Alexey Bokov's weblog » internet

Job interview via facebook – they’ll ask abt ur skillz and propr kmand of ze English lng

Alexey Bokov — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:38:32 +0000

“They’ll ask abt ur skillz and propr kmand of ze English lng”

How to create list of screenshots for list of urls ?

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:34:24 +0000

Okay, we have text file with list of urls and want to have firefox’s screenshots from this pages and also we need to have this screenshots in some normalized resolution ( like all images should be in 300×400 – thumbnails ). First of all you need to install Command line print Firefox add-on. Then create some simple script which will run firefox with needed url, print screenshot and close ( in my case via kill – may be it’s too brutal ) firefox in cycle. It may look like this ( url_list.txt – file with urls – each url on its own line ), after running this script you will have many *.png files which is screenshots for ulrs – 0.png – for first url in urls_list.txt, 1.png for second and so on.
#!/bin/bash id=0 while read line do firefox -print $line -printmode png -printdelay 10 -printfile ${id}.png ps ax | grep firefox | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill -9 ; id=$[$id+1] done < urls_list.txt

And now then we have screenshots ( all this guys are in different resolution in common ) then we need to normalize them – to create thumbnails for all images in 300×400 resolution – convert helps!
for f in *.png; do convert -thumbnail 300x400! ${f} thumb_${f} done
And we have many thumb_*.pn with 300×400 resolution all. A little note – using resolution without ! sign will work in another way – resize will be processed proportionally with using resize only for one dimension ( bigger one ).

Interesting links ( June/July 2010 )

Alexey Bokov — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:09:27 +0000

My interesting links ( May 2010 )

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:08:02 +0000

Mapreduce & Hadoop Algorithms in Academic Papers (3rd update), especially Scaling Up Classifiers to Cloud Computers
TeamBox – project collaboration tool
Continuous Integration for C++ by Rick Wagner
Beyond Position Bias: Examining Result Attractiveness as a Source of Presentation Bias… Yue, Patel, Roehrig, WWW-2010

.. to be continued

US military builds HPC clusted based on Sony PS3

Alexey Bokov — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:50:49 +0000

The US military has announced plans to buy 2,200 more of the game consoles, so that they can massively beef up the processing power of an existing, PS3-based supercomputer. A “Justification Review Document,” which has oddly been deleted from Google since I found it but is still available at this cache link, explains that, “the new PS3s will be placed in a cluster environment with an existing cluster of 336 PS3s by connecting each of the units’ one gigabit Ethernet port to a common 24 port gigabit hub.”
via arstechnica.com

New big trend in cloud computing – DNRDBMS

Alexey Bokov — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:31:19 +0000

Distributed, non-relational database systems – DNRDBMS – see

GridDynamics is one of the Top 150 Cloud Companies

Alexey Bokov — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:17:53 +0000

Grid Dynamics nominated “2009 Top 150 Cloud Computing Players” by Cloud Computing Journal. Look at letter G – here we are, around Google. .

Cloud providers perfomance tests and monitoring

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:47:10 +0000

10 reasons why cloud computing is bad idea

Alexey Bokov — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:07:03 +0000

* Cloud Computing makes your IT excessively dependent on the Internet
* Cloud Computing will attract clients mainly from Western markets
* Cloud Computing makes you dependent on the goodwill of your ISP

* Cloud Computing can expose you to the unethical practices of your ISP
* Cloud Computing is against the spirit of Personal Computing
* Cloud Computing makes your Cloud Data subject to American law
* Cloud Computing can expose your Confidential Data to “Corrupt Elements”
* Cloud Computing is sounding more like a Lobby than a Trend
* Cloud Computing may be of little consequence for the Average Small Business
* Cloud Computing may not contribute to your national economy

Found it here : Ten Reasons Why Cloud Computing is a Bad Idea by Hamad Subani.