Month: April 2024

Today I became curious about why Y is called “Y”. It’s “i grec”, “i” the Greek. In Greek, this letter is upsilon “υ”. For example, in German, Danish, and Brazilian Portuguese, Y is called ipsilon. Now why “и”. Because in Latin there was no [uː] sound (as in uber), the Romans called the borrowed letter “Greek I” or “I-grek” (meaning “Y”), thus indicating the origin of the letter and sound. In Greek, there is currently no such sound, there y is pronounced as i. But there used to be.

It’s funny that Y can act as both a vowel and a consonant in English. At the beginning of words as a consonant (yes, yellow). At the end of words as a vowel.

Interestingly, there is a place in France named Y. Search using “Y, France”.

People over 35 might be very surprised, but in April, TheBat mail client released version 11.1

Came and hugged sleeping Yuka, whispered in his ear that there’s fish (salmon) waiting in his bowl, and he woke up and went to the kitchen.

How Yuka sees it: the owner came, muttering something, his breath smells strongly of fish, I’d better go find that fish

So I started delving into commercetools, and instead of jotting down notes and thinking about what could be easily done with it, I began to write down what is difficult to do with it.

And published it as an article.

https://hybrismart.com/2024/04/09/navigating-the-gaps-a-deep-dive-into-commercetools-limitations/

Welcome

Interestingly, it turns out that July and August each have 31 days for a reason. Because of them, February ends up being the exception, and it’s not just because July and August are the only months named after Roman emperors (Julius Caesar and Augustus), and politically, it would have been quite incorrect to make one of them 30 days long, leaving the other with 31 days.

Another interesting fact is that in Rome there was a tradition to give personal names to only the first four sons, while subsequent ones could be named with ordinal numerals: Quintus — “fifth,” Sextus — “sixth,” Septimus — “seventh,” Octavus — “eighth,” Nonus — “ninth,” and Decimus — “tenth.”

Naming conventions there were quite complicated all in all. Google “Roman names” on Wikipedia.

Today I listened to an interesting story about laying the transatlantic telegraph cable and decided to check if telegrams still exist.

They indeed do, and in the USA, they are outrageously expensive. $23 plus $0.75 per word, plus an additional $20 for sending to a private address. It brings to mind “Izzy’s all.”

For $15 plus $5 for every 35 words, they send an email. There are services for sending and receiving telexs ($13 + $0.89 per word). There’s a separate “Political message” rate at $26 + $0.60 per word.

There’s an option to send telegrams through the mail, Postalgram, but you pay not to the post office, but to American Telegram. $30 + $10 for a batch of 30 words.

I wrote a detailed article about an interesting experiment on one of the projects. I needed to dissect the logic of a large Excel file — it contained several hundred quite complex formulas, and it worked like this: a manager would input about a dozen parameters on one tab, and all other tabs were ready to print the estimate for the client. It involved quite complex specifics and complicated products, with numerous features like a certain product having to be accompanied by a certain service, and here you need to multiply by two if there are four. No one at the client fully understood it; it simply had been working for over ten years, and throughout these ten years, people had been slightly tweaking its logic to the extent of their understanding. There was no documentation, but even if there had been, it would only have hindered, because what was done later based on the documentation surely would not have matched what Excel outputted, and avoiding reengineering would still have been impossible.

At that time, I racked my brain on how to make this reengineering feasible within a finite time, measurable in weeks, and came up with a solution based on functional programming in Groovy.

I am publishing a detailed analysis of the solution and a repository with the code. I had to write the code from scratch for the article, as well as devise a simpler Excel for demonstration (hundreds of times simpler than the original).

How I Reverse-Engineered Huge Excel File Full of Complex Formulas

https://hybrismart.com/2024/04/06/how-i-reverse-engineered-huge-excel-file-full-of-complex-formulas/

In our Ashburn, it seems we have the highest concentration of windowless buildings in the USA

I am currently reading Frans de Waal, and there is a reference in the text to a TV segment involving a banana. I googled it. It’s from some religious program, where a guy is proving that bananas were created by God, listing the reasons why. The funniest part is that the banana he’s holding, which was developed by humans through hybridization and selection, is quite different from the small wild bananas that this guy has probably never even seen.

“If you study a well-made banana, you’ll find that it has roughly three ridges on one side and two on the other. If you prepare your hand to grasp the banana, you’ll find that there are three grooves on the far side and two on the near side. The banana and the hand are perfectly made for each other. You’ll discover that the creator of the banana, the Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface. It has external indicators of its internal contents: green – too early, yellow – just right, black – too late. (…) Notice that there is a point at the top for convenient insertion, the shape perfectly fits the human mouth, it’s soft, easily digestible. It’s even curved towards the face to make the whole process much easier. Seriously, all of nature testifies to the genius of God’s creative design.”

In the comments, he was asked to comment on coconuts

God Made Bananas

https://youtu.be/qq7LXn4KSrM?si=uD0NzyqRu3CMYi4W