Month: February 2018

February 17 2018, 17:48

I wonder if there was a popular service that recommended one or more stories each day of a strictly defined volume, taking into account the reader’s tastes? The point is that there are loads of people commuting to work – some by car, some by subway, and the commuting time is usually more or less the same. For those who like reading or listening, it would be possible to find a story or novella of the optimal size from a large library, taking preferences into account (likes, surveys). You sit in the subway or car, start reading or listening, and by the time you get to work – the story has just ended.

It would be particularly interesting not to reveal the title and author until the story is read and rated.

Clearly, you won’t find much from the “great literature” in 30 minutes. But so much has been written in the world that it would definitely last a year with any preference settings, and then perhaps they might even begin to write specifically for this purpose.

Monetization – a thank you to the author at the end of the story. Money is automatically deducted unless the listener or reader hits a big red “do not pay for this” button within a certain period after.

I think finishing reading or listening to a story right as you arrive at work or home from work is significantly “more interesting” than stopping in the middle to finish it tomorrow. Of course, this is very individual, but the format itself would be interesting.

February 15 2018, 13:56

Finally set up my Macbook Pro to work with the same efficiency as before. I’ll leave this here for my future self and others.

Console – iTerm2 + zsh.

Editor – Sublime Text + configuration for external keyboard https://coderwall.com/p/upolqw/fix-sublime-text-home-and-end-key-usage-on-mac-osx

Code editor – IntelliJ Idea.

Diagram editor – StarUML, OmniGraffle, LibreOffice, Visio under VirtualBox.

Editors for text, spreadsheets, and presentations – Microsoft Office for Mac

Graphics editor. Unfortunately, GIMP. If someone suggests something better – I’ll install it.

Email – Microsoft Outlook and for personal mail, Mail.

Support for external PC keyboard (in my case, das keyboard) – DoubleCommand. Tried Karabiner, but developers turned it into a mess in the version for the latest OS.

Messengers. Skype – Classic version. The new one is inconvenient. Microsoft Teams didn’t catch on, forced to use Skype for Business at work. Telegram.

File manager. Midnight Commander. Tried a bunch, even ran FAR under Wine. Nothing better than MC yet.

Video. VLC, of course.

Remote access to the Mac at home – VNC Viewer.

Standard set of browsers.

Programming languages for everyday use – Bash, Perl, Python, Java.

Database – MySQL.

Video processing – iMovie (there’s nothing like it for free on Windows) and ffmpeg for batch processing.

Photo processing – GIMP for individual photos and ImageMagick for batch processing.

No current tasks about sound processing, but I will find something when the need arises.

Also using XMLmind for XML, but it’s foolish. Looking for a replacement.

February 11 2018, 12:41

Today, I finished searching and verifying a solution for an interesting task needed for a project we launched last week. The task looks like this: you have 10 XML files, each being a dump from an old CMS system, one for each language version of the site. The old system allows you to construct pages for each version arbitrarily, which makes the XMLs similar to each other but not exact duplicates in structure. Meanwhile, some text about the company might be present in all languages somewhere deep in each XML. In the first XML, it might be closer to the beginning, in the second – a bit further, in the third – it might not be there at all. But the relative arrangement of the blocks within each file is constant. If a text about the company is between two other segments, it is likely the same way in another file (if those two other segments are translated there at all). The number one task – to link different fragments about the same thing but in different languages. To use one or two known languages to determine translations into all other languages (or as many as will be available).

The second task is to take 4 languages in which the site has already been launched, and find matches for content in the four XMLs in these languages, and the attributes of components in Hybris, where this content was uploaded months ago and has since been actively edited by the client. After these matches are found, it’s possible to load the remaining six languages into the existing components, since after the first exercise we have the links. However, there are almost no exact matches between what’s in Hybris and what’s in the XMLs, but there are approximate ones. From the example above – the text about the company was split into three parts, and two of them were edited, but overall, it is the same as in the old CMS. Thus, the task is to link the components from the system containing texts in the current edition with texts from XMLs many months old. As accurately as possible. The rest can indeed be manually fine-tuned.

I successfully solved both tasks today. I really love such challenges.)

February 06 2018, 08:57

Both on Android, and now I’ve noticed on iOS an interesting “feature”: when the system decides to update itself overnight, it simply turns off the alarm. Or it updates at that time, I don’t know, I was sleeping. The main thing is that the alarm just doesn’t ring at that time. They could have warned us the evening before, by the way. Slept through for about twenty minutes because of this.

February 05 2018, 16:39

Today we launched the most grandiose project on Hybris in history live. 🙂 I won’t say which one yet, considering the confidentiality policies of the companies involved (the client and EPAM) and all that. So, no links for now. I will only say that it involves a company with a 100-percent recognizable brand and the site is being launched across a slew of countries, in a slew of languages and currencies, and represents a complex mix of B2C+B2B with a focus on very complex B2B.

About a year and a half ago, I joined the project as a solution architect, we came up with so many ideas there, and realized almost all of them. The continuation promises to be even more interesting. Hooray)