The DIMV Blog

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.

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

I’m learning, teaching myself something new every day.

I think this was always the case, but it certainly (and understandably) intensified since I switched careers. Every day, I go to bed knowing more than I did when I woke up. I like it, too; I think it’s one of the big treats of the software development trade.

All my life, I enjoyed acquiring new knowledge for the power it gave me. With it, I could do things more efficiently and also could do things I couldn’t do before. But precisely because of that, sometimes learning a new thing made me feel desperate: oh, how much time and effort would have been saved had I only known this before! It’s like spending two days disassembling and reassembling your engine to finally discover that the reason it refused to start was the empty fuel tank. All the precious time that could be spent fulfillingly, all the projects that would be possible, all the mistakes that could have been avoided; such a waste! I used to get really upset about it.

Got myself a tox account. Because why not, and also look at the world we’re living in.

Утро, завтрак, ничто не предвещает…

— Папа, извинись для меня! (Дочерь ещё путается в глагольном управлении.)

— Ладно, извинюсь. А за что, собственно?

— Я просто хочу тебя простить!

Никогда не обращал внимания, а тут вдруг пригляделся к чеку. Почему-то у меня в голове организация, собирающая со всех москвичей денег за электричество, была московской, в крайнем случае — подмосковной, ан нет!

Странности вроде неадекватной работы автоплатежей через Сбер или выключения сайта по ночам (да-да, их API для передачи показаний счётчиков работает только в рабочие часы — в XXI веке) почему-то теперь не кажутся дикостью. Возможно, это московский снобизм во мне пророс, ведь дикостью они быть не перестали…