Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in cubbi's LiveJournal:

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Friday, October 30th, 2009
11:47 pm	Halloween 2009 Hey, tomorrow is Halloween (longislanders, btw, party at our house!) and it will be 7 years since I walked out of JFK airport with a giant suitcase full of clothes, books, and hard drives. It's amazing how much stuff happened to me since then. Now let's see how much candy can I eat today before the trick-o-treaters come tomorrow. Current Mood: bouncy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 4th, 2009
2:07 pm	ocaml got really lazy now Redesigning and managing the team of rewriting by myself the C++ core of all software we make at work, from scratch, stirred up my interest in programming to the point that I started randomly writing programs during free time commute to work. Guess what, ocaml, the one functional language practical enough to be used in real world. from science to file sharing, and good enough to have been stolen by Microsoft, finally learned how to do infinite lazy lists while I wasn't looking. What used to take half a page of hand-crafted code fiddling with explicit lazy constructors and forced calls, is now done like this: list of all integer numbers above zero: value naturals = let rec n a = fstream [: `a; n (a+1) :] in n 1; list of all fibonacci numbers: value fibs = let rec f a b = fstream [: `a; f b (a + b) :] in f 0 1; And yes, in case anyone reading this is into programming like me, I know Haskell had infinite lists for 19 years, but Haskell is not for real world, plus these little "fstream" constructs from ocaml allow much crazier stuff done to them, by means of functional and backtracking parsers. Current Mood: geeky (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
12:19 am	Li Wei I totally forgot on whose lj (if it was lj) I saw a link to Li Wei's photography, these days I'm so busy at work I cannot remember what I had for breakfast. But hey, he's pretty crazy with his imagination and the ability to take a picture like that with no photoshopping. Even though he has a bizarre habit of falling into things head first - he makes one lousy superhero. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 31st, 2009
1:48 pm	Microscopes show C-H bonds now O.o As BBC reports on this article in Science published by a bunch of crazy IBM researchers from Zurich, atomic force microscopes can be tuned so insanely well now that even C-H bonds become (kinda) visible! (the molecule on the picture is pentacene) (The first picture is from IBM press release, the second picture is taken (and greatly reduced in size) from Science 325, 1110 (2009), without permission) Current Mood: geeky (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
11:00 pm	thought of the weekend More laser tag arenas should have mirrors, it adds a whole new dimension to the game. Current Mood: thirsty (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
3:29 am	Guess where we went today ( cut for the big spoiler pic ) Current Mood: energetic (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 24th, 2009
7:30 pm	Fried chicken and champagne! I had to go to Austin for a quick business trip, and out of the patchwork of places I went to eat, I liked best the brand new eating establishment there on San Jacinto and 3rd, called Max's Wine Dive, which was still open at midnight and served some rather nice food. And I could watch them cook it. And their slogan sums them best: "Fried chicken and Champagne? Why the hell not!?" Also, I have now participated in Space Balls Quote-a-thon at the Alamo. Austin is Wierd. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 10th, 2009
1:37 pm	A C++ epiphany boost::asio::async_read_until is the best invention since std::vector! Current Mood: think async (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
5:53 pm	I know who the real father of science fiction is! Jules Verne got brought up in an IRC conversation, and I started remembering his novels. Honestly, I never cared for his quaint science fiction, as awesome as it was from historical point of view (air conditioning, TV, and the Internet in the 19th century!), but his adventure novels completely swept my imagination. Captain Hatteras, Fifteen-year-old captain, Captain Nemo, Children of Captain Grant, various explorers, pirates, scientists, and tribesmen. In fact, his Mysterious Island is what made me a chemist: the true hero of the story was a engineer, who made everything, from steel to dynamite, out of raw materials. Odd how few people around me have even heard of that novel, although they all know about Captain Nemo (who meets his end in the Island) and now, anthrocon. Current Mood: thoughtful (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
12:26 pm	Well, I'm ever upper class high society... Happy Summer Solstice and the National Go Commando Day (at least according to the now defunct www.lcnc.net) Current Mood: bouncy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
10:25 pm	What would I do without eBay? Guess what I got this time? A 1918 printing of the first edition of both Jungle Books! In solid red leather binding with gold designs. And, the weirdest thing, which I didn't know until I've opened them, the books are inscribed to someone who had their birthday on February 18th, 1919. Which is also my birthday, just a bit before my time. Weird, huh? I've read the russian translation of the Mowgli Stories when I was about six, before seeing any sort of cartoons, and was completely taken by the idea of living wild. Grown-up, I've been finding influences of that book in my psyche all over the place. So I decided to feed this little old fancy with a nifty 90 year old treat, even though I have all the Mowgli stories (including In The Rukh, not found in the JBs) already. Current Mood: bouncy (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
4:04 pm	Even when the media is pro-science, it does it disservice. This image is Fig. 1A of the PLoS ONE article What the news say: Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution ... Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle. What the researchers actually say: Morphological characteristics preserved in Darwinius masillae enable a rigorous comparison with the two principal subdivisions of living primates: Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini. Defining characters of Darwinius ally it with early haplorhines rather than strepsirrhines. We do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid, but the adapoid primates it represents deserve more careful comparison with higher primates than they have received in the past. upd: I beat PZ Myers by one minute in posting this! His post is much longer, though. upd: looks like the researchers may have hyped it up themselves, off-paper. Way to lose face. Current Mood: busy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
6:17 pm	They are after flash games now? So Organization for Islamic Conference pressured Molleindustria into removing the flash game Faith Fighter from their web site. But it's still perfectly playable on newgrounds, and thanks to this publicity, I gave it a couple rounds, too. Fun, although too short. Current Mood: busy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
12:17 pm	Umhir deln Fshofth, du saq mishallfen I've insanely busy at work lately, and to counter the stress I've been entertaining myself by replaying the computer games of the early 90s using dosbox. Star Control 2, Ultima series, Civilization, Eye of the Beholder... I've got over a thousand of them. I think I am going to try and seriously play Wizardry 7 (1992) this time, having rolled some good chars and having finished the beginner dungeon for the first time. But I started replaying The Summoning, the old sequel to the even older DarkSpyre, and remembered something awesome about that game. The way the spells were cast! You see, in most games magic spells are choices in a pull-down menu, especially in AD&D inspired ones. In some old games, however, the player has to actually cast them, by remembering/writing down how to do each spell. In the Ultima series, spells were sequences of Futhark-inspired runes (for example, to cast Armageddon, the Avatar had to say "Vas Corp Bet Mani"). In Loom (Lucasarts, 1990), spells were composed of musical notes (different in different replays, and at expert level, they had to be heard and identified by ear). In The Summoning (Event Horizon, 1992), spells are sequences of hand gestures. Flame Arrow is a half-closed fist, then tight fist. Liquefy is open palm at 45 degrees, then straight. Do any modern games have spellcasting that's not just choose-from-a-menu? Current Mood: cheerful (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
6:59 pm	Writer's Block: Taxmen and Poetry It's Tax Day in the U.S., a day when the mind might be too occupied with deductions and long lines at the post office to think about poetry. But let's try: what's your favorite line of poetry? Song lyrics count. View 500 Answers This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet Current Mood: busy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
12:17 pm	Hail Eástre! It is the time to celebrate old goddess of spring light and fertility Eástre, whose month Eostur-mónaþ has now begun! Feast on hare pies in her honor and do what hares do! And I hope you didn't forget to paint your eggs red for the Zoroastrian celebration of No Ruz, which was a couple weeks ago! Isn't it interesting how rituals from across the world mix and mingle? Current Mood: mellow (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
1:08 am	in case you were curious where those trophies come from... ( cut for more tournament pics! ) Current Mood: bouncy (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
5:30 pm	on a more entertaining note on a more entertaining note, some bored scientists in England decided to make a virtual reality helmet with a smell tube and something that squirts flavors directly into your mouth, as Daily Mail reports. Apparently they even have a prototype already. Current Mood: amused (4 Comments |Comment on this)
5:17 pm	that crazy NYPD cop and other people unfit to do their jobs So the NYPD lieutenant from Queens, named Maglione, who once reported seeing a "demon" at police headquarters and urinated on himself because he refused to stop praying to go to the bathroom, is suing New York City to get his gun and shield back, claiming supervisors took them from him because of his religious practices. news story here While his lawsuit is, hopefully, ridiculous enough to be dismissed (after all, he was discharged by the medical board, not by an evil anti-christian supervisor), a lot of people in the USA refuse doing the jobs they've signed up for, citing religious conflict, from Muslim grocery store workers who don't touch alcohol or pork (even vacuum-sealed) to Christian pharmacists who refuse selling the contraception or that nurse, Sylvia Olona, who had a habit of forcefully removing female contraception devices from her patients. And all those people are actually protected from being fired by several state legislatures and one of the last executive orders of Bush administration. What's also scary is that Maglione was on the force for 22 years. Current Mood: busy (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
12:15 am	you have gained a level! Hey, it's my 33rd birthday today! Also on this day were born: Alessandro Volta, the physicist who invented the electric battery Ernst Mach, the physicist who calculated supersonic travel and formulated a principle that inspired Einstein Harry Brearley, the metallurgist who invented stainless steel Hans Asperger, the pediatrician who discovered a disorder that turned children into "little professors" Current Mood: cheerful (36 Comments |Comment on this)