Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 15

Why I like tennis

2026-09-15T07:49:43+03:00

What I like about tennis — you can't play it on your phone over the internet, and you need at least one other person.

Think about it.

Education Reform

2017-09-15T21:24:00+03:00

People are writing that, apparently, a new education reform has been passed. I have no idea what’s in it, but I’m obliged to have an opinion.

So. If it doesn’t specify a minimum take-home salary for a schoolteacher or university instructor of 10,000 (ten thousand) hryvnias, then it’s a useless reform, and it will only make education worse. The younger generation’s keen eyes are fixed on schoolteachers and instructors. A Teacher (with a capital T) should radiate successful success, not be driven into a corner by our state. This is a hello to Kravchuk, Kuchma, Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Poroshenko. In 26 years, none of them did anything to raise the prestige of the profession. All I remember are horror stories about teachers in schools fainting from hunger at the blackboard. And why even reminisce — I myself was on a 2,800 UAH salary, and what is 2,800 UAH for a young man? The burden of a loser, not the life of a young playboy. (For those abroad: that’s 100 bucks.)

And now about the masters of pissing into the wind. Basically, a master of pissing into the wind steps out under the spotlights and gives a master class. Then another master comes out of the audience, moves the first one aside, and says: "You’re pissing into the wind wrong; this is how it’s done!" and pisses himself from head to toe even worse than before. And he soaked the neighbors so badly that four countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Romania) appealed to the OSCE with a letter, like, are all those Ukrainian masters of pissing into the wind right in the head over there?

What I’m getting at. On the first of September I went into "Kofein" on Nauky Avenue to have breakfast and a bit of coffee. Mothers are sitting there, waiting for their kids from the university lyceum. The kids come in:

“Phew, they handed out books, again we have to carry all this heavy stuff!” — and he slams a big stack of books onto the neighboring table.

I turned to look at the book spines — I almost dropped my cup of "Kenya Gatomboya"! (highly recommend it, by the way) — all the textbooks there were in Russian!

There Will Be No Elections at KhNURE in October

2016-10-15T09:16:00+03:00

The committee for organizing and holding the election of the rector of KhNURE stated that it was impossible to carry out the work of preparing and holding the election of the rector of KhNURE.

Source: Витяг-з-протоколу-11-від-13.10.16.pdf.

For the fourth time in a row, the university is unable to elect a rector.

Jim Rohn’s Book “Five Pieces to the Life Puzzle”

2016-09-15T23:33:00+03:00

Someone has probably told you some abstruse motivational quote, or you’ve come across them in public pages. For example:

or:

With a probability of 0.99976556% × 10², these quotes were from Jim Rohn’s book “Five Pieces to the Life Puzzle.” Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn) is one of the best business trainers in the world.

You can subscribe to a bunch of public pages and get these quotes in portions, a drop a day. Or you can read Jim Rohn’s book and learn them all at once in a couple of hours. Besides the quotes themselves, the book gives a detailed explanation of why it’s this way and not otherwise.

For example, “Wherever You Are, Be There” (Wherever You Are, Be There). Rohn writes that one of the main reasons we are unhappy is that mentally we are not where we physically are. At home we think about problems at work. At work we think about conflicts at home. When we’re talking to one person, we think about another. We think too much about yesterday or the future, and we don’t feel ourselves in the current moment at all. Stop! Pay attention to the current moment: where are you? who are you with? what are you thinking about? what are the people around you telling you?

“Success and Happiness Are Easy to Achieve” (Success and Happiness Are Easy to Achieve). Rohn writes that we live life in small steps that lead us to success, and each of these steps is easy to take. But it is just as easy not to take that step. Being successful and being unsuccessful are equally easy. Being a bum under a pole at “Naukova” and being Bill Gates are equally easy; they both put in the same effort to achieve their success and lack of success.

A bum = Bill Gates? That is very hard to believe. But I offer you a simple experiment. There is Jim Rohn’s book. You have a choice: buy and read it, or don’t buy it and don’t read it. Both decisions are made very easily. Whoever makes the right choice will take a step toward success. It will be equally easy for everyone to make this decision. But the consequences will be different.

I strictly recommend Jim Rohn’s book for reading to people who are looking for genuine knowledge about building a strong life philosophy.

Students Are Curious

2014-05-15T23:20:00+03:00

Students are curious:

Hello. Could you give me some advice about defending a diploma. What do instructors pay the most attention to? When you’re showing the presentation.

You need to focus on the substance.

Most likely the instructors will be bored at the defense. Because they aren’t interested and they don’t understand what the student was doing. Don’t try to make them like you. You need to put the most important things from the work onto the slides.

Personally, I always pay attention to the substance: what the student did, what the motivation for the work is, what problem they were solving, how deeply they dug into the problem.

It’s bad when a student starts giving a lecture. That is, retelling other people’s ideas. A diploma is original work, which means the presentation should show only what the student did themselves.

You can mention further directions in the conclusion, but no more than one or two sentences for 10–15 seconds.

If there is a software development, the best option is to record a short video, without sound. You should comment on the video yourself, in words. Why do I recommend video? Because in 99% of cases, at the diploma defense the program won’t run: there will be no internet, the computer will glitch out, something else will go wrong, and the demonstration will have the effect of a dud bomb: everyone was expecting something big, and nothing happened.

Interested in my opinion on any issue of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. Questions can also be asked through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

Obrizan’s Law

2014-03-15T21:15:00+02:00

From the bell tower of ten years of teaching experience, as well as 7 years of experience organizing international conferences, I formulated this empirical law:

The amount of knowledge received is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source to the recipient.

Corollaries:

— at lectures, conferences, and seminars, you should sit in the front row;
— in lab classes, the students who show the best knowledge will be those sitting closer to the computer or the lab model;
— those who did not come to the lecture or stayed outside the door will learn nothing;
— the person who approaches the lecturer individually with a question will be generously rewarded.

The rational explanation is obvious: as you move away from the source, the level of noise and objective obstacles that interfere with acquiring knowledge increases.

If Programmers Became Doctors

2014-01-15T01:10:00+02:00

There’s an old joke: what would happen if programmers became doctors?

“Doctor! My leg hurts!”
“Strange, I have the same kind of leg and mine doesn’t hurt.”

Few people know that this actually happened. An icy horror grips my heart when I reread the records of those tragic events of 1985–1986 in the United States.

The Americans developed a radiation therapy machine: the Therac-25. As a result of various errors in the machine’s software, six people received an excessive dose of radiation; at least two died from the overdose.

On March 21, the patient Ray Cox was prescribed electron therapy. The nurse accidentally entered “x” (X-ray) — X-ray therapy was used more often, and she was used to it. Then, returning with the “Up” key, she replaced “x” with “e” and pressed “CR” several times. A few seconds after the radiation started, the machine stopped with the message “Malfunction 54.” Similar shutdowns had happened before, but their only consequence had been a minor inconvenience. So she pressed “P.” On this particular day the video link was off, and the intercom was broken, so there was no communication with the patient.

At that moment the patient felt a burn. Since this was not his first procedure (his ninth), he realized something was wrong. Just as he began to get up from the table, the beam turned on and burned his arm again. Ray got up, staggered to the entrance to the room, and began knocking on the door. Hearing the knocking, the operator immediately opened the door to the shocked and injured patient.

The total radiation dose received by the patient is estimated at 16,500 to 25,000 rad, and it was delivered in less than a second, over an area of about 1 cm².

Later, Ray Cox began suffering periodic bouts of nausea, and his left arm became paralyzed. He was hospitalized because of radiation exposure. Still more severe complications followed (including paralysis of the legs), and the patient died in September of that same year.

Source: Therac-25

A detailed report including all overdose cases, investigations, and causes of the errors: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

Kharkiv’s “EchoStar” Turns Five

2012-09-15T23:30:00+03:00

The other day, the Kharkiv office of EchoStar turned five. Back then, in 2007, the company’s team was formed mostly from students, graduate students, and staff of the Faculty of Computer Engineering and Control at Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics. We worked with some of them, studied with some, and locked horns with others in fierce battles on the soccer fields.

Guys, wishing you great success! Happy anniversary!

Two Postcards

2010-11-15T22:32:00+02:00

Two postcards arrived today, on the same day. One from Moscow, the other from Myrhorod. The one from Myrhorod set a record for delivery speed. Just on Saturday, November 13, I dropped it in the mail in Myrhorod, and today, on the evening of November 15, it was already lying on my desk. Two days.

Another interesting fact about the Myrhorod post office: they don’t sell postcards with images of the city there (same in Poltava). I had to buy postcards outside at a newsstand.

The postcard from Moscow didn’t travel as quickly. I sent it on October 31. It took two weeks to get to me. But it’s good that it arrived at all. You can see on it that one stamp fell off somewhere along the way. But it’s good they managed to cancel the stamps before that. Actually, in Russia the expensive stamps are self-adhesive. The cheap ones you have to lick yourself. In the photo you can see that another little bunny is just about ready to fall off too. Next time I’ll try harder.

For anyone who didn’t get what all the fuss is about: “Hobby”.

Now my collection has 36 postcards from 22 cities in 5 countries. ^_^

News from the Mental Hospital

2010-11-15T15:42:00+02:00

I continue studying the user interfaces of Microsoft—the leading corporation in developing office products. Last time we drew your attention to the alignment of numeric data in Outlook. Today we’ll be talking about saving files in PowerPoint.

One typical operation is saving each slide of a presentation as image files. This is convenient when you need to insert slides into a website or a video file. When this operation is performed, it’s logical to ask the user whether he wants to save all the slides or just one, for example the current one. But when the presentation consists of just one slide, that question makes no sense. Nevertheless, PowerPoint asks it:

You might think there’s a common algorithm in there for zero, one, or N slides. But if I try to save an empty presentation as graphics, I don’t even have that option:

So the designer did, after all, think about some edge cases. But, as we can see, not all of them.

After reading Alan Cooper’s book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, I’m starting to notice things like this more and more often.

How Glad I Am

2010-09-15T21:25:00+03:00

How glad I am! How glad I am! That I’m going to Leningrad!

September 17–19 I’ll be at the East-West Design & Test conference in St. Petersburg. This time I’m participating only as a speaker.

On September 20 I’ll spend the whole day taking a bus from St. Pete to Moscow. The route is planned to pass through the following towns and settlements: Chudovo, Novgorod, Proletary, Kresttsy, Yazhelbitsy, Valday, Vyshny Volochyok, Tver. An excellent excuse to study the geography of Russia.

September 21–22 I’ll be in Moscow. I’ll just walk around. Once I get back, I’ll share my impressions and pics.

Help in Discovering an Exploit

2010-09-15T07:58:00+03:00

At work, the guys analyze rootkits and exploits. According to Microsoft, successfully.

MS10-061

Vulnerability in Print Spooler Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2347290) This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in the Print Spooler service. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if an attacker sends a specially crafted print request to a vulnerable system that has a print spooler interface exposed over RPC. By default, printers are not shared on any currently supported Windows operating system.

...

Microsoft thanks the following for working with us to help protect customers:

Sergey Golovanov, Alexander Gostev, Maxim Golovkin, and Alexey Monastyrsky of Kaspersky Lab, and Vitaly Kiktenko and Alexander Saprykin of Design and Test Lab for reporting an issue described in MS10-061

microsoft.com

That's how it goes. For the most part, work is routine. But if you add up those work hours and days, what you get is “worked with us to help protect customers.” In case anyone missed it, that means you and me, Windows OS users. :) So thanks to Vitaly and Sasha for that.

Anyone interested in operating system security can register for Microsoft’s webcast, which will take place this evening:

TechNet Webcast: Information About Microsoft September Security Bulletins

Webcast topic: details on the September exploits (including the one mentioned above) and answers to listeners’ questions.

Went to a Mentor Graphics webinar

2009-09-15T19:19:00+03:00

Today there was a webinar (web + seminar) by Mentor Graphics on “Hardware Designs Reuse Using C++ and High Level Synthesis.” The lecture in bullet points:

ANSI C++ synthesis into RTL is supported;
a 10–20x increase in engineers’ productivity, as well as reduced verification time;
synthesis quality equivalent to manual work;
various parameterizable data types are available that synthesize well into hardware;
object-oriented device architecture: for example, you can make devices with one interface but different implementations;
you can view the results of micro-operation execution scheduling on a Gantt chart: timing delays, distribution by clock cycles.

Overall, I heard nothing new since spring. At the end there was a chance to ask the lecturer questions with a finger on the keyboard, and listen to the answer with an ear from the speaker. I asked the following questions and got specific answers.

Question: how are things with SystemC support? Answer*: our users mostly use pure C++, because they are programmers and don’t know SystemC at all.

Question: how does joint software-hardware synthesis happen? Answer: it doesn’t. At the moment this is just a tool for C++ to RTL synthesis, and that’s all.

Question: is it necessary to use any C++ extensions or directives? Answer: no, it isn’t. Our C++ models can easily be fed to any compiler and you will get the exact same simulation results. Directives can be used in cases when it is necessary to specify parallelism in a loop, etc.

here and below, a loose retelling*

There is an opportunity to watch more detailed demonstrations on the Mentor Graphics site.

We continue working on our translator. Among the nearest tasks: function inlining, expression optimization.