Evgeny Kuznetsov

SpinRite is a piece of data recovery software written by Steve Gibson of dubious Security Now fame. Anyone familiar with the matter knows how much Gibson likes to boast about SpinRite, how it is a complicated piece of software writted in pure Assembly language, how it’s polished and thoroughly tested on a variety of obscure hardware to achieve perfection at every release, and how its data-recovery algorithms are based on intricate physics of modern disks to ensure the recovery of every bit of data that could possibly be recovered. The data recovery ability “which far exceeds any other known utility” is the main selling pitch there.

My email domain is in Moldova’s TLD, I set it up back when I was practicing medicine to be “like House, M.D. but kuznetsov.md”. These days, Moldovan spammers are unusually active. It took me a while to figure out, why: they have elections ongoing.

Today I noticed several messages in Romanian in my spam folder and they didn’t contain the usual scam links to suspicious pages. I got curious and translated a couple of these.

Everyone around me loves JetBrains’ software. I, on the other hand, am typically puzzled when confronted with it. Today’s example is Teamcity Kotlin DSL.

This is Kotlin at the base. The language that has two kinds of string literals: one with escape sequences, and one without with undocumented and insane escape sequences. Test yourself: if to obtain a % you need to write %% (and it’s not documented anywhere), what do you need to write to get a $?¹.

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.

This post is about obvious things, but it looks like they aren’t that obvious to some people.

Many messengers allow to send voice messages instead of text. These messages are problematic: you can’t read them in a meeting, you can’t skim through them later to remember what the conversation was about, you can’t search the contents of these messages… The fact that the voice messages are possible to send doesn’t mean you should. You shouldn’t.

Some things are international.

I recently learned that the foundations of the audiophile world are being rocked, shaken and uprooted by a horrifying scandal that has already been dubbed MoFi-gate. Everything about this scandal is so hilarious I can’t stop giggling.