BamBook is a Kyiv-based internet shop.

On the 28th of February, 2007, I ordered a book from them, and paid for it with a credit card at the time of order. Soon I had a confirmation email, which said that the book will be delivered not later than the 16th of March (they promise 10-working-days delivery, so the date looked fine).

At the end of March, after writing several emails to BamBook, they responded with an official-looking “sorry for delay” and “we’ll do our best to deliver soon”.

After calling them on the 3rd of April I came to know that they at the moment actually do not have the book I ordered. They asked if I’m willing to wait for around two weeks, so that they “try” to order that book and then (add 10 working days) deliver it to me. I said NO, I WANT MY MONEY BACK with that kind of service you have! OK, they said.

Nothing changed until April, 23. So I called them again. They promised to return money again.

Another call was on the 3rd of May. They said that “refund is being processed”. I hope you imagine what kind of a company they are, if a simple refund processing requires whole month to be complete… or not complete, as nothing changed as of today, the 5th of May.

Update: as of May, 27, there are no changes, despite some more efforts put into getting anything from this real crappy Bambook internet-shop.

Conclusion: avoid BamBook internet-shop at all costs. Better go give your money to the beggar on the street – faster, with no troubles, and no waiting for anything.

“… consider a universal predictor based on pattern matching: Given a sequence X_i,… ,X_n drawn from a stationary mixing source, it predicts the next symbol X_n+i based on selecting a context of X_n+i. The predictor, called the Sampled Pattern Matching (SPM), is a modification of the Ehrenfeucht-Mycielski pseudo random generator algorithm. It predicts the value of the most frequent symbol appearing at the so called sampled positions. These positions follow the occurrences of a fraction of the longest suffix of the original sequence that has another copy inside X_iX₂ … X_n. In other words, in SPM the context selection consists of taking certain fraction of the longest match. The study of the longest match for lossless data compression was initiated by [Aaron D.] Wyner and Ziv in their 1989 seminal paper.”
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HD-DVD AACS Processing Key number: 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0.

Personally, I have no idea how to use this number. However, below are some links which will give you more clues…

And, also, it should be easy to follow the events with the collection of links below.
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This is quite a well-known thing among frequent and professional photographers, but still an interesting thing to know.
I was also told that digital photo cameras can “see” in ultraviolet as well, but didn’t check if that’s true.
As for infra-red light, this can be easily checked using any common “direct visibility” remote control. Most if not all use infra-red diodes to transmit signal. So I just pointed a remote at the camera, and made a shot. (Actually, camera real-time display also shows captured infra-red light, as it starts blinking in the remote.) Here is the proof of digital cameras ability to capture infra-red light. The bluish dot in the centre of the red-front-plastic-screen of the remote is infra-red light.

There was an excellent mod_rewrite cheat sheet at ILoveJackDaniels, but it is now gone.

I have been using it for over a year now, as from time to time there’s a need to try to remember how to use mod_rewrite (e.g. in the case of no-www Class B web-site).

To help preserve this useful bit of information, and for the cases of the original article being unavailable (which did happen a few years later), below is a link to the cheat sheet stored on my server.
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