I’ve tried it already under Windows, but as my main OS is Debian, I can’t use it

You can sign up for updates on Linux version.

After reading the Google Chrome book, it is a long time waiting for it to be released for Linux….

Also, I’m looking forward for the plugins to enhance Chrome. Although it did import my settings/passwords(?!)/bookmarks from Firefox, but it has no Foxmarks, AdBlock and some other goodies I’m now used to on all the computers I regularly use.

These are the addresses for those who would like to travel lightly, meet new people, get new friends, hang out with interesting people, or just find a shelter for a night in the foreign country.

I’m now registered in both systems (and getting “verified” in CS), and so far I stayed with three people (at two places) found via HC and CS. Both experiences were highly positive. Actually, my world outlook changed quite a bit after my first stay: I heard from someone that

it’s better to trust wrong person once, than always distrust all the people

But building trust, despite being central to HC ans CS, is only one - basic - component. Cultural exchange and knowledge sharing are also important, though so far I was unable to comprehend these components sufficiently to write on them.

At the CouchSurfing.com website, it appears to be popular to put some test/quiz results into profiles. These are the tests:
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When right-clicking many links in FF3/IW3, it quite often happens so that a random action is performed instead of opening the context menu (bug report).

One of the solutions work-arounds (suggested by Andre Pirard) is to slow-right-click, that is to hold the right mouse button down until the menu actually appears, then - and only then - release it. Or, you can even slow-right-click, move the pointer over the desired menu item, and then release - that will perform the desired action in a single long right click (instead of more common single right click with a following single left click.)

This bug/behaviour is otherwise unsolved.

… was held on June 22-28, 2008, in Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk), Russia. It was the sixth conference held.

The International Conference on Bioinformatics of Genome Regulation and Structure is the bi-annual event. It features several bioinformatics sections, which IMO cover most of bioinformatics sub-fields.

The Sixth conference, BGRS-2008, was well-organized and had something to offer to everyone. By far the largest section was Genomics and Transcriptomics (at least if judging by the abstracts book and by the posters presented; talks given were distributed more equally between sections). As I did some work in genomics (namely, our COTRASIF tool), I had quite a load of info to digest, and many new potentially fruitful contacts to establish (which I did quite good).

The second section on my scale of priorities was “COMPUTER ANALYSIS AND IMAGE RECOGNITION IN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY”, which had several interesting researches presented in the field of spatial/developmental modelling. There was a very good talk on model reduction (with an actual example) for the purposes of both comparing different models and decreasing the model complexity without sacrificing model-predicted outcomes.

As for the other sections, I didn’t find them interesting enough. Fortunately, there were social program events scheduled for every day, so I visited the Novosibirsk zoo and the Archaeological museum. I did not do as many pictures as I usually do at conferences/schools, because there were two photographers at the conference, and their photos can be freely seen here and here.

Most of the conference participants could speak Russian (I’d estimate the group of Russian-speaking participants at 90% of the number of participants), even though they were coming from e.g. Singapore or USA. But the official conference language was English, and the 10% of non-speakers were far not underprivileged, which goes well with the international status of the conference.

After the conference, there was a BGRS-2008 summer school. As I stayed for some extra days, I managed to attend up to 90% of the school’s events (including the guided tour to Novosibirsk ). For me, summer school was somewhat less useful than the conference, but nevertheless such presentations as on Petri nets and about SABIO-RK/Sycamore were informative and will be used in my future work.

There were 3 prizes for the student presentations; winners are at the end of the page.

Certificates were given after successful school completion. As I wasn’t registered, I can now only print out the empty certificate, which is to signify that I did not attend the last day of the school and thus was disqualified .

Just found that there are also some photos from the organizers.

There was also a football (soccer) game between the ICG team and the school participants team. I’m a fan of neither watching nor playing football, so I skipped this event altogether.

A year, maybe two ago, I came across the news that someone’s constructing a “building printer”, in the sense that it is first filled with liquid concrete, and then - given the schematics of the building - “prints” concrete, producing almost-any-complexity architectural forms. Unfortunately, the names and links to that instance of object printing was lost and forgotten.

However, I have just stumbled upon the news item about RepRap, which is claimed to be “self-reproducing”. Clearly, this isn’t true, but RepRap - replicating rapid prototyper - is able to produce (some?) of the components necessary to build another RepRap.

I’d like to point out that

“Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.”

by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc., is an offensive and unacceptable phrase, which shouldn’t have been put at the top of the quotes. I’d hack down that RepRap website for this single quotation, and would feel vende vindictive towards Chris, if I were Chinese. But that’s not a long time to wait to see China rising and this kind of jokes vanishing.

That was a side note.

Continuing on RepRap, I do find it’s uses intriguing. For the best of everybody, there’s a how-to build reprap page.

First uses which came to my mind were… a new plastic cup, and a custom notebook/PC body/case, to put standard components into and enjoy the benefits of the perfect custom design

Apart from simple things like cups and actually “fast prototyping” (which does depend on the precision of RepRap), there aren’t that much uses for the SOHO owner of RepRap. But as soon as some small-scale silicon-growing/cutting machines become available, that would definitely open up the whole new world of custom gadgeteering and home-brewed electronic wonders. Also, the level of global and local espionage activities will explode, and Big Brothers will grow like mushrooms after raining cats and dogs.

As mentioned here and here, XName is a popular DDoS target.

Although I did enhance reliability of my other domains with a total of 3 secondaries, I forgot to do so with the most visited bogdan.org.ua. Thus, when yesterday bogdan.org.ua stopped resolving from ns0 and ns1 of XName, the site actually became unaccessible. Other XName-hosted domains, but with more secondaries, are resolving finely even 24 hours after the primary ns failure…

Little research based on the list of free DNS services helped me find this comparison, and made me think this way:

• zoneedit has 18 servers, but had very unfavourable user feedback from it’s users
• everydns has 4 servers and very good user feedback
• editdns has 3 servers, could be a backup
• xname has only 2

There is also freedns.afraid.org, but there was nothing substantial about this service I could find (except for the note that if you’re using one of their subdomains, it might not be visible to Google).

To remedy the problem, yesterday I modified the domain record to contain two more NS. This seems to have helped now. I suspect that I’ll remove XName’s secondary NS from the record, and will replace it with some other secondary NS, and then add one more secondary to get a total of 5 independent NS for the domain.

Update: according to my blog uptime monitor, total domain downtime exceeds 33 hours. Problems started yesterday with two short downtimes (33 and 38 minutes), then domain name went down for 32 hours. Now domain is up, but that could be only because of adding more non-XName secondaries.

Update 2:

XName infrastructure was under heavy attack since friday 8PM (GMT+2).
Until sunday 1PM, despite efforts of our different transit providers, www , ns0, and our internal mail server were unreachable. ns1 was reachable, but not very responsive (about 30% of DNS requests were answered). ns2 was unaffected.
From Sunday 1PM to monday 3AM, ns0 was reachable with a responsiveness of about 50%. ns1 was fully responsive, as ns2. www and internal mail were still heavily affected.

Must have been some maintenance, as I didn’t notice any changes in PHP/MySQL versions since the 7th of March.

Update: it seems as though since that short MySQL outage everything is faster at GoDaddy shared hosting. Did they upgrade database server(s)? I have no idea, but I like the change.

Found this one very informative: 6 steps to stop content theft.

Also: 5 content theft myths, and why they are false.

And more links:

• free internet fax
• anti-spam email 1 (recommended)
• anti-spam email 2
• create on-demand snapshot (archive) of the cited web-page

Today I moved my blog and gallery into MySQL5 databases from an elderly MySQL4. Also, both WP and gallery are now updated to the latest versions. Soon I’ll change the WP and G2 themes - for the lighter, less cluttered - and will remove some ads… and will also add some others instead

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin - so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now - but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!

If you want to fetch emails from some of your POP3-enabled mail accounts to Gmail, there’s a help article detailing the process. However, when using Ukrainian Gmail UI, clicking the link which should bring up the dialog box to add one out of maximum five Fetcher accounts, I got instead an offer to add the email address which I can use in the From field of my outgoing emails - and absolutely not a word about fetching emails from other POP3 accounts.

When I switched to English (UK) UI, everything went just as described in the help article, and I added one address to fetch emails from.

After fetching some mails, I switched back to Ukrainian UI, and - quite expectedly - the Fetcher part disappeared from the Settings/Accounts. Now I’m waiting to see if the Fetcher is nonetheless functional, or if it is also disabled… It’s functioning! So the only thing which was really changing in this case was the portion of the Settings/Accounts page not displayed while using Ukrainian UI.

The moral of the story is: when you think that some functionality is missing in the Google service you’re using - just switch to English UI!

Just a minute ago, I was shocked after logging in to mail.bigmir.net: instead of the bigmir’s own, HTML-only email interface, I got redirected at the gmail’s “Terms and conditions”, after accepting which I found my emails in the classic gmail mailbox.

First thing to think about: at least they did transfer all my emails to the new account.

Second: hey, they had given up their own email interface! Are they leaving the web-portal market of Ukraine? Was the part of their team (which later formed MI6) too important to handle their exodus with no consequences? Is that just a desire to give customers “better” interface and not invest anything into development?

I hope this won’t be a trend, for every service to have Google behind their servers. Or even just behind the name, to avoid extra complexity of having a server.

Finally, I think I’ll get used. But it was only yesterday, that I read the Google anti-utopia, where Big Brother’s name is (evidently) Google, and it’s webcams and microphones and search history define each person’s future AND guilt. Scary…

And I wonder which will be the next service of bigmir.net, “outsourced” like their email.

Get it here. If you haven’t used any other theme except for default, and if you’re Firefox user for a long time - it’s time to try something new! I suggest you try ColorGnome - it’s bright, clear, vivid, cheerful and even funny! I’m using it for several days already, on all but one of my computer workplaces - and find it good enough to write about.

If you want something more strict/official-looking, try maxfox II or maxfox II graphite - I enjoyed these two a lot, currently maxcfox II is on the only computer which doesn’t have ColorGnome

Today, setting up a relatively serious (in CPU resources needed) web-system, I ran into a weird problem of python scripts ending prematurely. After some investigation, it looked like any process which uses up more than 20 seconds of CPU time, is automatically killed. To verify this, I wrote an infinite loop in C,

compiled it and executed several times on the GoDaddy shared hosting server. I did observe the program running for the maximum of 20 seconds of CPU time, not a second more. Please note, that 20 seconds of CPU time can be much more of "real" time, if the script isn't using 100% of CPU, which often the case for shared hosting. Thus if you have in your php.ini max_execution_time set to, say, 60 seconds, your php script may actually execute as long as one minute; but I'm pretty sure that if your script has lots of CPU-intensive procedures, then as soon as it uses 20 seconds of CPU time, it will be terminated (however, this statement still needs checking - anyone?).

To verify, I also created a cron job with the same file. It ran for 30 seconds CPU time.

Strangely, this behaviour is not documented anywhere.

This limit may also explain a number of other problems, if you have heavy web-applications: they just might be killed before they are finished, causing errors.

I do understand the reason for this limitation, and am sure similar limitations exist in other shared hosting environments. The only important thing here is that this limit should have been documented and even put upfront somewhere in the hosting plans descriptions.

I also wonder if the limit is the same for all godaddy shared hosting plans, or if it differs. 20 seconds when executed from PHP, and 30 seconds when executed as a cron job were observed on the Deluxe Linux Hosting plan.

Extensions, additions and comments are welcome.

The utility of snap previews (snapshots) is still doubtful to me, and if they start putting ads into previews - I'll surely remove all the snapshots code from my blog.

Without ads, it's just one of the "bells and whistles"; with ads, it should be at least an affiliate program.

Update: now Snap's are showing ads. And it's a kind of an affiliate program. I still have to look closer at it... when Time permits. Without looking into it closer, I tend to remove Snap previews.

Update 2: snap previews are now removed from my blog. I might, however, add them manually to the links where it would be appropriate.

Google launched gadget ads.

Watch this:

If it's convenient and well-designed, I wouldn't mind visiting such a fast food once in a while. Though it's hard to imagine having breakfast there every day: too dull, I suspect. But have to try first to be sure.

Some more videos of delivery and disposal:
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I had just installed the latest ATI video drivers for Linux onto my Slackware 11 (with kernel 2.4.33.3); I have Radeon Mobility X600 with 64MiB of non-shared memory.

Running glxgears, I got ~2050 FPS (glxgears window focused) and ~4900 FPS (console window focused, glxgears window out of focus).

But running fgl_glxgears yielded values as low as 1 FPS! As fgl_glxgears is much more similar to the real-world game visuals, it's apparent that no game will be playable at e.g. 0.2 FPS.

Also, there were numerous repetitions of a single error in the console window:

FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Function not implemented) __FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed! fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!

I found the solution which worked perfectly for me:
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I've been away from Internet for quite a long while... but now I'm back, and writing again!

As I'm moving to Linux as my primary OS, my readers should expect more Linux-related posts in the nearest future. However, this does not mean any changes in the overall blog ideology and priorities - they will be kept as they are now.

I'm currently completing a DNA sequence-analysis server, which will be announced later; I might post additional details on making an automated pipeline-like analysis web-servers for bioinformatics and/or data analysis; but the decision "to post or not to post" will be made based on "popular demand" (if any...).

I added a new video to my Conspiracy theory in gallery.

I am an advocate of the official position: that is, HIV causes AIDS. In the movie description, I put my comments which dis-approve the point set and mentioned in that movie. I would strongly recommend that you stick to the official position in everything that is related to your health!

And now, with all the warnings, you may want to see it (326 MiB):
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Earlier in one of my posts (Using PEAR HTTP_Client or HTTP_Request with HTTP proxy) I gave an example of using PEAR HTTP_Client and/or HTTP_Request from behind an http proxy. However, I didn't tell how to make PEAR itself work properly from behind an HTTP proxy (e.g., for online operations like "pear upgrade-all").

So here's that tiny missing bit of information (this is Windows-specific).

Launch regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment, and create a string value called PHP_PEAR_HTTP_PROXY. Modify that new value to hold the string like: http://proxy_username:proxy_password@proxy_server_address:proxy_port.

If your HTTP proxy server does not require authentication, then use http://proxy_server_address:proxy_port instead.

I think the strings are completely self-explanatory; however, here's an example: http://john.smith:CrAzYP433WoRd@192.168.0.1:3128.

This topic is covered somewhere in documentation, I think. There are also other ways to configure HTTP proxy for use by PEAR, the above-presented method is just one of the several possible.