Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 20

The Meaning of the Film "Groundhog Day"

2016-02-20T00:33:00+02:00

Today at business school we discussed the film "Groundhog Day."

The plot of the film is that a journalist ends up in a prison of time and is forced to live the same day over and over again.

The film is very interesting. But what conclusion can we draw from it? Some people live a similar life — every day for them is like Groundhog Day. Every day is like the one before. What does the main character of the film do? He started living that day differently. And what do people do? They live every day the same way.

If you recognized yourself and you’re living in Groundhog Day, then try living it somehow differently. And what do you have to lose if tomorrow morning you wake up at the same time, in the same bed, with the same gloomy mood? If you’re unemployed, then go do something. If you’re already working, but at a job you don’t like, go and quit. Nothing terrible will happen — after all, tomorrow you’ll still wake up at the very same time and in the very same bed. See a beautiful person in the subway? Go up and introduce yourself. Why be shy or afraid of rejection, when tomorrow morning you’ll again wake up at the same time and in the same bed, as usual, and again ride the same subway, like yesterday, and the same people who were there yesterday will be there. Go take a French course. It doesn’t obligate you to anything, because tomorrow morning you’ll again wake up at the very same time in the very same bed. Tired of your degenerate friends? Then tell them to get lost. Don’t be afraid, they’re not going anywhere, because tomorrow you’ll again wake up at the very same time in the morning and they’ll remain in your life. Acted like a piece of shit toward someone yourself? Live the next day as if you were that person’s best friend. Don’t worry, your stunt won’t be remembered, because tomorrow morning you’ll wake up at the same time and in the same bed, as usual. You’re in Groundhog Day, after all; the cards are in your hands.

Try something new every day. Add some variety. And believe me, there will be a happy ending, like the film’s hero has, when in the end you find yourself in a better reality than the one you’re living in now.

The Book “Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation” by Brian Tracy

2016-01-20T22:38:00+02:00

I recently read Brian Tracy’s “Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation” (105 UAH in the electronic version).

I remember my first public talk very well. I was a third-year student, and my academic adviser — Prof. Vladimir Ivanovich Khakhanov — sent me to Dnipropetrovsk for a student conference. I had absolutely no idea what that was and was very nervous. A strange city, my first time in Dnipropetrovsk, no support from friends or acquaintances. Out of sheer fright, I rattled off my talk very quickly and loudly, told them everything I knew about the system. When I finished, there was silence, and only after about 10 seconds did someone ask a question: “What language is the program written in?” And that was it. Nobody asked anything else.

It’s been 13 years since my first talk, and I still get nervous when I speak in front of people. For example, lectures at the beginning of the semester are the most nerve-racking, because you’re seeing these people for the first time in your life. You don’t know them, they don’t know you. Or speaking to schoolkids — that’s a whole different level.

In this book, as in any other, the main idea is that you need to prepare well for talks. Work through the outline, polish the wording. One new thing I hadn’t read in other books: the author pays a lot of attention to preparing the equipment in the room: arranging the chairs, setting up the air conditioning, lighting, and sound.

For my part, I can add that the best way to become a good speaker is to always know what you’re talking about, to have something you can tell the audience.

It’s a good book, I recommend it.

Summary of the Eleventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2016-01-20T22:11:00+02:00

On January 9, 2016, the eleventh meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 from 11:15 to 13:00.

1. Volodymyr Obrizan. Automated Testing of Programs in Python

A distinguishing trait of a professional programmer is having skills in automated code testing. We looked at how automated unit tests are created in Python. We used the unittest module.

The example source code is in the archive: unittest-test.zip.

2. Roman Podoliaka. Advanced Collections in Python

Roma continued talking about advanced collections in Python. That time Roma talked about:

— Dictionary with a default value (defaultdict)
— Ordered dictionary (OrderedDict)
— Counter (Counter)
— Double-ended queue (deque)
— Named tuple (NamedTuple)

An iPython Notebook is available in the source files and as a PDF file.

3. Discussion of the Club’s Work

We discussed a new direction for the club’s work: carrying out small projects. For example, creating a simple blog engine. Projects should be carried out using a version control system, with a code review process.

Previous meetings:

No. 8, No. 9, No. 10 12/12/2015, 12/19/2015, 12/26/2015 Summary of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 7 12/05/2015 Summary of the Seventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 6 11/28/2015 Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 5 11/21/2015 Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 3, No. 4 11/07/2015, 11/14/2015 Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How can you get news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club?

Subscription to news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-reg The mailing list will be the main channel for information about meetings.

VKontakte and Facebook groups: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt, respectively.

A Q&A site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

Questions? You can contact me personally: volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com

Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-11-20T12:10:00+02:00

On November 7 and 14, the third and fourth meetings of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meetings were held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 12:50. And here is what we managed to discuss over these two meetings.

Volodymyr Miz. iPython Notebook

At the second meeting we had already discussed iPython Notebook, and this time Volodymyr gave a more complete talk with a demonstration of creating a page in iPython Notebook. Once again, the links:

iPython http://ipython.org/
Canopy https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/ — a product for information analysis based on iPython.

Collective walkthrough of a problem from checkio.org

Thanks to Artur Ziarmand, who volunteered to solve one problem from http://www.checkio.org Everyone actively joined in and suggested to Artur how to solve the problem algorithmically.

Volodymyr Rustinov on translating Coursera into Russian

To start, you need to register on a special site for Coursera translators: https://www.coursera.org/about/translate Then send your login to Rustinov.

ABBYY already has an initiative for translating Coursera into Russian: http://coursera.abbyy-ls.com/ru

Kyrylo Sorudeikin on innovations in education

Kyrylo talked about a method of teaching students (and not only students) that consists of doing projects. As the project is carried out, the student masters all the necessary skills. This method is the opposite of one where the student simply memorizes various facts in sequence.

Volodymyr Obrizan. An elementary web application on the Google App Engine cloud platform

I talked about Google App Engine — a platform in the cloud where you can host web applications in Python. There is a simple lab assignment through which you can learn how to install libraries, write programs, and upload them to the cloud: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/introduction

Valentyna Pikalova. Overview of online Python courses (not Coursera)

A very detailed overview of many online courses. It’s hard to retell it here, so here is a link to the document that lists all the courses from the talk: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_3YUo2YXAVyUUwPw1mho_zzAqbOpKxNMbUdwerKWK2k Valentyna’s presentation itself was accompanied by a demonstration of various games written while studying these courses.

Volodymyr Obrizan. codingame.com: solving Python problems in game form

http://www.codingame.com — is another site, similar to http://www.checkio.org, where you can solve problems in game form. The site’s distinguishing feature is that the results are visualized here. Each problem is accompanied by a description of the algorithm for solving it.

Roman Podoliaka. Feedback on PyCon Canada

Roma returned from vacation, during which he attended the PyCon conference in Toronto, Canada. Roma talked about the contents of the conference, whose program can be viewed here: https://2015.pycon.ca/en/

Previous meetings:

No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How to get news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club?

Subscription to news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-reg The mailing list will be the main channel for informing people about meetings.

Groups on VKontakte and Facebook: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt respectively.

Site for questions and answers about Python and about the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

Questions? You can contact me personally: volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com

The Cycle of Kindness in Nature

2015-10-20T11:27:00+03:00

In December 2014 I was traveling from Kharkiv to Grenoble to visit a close friend. Warsaw was one of the intermediate stops where I needed to stop and spend the night. That was because I’d decided to save a hundred bucks and fly on a low-cost airline, which happened to fly out of Warsaw. But I’ll tell you some other time about how low-cost airlines are the pits. I picked an apartment 10 minutes from the airport, because the flight was at six in the morning, so I needed to get to the airport early, and in general I wanted to get a decent night’s sleep.

The day before, I used an ATM and took out 100 zlotys in a single bill. When I boarded the bus, the driver flatly refused to accept a bill like that, because the ticket cost 6 zlotys and he had no change. I walked through the bus asking the passengers to break a hundred. Well, at five in the morning the bus is obviously not exactly packed, and in fact there are only about four people altogether. In the end, one kind girl broke the hundred for me with two fifties. But the driver refused to give change from a fifty, too. So I walked through the bus a second time. But this time I couldn’t get it broken. In the end, the same girl simply handed me 10 zlotys. As fate would have it, the driver didn’t have change for that bill either. Well, at that point I decided to leave him 4 zlotys as a tip, just so this story would end sooner.

I went back to the girl and we started talking. It turned out she was from Latvia and worked as a finance specialist at a bank in Warsaw. And something similar had happened to her too, when she was in some airport without the local currency and some unfamiliar man paid for her. And so now, she said, she was also doing a good deed for a stranger. I suggested we continue the conversation at the airport, where I could buy her a coffee and thank her, but she declined, saying that she had already checked in and was rushing to her plane.

In August 2015, when I came to Istanbul and also didn’t have any local money, an unfamiliar man paid my fare on the tram. Well, most likely he was an undercover detective who was simply on duty at the stop, since there had been several terrorist attacks in Istanbul the day before, but it was still nice.

A few days later, it was my turn to play the giver of kindness: I paid the fare for a tourist who couldn’t buy tokens from the token machine because it didn’t take plastic cards.

Help others when they’re in need, and don’t be shy about asking for help yourself. Kindness should circulate in nature.

Associative Memory

2014-01-20T21:39:00+02:00

When I was a schoolboy, my father often took me with him to the radio market located at the Heroiv Pratsi metro station. While waiting for the train at the Istorychnyi Muzei metro station, Dad would point to the bas-relief and say:

— Look, that’s a chopping block and an axe for cutting off heads.

Twenty years have passed, but I never have any trouble finding my way at Heroiv Pratsi metro station — which of the two exits to take to get where I need to go.

Is There Life After Defending Your Thesis?

2013-08-20T19:51:00+03:00

Sometimes I talk with students about the thesis process and its results. I’m surprised by the arguments in favor of letting the whole process slide. For example, you can hear things like: “Why bother, if other people copy-paste and get good grades?” or “Whatever, no one’s going to read this thesis anyway.” Or even the heresy: “10 minutes of shame — and you’re an engineer.” Let’s look at these arguments one by one.

Why bother

For a “young specialist” (a term from the three-party employment agreement concluded between the “young specialist,” the university, and the employer), very soon after the defense it will come as a pleasant surprise that to find a job you will have to go ahead and make an effort. Sitting at home on the couch, the job will not find itself. After looking through the vacancies on the labor market, the “young specialist” will once again run into the fact that you need to make an effort to meet an employer’s basic requirements; otherwise you’ll look like an idiot at the interview. That is, you need to read some books, or at least Wikipedia. “What’s the difference between an abstract class and an interface?” the employer asked. “The bastard is trying to fail me!” the applicant thought.

And very often job postings also put forward requirements for work experience. The “young specialist” simply cannot wrap his head around it: “How is that possible? I spent five years not making an effort; where would I get work experience? And where is it supposed to come from now, if I don’t want to make an effort?” In the “young specialist’s” opinion, work experience should appear out of thin air, all by itself, without any effort.

But the biggest disappointment for the “young specialist” will be that even after getting hired as an intern or junior specialist, his torment will not be over. Turn off the lights, cover yourself with a blanket, and sit closer to the monitor — I’m about to reveal the scariest secret: at work, too, you have to make an effort. There everything is grown-up: the shareholders (the people who put money into the business) have authorized the director to lead the business to success (read: “make a lot of money”), and they in turn determine the personnel policy: you need to hire the very best, control them, and demand results from them. Who needs illiterate people who produce no results and make no effort to get them? What kind of business success can you have with employees like that?

No one will read the thesis

Is the thesis writer himself ready to let someone read it?

At the very least, the “young specialist” should read his own thesis himself: “Well, did I write some bullshit here or what?” Or check it for spelling mistakes.

Next, you need to give the thesis to your immediate supervisor to read. Maybe someone doesn’t know this, but it is the direct duty of the academic supervisor to read the work, write a review, and put his signature under this thesis. The academic supervisor gets paid for this.

The thesis also needs to be given to the person who will write the external review of it. This person also gets paid for it.

You can run an interesting experiment: give your thesis to a friend to read, and out of healthy curiosity ask to read his in return. Here, like with litmus paper, you will be able to identify a dumb asshole. The dumb asshole, cracking jokes, will refuse under various pretexts to show his work. It turns out that behind the moaning of “no one will read the thesis,” the dumb asshole is actually cowardly hiding the pathetic result of his training. A reasonable person, however, will give you his work and politely offer feedback on his friend’s work.

Of course, you should not expect that in the 15 minutes allotted for the defense, the members of the State Examination Commission will have time to grasp the essence of the thesis, or at least read it. But believe me, they have several other reliable methods for determining the “young specialist’s” level of preparation.

10 minutes of shame — and you’re an engineer

Let’s start with the fact that with that attitude toward the thesis process, after ten minutes of shame what you get is some random dickhead, not an engineer by any means. A plastic diploma is not a magic wand, and with a wave it does not turn a limp male sexual organ into an engineer.

And now the main point. Indeed, maybe no one will read the explanatory note itself, and you may never need it again in your life. The only thing the young specialist will be able to take away from the university is the engineering method for solving assigned problems. Problems can be solved in different ways. You can do it any which way, or you can do it methodically. Look up the etymology of the word “engineer” in dictionaries — it comes from Latin words meaning “genius,” “inventor.” So, about the engineering method:

Was the research problem formulated?
Was the literature on the subject analyzed, and was the experience of previous studies taken into account?
Was a mathematical model developed?
Were numerical experiments carried out?
Were tests developed for the model? What is the quality of the test?
Were the results reliable?
What conclusions were drawn?

And plenty of other questions in general, too. You can tell from the thesis right away whether the thesis writer asked himself these questions.

How it is for the humanities people — I don’t know, haven’t seen it.

Dates in Tables

2011-10-20T01:41:00+03:00

A year ago we discussed the table design of the email client Microsoft Outlook. Today let’s talk about tables in Thunderbird.

When using the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, I often run into this scenario. I open the Sent folder and visually scan the list of sent emails, starting with the most recent and then moving downward (into the past). For example, I remember that I sent an email a few days ago, but I don’t remember exactly which day. I need to see what days there were at all, so I can remember.

The figure on the left shows how it is now. Quickly searching for dates is hard. The constantly repeated fragment “10.2011” is confusing. Because of it, it seems as if all the dates are the same. To find the next day, you have to read each line in sequence. For example, try counting how many different days are shown in the table on the left.

This representation is clearly redundant. The figure on the right offers an improved version. Here the date is shown only once for each day. Now searching by day is much faster. To move to the next day, all you have to do is shift your gaze to the next date. Try counting the number of different days again. Feel the difference?

And the fact that the hours and minutes aren’t aligned by place value is just kindergarten, explained by programmers’ laziness. Usually a DateTime-type structure is serialized into the dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm format as a single string, and nobody wants to bother anymore with the fact that the hour can have either two digits or one. Nevertheless, that is no excuse.

The software development process should be set up so that in the end the user can work with the program comfortably, not so that the programmer has to write less code.

A Sample of Self-Promotion

2011-06-20T12:42:00+03:00

The “Addthis” button is in a hurry to recommend itself to me.

Amazing. I can’t imagine a person who would want to follow a button. Did the programmers really not think to show trending pages where this button gets clicked the most?

Omar Khayyam on laziness

2011-02-20T10:53:00+02:00

To live life wisely, there is much one needs to know; For starters, remember two important rules: Better to go hungry than eat just anything, And better to be alone than together with just anyone.

(Translator: O. Rumer)

A Little Tip for Jimmy Wales

2010-11-20T13:03:00+02:00

Many people have already noticed the appeal from Jimmy Wales — the founder of Wikipedia, beloved by us all. As we know, Wikipedia operates on voluntary donations, as well as the work of millions of volunteers around the world. Every year, closer to Christmas, Jimmy Wales calls on people to make whatever contribution they can. Downloaded a term paper? Copy-pasted it into your thesis? Showed off your Wikipedia knowledge in front of your friends? Be so kind — give Jim some money: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

Jimmy, old man! You helped us and made such a magnificent site, and we helped you and filled it with information. Sorry, of course, that I skipped the last wiki meetup in Kharkiv and stopped contributing to the project way back in April, but don’t take it personally. I’ve got a little tip for you: change the design of this awful banner. As our mayor used to say: “Make those eyes the way you know how. Nobody’s going to give you any money otherwise”! And for some reason there’s nothing about ambulances, either. Also, you need to say that the money raised will work for the benefit of all Wikipedians.

Look, I made a new banner design in Photoshop. It should raise twice as much money as you raised in previous years.

P. S. Jimmy has already replied, and I quote: “Don’t show off, send it in money!!!”

Shocking Traffic Accident in Kharkiv

2010-11-20T11:13:00+02:00

On the first day of the last month of autumn, a terrible traffic accident occurred in Kharkiv.

A streetlight pole, traveling in the left lane in violation of the speed limit, decided to perform a maneuver prohibited on this section of the highway: overtaking a car. After crossing the double solid line, the driver of the pole lost control, flew at enormous speed into the right lane of oncoming traffic, and collided head-on with a Subaru motor vehicle. As a result of the strong direct mechanical contact, both vehicles were thrown onto the shoulder.

The pedestrian who was on the pole got off with a mild scare and refused subsequent hospitalization.

Mechanics from the district service station reported that repairing the pole would cost its owner a pretty penny. In all likelihood, the driver of the pole will be stripped of the right to operate streetlight poles for a period of two to three years. The trees have already given all the necessary statements.

The zebra crossing, which happened to witness the horrific accident, was not injured.

Oh-oh-oh, Now You’re in the Army

2009-11-20T22:53:00+02:00

Recently I ran into a good acquaintance on public transit. He told me that five years of studying at our university seemed like not enough to him, and despite the exposé “Why Go to Graduate School?” by my friend Mikha, he decided anyway to enroll as a full-time postgraduate student at KhNURE.

When the topic of postgraduate study comes up, I remember my own years of study, and how everything could have been much better than it actually was. Obviously, wisdom always comes much later than the moment when it is actually needed. Nevertheless, a certain amount of methodological material has accumulated in my head, and it needs to be shared with people who are planning to write dissertations, theses, or even ordinary term papers.

This is an announcement for a small series of articles on the topic “How a Young Scientist Can Survive at a University.” What awaits us all:

choosing a topic for scientific work
conducting research and obtaining practical results
scientific and practical conferences
preparing the manuscript
defending the work

Perhaps some topics will be covered in several articles, while some will be mentioned in just a couple of paragraphs. I’ll repeat that these methodological guidelines may be applicable both to work on the scale of a Candidate of Sciences dissertation and to an ordinary course project. If there is some question you are already interested in that deserves coverage, you can go ahead and ask it in the comments or by email.

Lecture Notes on Optimization

2009-06-20T09:57:00+03:00

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the party committee of my department has decided that in the 2009/2010 academic year, third-year students will be left without a course on optimization. This is not because the course is difficult or useless to anyone. This year I became convinced that if you sit down and read the handouts, the average student can figure it out. Most likely, this has to do with the distribution of teaching loads. Now this course will be available only in evening classes at our department.

The good news is that the work on developing the disciplines of optimization and parallel programming will not stop there. Last year I taught this course for SCS students for the first time and managed to put together some slides. This year the slides were joined by lecture notes, though incomplete ones, as well as a lab manual. I’d like to go further and write a large set of lecture notes (a book?) that would combine the disciplines “Multicore Programming” and “Introduction to Software Performance Optimization.”

I imagine this book should consist of several parts. The first is introductory and motivational, so that after reading it there are no doubts left about the importance of the subject. This part will also need to explain various concepts of parallel programming. The second is architectural, explaining what makes programs on a dual-core processor run twice as fast, and why sequential-code optimizations work. In the third part, cover various libraries for parallel programming: WinAPI/POSIX, OpenMP, Intel TBB. The last part will discuss sequential optimizations, when all the parallel libraries have already been enabled and the program still isn’t fast enough.

I have a draft of such notes. You can easily download it: optimization.pdf. Please keep in mind that this is a draft — some chapters are unfinished, some chapters are missing, the figures are drawn crookedly, and formatting is missing in places. A sort of alpha version. But even now you can learn from it:

The differences between various performance analysis tools.
A bit about Intel TBB.
The main problems of working with memory.
A bit about branch optimization.
Loop transformations.
Automatic optimizations in compilers.
Introduction to OpenMP.

Thus, you can already start using it.

I would be very grateful if you wrote your view of what should be in such a set of notes. Also, if you point out errors or unclear passages in the current version of the text. Perhaps you have some questions that have no answers. This blog is convenient in that some of the questions can be considered already, without waiting for the final version of the notes.

I’ll gladly accept any comments here or by email at: volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com.