Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 06

A Reply to E. Ye. Rubin and V. I. Kauk

2016-11-06T10:30:00+02:00

Yesterday Viktor Ivanovich Kauk reposted my post about “Why I quit the university” to the group “KhNURE - open group” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/vicerector/permalink/1806975352897269/). He added his own narrative to the repost. A discussion happened under the repost, including with the participation of the rector of KhNURE, Eduard Yefimovich Rubin.

Several people reached out to me, like, Vova, we’re confused: there are several interpretations of your post. Whom should we believe?

Anyone who doesn’t want to spoil their mood on this wonderful Sunday had better not read further.

V. I. Kauk on my resignation: “What is striking is that it was precisely the last year that became like this and pushed him toward this decision. Without people like that, KhNURE will have a hard time confirming the high level of IT even in the Kharkiv region. Without the young, active, professional, and talented, we will not survive. And if our system of organization and management is squeezing out people like Vladimir Obrizan, then something needs to be changed, and urgently.”

Let’s get straight to the main thing: the high level of IT at KhNURE was pissed away by Mikhail Fyodorovich Bondarenko. I enrolled in 2000 in the Computer Engineering department, and even back then people studied there through bribes, while in lectures they would talk with a smart look about 555-series chips from the 1970s. (For comparison: in 2000 Intel released the Pentium 4 microprocessor with 42 million transistors integrated). In 2005, at my groupmate’s diploma defense, he was asked: “How does a Mealy machine differ from a Moore machine?” He answered: “Let’s leave that question unanswered,” and they gave him an “excellent” and issued him a diploma. In 2004, another groupmate, immediately after receiving his bachelor’s diploma, left with the words: “They won’t teach me anything else here” (he now works as a programmer in Sweden). There were still 10 years left before Rubin and his team arrived, and KhNURE was already reliably working to incubate morons and drive out the sane.

E. Ye. Rubin on my resignation: “I spoke with him. He left not because of the problems of the last year, but because of the worsening situation at the university and the problems of the last two, three years. And in this he sees the problem not in me, but more in people like you. He also had important business matters.”

I have been observing problems since 1999. Back then, at our prep courses, a teacher showed up drunk for a math class and wrote formulas while leaning on the board. Thank God, he was good at math, and it did not affect the quality of the preparation much.

In 2000-2005 I was a student, and a pile of problems was visible in lectures. (See above.)

I was on the Council of Young Scientists in 2006-2007. Even then Slipchenko ignored us. (See Youth Forum).

In 2008-2009 I worked at the center for teaching students in foreign languages. It was a complete sham — nobody studied there, and grades were put down in the dean’s office just like that. When I was leaving the CNSIM, Gorbachev, instead of asking: “Why, what’s the problem?” yelled at me, like I was a slave and had to work there forever. By the way, KhNURE’s name was already then “thundering” on the international stage. In 2009 Kuwait stopped sending students to study at KhNURE: News from Domestic Education There were 6 years left before Rubin arrived.

When I worked as a lecturer until 2016 — good luck expelling anyone, because the students know: the incubator doesn’t give up its own.

And in recent years: who brought in a pile of foreign students who understand absolutely nothing about IT and forced me to teach them?

V. I. Kauk: “I have known Vladimir for a long time. And I carefully read his confession of why he left. April 2016 is not a year or two ago. Besides, read closely, Eduard Yefimovich, and you will understand what is happening with EDUCATION at a specific faculty. I am not lying about anything, and by the way, your way of insulting people is well known. What exactly did I lie about? Did I really not give Vladimir the opportunity to show himself as a teacher and a person?”

Viktor Ivanovich, my brain works like this: first there is the decision-making process, and then there is a bifurcation point when the decision has been made, when it is too late to thrash around. There were many consultations on this issue with colleagues over several years. I watched what was happening for a long time. I began writing the series of posts about lack of success at the university in April 2015 (University Does Not Teach You to Be Successful). Six months before Rubin arrived.

And as for education at a specific faculty — it’s just that at ours we weren’t chicken-shit about talking about it.

E. Ye. Rubin: “Viktor, you know him, but I spoke with him and clarified the reasons, so that is why I say you are distorting things. By the way, Vladimir is one of the main partners for the dual-education project and took part in all the negotiations.”

That is true. Already after I picked up my work record book (September 2016), I took part in the discussion of dual education, and I fully support this project.

V. I. Kauk: “In your opinion, is the fact that Vladimir stopped being a KhNURE teacher bad or good? If it is bad, then what did the administration do so that people like him would come to KhNURE and stay there?”

And here is a very subtle point that only a handful of people understood: I quit, but I did not leave. These are two very different things. I do not need to go according to the schedule to an empty classroom. I do not need to pretend to do a lab with foreigners. But I continue to work with motivated students at the Department of APVT. Rubin, Chumachenko, and I are discussing dual education. In my own organization, I am road-testing an advanced course on mobile-platform programming, which, by agreement with Rubin and Chumachenko, I will deliver at the Department of APVT as an elective for students of our university. Don’t be so quick to bury me!

Paragraphs for those who still have questions. Those who have no more questions are strictly forbidden to read further.

In the last election I voted for Rubin. The other candidates are a highway into the swamp.

People here say that Rubin is not a scientist, that he is not an educator. For some reason people think that the head of scientists and lecturers should be a scientist and a lecturer. The head of scientists and lecturers should be a professional manager. It is good that Rubin is not a scientist, so that he would not have the temptation, instead of strategy, organization, motivation, and control, God forbid, to start writing articles or monographs. I go to a professional dentist to get my teeth treated, not to a Doctor of Medical Sciences.

People also think that everything will change in one day. The university has a pile of Candidates of Sciences and Doctors of Sciences, but for some reason they have forgotten about the law of inertia. My organization has only 16 people, and we change veeery slowly, one small change every 2-3 months. Do you really think that in 10 months Rubin should have overcome organizational resistance and brought you happiness on a platter? Ha-ha-ha, how naive you are.

People also think that everything around them should change without their involvement. Like, Rubin will come, he will change everything, and I will sit and wait. No, with that attitude you are digging your own grave. Do not wait for a miracle from someone else; change yourselves. Have the courage to take responsibility for what is happening around you.

“Change yourself — and your life will change.” (Jim Rohn).

"Save yourself, and thousands around you will be saved." (Seraphim of Sarov).

Monitor Setup

2016-02-06T21:57:00+02:00

It’s amazing how many people don’t know the main secret to setting up a monitor. The monitor brightness should be set so that it doesn’t contrast with the ambient lighting. That is, if the room is brightly lit, the monitor should be bright too. If the room has dim lighting, the monitor brightness should be lowered as well. You shouldn’t work at a monitor in complete darkness: at least put in a desk lamp, light up the objects behind the monitor.

This has to do with the fact that the eye shouldn’t have to keep readjusting to the brightness of the monitor and the brightness of the surroundings. If this happens very often, your eyes get tired quickly. But if the monitor brightness matches the surroundings, the eye never needs to adjust at all.

Ideally, sit facing a window so you can look into the distance — good conditions for relaxing your eyes.

The Book “Reflections on Personal Development” by Ichak Adizes

2015-12-06T12:22:00+02:00

I recently read the book “Reflections on Personal Development” by Ichak Adizes (325 UAH in paper form).

I had already read Adizes before. It was the book “How to Overcome Management Crises,” and I liked it a lot. My expectations for the next Adizes book were high. It turned out that “Reflections on Personal Development” is a collection of notes from his personal blog. That is, for 355 UAH I got a printout and translation of his notes, which I could have read completely free in the original at http://www.adizes.com/insights/

From the outside it may look like I screwed myself, but that’s not the case. I’ll explain now.

There are a lot of smart people in our world. Some of them openly voice and publish their thoughts. There’s no opportunity to talk personally with each of these smart people. But nothing is stopping you from reading books, blog posts, watching videos of these people’s talks, to get acquainted with them and learn their ideas.

What’s the difference between a book and a blog? A book is a stricter format. For example, in “How to Overcome Management Crises,” Adizes lays out his method, but not his personal attitude toward everything under the sun. A blog, on the other hand, is an informal format. In his blog he writes precisely his personal opinion on various questions: about business, about life, about success, and even about the fate of Jews in the Holocaust. I’ll emphasize it once again: the author’s personality, the author’s method, and the author’s personal attitude are three different things.

Besides, publishing blog posts as a separate book is both a chance to make money (the blog can be read for free, while the book has to be bought) and a chance to hook an audience that doesn’t hang out online.

And also, to write a book, you have to sit down and write it. A blog can be kept from anywhere — from home, from trips; you can write a post in 5 minutes, or you can take 3 hours. And then, lo and behold, 20 years later you can put together a book.

As for the book itself, I was interested in getting acquainted with the author’s personal opinion, although of course I expected something close to a method of personal development (because the method in “How to Overcome Management Crises” is set out in detail).

If you’re going to buy books, read the annotation and introduction on the site: is this, by any chance, a reprint from a blog? It may seem like a rare case, but it isn’t. For example: Artemy Lebedev’s blog has been published as a book: “My Blog, O Lord,” notes from the blog of Dmitry Yuryevich Puchkov (Goblin) have repeatedly been published as books: http://www.ozon.ru/person/270747/?group=div_book#detf

As a summary: there is no method of personal development in the book. But if you’re interested in getting to know Adizes better, you can read the book without hesitation. The translation and design of the book are good, but again, all of it can be read for free at the primary source: http://www.adizes.com/insights/

Lab Reports

2015-11-06T23:50:00+02:00

Truants come to me when they’re about to be expelled and ask:

“Vladimir Igorevich, what do we need to do to pass your course?”
“Make up and defend all the lab assignments.”
“Can we do them at home and bring you the reports?”
“Yes, of course you can.”

The students turn around and leave happy. They know they’ll ask their groupmates to give them the reports, change the last name there, and the next day come to me to defend them, and who knows, maybe manage to answer enough for a C.

But the truants don’t know one thing: there are no reports for my labs. In class, I specifically tell students not to waste paper and not to make reports. It’s enough for me to see a working program, the source code right from the computer, and I mark it made up. The job is done — the make-up is recorded.

I’ve been doing this since 2007. Interestingly, the students who promised to show up with reports would leave, and I never saw them again. Apparently, they’re still looking for the reports.

What I require from students who do lab assignments on their own is to prove that they did them on their own. And that’s very easy to check in one minute of simple dialogue. A person who did the lab themselves answers briskly. The one who copied it hums and mumbles.

I Remember Those Days

2013-01-06T16:27:00+02:00

I remember those days when a childhood friend and I, in the mid-nineties, were writing a computer adventure game for the ZX Spectrum.

The development environment was a notebook and a pen. We drew levels on paper, first drew sprites in a squared notebook, and then entered them into the computer as bit masks. The Spectrum had no operating system at all; when switched on, the computer immediately went into the command interpretation mode of the BASIC language, where you could enter the program line by line.

The first disappointment was that the Spectrum had fairly little RAM: just 48 KB. And if you also subtract video memory (about 6 KB), system variables (about 2 KB), and the character generator (about 1 KB), then even less than 40 KB remains. The program was stored in memory as a certain bytecode; I mean that a single command was encoded in one or two bytes. I distinctly remember sitting there and typing in levels, and after yet another line of code my character generator crashed: the program had reached such a size that the bytecode started overwriting the character generator. That was when we realized we weren’t going to write anything serious in BASIC. We knew that the assembly language for the Z80 microprocessor existed, but we had absolutely no idea how it worked. Let me remind you that this was the mid-90s; there was no internet with Wikipedia yet. That is, nobody had the internet, though of course in general it existed somewhere. But Wikipedia definitely didn’t exist anywhere.

And then my friend and I found out that there was a special book, How to Write a Game in Assembly for the ZX Spectrum. Nobody had any money back then, and my friend asked his mom for money to buy a T-shirt, and we secretly went and bought a programming book with that money. Times were harsh; democracy was already marching full speed across Ukraine, so admitting that you had spent money not on food, not on clothes, but on a book was a dangerous thing to do.

I’ll repeat: there was no internet, and there weren’t very many books either. So in that state of information hunger, books were read more than once.

One of the first sensations of writing a game in assembly compared with BASIC was that everything worked much faster and, naturally, took up less memory. Unfortunately, programming in assembly requires a lot of knowledge and perseverance; not everything was fully clear, and because of that development went slowly. And then the computer broke altogether, and that was the end of my career as a Spectrum programmer. The game remained unfinished.

Back then we squeezed the maximum out of the few sources of information we had. But now I look around and everyone has computers with internet, there are lots of books, and lots of forums where they’ll quickly answer the questions you need answered, too, yet young people are still in some kind of stupor. For an engineer, the internet is like an excavator for a digger. Over these decades, the informatization of our country has grown by orders of magnitude. Everything is already there. The only obstacles to success left are internal ones.

I’d do some programming on the Spectrum now, but you can’t get the years back.

Skype Commit Size

2011-05-06T21:47:00+03:00

So I go into Windows Task Manager and see this.

Let me explain why it’s so much. 10 megabytes is the chat functions. The other 90 is the set of animated smileys.

Map of the Oleksiivska Metro Line

2010-12-06T23:15:00+02:00

Last time, the editorial staff of our blg wrote about the design of the map for the Kholodnohirsko-Zavodska metro line. Today, a photograph of the Oleksiivska line map has been obtained from reliable sources.

Of the pictograms, I liked “Ice-cream Cone,” “Trash Can,” “Moon Path,” and “Some Damn Thing.”

Lingvo + Twitter

2010-12-06T17:13:00+02:00

Why doesn’t Lingvo have a “Tweet” button? I’d use it.

Tickets

2010-10-06T22:34:00+03:00

On the way from my place to the center there are advance railway ticket offices. Very convenient: no need to go to Pivdennyi to stand in line; you can just stop by, get the tickets, and leave. Five minutes’ work. So I usually volunteer to buy a stack of tickets if we need to travel as a group. That’s what happened this time, too. My colleagues and I were going to Moscow for a conference. I popped in in the morning and bought the tickets. This evening, saying goodbye to our partners from Moscow, I said: “All the best! See you in Moscow on the 28th!”, to which I got the reply: “Yes, but the meeting is on the 27th”!

I got to the internet, double-checked the dates, and realized I’d screwed up. I had to go to Pivdennyi, because that’s the only place where you can return tickets. The system didn’t punish me too badly. Just 16 hryvnias per ticket.

This is a good example of how an error found and fixed in the early stages costs much less than one found later.

Computing π — a contest by Intel’s Russian community

2009-05-06T08:55:00+03:00

Yesterday Intel launched another contest in parallel programming and optimization: “Parallel Races: the ‘π’ formula.” The gist of the contest: develop a scalable implementation of a generator for the digits of π. You need to find as many digits after the decimal point as possible in 60 seconds.

The difference between this contest and Intel Threading Challenge 2009 is that there is only one task, and all comments may be written in Russian. The contest will run until June 5, 2009.

This, nevertheless, does not rule out taking part in both contests at once.

P.S. Also, I don’t understand why they launch contests right during exam season.