Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 13

Sounds to Remember

2016-02-13T00:14:00+02:00

Most often, people bring back kilotons of photos from various trips. Rarely does anyone record video. And I like recording the vivid sounds of the places I visit. After all, photos, videos, and sounds bring memories to life in different ways, and complement one another very well.

The purring of my kitty (outside the competition program):

Jet engines at the air show in Korotych:

And this sound is very familiar to everyone from childhood:

And here are some sounds for you to dive back into childhood yourselves:

This is the kind of thing that happens on the Svaliava–Lviv commuter train:

Do you have recordings of unusual sounds? Next time, be sure to record some. Every smartphone has a voice recorder. It will enrich your memories of the trip even many years later.

Amazon’s Cloud Business Valued by Analysts at $160 Billion

2015-11-13T11:32:00+02:00

Even seasoned investment analysts were taken aback by the latest financial successes of Amazon’s cloud business. "Business Insider UK" reports that Amazon’s cloud services are estimated to have annual revenue of $16 billion in 2017, and the whole business will be worth $160 billion.

If all of this comes true, Amazon Web Services will become the fastest-growing B2B technology business in history.

Amazon will reach $10 billion in revenue in 10 years. For comparison: Google reached that level in 9 years, Facebook in 10 years, Apple in 20 years, Microsoft in 22 years, Oracle in 23 years.

Google’s Designers Are Losing Their Minds

2011-09-13T18:39:00+03:00

Google’s designers are quietly losing their minds. Today I noticed that in the search results they changed the color of a visited link. Hello, colorblind people!

And they’ve also stopped underlining links. Try to guess what on this page is clickable and what isn’t.

And finally, you can admire the trendy narrow scroll bars.

The Peculiarities of Construction in Ukraine

2011-03-13T11:01:00+02:00

Construction in Ukraine has its own peculiarities. At the minibus loop by Proletarska, they were rapidly building a simple little one-story shop. They built and built, and finally built it. Once, walking past, I even saw the signs: “Inexpensive Shoes” and “We’re Open.”

But with the arrival of spring, something happened to the little shop.

This is what the shop looked like on March 5. The signs, doors, and double-glazed windows have been removed. The drywall has been removed from the walls too. On the right, you can still see the insulation. But they’ll remove that too.

And here it is again, but already on the tenth. There are fewer and fewer walls.

And here it is on March 12. The walls are gone; what’s left is the facade and the steel skeleton.

This shop didn’t even manage to stay open a week from opening to closing.

I remembered a joke from English class at school: — How do you say “construction site”? — Building. — And “perestroika”? — Debuilding.

The book arrived

2010-12-13T20:20:00+02:00

Last month I started thinking that I’ve been reading way too little. I wanted something for the soul, and something I could reread more than once. The choice fell on a book by Edward Tufte (Edward Tufte), “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. I love all sorts of things connected with books: how they’re made, how they’re laid out, how they’re typeset. And here it’s just paradise for the soul — the presentation of quantitative information.

Chronology

On November 20 (Saturday) I ordered this book on Amazon. Initially they promised that my shipping type, International Standard Shipping, would deliver the package in 3-4 weeks. Well, waiting a month is the blink of an eye for Rogan riffraff.

Already on November 23 (Tuesday) I got an email saying, basically, that the package was delayed and I’d get it all the way on December 7.

Hm. It’ll be here in two weeks? And you call that “delayed”? Apparently they don’t know what it’s like when you wait half a month for one miserable postcard from a neighboring country. I decided to double-check that date on Amazon’s site. Apparently there was a mistake in the email, because the official site predicted the delivery date for as far off as January 7, in the new year of 2011. After reading the site some more, I realized that they can’t actually guarantee any delivery times at all for this type of shipping.

Today the mail lady brought a notice: a parcel was waiting for me at the post office. So, all told, 24 calendar days passed from the moment of ordering to receiving it.

Unpacking

I know, you love unpacking.

This is the kind of little box Amazon sends little books in. The cynical smirk is the Amazon logo. From the return address with the words “Deutsche Post,” I figured that either the book came from an Amazon logistics center in Germany, or it was simply repacked there.

View from the back. This time the smiley is already sad, because it knows: any moment now, such beautiful packaging is going to be torn open.

Their care for customers is striking. Usually, domestic packages with books have to be gnawed open with your teeth to dig the valuables out of there. The capitalists, however, came up with a special flap that opens the parcel quickly and easily.

Surely this technology is protected by a dozen patents, so we simply couldn’t reproduce something like this without violating copyright. Or maybe no one here has thought of it yet. As the person who recommended this book says: “But you’ll have Skolkovo.”

“Vzhiiiik!” said the flap. “Ooooh, fuck!” said Vova. The most important thing showed itself from the packaging.

For extra reliability, the book was wrapped in thin cellophane. For fans of “What? Where? When?” there’s a nice opportunity to show off your quick wits and write in the comments what’s depicted on the cover.

A random spread, selected on the fifth or sixth try. The book is solidly made. The paper is white, the typography and layout are excellent.

The binding, like that of any good book, is unpretentious, but firm and pleasantly rough to the touch.

This book will take the place of greatest honor on the bookshelf.

And that’s the end of the unpacking; good for you if you were listening.

Suddenly Roma Became a Teacher

2010-09-13T08:42:00+03:00

And now it turns out that Roma Prikhodchenko has become a teacher. A fourth-year student will be teaching third-year students. Ololo.

I took one group from Lopukhin for the System Software course. I’m teaching my own program, which includes Unix-like systems, virtualization, and version control systems. All topics are considered from a programming perspective.

prykhodchenko.wordpress.com

I think that despite his young age, Roma will do no worse than Yuri Vladimirovich.

Threw Out a Chunk of Code

2010-08-13T19:05:00+03:00

Today I removed the old C++ parser from the project. Thanks to a fellow graduate (almost), who talked some sense into me about doing this. I decided to integrate clang — an open-source C++ compiler. It’s written in C++, compiles to the llvm intermediate representation, and is also supposedly faster and smaller than gcc. Now it’ll take some time to adapt this representation to the algorithm flow graphs used when synthesizing into hardware. The synthesis algorithms themselves and the dump to Verilog won’t change. I’ll report on the results later.

Pic-related: