Today I went to the company I start working at from March 1st, so I took a picture of the new office. So.. here it is:
Took the picture with the shitty SonyEricsson V802SE phone, so the quality is the same as the quality of the phone. Meaning - it SUCKS. Will think twice from now on before buying anything from SonyEricsson.. :/
Today I discovered one very fantastic compression utility, called 7z. That's a compression technology similar to Zip or StuffIt, but the compression ratio is fantastic.
Not that it is a brand sparking new compressor, but it's rather me being slow again ;)
So as a test, I tried to compress something with it just to try how good is the software. The place of "something" took Mac OS X's standard Mail.app (I guess it's because it sits on the top of my Dock..). To compare compression ratio with more widely used compression technlogies, I compressed the same file with OS X's Zip archive, as well as .tar archive bzip2'ed at highest compression level (bzip2 -9).
The results are on the picture below:
Compression times are the following:
- Zip: about 5secs
- bzip2: about 11 secs
- 7z : about 18 secs
7z shows to be the slowest, but there are times when you'd better wait for a file to compress better :)
Today I tried to get onto snowboard for the first time :) We woke up bloody early at about 5:30am, got onto bus and went to Ontake Ropeway ski-resort (3+ hours by bus!)
The temperature was about +7C, but there was lots of snow in the mountains (and looks like it was mostly natural.. although I don't know for sure). Oh well my wife told me I did pretty good, better than most of people she knows. It was pleasant to hear :) Indeed.. while taking some pretty mind-blowing hits, rolling over my head etc I could get "some" grip of the snowboarding. This was the first experience, and the last one for this season (it's getting pretty warm here pretty fast). But I'm looking forward for next year's season.
..ah and my whole body aches :) Don't even want to think what will become of it tomorrow heh :)
Japan finally took its first medal at the game in Torino. In figure skating. The gold one. Congrats go to my wife ;) And I will abstrain of comments looking at 2 digits count of medals which Russia took :)
Games are always late relases on Mac (well almost always), and I'm a pretty lagged player regarding new releases, but I finally finished Doom 3 today. I was running pretty well on my Intel iMac (20-inch, 2GHz CoreDuo, 2Gb, ATI X1600 256Mb) - steady 30+ fps at high details, 1024×768. Ultra-high requires 512Mb video RAM. Bloody hell… 512Megs.. :)
Since I'm really out of time lately, I tried to play several levels in a usual way, but in the end I have decided it takes too much time and also not very exciting so I just switched to god mode, gave myself full ammo, even clipping at higher levels ;) - and the game was done in I think 4-5 hours. Oh well I'm a happy camper again since I can concentrate on other things, without thinking about when I will have time to continue my descent to Doom's hell.
As for the game.. Aside for visuals, it's not very good. I'd say boring. Same stuff repackaged, same stupid enemies, almost no lights everywhere, and not my type of the game overall (I just hate these dungeon style maps..).
Looking forward for Quake 4 release for Mac on Feb 28th
The move to the new server is complete. There are some problems regarding PHP config to be resolved (japanese encodings stuff etc), but other than that, I'm on a new server now.
I have started a simple page about problems and solutions to them for PHP programmers who need to move their PHP codebase to ASP. Still a bit too simple, but oh well better something that nothing
…bloody again… this time to WordPress
RapidWeaver, which I used until now, is actually a pretty nice piece of software, I could even close my eyes on its incredible slowness. But! There is one thing which made me move - the thing is that when I use RapidWeaver, I basically can post to blog from exactly one place - my home computer where site file is stored. Meaning no posts from job (I worrk at job, really, but sometimes.. you know.. ;) and other convenient places
So.. move is complete (and installation was a breathe), and now I hope I'll find some time to tweak the design so i doesn't look like zillion other wordpress based sites on the Net :) On the other hand who cares ;)
It's been a long year since I started my first job in Japan as a contract programmer. Well it's been a hard year and it's finally over and I'm moving to a new job starting March 1st. So, this Monday starts the last week of my contract at current company. Hopefully is will be smooth..
PS: Guess some day i'll post some info on how to search for a job in Japan :)
