A Dialogue With Bot

Back in the days when ICQ was popular spam bots added you to their contact lists dozens times a day. But they were brute and ugly. At first they spew their spam links at your face when you added them, then they simply started to insert spam links in the body of the invitation. ICQ is long dead and spam-bots never bothered me in modern protocols... until some time ago.

About Questions and Answers

That is very interesting how people perceive and assess questions and answers. How do we assess quality of the question? The first and the main criteria is whether topic-starter did his homework searching for the answer himself. That's why "Do your homework" is the first advise on "how to ask the question" page on every software forum (and there is one on gis.stackexchange). The second criteria is sufficiency of information provided by the topic-starter. No one likes to play clairvoyant and guess what is the actual situation (but with experience the ability to foresight omitted details is being developed) and waste their time asking for more information.

About On-line Education

Recently I've accomplished 2 of the on-line courses provided by Coursera. 

A "Model Thinking" course provided a nice overview of the existing approaches to model creation. Despite oversimplified maths (that I tried to compensate by using R-scripting where it was applicable) I liked this course for covering a wide range of real world implementation of different types of models.

A "Game Theory" course was quite nice, but had a lack of the real world implementation examples (there were a couple of them). And it was quite disappointing because that was what I hoped to learn about. I've already studied Game Theory in my University 7 or 8 years ago and since then was curious in seeing the theory in action. Unfortunately all the examples I've encountered were either oversimplified or far too complicated. The good thing was that the statement of accomplishment of Game Theory course was much fancier then that of Model Thinking.

About Spatial Ignorance

There is one question about spatial technology that bothering me for a couple of years. 

Is anyone suitable for working with GIS and spatial data or one should be a professional?  

Well that's a tough question. But in general it depends on conditions. 

Lets ask ourselves two more other questions.

1. Is anyone suitable to operate PC, printer or database?
2. Is anyone suitable to be system administrator in your office?

Obviously it is "yes" for the first question and "no" for the second. Anyone can ride a bicycle but one need license to drive a bike.

So my answer for the given question is - one need to learn a lot to understand how to work with spatial data. Anyone willing to learn theory is suitable to work with spatial data.

Tonight one smart ass (or should I write "cat"?) asked me why in the hell I suggest to calculate distances (when using PostGIS) in the corresponding zone of Pulkovo-42 for Russia (EPSG:28403 for example) when possible? The motivation of the question was based his statement that one will need far shorter SQL-query for distance measurement if the geometry would by casted to geography type and distance would be calculated with EPSG:4326. Like: "Eah, ST_Distance will return meters even for ellipsoidal calculations! Did you know it, dumb ass?! Admit, you suck!"

Well, kind reader, can YOU see the GLOBAL difference between  EPSG:28403 and EPSG:4326 (it is not about projection)? The answer is "reference ellipsoid" (or "geodetic datum" or just "datum"). This reference ellipsoid defines the Earth shape model parameters for all the calculations that one would perform with spatial data.

Well, kind reader, if you were (are) a good student then you should understand, that if reference ellipsoid defines the MODEL of the shape, then it also defines the BIAS of this model from the true value at any given location.

The next questions you may ask: 

Q: Does this bias matters?

A: Well, it depends on your goal requirements and the answer will be "NO" or "YES". So you may ask me here if in doubt. 

Q: How big is the difference between measurements using different datums?

A: Well, it depends ;-) ... depends on datums compared as well as locations compared - from centimeters to hundreds of meters. 

Q: Will 1 meter difference make your day?

A: Absolutely! Do you have a land parcel in your possession? Imagine that tomorrow some people from the municipality will came to you and demand to move you fence, because it is build on the adjusted road land parcel. They show you a digital map where your fence is 1 meter on the adjusted parcel. And this shit happened because of 1 meter bias! 

Instead of conclusion

If you're a cat - grab a handbook on geodesy and become a human being, or... just keep licking your balls and quit work with spatial data before you'll ruin something.

My Gmail Content instead of video in YoutTube... WTF?!

A funny snapshot of what I sow instead of video on YouTube - a part of my current page from Gmail! And if I change page in Gmail, the video frame content changes respectively. This thing happened when the PC turned on from the suspend mode (but it never happened before).

This is an actual snapshot (not a photoshop) of the Gmail page instead of video

I'm a Father Now

On the 23 of March my wife gave a birth to a beautiful girl. We are going to name her Alice (the name that stayed last after we've cut out all other names from the list one by one). But I've not abandoned yet my insidious plan to (secretly from her mom) register her as Hatshepsut ;-)

2011 - An Apple Year

(Photo by net_efekt - CC-BY)

Just for the record, 2011 was remarkably plentiful of apples in European part of Russia. So I ate a lot of apple jam this winter and even tasted a home made apple wine.

Maybe there will be another apple year in future and it will be possible at least to try to estimate an interval for this phenomenon.

Winter is the Best Cooling System

My CPU never was so cold:

How to update BIOS for free if you don't have a CPU

In the situation when you need to update BIOS to let your new CPU work and you (and your friends) do not have another CPU that would be able to start the system, you have to pay for service to so called "experts". In my case prices varied from 20 to 50 Euro... for this 5-minuets work O_o. New CPUs have the same price...

Solution is quite simple actually. You just have to buy new suitable CPU ;-) I've purchased the cheapest model for 25 Euro, used it for a 5 minuets to update BIOS and then just returned it in the perfect condition to the warranty department of the shop where I've bought it. Now I have BIOS updated and my 25 Euro back. The only expenditures were for the public transportation - about 1 Euro.

AMD 8-core processor: finally I can use it!

Over a month ago a motherboard of my 4 years old desktop died right in the middle of the important work. I had to make a decision whether I should repair it or buy a new PC. At that moment I've already faced a lack of performance and knew that a simple upgrade will not help much. But I had no intentions to spend money for purchasing completely new PC. So I decided to buy new powerful CPU, a corresponding motherboard, and a lot of fast RAM.

Wuala vs Dropbox: a decision making

After sudden death of my computer I've understood the necessary of the backup storage for the most important files. Of course I would like to store hundreds of Gbs of my GIS projects, but no such option is available for free. 

Actually there were no problem at all with retrieving data that I need for the current project. I just went to the friend of mine with my hard drive, connected it to his desktop and copied about 40 Gbs of crucial data to my laptop. Seems Ok, but there are some files that I would like to have now, but I need another 3 hours for traveling to get it or buy some SATA adapters (and I don't want to by something just to use it once).

The sizes of these files are actually small: my scientific library, my articles, my writings maybe some shp-files. So common free of charge 2 Gb of space that is provided by several companies would suit me well. There are a lot of options nowadays but I limited it to a Dropbox and a Wuala. I need to pick up one... Let's see...

Dropbox do not offer RPM for openSUSE, Wuala do. Dropbox requires Nautilus to be installed (when I prefer Dolphin and KDE), and Wuala don't. Conclusion: Dropbox sucks, Wuala.

No Place for Russia

There is no such country as "Russia" in the witpress registration form))) Romania is absent too... Still I'm happy that Rwanda is not forgotten ;-)

Living in Russia is Bad for Your Health

There was a link to the interesting research in one of my e-mail subscriptions today. The book "The New Profile of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in Russia: A Global and Local Perspective: Summary of a Joint Workshop" brought my attention because of my nationality. I decided to check it out. Of course I had no intentions to read the whole research, but I was curious about graphs and pictures. Here you are one the scary one:

HEALTHCARE MINISTRY WARNS: LIVING IN RUSSIA IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH!

About communities

There is an interesting post (google-English) about organisation of the community for the Open Source project. To my mind these thoughts are useful for every volunteer based project / community - not only to those dedicated to the software development.

The main ideas (some are in my interpretation):

• The most of the community participants are passive.
• The most active participants have to be rewarded by increasing their control over the project.
• Community have to be organised and organisation have to be transparent.
• At the beginning community needs a "magnanimous dictator" to unite the community and make project attractive for participants, but for the community and project survival in the long term it is necessary to develop democracy and try to reach the state of anarchy.
• Project become more attractive when those, who are capable and willing, receive more important tasks.
• In the beginning it is hard but essential to organise a proper feedback.
• When community and project are grown and mature it is necessary to prevent its division (fork for the software) because splitting exsanguinates community and the project.
• Community have to survive its founder so it is necessary to develop the democracy and move towards to anarchy and make decisions via consensus.
• At the first stage of the democracy the "silent consensus" will prevail, and the silence will mean the agreement. Vote system have to be developed.
• With the procedures became more complicated the need in providing newbies with the rules of participation will rise.
• "Formalisation of the agreements helps to ensure that the community lives its own life and does not depend on anyone individually".
  
• "The community can survive and flourish for as long as there is demand for the product produced."

Calibre: convert to EUPB problem

I had a problem with converting any file to EUPB format for Sony Reader both under Windows and Linux. Calibre started conversion but stuck at certain percent. I solved the problem with checking "Without default cover" in EUPB output options.

iPad: designed 10 years later as supposed to be?

I've discovered article in an old journal yesterday. This article about future computers was written in 1988. There was a competition organised by "Apple" about what will be a PC in 2000. Following description won: it will have the size of an exercise book with only "Power" button, touch-screen display, build-in GPS, wireless interface and an option to find location of the lost computer. Definitely it is a portrait of the iPad. And "Apple" definitely was sure that it was possible to have it in 2000 (otherwise this version wouldn't be rewarded). So the next time you will be at the Apple store, point at the iPad and ask: "What took you so long, guys? I was expecting this shit like ten years ago!"

UPD: This picture above (original picture, actually) has an interesting history. I shoot it 22 of January, the next day I showed to the friend of mine, he copied it and on the next day showed it to his friend, who posted it at his death LiveJournal, and then it appeared there at habrahabr.ru. I suppose I should think about leaving watermarks at my pictures before showing to anyone ;-)

Winter puzzle

There are sooooo many snow in St. Petersburg this winter. Here is a little puzzle for your amusement. How many vehicles can you see at this picture?

Click to enlarge

Mail.Ru is a batch of spammers

Of course this is an open secret, but the spammers of this company continue to hunt me. I thought that was able to get rid of them, when abandoned my account @their.domain several years ago... No, it's not so simple to escape enterprises nowadays.

A month ago I started to receive a lot of spam, a Russian spam at my gmail account, which is unusual for gmail. And I was sure I didn't exposed my  gmail account to any suspicious sites at least for a several months.  I decided to check detailed information on these mails. I found that actually this spam was from my account @rambler.ru. I do not use it since I started to use gmail, but still  keep to collect incoming mail from it. 

As I was sure I didn't exposed my gmail account for months, I was dead sure that I didn't exposed my rambler account for years! WTF? The answer was somewhere near, but not too obvious, so it took time to discover the truth. The reason for spam was that Mail.Ru purchased the ICQ! I bet you didn't get it ;-) Let me explain:

1) the spam-attack started right after that bargain;

2) my ICQ number is connected to my rambler account;

3) Mail.Ru acquired information about my rambler account and started to send spam. 

Blocking LJTiMES

Annoying shit

This new Life Journal's frame drives me crazy. If someone wants to get rid of this stuff (and I do know that there are a lot of people who do not even think about blocking ads and other unnecessary stuff), here is an option for the Firefox. I have the Adblock Plus addon (and Element Hiding Helper for it) installed. Unfortunately, right clicking on the frame and choosing option to disable the frame will work only for the current journal and this frame will reappear at another one. So you should chose an own filter option (after right click -> block the frame) and type: http://*/__rpc_lj_times_string.

I'm counted

Russia needs everyone slave - it is important to know whom to milk.

 

Now they can sale the database with some information about me. The inventory-guy was a student from the culinary technical secondary school situated in front of my windows across the street. He provided me with information that it is quite safe to eat at "Dve Palochki" restorations (he is working in one of them), but it is better to abstain from ordering soups: they add an MSG (which cause an addiction and an impotence) in it. Now I know why I liked their spicy soups so much ((( It is good that my visits to these restorations were not frequent.

Despite the youth, the guy has a clear view on the impotence of our government, our people... I told him to learn foreign languages and leave damn country. He answered that Sweden is his goal.  Good choice. Farewell, comrade...