November 04 2016, 17:51

Fun games could be made – “identify nationality by face” and “identify language by audio recording”. A person’s photo is shown, along with answer options. Or they let you listen to a phrase, and you need to determine the language. Of course, it is not entirely legal to use other people’s photos for this, but what Facebook app or Vkontakte app doesn’t do that. There are perfectly legal photo banks. For audio, there are plenty of voiced books in various languages in the public domain. This would be an interesting thing. And seemingly simple to make.

Users could be allowed to upload their own photos and get statistics on which nationality other users identified them as. I think many would find this interesting, and the bank of available photos with “correct answers” would only grow.

November 02 2016, 23:00

Major update on the blog about hybris: an article on ImpEx. It is a format in hybris for importing and exporting data. It is actively used for integration and data migration. It is an enhancement over CSV. But the enhancement is quite “advanced”, it has its own language and syntax.

So, the article primarily covers undocumented or poorly documented features of ImpEx that I managed to unearth.

I also included some recipes and tips&tricks, which are often needed and frequently asked about by developers. Now there is a link to throw (since there is nothing like this in the official documentation).

https://hybrismart.com/2016/10/30/mastering-hybris-impex-recipes-and-secrets/

October 27 2016, 18:58

Interesting facts about the venerable stealth F-117. It turns out that it has such a faceted shape because, at the time of its invention, they couldn’t calculate an effective scattering surface for more complicated shapes. Due to this, it has no aerodynamics to speak of—so much so that it’s completely unmanageable manually. Essentially, it’s a rocket with wings, controlled by a computer, since its flight must be constantly adjusted. It’s covered with “iron ball paint” — microspheres of carbonyl iron or ferrite. The coating is capable of absorbing radio waves in a certain range of radar frequencies. When exposed to radio waves, the ferrite molecules within the coating come into oscillatory motion under the influence of an alternating magnetic field, transforming the energy from high-frequency radiation into heat. This heat is transferred to the aircraft’s structure and dissipates. That’s why it’s invisible on radars. Moreover, this is so crucial that after each flight the aircraft was inspected for any scratches or chips. The cost of flying the aircraft is $135,000 per hour, and the aircraft itself costs two and a half billion dollars. The tail is covered with small pyramids that repeatedly reflect the radar signal to either fade it out more quickly or deflect it sideways.