stas' weblog

Наверное, каждый город в мире, насчитывающий многовековую историю, может похвастаться обилием строений, улиц, памятников и других сооружений, когда-то игравших важную роль в его, города, жизни, но впоследствии потерявших своё первоначальное значение. Впоследствии такие объекты либо обретают новую жизнь, становясь неотъемлемой частью новых процессов или событий, либо переходят в разряд памятников архитектуры и искусства; таким образом с течением времени и создаются те самые, плохо поддающиеся формальному описанию, дух и атмосфера города, его характер. Как это ни парадоксально, но именно старые, построенные какое-то время назад сооружения формируют город в том виде, как мы его чувствуем и осознаём, и пройдёт ещё достаточно большое время, пока возводимые сейчас многоэтажные башни и экстравагантные сооружения займут прочное место в ансамбле города и станут определять его облик.

Don’t ask me why, but I decided to take a part in this virus-like game striked a lot of Planet’s blogs lately. Here’re the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

The result for me comes from the “Paradigms of Artifical Intellegence Programming” by Peter Norvig. This great book has been living on my table for month already awaiting for me to finally find some time to get into the wonderful world of the Lisp and AI. The quote is following:

The special form let* is appropriate when you want to use one of the newly introduced variables in a subsequent value computation.

I hope the book will stop having a bad time soon and we’ll be enjoying working together on the fascinating AI stuff for a long time.

There were a lot of noise recently about a new little toy project that anyalizes your “writing personality” based on your blog posts. So I tried to test it within my blog as well. As it comes my writing personality is of the “ESTP - The Doers” class. The meaning of that is given on the projects’s website as the following:

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Well, probably it is not far from reality.:-) At least, they assure your blog writing style has nothing to do with self-percieved personality.

What is your blog writing style? Check it here.

Картинка из офиса, не мог не сфотографировать. “Кризис” наступает, чего уж там…

We are almost there. Just a small step behind.

In case if you’re an active user of torrent networks like me you may discover one day you have a lot of music stored as APE-compressed AudioCD disk images. Although nothing bad, it is rather hard to manage a big music collection stored like this and navigate between tracks while listening this music. Recently I decided to convert the entire collection to the separate FLAC-compressed tracks, and here’s how you can achive the same.

• Install audio/cuetools and audio/shntool packages (or whatever it called in your 3rd party software manager)
• Install audio/flac package (you’ll need metaflac to tag resulted files)

• Split the big APE file to separate FLAC-compressed tracks:

  cuebreakpoints my_favorite_music.cue  | \
      shnsplit -o flac my_favortite_music.ape
  

• Add metadata information to FLAC tracks:

  /usr/local/share/examples/cuetools/cuetag.sh \
      my_favorite_music.cue *.flac
  

• Rename resulted files (optional). I use the following script:

  #!/bin/csh
  set c=0
  foreach i (`echo *.flac`)
          set name=`metaflac --show-tag=TITLE $i | \
              sed -E -e 's,TITLE=,,' -e 's,[[:space:]]+,_,g'`
          set filename=`printf %.2d__%s ${c} ${name}`
          mv ${i} "${filename}".flac
          set c=`expr ${c} + 1`
  end
  

After that you’ll receive a number of properly named flac tracks in the working dir. Enjoy!

Several days ago I’ve made a post about the LIFE photo archive recently made available by Google to everyone with Web access, and attached an image as illustration. That was a photo from the “Winter in Moscow” series taken by famous American photojournalist Carl Mydans. Today I’ve taken the picture of Kremlin from the same position as Carl did fifty years ago to see what has changed since his trip to Moscow. I’m sorry the angle is not exactly the same – I didn’t have the original photo available with me and I tried to reproduce position close to what I remebered. Here are results.

I’m not sure when exactly Calr Mydans made his photo. From picture it seems that the month is close to what we have now, i. e. November or December, but I easily could be incorrect. But the result is interesting anyway – two photos of winter Moscow divided by an entire epoch…

Google started to publish scanned photographs from the LIFE magazine stretching from the 1750s to today. Some of them have never been published and comes directly from the LIFE archive. There’re a lot of really brilliant photos, and those are now available in free and accessible form.

Be sure to check the archive here.

Thanks, Google!