Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Secret places on a map

Whenever I need to point somebody to some place on the map, I use wikimapia, since it is very handy for such things. Today, when I went there, I decided to see what’s around me and found this: http://wikimapia.org/#lat=34.5871849&lon=32.9922009&z=15&l=0&m=b

It is a very nicely described Akrotiri RAF. Almost every small building in a guarded area is pretty well described and labeled. That’s kinda cool.

Perl strict refs

Just a short note on Perl strict refs. I had to dynamically load a module and call a function in perl while using strict mode. Originally tried this way:

my $module_name = "Blah";
eval("require $module_name;");

if ($@) {
  die "Failed to load module: $@\n";
} else {
  my $func_name = $module_name . "::do_something";
  &$func_name("some args");
}

But got a warning that I am not allowed to do this while in strict refs. To fix this, had to change the last block to

  my $func_name = $module_name . "::do_something";
  my $func_ref = \&$func_name;
  &$func_ref("some args");

And all went fine. One other alternative was to use the next setup:

  my $func_name = $module_name . "::do_something";
  { no strict refs; &$func_name("some args"); }

Which would cancel strict refs in a short scope. But I didn’t like it :)

Vanessa Mae

Attended a concert of Vanessa Mae yesterday. While the performance was very good, the organization sucked completely. There was a huge mess with entrances, where people didn’t know which entry point they will be allowed having which type of tickets and huge crowds were going around the building. Then, when entrance was announced, it was not opened in advanced and doors opened just 15 minutes before the announced beginning. After people went inside, there was a complete mess with seats, since some tickets were with reserved places and some not, but there were no clear distinction on which areas are for reserved and which are not, what caused a lot of movements between the seats for another hour or so. The actual concert delayed by 1 hour.

Another weird thing was the fact of people coming with pop corn. That’s kinda funny.

After the concert, it took us more than one hour to exit the parking, since the traffic was not organized by any means, and at the end, I found that half of the exit gate from parking was closed, which caused huge traffic jam.

At least Vanessa was very good, energetic and active! Pictures here.

PS: I am not good at photography, so photos are not of the best quality, but whatever I could manage, seating on the other side of in darkness :)

Changes

Too many upgrades and other changes happen recently. First of all – new WordPress with new look and all those nice things. I am completely happy about it. Being system administrator for a while, I bet wordpress is the easiest thing to upgrade, compared to all the rest.

Android 2.2… As I have purchased Samsung Galaxy 3 (i5800 or Apollo), I was checking around and found out that I can upgrade to newer version of android, which was supposed to be faster, better and so on. Fighting for a day or so I did managed to upgrade the phone. One thing that I got weird – I had to use Windows PC with Odin tool to do the upgrade of a Linux based phone. I am not sure if there is a way to do it somehow simplier and from Linux PC, but that was the only proper way I found out. On the other hard – it really was a nice thing. My phone became much faster (can see that with no bench-marking) as well as some apps got much better (especially contacts. No I can use native contact application and like it more that GO Contacts, that I used while running Android 2.1).

Google+, oh that’s a nice thingy… I like pretty much. Being a big fan of Google products at one hard and a user of all those social network sites, I find Google+ to be very fast, clear and handy. One thing that I regret yet is a limited amount of people there and invite-based friendships that have some limits, but I bet this is a matter of time and I do believe that Google+ will find it’s way out there.

There are few other changes here and there, but I won’t mention them due to many reasons for each of them. Generally I like what’s going on and while I believe things will shape around, I am really glad to see all those changes.