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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Note: have a look at other hosting options.

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.
Update 8: this blog is not at godaddy anymore for the reasons which have nothing to do with speed.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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).
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you happen to have no idea what would be interesting for you to do in life, you may try the method described below.
Read the rest of this entry »

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’).
Read the rest of this entry »