Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Perl is truly weird

Otherwise how else would you treat the following: $#$ar_ref?

It is actually $#($ar_ref) which is the last index of an array referenced via $ar_ref.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Michael's last curtain call

It suddenly came to my mind right after I got to know about Michael's passing away: the world has had or is about to change when *SUCH* people leave it..

But the strangest thing is - when now I see him performing on my screen, I do not *feel* him passed away. It is half sad and half light feeling about what happened.


"This is it. This is the final curtain call." Michael Jackson

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Gmail: spam handling as a user experience

It might be a better idea to post below as a feature request to Gmail team directly, but I post it here because of two reasons:

1) I'm rather busy at work to find their blog
2) let's check Google's track_everything_happening_on_the_web property


About spam again. Recently I have been receiving quite a bulk of these pleasant messages (giving the unique opportunity to enlarge something on a recipient's body etc) - which results in about 100+ messages / day filtered out to the spam folder.

Not sure about the majority of e-mail user habits, but I have an attitude to check all the spam messages (don't worry, only the titles; well the body rarely as well) and get rid of them manually, rather than leaving the engine to automatically delete them after N days. I should notice the precision of the spam filtering algorithm Google has in Gmail: it works perfect in my case. But still even the tiniest 0,(0*)1% probability to overlook the valid message in spam folder may give hard times and irreversible processes in my brain, which I do not want to happen.


So my idea follows next. Suppose I have 10 pages of junk piled up in the spam folder. When I open one page and start looking through the e-mail topics, I obviously spend some time (like 2-3 minutes for 100 messages). Once I have done this, I may or may not proceed to the next spam page, but with no regard to it Gmail marks internally the page as "read". When I sign out or after a while (another configurable parameter), Gmail silently deletes all the "read" messages.

For the sake of flexibility there can be the third feature: a button (or a fixed option) , explicitly prohibiting to silently remove messages even though they have been read.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Словарный запас: результаты теста

Итак, ваш запас: Тоже очень хороший результат. Ваш словарный запас значительно выше среднего
Пройти тест

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Perl's flexibility

I was suspecting Perl to be rather flexible and implementing the principle "type as you think and get it working" (which does not apply always as Perl is 'weird' by definition), but could not imagine it goes that far:


sub getHeaderName
{
return (split " - ", shift)[1]; # let's see if it works. Upd: it works!
}



, where input string is of type: "process_type - process_name" and I need process_name value from it.

Monday, June 15, 2009

spam: get phd diploma!

"GET YOUR DIPLOMA TODAY!If you are looking for a fast and cheap way to get a diploma, this is the best way out for you. Choose the desired field and degree and call us right now: For US: some_num Outside US: some_another_num
"Just leave your NAME & PHONE NO. (with CountryCode)" in the voicemail.

Our staff will get back to you in next few days!"


I wonder, if this fake diploma will help me, e.g. when applying to Google jobs and during work.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Google's search suggestions




Is it "null" which Google predicted to be next in the sequence, or is it that Google predicted turned out to be null (system issue)?

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Syntax and semantics

It may be the implications of the specifics of my phd topic, which made my eye keener, but I tend to come across the above two terms every now and then. People refer to syntax as to rules and to semantics as to in a way an invariant of those rules and something that one basically wishes to express using the rules.

Today I've bumped into an article with the following title: "Syntax is from Mars while Semantics from Venus! Insights from Spectral Analysis of Distributional Similarity Networks.":

"We observe that while the syntactic network has a hierarchical structure with strong communities and their mixtures, the semantic network has several tightly knit communities along with a large core without any such well-defined community structure."

Another example brought by one functional specification which has found me at work: "The [some company's] command language provides syntax and semantics to perform
service-specific and service-independent management operations."

It is important to notice, that in general one can bind any semantics to a particular syntactic structure, i.e. what exactly happens after applying this particular structure. And at this point we come to another level: pragmatics. What will happen refers to pragmatics behind an action rather than semantics. The semantics is just a formal intermediate representation of used syntactic structures. I will try to gather illustrations in English later.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Приготовление еды и программирование

Приготовление еды - это как программирование или компилирование проекта с исходников.
При компилировании с исходников иногда тоже как и при написании кода надо поисхитряться, может, даже поизменять код. Поэтому тоже процесс творческий. И ещё: важное свойство компилирования проект.. приготовления любимого блюда - это то, что это можно проделать в любой стране, даже при условии, что в этой стране такое не готовят.

Переведу, пожалуй, для Гугл:

Cooking is like programming or compiling a project from its source code. When compiling from a source code at times one should be skilful, sometimes change the code. Therefore it is also a creative process. One important property of compiling a proj.. cooking you favourite dish is that one can do it in any country, even given a fact that this dish is not cooked in this particular country.