Category: General

Just a general category

Few photos of different events

For the past couple of weeks there were few events and meetings here and there.

 

Managed to take some pictures as well, so decided to post a short note here with links to appropriate galleries.

First of all there was a 15 years birthday of LITC (Russian school in Limassol) which I was attending. Have lot’s of friends who studied there, so had a chance to bring back memories of how it was in school. Pictures here

Last Saturday we had a Russian-Cyprus VI festival hosted on the sea side of Limassol. This year the performance was really poor as well as the general organization of event sucked big deal. Nevertheless I managed to take few pictures throughout the event.

 

Finally, managed to get out for a beer with Den and Polina to Woodman pub somewhere in between of the events and since had a camera nearby, took few pics as well.

Visual Basic and Visual Studio

It’s been quite a while since last time I touched Visual Basic along with it’s default IDE – Visual Studio. Yesterday I had a quick chance to see it again, since I needed to help on the project which is under development in this environment.

What I can say – things are still as ugly as they used to be (IMHO). So few notes about things that pissed me off:

Auto indent in visual studio is more harmful rather than helpful. Auto completion is very annoying (it tries to complete everything I type instantly and with things different from what I want). All the time I was fighting with these two. I guess there are options to disable/enable features like that or configure different behavior, but in default configuration it sucks. Syntax highlighting is very poor (only highlights few reserved words with one different color).

Now with regards to Visual Basic: it is very interesting to see a language with uses “_” (underscore) to indicate that the line will continue after newline (VB does not use semicolons to indicate the end of statement, instead all statements are one per line), and uses ” ‘ ” (single parenthesis) to start comments. I know languages which are dependent on new lines, but more classical sign to show a continuation of line would be “\” (backslash), while for comment, either “#” (hash) or // (double slash) or /* */ (combination of slashes with starts for long comments) is used.

I had some other thoughts on function names and other, but I will leave this one out :)
Don’t trying to blame anything here, just my view of things as I touched them by accident after using Vim for coding PHP/Perl/C for a while.

Dropbox and major cleanup

I’ve been hearing about DropBox for a while now, but somehow never checked it out until few days ago. The service is really nice, easy to use and pretty handy. While starting to use it, I was moving a lot of my staff under the directory which is being synced with the server and decided to clear up the mess around my home directory, which was gathering there for a long while.

It all went into major clean up. Deleted old and obsolete documents, all media content (movies from mobile camera, pics and so on) which is already uploaded to one of those services like Flickr or YouTube. Deleted everything that I haven’t touched for few years and won’t probably need any more as well as content which is freely available on the internet and can be redownloaded easily.

After all of this, I went to all my IM lists and cleaned old contacts, removed all obsolete passwords from my password managers (use KeepAssX for this). Finally – went through few of my servers and removed old websites that were not used for ages and there is no need for them any more.

Now I feel better and I am waiting for release of Fedora 15 today…

P.S.: DropBox is running an offer where if I invite someone there, both of us will get +250MB of storage, so if you are not using DropBox and you are thinking to try it – let me know, so I can send you an invite (instead you directly registering) and we can all benefit ;-)

Update: thanks to Chris Ergatides for pointing out the direct referring link on DropBox, so if you want to register there, referring to my name, click this link (thanks in advance) ))

C++ examples

Though I am not coding in C++ and my experience in these languages is minor, I am ofter asked to help students with the studies in the subject. So was the case recently, so I ended up writing two small programs: one has to do with link lists and few functions to work with them like push, pop, insert, remove, sort, print, search and the other one is a classic thing with drawing triangular from star (or any other) symbol.

Just in case someone is learning C++ now, you can download the code and go through, hope it will help or give an idea.

So here is the link_list.cpp stuff and here is a star.cpp.

BTW, those who are using Windows and something like DevC++ often can see a call to system(‘PAUSE’) which is really bad and works only on Windows. While doing link list thing, I did a function called user_wait(), which does the same, but  in more natural way, here it is:

  /* waits for user to press Enter. Good replacement for system('PAUSE') which works only on Windows */
  void user_wait ()  {
      char blah;

      std::cout << std::endl << "... Press Enter to Continue ..." << std::endl; // print msg
      std::cin.get(blah); // wait for Enter
      std::cout << std::endl; // put newline
  }