izard's Journal

10:08am: This blog
I'm writing the blog in English because I type twice as fast this way than in Russian (yes I am improving...), and 90% of my friends and friends read English any way. I answer comments in the same language they are posted.

I am trying not to post anything related to my employer, but if I do so, this expresses only my own views and does not represent official position of my employer.

When I post about some technical topic which seems non trivial and is related to my employer's product, don't expect it to be inside information. If I post about it, it means that this info is already public. Usually I do not post any personal information or anything that is related to my family.

All photos are mine, and I allow anyone to copy, change, do anything you please with them. I don't post "friends only".

Useful tags are: software , idea , Deutschland, freediving and trip report

10:39am: Trip report: Cologne
Just got back from Cologne.


Just behind the heron there is a hotel where I was staying for one night.

I was surprised that in S-Bahn in Cologne there are special areas for 1st class passengers. "Если в обществе нет цветовой дифференциации штанов..." So St.Petersburg officials who once planed to have a special VIP area in the metro trains were in fact not as silly as I thought, they must have seen this example.

Few more pics under cut.
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All pics are in picasa album

I have noticed that in Germany it is still a common practice to name companies, including IT after founders name. It was popular elsewhere 100 years ago (Ford, Procter&Gamble, Suzuki, Toyota, Mitsubishi:), but I think not any more.

9:55pm: Cow farm in Alps
Last weekend in Alps a colleague had taken us in a very good Bavarian restaurant. We would not find it ourselves:
it is located next to a farm, which smells like ... a farm.

Then we walk 10 meters and we are in. A colleague told us it is in top 5 in Bavaria according to some culinary reviews.

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Just realized that this May is a little bit busier than usual: I traveled to customers twice and will have three more trips until June. Each trip requires some preparation and solving issues offline afterwards. That's why I am posting not so frequently lately.

2:27pm: e-mail log.
It was public holiday yesterday. Enjoyed it a lot, went to see "The dictator", the closing monologue at UN was amazing.

Here is a short log from internal e-mails I was exchanging with American colleagues Wednesday evening:
me> Here is the data I promised to provide.
they> We need some more, can you do measurements in the lab and send tomorrow?
me> All that on Friday only – tomorrow is holiday here and they literally lock the office and there is no way to get in (same for Sunday, sometimes I envy you Americans :)
they> Yup – over in America, they allow us to work to death :)

11:18pm: Snails
This weekend we've been to Alps again, and the weather was bad. Bad for humans, but perfect for snails. There were tons of them everywhere, some up to 30cm big.



Few more under cut
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1:13pm: Evil mobile apps ideas.
Always on and connected mobile experience:

1. Free app utilizing NFC to open doors/turn on/turn off engine of a car. When app becomes popular, push an upgrade which records acceleration after car engine is on and roughly calculates the speed. When speed is grossly over limit, calls police or better automatically transfers fine using online banking.

2. When you bring a broken phone to service center, they check a log of an app which uses accelerometer to record all free falls, and if there were any void the warranty.

Last one with black humor under cut.
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1:03pm: Hiking in Alps
This weekend we met our friends who live in St.Petersburg. The weather turned too bad for sightseeing, so on Sunday we went to Alps and took one of the most easy and popular trails up from Spitzingsee.

We were the only folks on a trail! There were few reasons for that: weather was bad, it is too late for skiing, and too early for hiking. So It was very unusual - usually the trail is crowded - you literally go back to back with some other hikers for kilometers.

Because of heavy rain and fog mountains were not particularly beautiful, but on a smaller scale there were plenty of sights of spring:


Under the cut, there are more indications of spring in Alps and finally, a photo of my wife. (I normally don't post her pictures in my blog)
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7:57pm: Atomkraft? Ya, bitte!


What would it take to replace nuclear generated electricity with photovoltaic? Germany would have to buy 12x more panels than current install base. Most of the panels are manufactured in China, and manufacturing process is not environmentally friendly. Still purchasing those panels is subsidized by government, which could have spent the money on nuclear power research :)

12:26pm: Russian consulate Munich
We must be doing something wrong, but so far the experience with Russian consulate is A+. Fast, efficient and friendly. Very similar to Munich KVR. Thumbs up guys.

The only thing they lack is online feedback form where I could write how awesome they are (especially comparing to other Russian bureaucrats I've dealt with). However if they had this form, they would likely have more negative feedback than positive - that is the impression when coming to the consulate and listening to other customers around.

4:55pm: x-states
For the applications I usually work with first thing we do is disable all power management. It only brings uncertainty to execution timings which embedded and a lot of telco/enterprise workloads want to avoid.

But for most of performance conscious programmers power management brings a lot of fun. Before recently, there were several states with well documented transitions and timings. Now they are more complex - there are C-states, S-states, P-states and D-states and they interact :) Oh, yes, frequency can also change - both down and up! (HT would bring some more complexity)

Good thing is Intel Vtune XE has a special collection mode to catch some of the transitions I've mention above.

11:29pm: Joy of clojure.
Reading "A joy of clojure", made to chapter 6 so far. I like the book more than Halloway's.

I did not know Clojure has integers with bases 2-36 built in.
REPL=> 36rz
35
I don't get the motivation to add anything but bases of 2,8,10,16. Also having rational numbers support looks like tribute to Scheme rather than real world requirement.

However I am hardly in a position to complain about industry use of Clojure. Unfortunately I can hardly use it at work - only did some small log parsing tools with it. All people around me (colleagues and customers) are using C,C++,IEC61131 and Asm only, so I interoperate :).

2:07pm: Programming for absolute beginners
I just had to lead a one hour programming lesson for a small group of 14 year old girls who know nothing about programming.

So what I did was I've taken a Qt snake game demo (very similar to a game installed on many Nokia phones), removed few lines from a Javascript file that contains the games logic (Qt/demos/declarative/snake/content/snake.js), and guided students in re-creating the parts I removed.

I only explained that we have two sets of Cartesian coordinates (one for human, one for AI player) which we can alter each time tick, and told them they can use assignments and checking conditions with <, >, ==.

I think this is a very visually appealing and interesting exercise with easily adjustable complexity.

diff is under cut.
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Three places to check are marked with FIXME. First place is logic to move a snake, good to start. Second is a hack to make it easier to debug.

Third is the really interesting part, because here students can invent a strategy, algorithm and code for AI player. The girls I worked with, who had never programmed before, managed to write an AI player that chases and catches human one :) It was running on a netbook and CE4100 Atom based set top box

2:24pm: US export control
CoCom was abolished in 1994 after collapse of the Eastern Block, but something new emerged instead.

Among US government agencies that regulate industry, there is one that imposes export control on so called "controlled technologies". Those comprise of high tech know-how that can be used to design modern weapons.

Easy to see what US bureaucrats think is high tech applicable to weapon designs:
- Radiation-hardened microelectronic circuits.
- microprocessor development technology.
-supercomputing - cooling, interconnect,etc
- high speed communication – laser, ultra high frequency radio.
- solar arrays and/or solar panels, with a minimum average efficiency of 31% or greater
- microwave power amplifiers
- cryptography and security
etc,etc,etc

Interestingly enough, the published scientific research on that topics is fine, what counts are real products and privately funded R&D. It is also interesting that there are different levels of country's credibility: e.g. Israel is ally of US, but not all technologies are allowed to be transferred e.g. HPC is not.

A very large set of activities could be interpreted as technology transfer: e.g. just a chat between someone who is working on a controlled technology with a national of controlled country. However if that national of controlled country acquired permanent residence of US (green card) it becomes fine. Permanent residence of many countries like Australia, UK, Germany, is treated the same way. This looks silly because I don't get what happens to a KGB spy when he acquires e.g. a permanent residence of Canada. Oh wait but there is no KGB any more? Who cares!

Disclaimer: As I believe everything I read in internet, all data above is from public sources.

10:25am: sleep and AI
I must be reinventing the wheel, but I think one of the key processes for creating alife strong AI is implementing sleep.

Any way I think sleep is much overlooked process in alife space. Any complex enough being: fish, insects sleep. According to an article, even roundworm nematode sleep, but only while they develop.

10:44pm: Singapore 2/2
Short post about Singapore..

First thing you notice in Singapore it is really a major shipping hub.

I never seen so many big ships at once before (well, I did, but that was in Singapore too.

Another thing that we found entertaining was a note in a MRT (local metro) regarding a service interruptions. It was as following:

"Dear passengers who experienced MRT service delays 6 weeks ago. Could you please describe your experience at http : // website. You could also suggest us if there are any improvements you would like us to implement."

I wish MVV would do anything like this! During last week I had to spend 4x more time commuting because of service interruptions..

4:30am: Where modern CPU is "invented"?
Reading Russian web forums, I've noticed two misconceptions:

"Core 2 processor is invented in Israel", someone wrote in this thread at RSDN. I've seen this point of view few times already also at ixbt and some other places in runet. Few argue that it is not true and everything important happens in US.

There are plenty of public sources describing where each new microarchitecture is developed.
E.g. according to Wikipedia article, article at Intel web site and many articles like this one
Nehalem(2009) and Haswell(2013) are designed mostly in Oregon; Merom(2007) and Sandy Bridge(2011) - mostly in Israel. I tend to believe everything I read in Internet ;), so I thought it is kind of common sense, nothing to argue about.

The real mystery is where Atom cores are designed :::))) If it was not linkedin, that would be a bit more difficult to google :)

1:47pm: Trip report: Singapore
Previously when we flown via Singapore we only managed to get to the city center for few hours. This time we've spent there 2+ days. Still not enough to really see most of the city, but OK for experiencing most of touristy stuff.

Marina bay had doubtlessly became a new Singapore landmark.

When flying A380 to Singapore, we've watched a National Geographic film about construction of Marina Bay. It was especially interesting to see it after watching how civil engineers were struggling to make this structure stable.

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9:42pm: blogging policies
Just spent two hours at work clicking through mandatory annual policies compliance trainings.

Like last year or two years before, one of the topics was what kind of stuff I can and what I cannot post in my personal blog. So far I think I was complying :)... But there is one thing I have not noticed before: my understanding was that I am not allowed to post anything - no confidential technical or marketing details, and nothing about my colleagues.

The later appeared to be not completely true... Of course I am not allowed to post my colleagues pictures and and jobs details. But what I can do without violating anything is to invent a pseudonyms for my boss and colleagues and post about any social interactions! The only issue with that would be that there is nothing interesting happening.

What is really cool about work is not office politics (I don't notice any), but technical details of inner working of CPUs and platforms. Unfortunately checking what is public and what is not it is usually time consuming, so I will continue posting technical stuff which is either trivial or unrelated to my work.

7:43pm: Last day of winter
In 2011 I posted about a first day of Spring which was 2nd of February. This year the last day of winter is very late, 8th April. (I hope it is the last one).


Yesterday Snow covered Munich and stayed on the ground for almost a whole day. I guess it is a global warming to blame.

11:41am: Сон
It must be because of a full moon, I just had a weird dream.

I am riding in a horse-drawn carriage together with Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky in a center of Munich. We are having a small talk, and he is in a calm mood. Then we see a crowd gathering in front of our way. He becomes happier as he thinks the crowd is here to greet him.

However I noticed there is another carriage in front of us, and there is a Pope (Ratzinger) inside. I ask my companion: "Vladimir Volfovitch, may I make a picture of you and Pope in the background." He shouted at me: "Why did not you(du,ты) take picture of me before, now you want a picture of Pope more!". I answered "But the picture will show how you are overtaking a Pope's carriage, isn't it good?". He nodded.

After I took a picture, he told me: "Now, publish how I overtaken the Pope quickly in the blog, you are a blogger aren't you?". I answered: "Not really, Medvedev is a blogger, and I don't even have a Twitter". So, publishing this post now only because I was asked by Vladimir :) There is no picture in the post because it did not survive the awakening.

8:06pm: Random Munich pic
In spite of bad weather, we are showing sights of Munich to my Schwiegereltern (German is often more terse than English).

One thing has caught my eye: there was some construction right at tram tracks in a busy intersection, and workers managed to do it without disturbing a tram schedule.

Every two or three minutes two special workers were blowing a horn (it looked like a steam punk fetish btw), and all other workers moved their machinery out of tram tracks. It was very entertaining to watch.

9:41am: NNL == The President of Russia (yet)
I've taken two days off before Easter, and now I am reading "The Deadline" by TDM, just got it from Amazon.

TDM is a genius - in a book published in 1997, he described a character called "National Noble Leader of Moravia" who is very much resembling Mr. Medvedev, current president of Russia.

5:30pm: 1st april post
Recently I got several vouchers with wifi connection credentials from a hotel's reception. Logins and passwords apparently were machine generated and were merely a meaningless combination of letters and numbers, but one login had a meaning. Actually I am posting this because I just found the voucher in a book about Java performance, I was using it as a bookmark.

The login was "21virgins". When I got it I asked a guy who gave me a voucher "Who had selected so interesting combination for a login?" After a quick look he answered: "Oh yes there is a typo, it should be 72 not 21". It was a Muslim country, it is good it is free enough that ppl can tell jokes about religion :)

10:35am: Terse clojure code.
After a post by antilamer I tried to compose a clojure code that should definitely look better than written in Java. However my skills are still lacking, what I've got looks uglier and is nearly O(n^2) minus laziness.

(defn find-ones [arr k]
 (let [n (count arr)
       sum (reduce + arr)
       subvecs (fn [l] (map #(subvec arr % (+ l %)) (range (inc (- n l)))))
       has-k? (fn [l] [l (reduce + (map #(if (<= k (reduce + %)) k 0) (subvecs l)))])]
   (if (< sum k) Integer/MAX_VALUE
     (first (first (filter #(> (last %) 0) (map has-k? (range k n))))))))

10:30am: Bali:other [3/3]
I just tried 30 days evaluation Adobe Lightroom.

Appears too complex for me.

Just few remaining bits of our previous vacation.
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All pics are in picasa album