird. I mean, celebrating the birth of Christ by giving somebody Neverwinter Nights as a gift is well, strange. NWN has several gods, and magic. That's got to be at least slightly heretical. The tree. Another curious way of celebrating is cutting thousands of trees for no good reason. Most of those will end getting thrown out later, when the "Christmas spirit" evaporates and it magically turns into a piece of junk. At least we've got a plastic one now. Having to explain people yet again that in Russia we didn't celebrate Christmas and got gifts for the New Year, and that no, I hadn't heard of the Wise Kings before coming to Spain either. Here in Spain people get gifts twice - Christmas and Wise Kings. I did notice though that Dylan striked out "Christmas" and wrote "New Year" on his card, though :-) What exactly am I celebrating, anyway? Being an atheist it can't possibly be the birth of Christ, which seems to be a quite different date anyway. The winter solstice? Also quite unlikely, although celebrating a natural event I know happens for certain at least sounds more logical. I'd say that actually I don't celebrate anything at all, and just accept a few gifts and eat food somebody else paid for. I definitely wouldn't bother with all of that if I lived alone. Writing a rant like the above will inevitably get me lectured by somebody that this is a time to be happy, and all that. And don't you dare to question things like a religious holiday being celebrated by governments that theoritically are separated to the church. Oh, and since I know somebody will say it if I don't: Bah, humbug :-) (3 Comments |Comment on this)