1. Unless these guys has landed in a military airport (and I highly doubt that), they wouldn’t be warmly meet by soldiers with AK-47s (which are not in use anymore, well, except maybe in Moldova)
2. Airport security guards tend not to wear a full set of “Red Banner” orders (which were mostly given during Second World War, and usually for something truly exceptional; and yes, it’s exclusively military).
3. A “Motherland calls” banner which was hugely popular, right, in 1941-1945, is … let’s say – not that much in use anymore. For the last 50 years, that is.
4. Soldiers are wearing a mixture of 40s and 00s uniform.
5. The old GAZ truck they’ve been driven in, hasn’t been in use for at least 30 years. I’m actually quite surprised they found a working one, that alone is an achievement!
6. … the list can go on and on and on and on without even touching our favorite stereotypes (ushankas-vodka-pretty girls with long hair … wait, leave the last one, right. For a change, that’s mostly true).
7. And for fucks sake, it’s fucking Moldova, not Russia! (that may actually explain quite a few things – there’s a war there, you know…)

So did we finish with Skins? Can go on with my rant? No, not really.

One thing I started realizing mostly recently is that any people tend to be ignorant about any foreign culture. As I live in London, people often ask me questions about Britain. Now forgive me if I won’t list them here — being not natively British, I don’t feel like I have a right to exercise my wit and pretend to be humorous about it. No, it’s funny, really, just not in that way (and even less will I pin-point where were most of these people who did ask me these questions, however mostly they had very funny accent).

Is it good? Is it bad? Well, that’s the way it is. No morals here, make your own conclusions and I’ll go back to my Skins (stop laughing I told you!!) and to my Zürich-London flight, which due in … oh my, less than an hour! I think I should be moving now!

Early in the development cycle, it’s perfectly acceptable to go for a policy of “zero bugs” and “100% tests”. But as the deadline looms, these choices need to be reconsidered all the time and evaluated while keeping a close eye of the final goal. Very often, Agilists simply forget that their job is to produce software that satisfies customers, not software that meets some golden software engineering scale.

Worthy article written by someone who understands stuff. Read it.

— Mom? I have a confession to make. I use Java.
— What the hell are you talking about?
— I want to use a programming language which doesn’t only run in Windows.

My, this is so full of win!

— Hey, what are you guys up to?
— We are just enjoying some porn…
— Hope you’re not doing Java and open-source!

Watch it. Now. Try not to laugh to loud (I failed that quest). It’s hilarious and simply brilliant.

P.S. it features Scala Johansson, William Windows and a new start Lenny Linux!

One thing about dealing with clients, who pay you money and you give them something back instead — is that disasters happen. They really do, and this is a sort of a natural law to me — if they didn’t, the whole concept of customer service could become an abstract. But how would you deal with the disasters — this, in my opinion, pretty much defines the way company treats customers in general.

Today we had a table booked at Bodean’s BBQ at Westbourne Grove for 8PM. When I came there 5 minutes early, I was warmly greeted by firmly closed door and a hand-written note, that due to a power failure, the restaurant is closed, the closest one is in Soho, sorry so much for any inconvenience caused. Draw me surprised. Draw me astounded.

Next thing I, righteously infuriated, called an only number which seemed to answer — Bodean’s at Soho. After I finished complaining about my ruined evening, a person who picked up the phone asked me to wait as she’ll ask her manager. Next thing happened — a manager, someone Glen, was talking to me.

First thing, he apologised. Then he listened for my rant again. After that he did what surprised me so much that I am writing this post: he suggested to book me a table at Soho branch and pay for a cab from Westbourne Grove to Poland st.

Draw me amazed. Draw me astonished. I have never seen anything like that.

Food was excellent. Service was on a par. Table was — indeed, the best table in seriously overcrowded restaurant. Now, that is how every restaurant should treat their clients — and not only a restaurant. That is an admirable example of conducting a business. That is the way to make sure, that every damn friend of mine will find out about this fact and should opportunity arise, will be dragged into this restaurant, just to show that this is for real. I applaud to you, Glen. This was a fantastic evening, and you have saved it in every possible way.

I didn’t — and now it occurs to me it’s a nice way of browsing through news. Granted, it isn’t the most productive way if you need to find what’s going on in the world — quickly, but can certainly be used to kill some of that invaluable resource we all love to waste so much :)

Shamelessly stolen from here.

Can I use the internet on my phone or mobile broadband in Europe without buying a Booster?

We have boosters to buy so that you’ll always know exactly how much you’ve spent and know that you won’t get any unexpected bills. Using the internet on your phone or mobile broadband in Europe without a booster would previously have been charged at £1.50 per MB, so 50MB would have cost you £75. With a booster a 50MB allowance is only £10 so you’re getting much better value with boosters. You can buy as many boosters as you want and the cost of it will come out of your balance or added to your monthly bill but you’ll know exactly what you’re paying.

To me it looks absolutely beautiful. Fine, maybe this is the way it’s being done in England and English people are used to it — then please forgive a clumsy foreigner, but something tells me this has got very little to do with English customs and traditions :)

On the other hand, I cannot praise enough very fair international data tariffs — £10 for 50MB is nothing to worry about, really. Unfortunately, it only works as long as you stay in Europe — but it is still way better I could’ve expect while being locked in with an O2.

1. You should have a DMZ’ed (or accessible from outside world in some way) server running in your home network which you can SSH into.
2. Your home Mac should be on (you can use etherwake command from within your network to wake it up first).

As long as these two criteria are met, you simply do:

laptop:~ kirillov$ ssh -p19322 -L59000:imac:5900 user@home.selfip.org -fN

The bit

-p19322

you need only if you’re running your SSH daemon on a non-standard port (or your forwarding is set from a non-standard port); either way, it is highly recommended. This piece

-L59000:imac:5900

says “I want to forward all requests coming on port 59000 of my localhost to host imac in the target network, port 5900” (which is a default VNC port). Finally,

my_home_username@myhomeserver.selfip.org -fN

is pretty straightforward, “-fN” says “go to background right after asking for login and password if they are needed”.

After you’ve done that, all you need to do it to hit ⌘K in your Finder (or start a dedicated VNC application) and do:

After that you’re likely to be asked for login and password, which, by coincidence will be login and password from your home Mac. And you’re in!