all.log

Just for a note… some interesting hard-to-find (or to remember) GSM commands:
(more…)

Я действительно долго искал признаки первоапрельской шутки в новости от 6 апреля о блокировке “Укртелекомом” в городской телефонной сети прямых мобильных номеров, используемых GSM компаниями UMC и Киевстар GSM - настолько невероятна эта наглость.
(more…)

Сюрприз обнаружен на официальном сайте “Воли бродбенд” - Открытое письмо-обращение компании “Воля”

Превосходный ответ телекоммуникационного гиганта бизнесменам-неудачникам и прочим нытикам. Который, впрочем, в свою очередь потребовал ответа.

Всё сформулировано очень чётко и убедительно по всем пунктам, … кроме одного абзаца, в котором говорится:
(more…)

Another big-outlet backed testimony for Jesus and Bible.

Same old questions are mentioned by Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute:

I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” “Why am I here?” “Why does mathematics work, anyway?” “If the universe had a beginning, who created it?” “Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?” “Why do humans have a moral sense?” “What happens after we die?”

Good job, CNN!

Remarkably, Francis Collins has been an atheist/sceptic untill his 27th year in life - almost like myself.

Что же делать? Возвращаться или нет?
Есть ли смысл в прямом городском номере на мобильном телефоне?

После 2-х лет умопомрачительных 25 центов за минуту входящего звонка на прямой номер, я уже совсем отвык от прямого номера, как феномена (как, думаю, и большинсто некоммерческих пользователей прямых мобильных номеров)

Теперь Golden Telecom GSM предлагает тариф на входящие $0.05/минута.
Есть безлимитная опция («Прямой Неограниченный») - $15/месяц + налоги $1.

Это особенно привлекательно в свете обещанного национального роуминга Голден Телеком GSM в сети УРС (”Украинские Радио Системы”, ТМ “Beeline”, “WellCOM”).
Представляете - прямой киевский номер на ЮБК или в карпатских горах - за 5 центов в минуту!
(more…)

If you happen to deal with a website template having the copyright year (the four digits at the bottom of virtually every www page on earth) hardcoded as a number in its PHP files, replace it with the following string:

<?=date("Y")?>

and you’ll be surprising your visitors with great immediacy every year in its very first minutes!

(requires “short tags” enabled in PHP configuration)

The excellent “The Three Musketeers” by George Sidney (1948) on TCM reminded me of numerous disputes of colorizing old movies.

And I thought I got the idea, at least with the old movies depicting even older epochs - like in the case with the Musketeers.

See, the idea is that a color movie of 40’s is as much unusual as a B&W movie of a more recent period, like “Schindler’s List” (1993)

What is common in these two situations - the events portrayed are greatly divided from the times they are played by actors. So the purpose of the artificial addition (”colorization”) or removing (b&w shooting) of the color might very likely be an attempt of amplifying a dramatic impact on a viewer with the improbable connection of the Unconnectable (subsets of Time in this case)

Have you noticed how craftily mobile phone manufacturers hide the single but probably most controversial piece of information - SAR?

(SAR stands for Specific Absorption Rate - a measure of radio wave energy exposure upon a cellular phone user. It varies greatly between phone models even by the same maker)

So far only Siemens has been found to clearly state this parameter on the product pages in its website. Samsung-Europe publishes it on their website quite prominently, but not in the product manuals.

All the others producers checked (Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola) guard it pretty heavily.

For e.g. Nokia makes these data available in seemingly convenient form but keeps them on an isolated domain. Why not on the same pages with the rest of the technical data? That’s easy - to exclude them from the product selection process.

Sony-Ericsson buried this 2-significant-digit value into a 2.5 MB (!) PDF file - a dedicated monster for each single cell phone model - probably to deter the inquisitiveness of the potential customers.
FYI: it’ll take an average dial-up user (these users still comprise some 40-60% of all home users or more, depending on the market) half an hour to download this “document” of the WHOLE TWO decimal digits for only one phone model.

So why’s that?
Do they just keep customers for brainless cattle?
Do they fear that customers are going to make “wrong” purchasing decisions based on “unimportant”, but highly vexed data which SAR definitely is?

The marketer’s logic in Sony-Ericsson’s case is fairly clear: dial-up users are overly conservative folks who don’t understand the benefits of broadband which is very cool and it is very wrong not to choose new technology. These marketers aren’t willing to realize that dial-up users are just being reasonable in not going for crazy speeds (or any other new “cool” stuff for that matter) - they can’t read text at 2 Megabits per second anyway, so why pay for it?

Therefore, mobile makers probably think, it’s better to liberate these unfortunate from any distractions. Or otherwise these consumers will risk conservatively sticking to their old handsets thus spoiling sales prospects.

Due to nicely warming climate this year’s biking season has already been started (it happened on Jan 18)

As always, new season start is marked by summing up the statistical data for the previous one.

So… the season 2006 had the following features:

• Total Distance ridden: 2017.8 km
• First ride (season start): February 17, 2006
• Last ride (season finish): December 16, 2006
• Total riding days: 89 (22.67 km/day)
• Time on the go (wheels spinning): 140:12:54, or 5d20h12m54s
• Maximum speed (downhill on the highway): 63.0 km/h
• Average speed: 14.4 km/h
• Maximum trip distance within a day: 62.84 km
• Minimum trip distance: 1.78 km

Season’s graphs:

Odometer

Notice the perfect inverse tangent curve shape

Average & Maximum speeds

Note: the maximum of 79 km/h was a cyclometer’s fault which is running its 6th year on the original (factory loaded) battery.

And here’s my invention - an attempt to numerify (i.e. to represent numerically) the hardness of a day’s ride - currently it is calculated as Distance ridden times the day’s Average speed.

It seems to classify the “hardness”, or ride difficulty, or body burden caused, pretty well assuming terrains do not differentiate substantially

Everyone hates spam. I mean, ok, some people may actually like advertising, but spam isn’t just ads. Most spams are genuine frauds & scams. And who likes to be defrauded?

So why hasn’t it been stopped yet? Why do we see the volume of spam in our mailboxes only growing instead?

One of the markings of the past ‘06 was the drastic attempt by guys of BlueSecurity (Israel based BTW) to finally stop this vice. The idea was brilliant - to block spammers with the spammers’ methods - DDoS against the spamvertised sites (used to distribute goods - either electronic or physical), effectively stopping sales, not the innocent zombified home computers (used to promote those goods).

The plan was so huge, it hit spammers really hard, but didn’t stop spam on Earth.

Unfortunately the good guys have lost this blitzkrieg. The spammers struck back and made notable collateral damage to the whole Internet, generating quite a lot of news - on slashdot.org, Washington Post etc.

As we see, it is a multimillion-dollar business which makes tier-1 ISPs to play to their tune. This is the problem as ever more laymen are joining the Internet in coming years. The more technically unsavvy the average Internet user becomes, the more desirable target for spammers the userbase presents.

Sadly, unprofessional users are both consumers of spam and tools in hands of spammers to spread the evil.

And as long as big criminals are entering the game (see BBC report for e.g.) we are about to become witnesses of large financial interests repartition which historically leads to… wars.

Furthermore, assuming these interests are not merely large, but worldwide - just like the phenomenon of Internet economy suggests - the problem at hand (the war) provokes to be more precisely called “The World (War)”…