IN MY OPINION

It was a great day today. Before the May holidays, almost all of our employees took a short vocations and were absent today in the office. Only some of us (real geeks), were working today instead on the next Monday to join it with other days off. The office was empty and silent. I hadn’t seen so productive atmosphere before, and it made me extremely enthusiastic. I’ve done a lot of important refactoring of the core API today. This significant changes had been delayed for a long time, and today I decided to perform it during a day. I thoroughly planned all changes step by step: classes, database, file storage, tests. Of course, I underestimated a necessary time, so I had to work without a lunch and left the office at 9.30pm. But after I committed everything to the SVN, and our Cruisecontrol eventually build it, I overcame with joy.
When I was walking down the Pecherskiy Uzviz street towards an underground station, I met a cute animal. It was a little hedgehog approaching the nearest bushes near the local school yard. I confidently and quickly took out my photo camera from the backpack and
took a picture. It was so sweet

I got tired looking for a good solution to imitate a rownum in MySQL every time I need it. Here I post the most
universal solution that doesn’t need a script mode and can be executed in a single statement:

This solution and others you can find in comments to the MySQL Reference Manual.

Dear Sir or Madam,
I would like to introduce our cool guys who are willing to work as a Star Team Call Center:

Thanks to the great online image editor which was able to resize this animated gif’s to obtain reasonable file sizes.

This morning I took part in a flash mob for the first time. Spontaneously some of us decided to
dress in caps and headphones. Firstly, one of us sitting at the table and working, dressed is a cap while listening to the music in headphones. I saw him and made the same. The chain reaction was spreading across the office. Actually, it is nice idea to perform something like that once a week on Friday

Only one Sonopia Crewer didn’t understand what’s happening. It was scared and tried to escape

There are several botanical gardens in Kiev. People prefer visiting it when one of many kinds of flowers is blossoming. I know that the most popular are magnolias and lilacs. I’ve seen dozens of times a lilacs flourishing in the Central Botanical Garden. As I remember, it happens in May or little bit later. Families, teenagers, just friends meet there and walk down the long alley between beautiful lilac bushes colored in white, red and pink hues. It smells like grandma’s eau-de-Cologne or scented soap. Everybody touch flowers, take a smell at it, take photos.

Only a week ago, I saw a magnolia for the first time. This month, me and my little one used to going out a lot. We went across all central parks, and were in trouble not having where to go for a stroll. Suddenly, we recollected that we hadn’t been to Botanical Garden near Kiev Metro station “Universytet” for a year. Once we entered it, I noticed beautiful trees which were blossoming. It was magnolias. For some reason, I always thought that magnolia is a kind of flowers which is growing in the flowerpot, and should be small like tulip or even orchid. I was amazed that it was great and beautiful trees. If you have an opportunity to visit this place right now, do it without any hesitation.

This morning every programmer at Sonopia got a bunch of fruits on the table. This tradition started some weeks ago, and sounds like a great idea It’s healthy and natural. Of course we can go to the shop and buy it for ourselves, but as usually there are crowds of people at the shop in the lunch time. Organized fruits delivery to the office is much more handy. And if you buy fruits after the lunch, usually your stomach is full and you don’t want anymore. But eating it before the lunch definitely decreases your consumption desire.

OpenId – is a one of the many global unique person identifier. The idea is not novel, but there are bunch of open-sourced, not vendor-dependent, collaborated implementations. Basically, the idea is in using your any well-known account, e.g. LiveJournal as a login or your ID in other systems. It is very useful, because you don’t need to create an account on another OpenID supported system, to make a simple action like leave a comment to a photo of your friend. As I run my own WordPress driven blog, I always wanted a some way to comment my friends posts on LiveJournal. But creating an account only for that reason, seemed to me meaningless. And at that moment appeared a genius and bright implementation of that unique id MyOpenId. Moreover, the LJ started to support this authentication method. For me only one inconvenience remained. I didn’t want sign my comments as jdev.myopenid.com (it is my MyOpenId account), because nobody knows who is behind this account. I needed a solution which allows me to associate my blog with my openId. Today I bumped into a great recipe in the How to Use Your Own URL, Not WordPress.com’s, As Your OpenID article.
Basically you need to do this few simple steps:

• Get your MyOpenId.com account (or on any other OpenId provider)
• Log in into your WordPress driven blog as admin
• Go to Presentation -> Theme Editor -> Main Index Template
• Add to head section of the index.php file such simple strings:
  <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
  <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourAccount.myopenid.com/" />

Now, I can and do a LJ post comments of my friends

Just now I got office where I’m working. I have spent all the morning standing in the queue to the Polish Embassy to apply for a visa. I’d like to write about it, because I feel strong desire to do it right now.
My wife and me decided to have a short break from work and spend a week in Krakow, Poland. We haven’t been there before, but we like such ancient cities with lots of cosy places and architecture masterpieces. Till this morning we had gathered all necessary documents including hotel reservation letter, insurance, photos and application forms. The only problem was that we printed the application forms in incorrect way. Yesterday evening we were filling out the forms, and figured out that we printed each page on the separate sheet. As we don’t have at home neither laser printer nor a xerox, we broke into Ivanka’s office at 7.40 and made there 6(for an emergency purpose) photocopies. The office security was interested in what we were doing, but we pretended that it was conspiracy theory. Then, we swiftly moving through old crooked ways got to the Embassy.

As we reaching the Embassy we were astounded by the number of people standing in the queue. There was a large crowd of people who were standing or walking along the street waiting for the open hours. Fortunately, there are two Embassies which are situated one near another. Another one is a Czech Republic Embassy. Therefore, only part of all people were standing in the right queue. At that time, near 8 o’clock, in the line were standing approximately 30 person. It’s not too many if the Embassy staff works fine. But this day, something was broken in the well tuned mechanism. It was expected that we would pass all procedures till 10 o’clock, but I had to wait until 1 p.m.
Ivanka had to go to work, so after she filled in the application form she left me. I was accompanied by few students who are planning to visit Poland by AEGEE program and a professional truck driver. We were socializing, mainly about Poland and Europe sharing our own experience. It was quite interesting and funny. But queue was moving extremely slowly which disappointed and irritated us. They started to let people in at 9 o’clock and processing around 5 person per hour from our line. The trick was in other entrance, or rather, another stairs. From that side were hanging
cute blonds from the tourist agencies with bunches of applications and well-connected people who trying to avoid standing in the public line. But what is worse, there are lots of swindler near the Embassy who always tries to insert another folk into the beginning. Some of their dummy people, usually old grannies or other loafers who want to earn some money, are standing all the time in the queue pretending that they are reserve place in the line for somebody else. When a swindler found anybody from real Poland visitors who don’t to waste time, and starting from 10$ you get the warm place in the queue instead of any idler who is near the head of the line. Everybody in the line knows what is happening, but only some of them are ready to argue and
to save time for honest people in the line. Another bad thing is that, the moneymaker violate even their rule and try to insert 3,4,5 people instead of one dummy person. It is so offensive to all people to behave like that. It seemed, that the Embassy security definitely knows about that cheaters, but for some reasons don’t pay any attentions on that. I’m not going to speculate on the supposing of any connection between the security and that guys, but I would estimate the behavior of the security as inappropriate towards people in a line. The security guys I’m talking about are Ukrainian soldiers. On the other hand, the Polish man from the security was extremely polite and cheerful. The office workers were excellent too without any complaints.
I can understand travelers who are not from Kiev and have only one day to get the visa. But what is more surprising, all that people don’t pay money to that guys, and exemplary stands in a row. Especially honest poor workers, who have to go abroad to earn some money for their families. There are lots of polite and high moral person. But between that who violates the queue rules always occurs very rude, offensive and bad-mannered individuals. They illegally pays money, push aside everybody, have an argument and irritate everybody. And what’s more important – they waste OUR time. In this simple game that businessman are earning money, that “smart” guy saves his/her time, and we, who came there at 8 o’clock, have to waste OUR time and loose temper. After seeing that, I’m not very surprised when Ukrainians are not welcomed to Europe. We have to learn how to behave in posh, unobjectionable way. Especially in public queues. I think that it is a litmus paper of any society.

If I could suggest to the Ambassador, I would definitely give him some advices how to improve that system. It is obvious that there are people who need an urgent appointment, why don’t improve the system allowing them to apply for money? It would be an organized process which could be managed not by street dealers. Or considering a huge flow of the people between Ukraine and Poland make more available rooms which receives documents.

Now, I’m trying to relax by eating a chocolate and drinking tea.

Some useful advices who wants Poland visa:
- you can apply for your wife/husband, your surnames have to be the same;
- write correct address of the hotel, and enclose a reservation letter;
- photo has to be with VERY large face, > 80%, they scan it;
- don’t panic

http://www.wrigley.com/wrigley/products/products_eclipse.asp
Must chew for every Java programmer! Moreover, the last one on the page is branded in the same colors as Eclipse IDE. I’m eager to taste it.

I did. Despite of nippy evenings, I opened my annual running season this evening. I’ve been doing it for 5 years. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep doing this healthy exercisers more then a month any year. I’m not going to make predictions about this summer, I just started it with hope not to give up as long as I can. I prefer to run accompanied by a friend. But today I was alone, and I made up for it listening to the radio in my mobile phone.
Some statistics:
- route length: 4.2 km
- time: 25 min
- on the Google map: April 5th running
- on the pedometer: route
To draw a path, I used a new feature of Google Maps – My Maps. There you can draw a lines on the Google map, assign captions and save it. Fascinating, but I feel a lack of necessary function – calculating the length of the drawn path. After I spent a few minutes searching the right tool to perform it, I bumped into lots of mashups – sites which combine plain Google maps with additional business logic, like calculating different paths which are generated by GPS devices or entered manually. You can find out what kind of useful functionality could be created using this modern Web 2.0 technique here.
So, to calculate the length of my running route I chose Gmaps Pedometer site. Everything was similar to what I did before on the My Maps service. I chose a check point tool, and marked all corners I passed. The length was summed up automatically.