Just a little announcement: we (me and few of my friends) are participating in the People’s Photography Exhibition this weekend (25 and 26 August 2007). Our stands will be located here.
BTW, if anybody still reads this blog, I must say I feel sorry that I mostly post to my Russian blog on LJ rather than here, but it will unlikely to change in the nearest future. I am just too busy right now to contribute to both blogs regularly.
This is crazy enough, so it worth translation. But first of all a litle preface:
In 1978 they made a TV musicle “d’Artagnan and Three Musketeers” in Russia, that happened to be one of the most loved by Russian audience. Young Misha Boyarsky played d’Artagnan very well, sang, rid horses, jumped around and participated in many fights and a love story as usual.
They also also had two sequels much later, that I never watched, but that’s beyond the point.
Now I came across the message about the new sequel to it with the same actors (almost 30 years older though) and here is its weirdest description:
Mazarini’s treasures
The movie will start with the death of the musketeers, that does not exclude them from the rest of the story though.
They will observe from heaven with their old men curiosity how their multiple children search for the treasures of cardinal Mazarini.
The descendants of course have their own strange sides, i.e. d’Artagnan’s doughter Jacqueline wears man’s clothes, glues a little mustache under her nose and calls herself Jaque. Porthos apparently had two children, one of whose does not know who his father was. Aramis has more decend child, Anri, who returns Jaque her feminine side.
The search for threasure was not successful, so musketeers request God to return them back to earth for one day to sort everything out. Our old heroes obtain new powers, such as being able to go through walls and predict the future, enormous strength and even an ability to wrap space-time continuum. With such a great help beneath their shoulders, their descendants successfully accomplish their mission.
Excuse me for rough translation, just wanted to share
The most common comment to that description is “what do they smoke on this studio?”
Here is the link to more pictures: http://filmz.ru/film/3475/photos/
As I wrote on my Russian LJ blog yesterday, I just released a little beta version of two Kana tutorials, i.e. ones for Hiragana and Katakana.
They are in early beta stage and going to be developed further whenever I have time for it, but they are already quite useful and fun to play with in my opinion.
You can read more on how to use them on my Kana Tutorials page: http://www.karanagai.com/learn/
When I find a little bit of free time (and that happens rarely) I like to walk. Quite naturally I take my camera and make some random shots with no particular purpose in mind. Normally more than half of the pictures during these “sessions” are deleted and most of the rest go to a digital hole, sometimes as is, and sometimes after heavy editing.
From now on I decided to publish these photos in my Picasa Web Albums space. Here are the most recent walks (click on the thumbnails to go to corresponding albums):
A week ago, in Dublin Docklands in the evening. There is a lot of construction activity happening around Docklands now. I guess it’ll be new city centre some time.
A little walk along the Royal Canal in Clonsilla area of Dublin 15, where I live. The Royal Canal goes from the west of Ireland to Dublin. There is a Royal Canal Way trail going along it.
A bit more from Docklands in daylight. Here I am playing with the new polarizer filter. How did I live without one before, do you know? 
Not really a walk, just went out of the car on my way to work through Phoenix park to shoot this nice sunrise. It came out not as well as I expected, though. It is very difficult to shoot against the sun.
I have Flickr account for quite a while, but never used it for anything, but checking how the service works. Now I have started to publish some photos on it. I am not going to publish massive amounts of photos on Flickr (for that purpose I have karanagai.com and todublin.com galleries and also some place for family/friends albums), but only few photos I consder to be good and interesting for some other people to see.
So here is the link:
Here is one excellent speech by Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple Mac evangelist:
This week I’ve been to EIBTM 2006 exhibition in Barcelona. Here are few series of pictures from this place.
The link from the following picture leads to a number of photos of Gaudi’s works in barcelona:
Then some attempts to make night shots of the city:
Various shots made on the streets of Barcelona:
The EIBTM 2006 exhibition itself:
A nice little antiquity fair beside Plaza Catalunya:
Few more shots made on the streets of the city, primarily within the old city area:
I have done little walking and a bit of photography near Lough Dan in Wicklow on Saturday.
Not really much to show though. Anyway you can click here to see all the pictures.
Best examples:
Some deserted house on the shore of Lough Dan:
The lake itself:
One more:
A little river going from Lough Tay to Lough Dan:
This is b0rg, with whom we’ve made this trip. Also an amateur photographer:
This is a landscape shot on our way back. The mountain in the background is Luggala or Fancy Mountain, that rises above Lough Tay:
And finally this is the map of our little walk (taken from Google Earth):
The upper lake is Lough Tay, the lower is Lough Dan. The green line is our path.
Assume you have a small team of people involved in development of various projects over the time. Projects come and go, some of them exist in parallel, some of them go and come back later again etc.
Say, the team does not have any formal tools for defining and tracking project requirements and bugs. One of the vialble (IMO) approaches would be to utilize a simple blogging engine for that purpose. That could be done in the following way:
The engine must support tags and multi-tag search. It also must support multiple users of course.
Every project is associated with a specific tag, e.g. project DreamViewer is associated with a tag DreamViewer or tag projDreamViewer.
Few more tags are introduced to reflect different types of posts:
1. Use-case - the post defines a use case (actors, goal, steps, extentions etc.). It could refer (just by providing a URL) to some “Feature-request” post describing the need in some feature in a couple of sentences. It als can refer to other related, more specific or more generic use cases.
2. Test-case - the post defines a test case, a scenario of testing. It could refer to a use case that produced this test case.
3. Bug - self-explanatory. It may refer to a test case, that was used to identify the bug.
4. Feature-request - short description of some feature to be implemented. Could refer to some use case describing associated scenario.
5. Specification - some (primarily non-functional) specification, for example database design.
6. Note - just any kind of note, used to communicate some message to other team members.
Some tags may also be introduced for statuses (e.g. statusOpen), priorities (e.g. pHigh), team members (JohnDoe) etc.
Comments to different posts could contain discussion, additions to the original post, status change notes etc.
While such a solution is very light and do not pretend to be comprehensive in any way, it may become a good replacement for completely ad-hoc cowboy-style management of requirements and bug tracking.
Here is nice trilogy of Joel Spolsky about three stages of candidate selection process for a software developer position:
How to carry out an interview over the phone
How to carry out an interview in person
Very useful reading for everybody involved in hiring such people. Even more so for candidates going to interviews.
KaraNagai is a nickname in fact. I am a Russian guy living and working in Dublin, Ireland.