Deadprogrammer visits Odessa : Part I : Introduction

I live on a high floor of an art deco tower facing a busy Brooklyn street. The acoustics of the building and the street are such that I can sometimes hear what’s going on in the street right from my desk. Once I heard the sounds of a minor fender bender followed by an angry exchange unpleasantness that was escalating into some creative Russian profanity. The driver who rammed the other car was pretty unapologetic and criticized the driving skills of the one who got rammed. Then followed the exchange that made me laugh out loud – the driver who got rammed said – “the way you behave, man, you must be from Odessa.” “Yes, I am,” – answered the other guy, and added – “and you still drive like a moron.”

Odessa, Ukraine, my hometown, is a very special place. It has a Bizarro mirror twin, Odessa, Texas.

Odessa is a resort town situated on the shore of the Black Sea, right across from Turkey. Culturally it’s a bit like Brooklyn (or Brooklyn is a bit like Odessa because of an almost constant infusion of Odessans) – a city with an attitude, a city where a lot of famous people are born and famous people come to live. Architecturally it’s a lot like Vienna and St. Petersburg: a city built on a grand scale (but with softer edges), by the best architects.

Odessa’s ancient past is obscure: a Greek colony, a small town controlled by Kievan Rus, the Golden Horde, various Khanates and Kaganates, and finally a Turkish fortress. Odessa’s fortunes have turned when Russian forces invaded it in late 1700s. Catherine the Great apparently wanted to fortify the newly won land, and committed the people and resources needed to make the new city of Odessa a success.

The founding fathers of Odessa were a bunch of distinguished foreigners in the service of the Russian crown: General José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons, Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septemanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and Count Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langéron.

Richelieu, or the Duc, as he’s commonly known in Odessa, will forever be loved by Odessans for his accomplishments. The way I imagine the Duc is sort of like the 18th century Steve Jobs, with a reality distortion field of his own, except without being an asshole (Richelieu was known for his kindness and indifference to money). Somehow – nobody know exactly how – Richelieu got Odessa the status of a “free port“. This meant that goods could be unloaded without paying the taxes within the city limit. This brought about an unprecedented influx of wealth, which in turn fueled the building of Odessa by the best European architects in the European manner. Odessa’s opera theater is only slightly smaller than Vienna’s, and is by the same architect.

Another unique aspect of this new city was the ethnic makeup. Besides the usual for Ukrainian cities mix of Ukrainians and Russians, Odessa became a melting pot. Frenchmen, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Armenians: all rushed into Odessa. Even the Jews were allowed in, and not being limited to certain occupations or living in a ghetto. Odessa is a very Jewish town despite what the author of Everything Is Illuminated might have you believe.

I left Odessa when I was 16. I came back for a 10 day visit 15 years later.

Odessa is a a city that makes you nostalgic, and I kept seeing it in my dreams. Luckily there’s a small international airport in Odessa and President Yushchenko kindly lets the holders of an American passport into the country freely, with no need for a visa.

12 hours and $1300 later I was standing in Odessa, looking for a cab. A pushy cabby was very surprised when I did not want to ride in his clean BMW and chose a cheaper and dearer to my heart filthy Soviet-vintage car.

As far as hotels go, Ukraine is much more reasonable than Russia, but there are still no Marriott-like affordable and well-designed chains. There are overpriced hotels with decor that will burn your eyes out, cheaper, but scarier hotels, and apartments that you can rent which cover the gamut. Odessa has a population of about a million, but it swells to twice the size in the Summer season. Because of that there are thousands of very reasonably priced rental apartments with great amenities. Unfortunately I did not plan enough ahead, and ended up reserving a very cheap room in a brand new hotel Zirka that recently opened right in the center of the city.

For a very reasonable $35/night I lived in a tiny-tiny, somewhat flimsily outfitted, but very clean room with a fully functioning shower, air conditioning and beautiful views, right in the historic center of Odessa.

The hotel was still being built when I lived there, and I herd later that it was becoming a bit notorious for renting the rooms at hourly rates.

As far as I’m concerned, you really can’t beat their amenities, their location, and their prices. Also, the staff was very courteous and professional. It was very quiet there during my stay – but worst case scenario – you might overhear noisy sex, from which you are not guaranteed at almost any hotel.

It’s hard to see on picture, but the towels had little dollar sign designs.

My hotel room reminded me very much of the affordable hotel room that I lived in in Japan, down to the picture of soft drinks that I took there.

In Odessa I mostly drank Borjomi, a Georgian mineral water. Borjomi, as far as I’m concerned is the tastiest mineral water in the world.

Odessa has its own mineral water, Kuyalnik, but it’s not sold in restaurants for some reason. I found a few bottles in a convenience store closer to the end of my stay. More about Kuyalnik later – I have a very special connection to it.

Apparently in Europe Diet Coke is marketed as Coca Cola Light, is sold in frosted bottles, and as far as I can tell, in a different formulation. It did taste different, and I know my cokes.

I quickly unpacked, grabbed my camera and went for a walk.

You really can’t enter the same river twice. I left Odessa when the Soviet Union was still intact. When I came back, a lot of things stayed the same.

There’s still a fountain in the City Square, the live band is still playing on Sundays and the pairs still dance.

Acacia trees, the most common plant and the symbol of Odessa, are still filling the city with the aroma and sidewalks with their yellow flowers. Cleaning ladies (and men) still sweep the sidewalks with brooms made out of small branches. I brought a small jar with acacia blooms with me – the smell of nostalgia.

Remember that ethnic markup that I described earlier on? Well, somehow that mixing of genes resulted in the hottest women on the planet. Odessa is still the city of super hot women. This brings a large contingent of sex tourists and mail order (in this case – cash and carry) bride seekers. I was approached (probably because I was typing away on a laptop) by a most distressed gentlemen in a cafe: he could not get online. His hands were shaking. I fixed some gnarly windows crud setup options and wi-fi started working. All he cared about was getting to a dating site, and when it loaded, his hands finally stopped shaking.

Things have changed though. Odessa took on some qualities of Havana, Cuba. Historic buildings are deteriorating, old cars are kept alive way past what’s reasonable.

It’s not like Havana because people seem to prosper. Even the pensioners do not go hungry, there is a lot of new construction, and the rich are really, really rich. I’ve seen just about every expensive car I know in the streets, except maybe a Maybach.

A few things about the new Ukrainian economy. The salaries are paid in US dollars, but dollars are not accepted anywhere. You can easily exchange them into hryvnas and back very easily, and the rate is somehow kept at about 5 to 1, without even having to shop around for a rate.

Real estate is amazingly expensive: for instance the apartment that my parents sold for something like $5K costs about $500K. At the same time the mortgage industry is almost non-existent.

I’m told that the government officials are amazingly corrupt, and they constitute a major portion of the upper crust. A police captain can easily become a multimillionaire, and so can just about any government bureaucrat. There’s a practice of “otkat” – kickback from a government project is rampant. High ranking policemen and bureaucrats are almost outside the law, like in India.

At the same time, even with all the corruption and bribery, the economy is pretty healthy, even without Russia’s oil.

Price-wise Odessa is not the bargain that it once was. For most things I’d estimate the cost of living at about 60-70% of Brooklyn prices. Food and rent is pretty cheap, but electronics, clothing and cars are more expensive. In particular, cars are taxed so much that they cost about 2 to 3 times more than in the US, which makes all those Rollses that I’ve seen even more impressive, and explain the Soviet-era cars.

Deadprogrammer Visits Odessa : Part II : Balconies and Yards.

What Up

The following will probably be only interesting to people who build their own computers (and probably not even them), so feel free to skip this post.

My little Shuttle XPC computer gave up the ghost (the onboard SATA raid controller got really messed up). It took me a good while to frankenstein together a reasonable machine out of all the parts that were stashed away in my apartment, so I am a-computin’ again. I am researching a purchase of a high powered replacement, but meanwhile, let me share some technical tidbits that I’ve learned along the way.

First of all, it’s really easy to actually fry a floppy drive. Fried floppy drives look like they are working, but they don’t. And without a floppy drive you can’t install (or repair) Windows 2000 or XP on a SATA or IDE raid array. Even if your motherboard claims that it can boot from a USB floppy drive, it probably can’t. Well, at least mine can’t. The moral of the story is that doing away with legacy hardware such as a floppy is not a good idea.

Anyhoo, it’s a good idea to have separate two drive arrays: one for data and one for the system and programs (it’s a good practice to point data directories such as the desktop to the data array). The data array should run raid 1 (mirroring) – that way if one drive dies, you will still have another. You can periodically backup onto a third drive and hold it in a remote location. With 250 gig SATA drives costing about 100 bucks there is no reason not to do this.

The system drive should run raid 0 (striping). Striping actually significantly speeds the system up. You can also keep the system drive small, say about 40 gig – and back it up onto the data drive via Norton Ghost. It might be a good idea to splurge on real SCSI drives and a card. In fact, that’s what I’ll probably do for my new computer, as drives seem to be more of a speed bottleneck than RAM or processors.

SATA drives can be mounted externally: it’s called eSATA. If you have a small computer such as an XPC it’s a very good idea, as the drives become much easier to cool. I am probably going to jerry rig an eSATA enclosure out of an old computer case and some hotswap thingies, but they are also available from these guys.

I am a big fan of dual monitors – have two 17″ lcds. To run a dual monitor setup you need either two video cards or a “dualhead” video card. Well, I have a dualhead Matrox P750 (bought it because it has 2 dvi outputs), and boy does it suck. Driver installation is a nightmare – there are several versions of video card bios and and a multitude of driver versions. Most don’t work and crash Window. If you do get it to work, the stupid card can’t work well with low color/resolution settings: it shows lines and crazy patterns in bios screens. There’s a bios fix out, but it does not work. More than that, if you want to color match the monitors through a calibration cajigger, you can’t set up individual color profiles on the monitors. In short, I am much better off with two separate cards.

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GRETAGMACBETH Eye-One Display 2 (This is the one that I have. People say that it’s a little bit better than the cheaper
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ColorVision Spyder 2

WML : Fasteners Are Engineer’s Best Friend

While we are on the subject of screws, here’s another thing that I learned about fasteners. As any know-it-all who pays attention to things like that I looked up why screws with what we called cross-shaped screws in the USSR are called Philips screws in the US (I wonder what they call them in other countries) are called so. Of course the answer was one web search away in the Straight Dope Classic Why did this guy Phillips think we needed a new type of screw?

I also purchased One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw used at Amazon. I learned that the screw and the screwdriver is a rather recent invention, interestigly enough one of the very few tools not known to the ancient Chinese.

Useless trivia aside, I hate both slotted and Phillips screws. Of course I would not even think of using slotted screws for anything other than period-correct Craftsman style or Art Deco hardware such as cabinet pulls or outlet covers. But the common Phillips screws, with their falling off from the bit (even the magnetic one) and stripping (not the good bachelor party kind) drive me absolutely nuts.

The solution? I bought a couple of boxes of hybrid Phillips/square screws from Rockler. You can use the regular Philips driver, or you can use a special square one. The benefit of a square bit is that the screw does not fall of the bit and does not strip easily. The kit also includes a bottle of suggestively named Rockler Screw-Lube. The paper box is rather sucky and unusable – the partitions lift up and the screws mix.

WML : Mr. Squeek No More

Here’s yet another edition of WML – What Michael Learned. And the subject of today’s post is one of the things that I hate as much as I love hardwood parquet floors – squeaks. In SAT-speak I am somewhat corpulent and nocturnal. And a sonorous squeak of a parquet floor in the dead of the night is not one of my favorite sounds. I am certainly not one of those people who think that squeakiness adds character to an old floor.

A few years ago I searched for a way to repair squeaky floors and kept finding advice for those who could access the floor from below – in cases of houses with basements that expose the underside of the upper floors. Then recently I found a solution in an episode of Ask This Old House that works for me. It is marketed as “Squeeeeek No More“. That’s right – 5 e’s. Luckily Google suggests the “correct” spelling even if you use less e’s.

I bought my kit over here. It came with 50 snap-off screws, a square driver bit, a special stud finder screw (he heh) and a depth control/snap-off tool that looks like a Klingon weapon or instrument of torture.

Here’s how it works :

First of all you shoo away the cat (7). Then you need to find a parquet plank that squeaks. You do that by first finding the general location of the squeek and then with your foot sideways pressing on individual planks. Usually it’s only one or two loose planks that generate the noise when they move. Each one of the planks is nailed individually and it’s the nails that make the sound . You don’t need to worry about finding a stud – just drill a few pilot holes (so that the wood won’t split). Then using the square driver bit (1) you drive the screw (2) a few turns into the pilot hole. Then you drop a depth tool (3) over the top of the screw and continue driving the screw into the floor with the driver bit. The driver bit has a fat section at the bottom which will prevent it from driving the screw further than necessary when used with the depth tool.Then you use a T-shaped hole in the depth tool to gently break off the head of the screw (2a) by rocking it side to side. The screw will break off under the surface of the wood leaving a small hole (5) and (6) in the floor that can be filled in with wood repair sticks.

I found that it takes about three to five screws per squeaky plank. The Klingon device is not really necessary for parquet floors without carpets.  The screw breaks easily with the tool, and doesn’t when you screw it in. It would be a good idea to practice on some scrap wood (which I didn’t do of course), but I’ve had no accidental snapoffs so far. It would become a problem if the screw would break off above the surface. I guess the best way to fix that would be to pound the crew in with a nail set (which is not an easy matter for sure).  If you do not predrill the hole a split in the plank would not be an easy fix as well. On the plus side, the holes are not very visible even unfilled. I guess the best time to do this fix would be right before floor refinishing.

There is a cheaper version of the kit marketed as “Countersnap“, which seems to be exactly the same thing, except the depth/snap-off tool that comes with it can’t be used on carpets. Actually I think that’s the one I’ve seen Tommy use on Ask TOH.

Of course this system will not work for people with radiant floor heating, pipes and electric wires that run under the floor, super expensive museum quality floors with highly polished astronomical mirror grade finishes and landlords who do not allow driving screws into the wooden floors no matter how squeaky you or the floor gets.

Oh, right. 50 deadprogrammerTM points to the reader who can tell me the sci-fi author who inspired the title.

Some Microsoft Poetry

I have not had any problems with Windows 2000 for years. Until the last couple of months. One of the patches must have done something to the crispy crunchy goodness that is Windows graphics code. Since then – nothing but trouble. It seems to begin when I have too many windows open. It happens both at work and at home where I have completely different video cards.

I already replaced a floppy drive in my home computer with an internal memory card reader. This left me totally unprepared to nasty progression of : messed up window rendering -> bungled driver upgrade -> 640×480 only mode -> 640×480 only mode in safe mode only -> crash -> crash -> crash -> fundamental system file corrupted -> repair boot that DEMANDS THE STUPID RAID DRIVER ON A FLOPPY -> a whole weekend with a computer that has all my files on it that won’t even boot. This is what you get when your operating system of choice has graphics code mixed in with everything else.

That’s it. From now on there will be a fully built Linux server with all my files on it somewhere in my apartment. Hopefully in a couple of years I’ll be able to make a complete switch to Linux. Lets face it: Windows XP is slow, buggy and generally crappy. Especially in it’s Tablet PC variety. I can’t even imagine what crap they are whipping up right now without Dave Cutler, but that doesn’t matter. It’s going to be too little too late. Now, if there was a whole lot of developers walking around MS campus with Cutlers boot squarely up their collective asses things might have been different. And now Windows 2000 is messed up by patches. Linux starts to look better and better.

Soviet Voodoo

Oooof. Finally fixed a rather nasty bug that was depressing me most of last week. This and a nice little poem by reminded me about a few superstitions of my childhood.

There was no subway in Odessa, but we had buses, trolley buses and trams. Poorly printed pieces of bad quality paper served as tickets. The system was somewhat interesting: the driver wouldn’t check the tickets. You had to board with your own ticket and perforate it in a weird looking wall mounted press inside. If during a spot check you didn’t have a perforated ticket, you’d theoretically be fined. In reality everybody except the few unlucky loosers would perforate their ticket in the nick of time.

So, back to superstitions and luck bringing rituals. Every ticket had a serial number. A lucky ticket was considered to be one, in which the sum of the first three numbers of the serial would be equal to the sum of the last there. If you found a lucky ticket, to gain some good luck, germ or no germs, you had to eat it. Here’s what one (actually this is an even more special palindromic lucky ticket.) would like:


(image from http://iagsoft.nm.ru/ticket/chel2001.jpg)

Then there was the “Chicken God”. That was a name for a beach pebble with a hole in it. The hole was supposed to be of a natural origin. A chicken god could be worn on a necklace. To wish on it, you would look through the hole at the sun (getting half blind in the process) and speak your wish.

Update: tells me that they are called “Holey Stones” in the US and the tradition is somewhat similar.


(picture from http://www.thegodsgrove.com)

Oh, and the black Volga. In the Soviet Union a black Volga GAZ 24 was a car of choice for various party functionaries and other important people. A kid who’d spot one would usually mutter a little rhyme “black Volga my luck, which nobody can pluck” (“чернаÑ? Волга, моÑ? удача, никому не передача”). Hey, I am no poet.


(image from http://autonavigator.ru/autocatalog/gaz/24-10.shtml)

WML: Dude, I Am Getting a Dell

Guess what? This post is going to be about microcomputers. PCs.

I never owned a computer in the Soviet times. Not even a programmable calculator. I did have access to some old Wang clones called Iskra (Spark) in an after school program, played with a programmable calculator of a neighbour, played games on a frien’d PC, played games at my father’s friend’ work computer ( also PC), paid to play games on Sinclare computers that some enterprising people set up as a pay-per-play arcade, etc. Oh, I still remember the horror in the eyes of my teacher when I found a set of programs that calculated the level of contamination from a nuclear blast given the input of wind speed, bomb yeild and some other variables. Those Iskras were donated from the Red Navy.

In the US, my father purchased a 386 for a humongous sum of $1300. It was put together in some computer shop on avenue U. That was in 1993 or 1992, I think. Since then, I’ve been upgrading my computer on the average once every three years. I think In all, I went through 3 cases, 6 motherboards and 2 monitors (not counting my wife’s computer). I never owned a brand name computer. After the second computer I’ve learned that I could be putting together myself.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, putting together my own stuff. What could be simpler? Pop in a motherboard, a videocard, a modem, some ram, some hard drives — and you’ve got a box!

I’ve become thoroughly familiar with what cuts from a ragged computer case feel like. I’ve learned how hard it is to be without the Internet when your computer is in pieces on the ground (and a driver needed to make the new hardware run is on the Internet, of course). There are very few types of flashable hardware that I did not have to flash. I accumilated a huge collection of computer screws, cables, cards and thermal processor grease.

The questions that went through my mind were:
Why are jumpers so tiny? (these days they have jumpers with little tails that can be taken out with just fingers)

Why ide cables are so hard to deal with? (there are rounded cables available now)

Why it’s so hard to find 0th pin on the hard drive connector? (newer ide cables come with a little peg that doesn’t allow it to be put in the wrong way)

Which idiot came up with PS2 plugs? (one word – USB , well, ok, three words).

And most importantly: WHY ALMOST NO PIECE OF HARDWARE, PORT OR CABLE COME WITH A LABEL THAT WOULD CARRY MANUFACTURER’S NAME AND A MODEL NUMBER????????????????????

This is all slowly changing, of course, but the much bigger problem of minor factory defects and incompatibilities between chipsets still plague individually bought components.

My last self-put together box – a dual processor PIII 1000 sucks ass. I could not get a single AGP video card to work with it. An IDE raid controller that worked ok on my previous motherboard wold cause all OS to crash. And finally, two little pegs that held the cooler on the processor broke, and I can’t keep PIIIs from overheating.

I’d like to say, that after I’ve removed the raid card and put in a PCI video card, the system ran extremely steady for a year. Now it’s time to think about the future of my computers.

So my resolution is this:

1) Throw out the crappy dual processor motherboard and the crappy coolers. Buy a nice cheap and super steady single processor PIII motherboard + a stock Intel coolers and turn that computer into a file server. Four 120 Gig 5400 RPM drives (I don’t need the speed, and those drives run much cooler) should do the trick. The case of that computer is very nice and cool looking (it’s a square. It looks like this:

Maybe I’ll even make the drives removable, but so far all removable racks that I’ve tried sucked ass.

2) Buy a nice Dell workstation. That will be used for image manipulation and coding.

3) Buy a big ass LCD monitor (or maybe one of those Sony 27″ CRT monitors) for use with the workstation.

4) Buy a tablet pc for myself and a laptop for my wife.

5) Donate or sell on eBay all the crappy hardware still sitting in my drawers.

I think all the money I saved this year on rent should easily buy me this hardware.

Subway Good, Bus – Bad

I am composing this entry on my blackberry device wile riding the D train. The conductor of this particular train is pretty distinctive – he announces all station with the intonations of a professional announcer. He especially likes to say “Loooooong Iiiiiiisland rrrrrailroad”. He’s been doing that for years. Sometimes he wishes everyone “happy Monday”.

This reminds me how many years ago, in my hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, all the buses, trams and trolleys got this little tape player that would announce the stops with pre-recorded messages. It was always weird to see the same regular tram operator, but hear a professional doctor’s voice announcing stops. I think that originated in Moscow during the Olympics because the drivers could not learn how to announce stops in all those foreign languages.

In Brooklyn bus drivers don’t announce stops at all. I should check if this is required by their rule book. They are extremely strict about picking up passengers outside of bus stops – they won’t open the doors even if they are stuck in traffic. I think I should make it a habit to write MTA supervisor to commend good bus drivers and to report various assholery perpetrated by bad ones.

For instance, once I was locked in a bus by the driver for 15 minutes, while he went to discuss something with another bus driver. That was 2 blocks away from my stop. That’s when I realized that I don’t remember which lever releases the bus door. Gotta look that up…