Evgeny Kuznetsov wrote on I missed out on a rather good movie today.
My wife was watching, and I was doing some housekeeping on one of the non-work-related projects. I could have joined her on the couch, but I chose to turn my back on the TV, so I didn’t watch. I listened through the whole story, and I turned around to watch several scenes, but I didn’t watch the movie. I think I would have enjoyed it if I watched.
In Russia, we have a lot of holidays. Some think we have way too many holidays, but I’m kinda used to it, so I’m not fit to judge.
Most of Russia doesn’t observe Christmas on December, 25 (the prevalent church here is the Russian Orthodox who never switched to Gregorian calendar, so Christmas is January, 7). However, the USSR legacy (they tried to make the church-related holidays obsolete by introducing the non-church-related holidays about vaguely the same dates) of celebrating The New Year on January, 1, combined with the modern Russian return-to-roots state-wide celebration of Christmas, results in the state-sanctioned holiday (think of it as “bank holiday” in Western terms) spanning most of the first half of January.
Today, in one of the Telegram chats somebody asked if anybody remembered what the limit of the filename length in MS-DOS was. That someone could not remember the 8.3 rule seems counterintuitive to me, but I can rationally persuade myself that there are people who never worked with DOS or that someone could forget. That’s not what triggered this post.
It was the answer. Someone just forwarded an reply to the question from one of the GPT assistant chats.
TIL that the Python programming language was named after the Flying Circus, not after any snake. This explains so much that I seem to no longer have any questions to Python whatsoever.
Even more: I must confess I’m starting to seriously like it.
I’ve been wearing a wristwatch since I was a teenager. If I happen to leave home without a watch on my wrist, I feel as if I’m naked, uncomfortable. For the last ten years, I’ve been using smartwatches almost exclusively.
Three months ago, my smartwatch stopped functioning and I decided to try and live with an ordinary watch for a change. I dug out my old quartz watch, put in a new battery and set the time. The battery is still good three months later and will run for a couple years more, which is awesome compared to smartwatches. The rest of the experience was frustrating.
I don’t really care about the US politics or the US economy that much. I don’t live there, and the local developments around me interest me much more. However, as I read about Elon Musk being appointed as advisor or whatever it is, I remember thinking: “Now, at least they’ll have someone with an idea”. After all, what Musk did to the industry of space launches is worth a praise every day of any week — at least in my book.
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.
Евгений Кузнецов написал В Калининграде сейчас невероятно красивая осень. Сухо, тихо, листья, запахи. Идёшь, и кажется: в этом мире не может быть зла, никакой суеты, ни жестокости.
Каждый из нас ведь — часть этого мира. Мы все — в нём, он — в нас. Так откуда возьмётся что-то, кроме радости и красоты?
Но стоит об этом задуматься, тут же вспоминаешь, что всё ведь как раз наоборот:
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.1
