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.

BamBook is a Kyiv-based internet shop.

On the 28th of February, 2007, I ordered a book from them, and paid for it from the 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.

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.

The VentureOne by Venture Vehicles.

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.. and Pentagon has a competition on liquid robots.

Update: WordPress 2.5+ does not require adding rewrite rules to .htaccess, as it now redirects the browser to the correct (configured) URL itself. However, if you would like the redirection to be made by apache’s mod_rewrite rather than by PHP’s header() instruction (which I suspect to be slower than mod_rewrite), then you can still use the instructions below. (Another consideration to stick to mod_rewrite is the presence of other software installed into the root of the same domain as the WP blog; mod_rewrite solution works for all, while WP’s own redirect works only for WP.)

See important update at the end of this post!

In the early days of my acquaintance with internet, I considered it obligatory to add the “www.” part in front of every site (domain) name. As a matter of fact, without those three mysterious letters most of the websites “didn’t work”.

Now, nearly a decade later, it appears clear to me that the www part is redundant. But it was only today, that I finally switched my blog to the use of Class B no-www policy. Earlier it was Class A, the most common.
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As I earlier said, computer games are evil. After nearly half a year of not playing any computer games, I spent a few hours on “trackmania nations” racing.

Probably the only reason of writing about trackmania is the system of “distributed gameplay” in this game. As I am not a gamer, I do not know if trackmania was the first to introduce the “distributed gaming and ranking system”, but the system itself is very appealing and even akin to the computational efforts like The GRID and seti/folding@home etc.
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Update 7: I’m now quite satisfied with page generation times. See other updates at the end of the post and comments to find out more.

Note: have a look at other hosting options.

I’m currently using GoDaddy shared hosting plan. I noticed that my blog, as it grows in popularity and visitors, displays a wide range of page-response times. The best I had seen so far was below 3 seconds of page generation time (note: _not_ page loading, but page generation). If it were the average, I would be happy. However, much more frequently observed times are in range of 20-30 seconds per page. Sometimes pages even timeout, as my uptime tracker service is reporting (For February, there were 100 minutes of unresponsive pages, for March - already over 10 hours!!!).

For example, today around 16:00 GMT the following statistics were reported by my blog:

22 queries.
33.416 seconds.

Evidently, this is unacceptably slow.
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Do you know what is parkour? If not - this videos collection will tell you

(But, in short, the philosophy is: “100% efficiency in urban movement”.)

All the videos (except for two) are embedded from the Parkour series at ExpertVillage. As a side note: ExpertVillage shows ads before the video from time to time.

To start with, you may want to know the short history of parkour. Here is a movie from one of the parkour-evangelists:

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In my previous post on project management tools I stated that will try dotProject out. So I did, and here are my first impressions (mostly - what I dislike; the likes will come after some period of usage).
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I decided to streamline my project management procedures with some kind of software, as the number of concurrent projects is increasing, and more and more time is lost both for switching tasks and trying to grasp a-new the global view of the project each time I turn to it.
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If you happen to have no idea what would be interesting for you to do in life, you may try the method described below.
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This essay is primarily targeted at the teenagers up to 17 years old, but can also be helpful for up to 25 years (in the extreme cases). I did realize the things I am describing here quite late - only somewhere in the third year of my bachelor diploma studies. The following text is based on my own experience, and may not be appropriate for everyone.

From my early childhood, I did not want to specialize. I just didn’t like the idea of doing only some limited portion of work, when there are so many interesting things to do. Becoming a specialist a priori seemed the way to boring life, because as a specialist you must do only the small subset of things related to you profession.

Opposite to becoming specialized in some field, I imagined doing that and this for some short periods of time, and eventually becoming a ’specialist in everything’ (which pretty much equals to a ’specialist in nothing particular’).
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