Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 03

Looking for an Intern

2017-05-03T15:33:00+03:00

We’re looking for an intern for two weeks, for manual testing of mobile applications and an Internet TV set according to pre-prepared test scenarios.

Required skills:
— English: reading test scenarios, reading Jira, writing reports, writing in Jira;

For the internship, the intern will receive compensation. The especially talented will receive a job offer.

Send a cover letter and résumé to obrizan@dnt-lab.com

The Book “Economics: The User’s Guide” by Ha-Joon Chang

2016-02-03T22:43:00+02:00

I recently read the book “Economics: The User’s Guide” by Ha-Joon Chang (116 UAH in electronic form).

I sincerely wanted to start understanding economics better. I read it; I didn’t end up understanding it much better. But there were interesting bits in the book.

About how the imperialists (Britain and accomplices) waged economic wars in Asia for centuries, using all kinds of vile methods and actual wars to push through their interests.

About how in the International Monetary Fund the U.S. has veto power, i.e., you could say they run the IMF. The IMF gives loans in exchange for political control over a country.

International trade is, 80% of the time, transnational corporations moving stuff from one pocket to another. And a corporation can skillfully regulate imports and exports with itself. For example, buy ordinary hammers at 800 dollars apiece. Or buy a Toyota car for 200.

Foreign direct investment, at best, has no effect on a country’s economy, and sometimes makes it worse. Because any politician is ready to dance for an overseas investor and tailor the laws in favor of the investor, not the country.

Free trade is a noose around the neck of developing countries (hello, association with the EU!). For a country, it’s better to buy its own products, lower quality and more expensive, than foreign ones that are better quality and cheaper.

You won’t learn economics from this book, but you can pick up a lot of facts. Recommended as light bedtime reading.

The Book “How to Overcome the Crises of Management” by Ichak Adizes

2015-11-03T08:38:00+02:00

The other day I read Ichak Adizes’s book “How to Overcome the Crises of Management” (420 UAH at the business literature store). As a result of reading it, I clarified for myself what kinds of managers and executives there are.

The author identifies four components:

P — performance qualities, the ability to work painstakingly and see things through to the end;
A — administrative qualities, the ability to maintain an “everything by the book” mode of operation;
E — entrepreneurial qualities, the ability to see new opportunities, generate new ideas;
I — integrative qualities, the ability to come to terms with others, bring a team together.

And every person, including an executive, combines these qualities in himself to some degree. According to Adizes, a strongly expressed quality is encoded with a capital letter; a weakly expressed one is encoded with a lowercase letter. The absence of a quality is encoded with a zero. Thus, PAEI is the ideal executive who combines all the qualities. The book says there are no such people. 0000 is a “dead stump,” an executive completely incapable of anything.

Typical “characters” of executives are given.

For example, 00E0 is the “arsonist,” according to Adizes. An executive who gushes ideas, and every week he has new ones. Each subsequent idea is better than the previous one, in his opinion. The subordinates of such an executive suffer, because they haven’t had time to finish the previous assignments before they already have to drop everything and do the new idea.

0A00 is the “bureaucrat,” according to Adizes. With an executive like that, there’s no point dreaming of any development, but everyone does have to arrive at exactly 9:00, leave at 18:00, sit through monotonous meetings, and write reports in a strictly defined format.

Or, for example, P0E0 is the “scientist who was appointed director of an institute” or the “actor, head of a theater.” He knows how to work, sees new opportunities, but has no idea how to manage and can’t bring a team together.

And so on.

While I was reading the book, several times the thought occurred to me: “How does the author know all my shortcomings and describe me so accurately”? Besides that, I applied all the knowledge to all my current and former bosses: it all checked out. The secret is that over the course of his practice, Adizes has analyzed the work of hundreds of companies. He knows what he’s talking about.

Adizes says that a company’s success is a well-selected team of executives in which everyone contributes within his area of competence and all of whom are united by the I quality — the ability to come to terms. Besides that, it’s important to have weakly expressed qualities not only in your own competence, so as to better understand the other members of the team.

I recommend the book to everyone: managers, programmers, deans, department heads, rectors, directors, vice rectors, injectors. You sharply begin to understand your place in the organization, your strengths and weaknesses. The path is visible for how to achieve success together.

Toy

2011-05-03T18:35:00+03:00

Choosing between an Apple iPad 2 64 GB WiFi+GSM and some other cooler gadget, I didn’t think long and picked the cooler gadget: a second-generation “Digilent-Basys” development board.

The development board has a Xilinx 3S100E FPGA installed, with a degree of integration of 100,000 logic gates, which makes it suitable for implementing SSI, MSI, LSI, and VLSI.

The development board also has a VGA video output, 4 seven-segment displays, 8 switches, 4 buttons, 4 connectors for external connections, a PS/2 port, and a USB port.

The development board is suitable for finishing a dissertation, as well as for preparing lectures, labs, and term papers for the course “Computer Technologies in Computer-Aided Design.”

How Do You Solve an Impossible Problem?

2011-03-03T14:16:00+02:00

I’ve had cases like this in my practice: you ask a programmer to make some feature, and he answers, “It’s impossible to make it.” I ask, “Why?” and he replies, “I read such-and-such documentation, looked at such-and-such example, tried doing it this way and that way, and realized it’s impossible to make it.” And sometimes they say, “You might as well have asked me to fly to the Moon and back,” implying that I’m asking for the impossible.

I’ve noticed this thing about solving problems. Here’s a problem. If someone has solved it, that is proof that the problem can be solved in a finite amount of time. But the converse statement, “no one has solved it, therefore the problem can’t be solved,” is false. Often, after assigning an “impossible” problem to a more capable person, it turned out that he successfully solved it. The constructive approach is to break the problem down into simpler ones and point out where you got stuck.

I would immediately make a little note to myself: aha, that first programmer is either incapable or unwilling. When someone tells you “this is impossible,” the phrase should be interpreted as: “I haven’t tried doing it, and I don’t want to either.”

The poker whistled as it sliced through the air...

Recommendations for Technical Writers

2010-12-03T21:53:00+02:00

Many of us write various kinds of documentation in English. That includes presentations, user guides, help files, and just plain blog posts. I’m the same way. We teach people with screencasts, where you have to explain what’s happening on the screen. The scripts contain a lot of descriptions of different controls, like “open the File menu,” “click the OK button,” “select the Options tab.” I couldn’t figure out how to write this correctly in English. Should I use articles? In what order should I write the control and its name?

Question for the readers: which is correct:

Select menu **Open **
Select Open menu
Select the Open menu

Or in this case:

Press button OK
Press OK button
Press the OK button

I spent six months racking my brain, I couldn’t sleep, I forgot about every other pastime except reading the dictionary and grammar references. When I was taking the train on a business trip, I looked out the window, and instead of trees, buttons, little menus, and radio buttons ran past my eyes. While pondering this question, several times at the terminal station of the subway I forgot to get out of the car and rode off to the depot. When I was getting money at the bank, the teller asked me, “Full name?” and I answered, “drop-down list.” At the registry office, to the question “Do you?” I answered, “No to all.” I would walk up to random passersby on the street with these questions, but they would only make the crazy sign and walk away...

The eclipse is over. My mind is so clear, and now I see what awaits us.

At this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx, Microsoft employees describe guidelines for designing application interfaces for Microsoft Windows, including documentation guidelines for every possible type of control.

Thus, none of the options above are correct. The correct options are: “Click File,” “Click OK.”

If you want to be literate, this documentation is required reading. There are many controls, and the recommendations are different for all of them.

Did you know about these rules? Or have you been so smart since school that you write in English without mistakes? Do you even care whether you write correctly in English or Russian? All bloggers who give a damn are invited to the comments.

P. S. And after our last conversation about design in documentation, did anyone find any decent templates for Doxygen?

Vacation Out of the Blue

2009-11-03T09:47:00+02:00

It all started last Friday, when friends sent me links to the news. The news said that a decision had been made to close universities for three weeks for quarantine.

I immediately wanted to get some kind of official information from our administration. Interestingly, on the front pages of four major Kharkiv universities: KhIRE, KhSU, KhPI, KhAI, there is still no information about the quarantine or the rescheduling of classes. On our electronic schedules site, students still have classes listed for this week and the following weeks.

Yesterday the dean of the Faculty of CE Vladimir Ivanovich Khakhanov called me, and we did finally post this announcement on the faculty website: classes are suspended until November 23, 2009.

So what should a student do with himself for these three weeks? Obviously, the classes for this period will have to be made up. Labs will have to be done, term papers and reports handed in, the exams will cover all 120% of the questions, and there won’t be any slack. There are two possible ways things can develop: a) compressing the class schedule so that students study from 7:45 to 21:45; or, more likely: b) no winter break — you’ll pass your exams and the next semester will start immediately.

So the “what to do” list might look like this:

finish lab work on your own or do it ahead of time, to save time and close out the course early;
prepare reports, if any were assigned;
do the course projects — they usually take a lot of time; you can work on them from morning till night, and for once you won’t be distracted by trips to the university;
find books and independently prepare the material that you’re going to cover — that’s advanced-level stuff, but it’s worth trying.

If the homework is done, you can do other things: see friends and relatives, sort out household matters, take care of things around the house, learn a new programming language (or brush up on an old one), read that book that’s been sitting on the shelf for ages waiting its turn, make some quick little project with a friend.

In short: whatever you fill your time with is what you’ll get in the end. Good luck, and stay healthy!

P.S. Bonus track from Sasha Adamov: tips for disease prevention.

Intel’s “Explain It on Your Fingers 2.0” Contest

2009-07-03T13:18:00+03:00

Another contest from Intel. This time you don’t have to program anything. The contest is called “Explain It on Your Fingers 2.0”. The task of the contest is to give simple definitions for various terms in parallel programming. For example, what are SIMD and MIMD? Don’t try to rush off to Google or Wikipedia for definitions. Better imagine this situation. You’re doing a lab assignment on optimization, your grandma comes up, peers into the VTune Thread Profiler window, and asks: “Grandson, what’s this?” Explain to your grandma what thread pool and context switching are, and do it so she understands and can retell it to the other old ladies on the bench by the entrance.

The contest is being held for the second time. Here is how participant dnafigator defined the term deadlock :

“when entering the bathroom, Anzhella forgot to take her robe with her. normally, she can go out into the room even undressed, but while she was in the bathroom, Anton dropped by, and Anzhella has to give him a flash drive that’s in her purse. Anton himself refuses to dig around in the purse and demands that Anzhella give him the flash drive, and he won’t leave without it. Anzhella can’t come out into the room while Anton is there. Anton is waiting until he’s given the flash drive, Anzhela is waiting for Anton to leave, after which she can come out and give it to him”

Contest site: http://software.intel.com/ru-ru/articles/contest-spell-it-out-2-main/