It is sometimes surprising that life takes very unexpected turns. In the beginning of this summer I was spending time at my home considering a number of ideas for independent research projects. Then suddenly I received an invitation to visit Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Hsinchu, Taiwan. I got very excited and accepted the offer immediately.

So now I have arrived to Taiwan. To me it looks a lot like California – arriving to Taipei was similar to that in San Francisco with its multi-storied system of roads. Then a taxi driver picked me up and we went on a highway to Hsinchu, Taiwaneese equivalent of Silicon Valley. The road looked a lot like 101, California main highway because of the palm trees on the sides of the road and hills on the horizon.

Many people are saying that weather here is a bit hot, but to me it feels quite comfortable and familiar because it is similar to that in Stony Brook – hot and humid. Also there is AC in the buildings so most of the time you don’t feel heat at all.

ITRI was built in 1970s. It looks like they were trying to outperform the best campuses of Silicon Valley as the level of comfort here is above any expectation. For example, just across the guest house (hotel) there is a swimming pool 50 m in length, with steam sauna, electric sauna, and 20 jacuzzi baths! I think only Google could match that level of luxury. The guest house is also quite a fancy place – there is a pond with gold fish in it! Looks very nice.

The people are very friendly and helpful. Even if the person does not speak English (s)he will always try to explain with gestures or will lead you to someone who speaks English. The penetration of English language here is quite minimal – most of the signs in the shops are written in Chinese. This only encourages me to learn Chinese, I actually started learning it when I was preparing for the trip in Russia and I think it is a lot of fun to learn the characters because often they resemble the words they are intended to express. Guessing the meaning of a character is like recognizing objects in a painting.

Another funny things that I noticed soon upon arrival was how local people navigate the roads. They use scooters – small motorcycles. Often, they line up and occupy the whole lane of a road. To me it looks like presidential escort as I was riding in a minivan surrounded by motorcyclists.

However, when we were approaching Hsinchu a tropical storm began. Lots of water was pouring on the roads. When the rain was over it turned out that puddles were still there. When a car drives through the puddle a fountain of water emerges and the water goes to other cars. But imagine what happens to those who drive scooters. The water pours on them like a shower! Oh dear! Just think of it – you are driving your scooter and then quite unexpectedly you get a cold shower!

On Sunday I was exploring the neighborhood of ITRI. I found out that campus is surrounded by a concrete wall. There are security guards at the front gate. It is funny how the institute protects its employees and its research achievements. Within half-hour walking distance to the left and right there are a few stores where you can get food and basic supplies and even carpets and furniture. Then there are a few restaurants. I have eaten tasty dumplings in one of them. There are a number of houses along the road. They are quite small, typically 2-storey buildings. However, there are bigger houses right behind them, hiding from a noisy road. It looks funny that when you walk along the road you think you are in a village (small houses) but when you look on the side streets you think it is a big city (10-storey buildings).

The food here is really delicious. It is a lot different from our traditional notion of Chinese food (what is offered for example in the US and in Europe). A typical dish here consists of rice (white), vegetables, mushrooms, meat, and fried eggs. On the other hand, people eat here noodles in cups which you prepare for yourself by adding hot water. I have spotted a few vending machines with this food. I guess it is traditional habit to eat this fast food. It is funny to see this food near luxury buildings on ITRI campus. I am trying to imagine taking jacuzzi bath with a pack of noodles in a cup.

Today is the first day in the office. I had a number of meetings and got an ITRI badge. I found out that I can use it as a credit card in cafeteria. In the end of each month the bill will come. I guess I will have lots of fun here!

I have visited Christ the Savior Cathedral which happened quite randomly. I walked into a tourist booth and found out that a guided tour to the top of the church was just beginning. Because of the stunning view that opens from there I decided to join the tour. Taking pictures from above was free of charge and I used my iPhone to take pictures and Microsoft ICE to build a 360-degree panorama. Here it is:

In fact, the guided tour began inside the Cathedral with an explanation of the wall paintings. They are amazing! The name of the artist who painted many of those is Nikolay Muhin. The Cathedral contains many interesting icons and remnants of Saints. Then we used the elevator to get to the roof and enjoyed views of Moscow. Then we went down to the ground floor and visited a museum also located in the Cathedral. A number of old icons are located there.

Then I went to a museum of Ilya Glazunov located next to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Earlier I have read his book that describes life of his family over the last two centuries (19th and 20th) and how events in Russia were tightly intervened with lives of his relatives and his own. The museum is absolutely fantastic. It has four floors and many halls. Sometimes it seems that many people worked on those paintings, not just one person because they are dedicated to various themes: from Russian history to works of Dostoevsky to more or less modern art that depicts events in Russia in late 1980s.

I have bought a photocopy of this wonderful painting. After visiting the museum I went back to the railway station and left Moscow on an afternoon train to Nizhny Novgorod. I went in a sitting cabin which had 6 chairs but only 2 people were there so our trip was quite comfortable.

Also, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior I bought a few books including life of Sergey Radonezhski. I want to read them but only after I finish reading History of Serafimo-Diveevsky monastery, an amazing book that describes life of Serafim Sarovsky and related events. Overall, it seems to me that Moscow is looking a lot more like Russian-Orthodox capital because of various events and exhibitions dedicated to Russian history and culture. I enjoyed my trip to Moscow.

New trends in computing appear every now and then. Dealing with massive amounts of data is not new but a few interesting applications that can greatly benefit from our increased processing power are on the horizon. Wired magazine describes these applications in the following two articles that appeared recently:

Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure


What You Want: Flickr Creator Spins Addictive New Web Service

The first article deals with the problem of how the new drugs are developed. It turns out that the biggest problem is not whether it is useful or not but whether it poses any danger (or in other words has any side effects) or not. For example, aspirin was discovered in 1899 but it was not until a 100 years later that it was noticed that patients who take aspirin regularly have descreased risk of heart attack. In this case, the side effect was positive. However, in many other cases it is negative. The difficulty of testing a new drug is that it takes a lot of time to establish a strong correlation between taking a drug and a certain change in patient’s body. The problem is that increased body temperature is a possible result of many things – food, outside environment, which people the patient talks to, etc. A more comprehensive monitoring system is needed to take those things into account. However, working with such a multi-dimensional data set is only possible with use of automated tools and requires lots of processing power. This is what Google is good at.

The second article describes Hunch, a system that tries to build a psychological model of you. It asks you a number of random questions, for example whether you believe in alien’s kidnapping or not and then matches your answers to those of other people. Then it can give you recommendations based on what people with similar answers like. The system makes a step further, however. It can try to guess your answers to arbitrary questions based on what people who are similar to you answered. I have tried to allow Hunch to learn a fair amount of my preferences – I answered over 100 questions. After that it started to recommend what seemed like interesting guesses. However, when it tried to predict my answers its rate of correct answers was around 50%. Therefore, the system did not learn much yet. On the other hand, a human being is a lot more complex creature whose model obviously does not fit into 100 questions.

Another system mentioned in the article which I liked a lot more is Aardvark. It uses a unique combination of computing technology: messaging, tagging, social networking, etc. Its idea is simple and I guess many people have thought of it. What if you have a question but you don’t know who to ask. Then most likely you head on to a web forum or a mailing list and ask. The problem is that you have to find an appropriate forum and wait a couple of days to get an answer.

The problem is that Internet does not allow you to find right people instantly. Try typing Who knows Chinese out there in a search engine and see what happens. Aardvark is a kind of social search engine. Once you type your question the system determines its topic and tags it appopriately. Then it searches over its database of users who have indicated that they are experts in this particular area. In addition, Aardvark will check who is online at the moment to avoid sending your question to someone who is possibly on vacation. The expert will get an IM notification from Aardvark asking whether (s)he wants to help. If yes, the expert can type the answer immediately and even chat with the person who asked the question. The whole process is real-time which actually encourages people to ask questions.

I have tried Aardvark both to ask questions and to answer linux questions. In either case the experience was positive. I got answers that were quite valuable. For example, when I asked how to learn Chinese I was given a link to a web site with online language course which even had an iPhone app to facilitate learning. I could not find it otherwise in app store.

Aardvark contacted me through Google Talk a few times. It is actually fun to talk to a robot because this way you can help out real people. I guess this is one cool application of artificial intelligence – robots are helping people to socialize!

On July 29th I went with my parents to a summer camp at Vetluga river, approximately 150 km north-east of Nizhny Novgorod. Because it felt extremely hot in the city because of the heat wave that stayed in Russia for 3 months, it felt very refreshing in the camp. We have enjoyed our stay in the wooden houses during those two weeks when people in cities and certain villages suffered a lot. Every morning we were swimming in a lake and then after breakfast in Vetluga. Road trips were another activity that we enjoyed.

The summer camp is situated near Varnavino, a small town nowadays which was a monastery in 1600s. St. Varnava has founded this monastery. I guess it was rich and joyful area before October revolution. But then lots of destruction happened and people fled away. What is remaining nowadays are either ruins or stones which are put in place of destroyed churches.

It is quite unusual that despite the wide-scale efforts to restore old churches and monasteries in Russia, there are still lots of ruins in this particular area. I guess this is because it is quite far away from the center of our region and not too many people are living there nowadays. However, this area looks so beautiful that it is possible to justify restoring the destroyed buildings, for example to attract more tourists. There are lots of abandoned homes in the villages, there are also lots of homes that were acquired as summer homes of people living in cities. To me it seems that life there has not recovered yet after Big Bang of the revolution, almost 100 years after it happened. I don’t have the pictures of abandoned country-side life there but it looks very impressive and makes you think of those people, their lives, and what happened to them.

We have visited Svetloyar lake which is famous for its invisible Kitezh town. The story goes that there was a beautiful town 1000 years ago. However, it has collapsed into the lake to prevent its capture when Mongols have approached it during their conquest of Russia. There are a number of theories nowadays of how the lake was shaped, from volcano to meteorite strike to who knows what.

The people’s belief is that you have to walk three times around the lake praying to get your sins forgiven. In other words, this remote place is deeply connected to our history and culture. But we have not walked around the lake, instead we were only swimming there. Also, there are a number of trails out there going to the burial site of three monks respected for their saint lives. Also there is a stone which the saying goes has a footprint of St. Virgin Mary.

There is a village Vladimirskoe next to the lake. It has beautiful museum where local craftsmen are building beautiful things. I have noticed that this whole area of north-east of our region is abundant with crasftsmen – for exapmle Khohloma in Semenov, ceramics in Svetloyar, etc. To me this culture looks like traces of old civillization that we have so little evidence of nowadays. We can only come more often and try to learn more. It is because of the significance of this area that great Rimsky-Korsakov has written opera dedicated to this area.

Here I would like to discuss the work that I was doing before the disaster began, in particular the re-designing of my website that I have started in July. I have lots of information of various types on my web site including recent projects, academia stuff, as well as more personal things such as sports exercises that I am doing and collection of live recordings of organ music.

So I decided to put the content in the middle of the screen and surround it with various levels of navigation menus. There is the top-level menu which has few broad categories and context menu attached to the side of the page. I decided to make sure that things are coupled tightly visually, that is that there are no holes between content and menus.

Of course, I considered issues of performance. In particular, I would like to put a number of widgets to my pages, that is small areas whose content is generated dynamically. However, loading them along with the page would increase the start up time dramatically. One solution is to use iframes. However, there are interaction issues associated with using iframes, for example you have to make sure that the height of the page you are loading is the same as the height of iframe if you want to avoid scrollbars.

Another solution is to generate script tags dynamically using onload event. This works just fine: the page loads quickly, and then additional content appears after a while.

I have extended books section on my web site. Earlier it included only list of books in our home library. Now it includes books that are available online and that are interesting to me, mostly programming books. For each book I needed its image, title, authors, etc. How do I get this information? One obvious thought is to use Amazon API. However, Amazon provides no such API, surprisingly. Fortunately, Google does. I was very impressed with its large-scale books service – books.google.com. The full content of many books is avaiable online. Earlier I was subscribed to an online library but I don’t need it anymore because of Google Books. In addition, it is possible to fetch information on any book through an easy to use API – you only need to send its ISBN to Google and it will give you all the necessary information in an XML response. It turns out that this nice feature is hidden deep inside the description of other Google APIs, it is located in Client libraries and demos section, here is the link to the live application.

One might wonder why am not I using one of the numerous frameworks out there: jQuery, Yahoo web toolkit, etc. There are a number of reasons of doing so. To me the frameworks offer convenient tools to put up a web site quickly, content management systems such as Drupal are doing this even better. However, the site would look too standard, formal if you wish. I would like to have a site with a customized look. On the other hand, coding your web site from scratch would require too much effort. This is why I am using the third approach: read lots of web design books and pick techniques that you like. Then the web site would get a decent look and it will differ from web sites built with standard toolkits.

The next improvements that I would like to implement/borrow from books: animation of menus, and additional widgets such as tooltips, popups, buttons, etc. I only need to decide what is more important: generating content for the web site or improving look and feel of what is already there.

This summer in Russia is one of the hottest in a century. Already lots of forests and fields are burning. The amount of crops that it is still there to harvest is decreasing rapidly.

We have been walking a lot, one of our favourite routes is that to Oka river on which our town is situated. I have taken a few nice pictures of insects which there are plenty of in the fields.

The pictures have been taken by my Panasonic DMC-FZ8, a camera with a 12x optical zoom and lots of automatic modes to take pictures in. One of its coolest features is its ability to take RAW images but I should confess that over the period of two years I have never used this feature! Otherwise, I enjoy the responsiveness of the camera, its flexibility in controlling shutter speeds and ISO levels.

But I still wonder whether the cameras are at the bleeding edge of software technology. I mean, there is lots of post-processing that we often do in Photoshop or the like which we could do in the camera. Apple is working in this direction – a number of applications have been written that allow to adjust various parameters of a picture after you take it on your iPhone. Therefore, iPhone is the first computational camera or in other words a camera whose software you can tweak in arbitrary ways.

In particular, I would love to have the following two features in my camera:

1. High Dynamic Range imaging. Imagine you take a picture in a room with a bright light coming from window. Obviously, traditional camera allows you to see either inside or outside but not both. The reason is the limted range of light that it can absorb. The key is to take a number of pictures with different exposure levels and combine them. So simple but would make lots of people happy! Available on iPhone (proHDR).
2. Making panoramas – that is, stiching a number of continuos images together. Available on iPhone (PanoLab – FREE!!!)

But there is another way to make panoramas – use cool software called Microsoft ICE. It makes very nice panoramas and can save it as either JPEG or upload to Photosynth, a web site for sharing 3D models.

I used to read WIRED magazine a few years ago. Then when I started working I only had time to read what was absolutely necessary – Communications of ACM.

However, this spring I decided to subscribe to Wired magazine again. I was impressed when I got a copy of the magazine – it has totally changed. To start with, nowadays it is half advertising, half content magazine. I guess this is because of the economic crisis. In other words, it is possible to throw away half of the magazine right off the start.

What remains is also not necessarily interesting. I used to like wired-tired-expired section as well as those new pesky words from the underground that Wired was decyphering to the rest of us. Those sections are gone.

But there are few interesting articles still. In June 2010 issue a number of interesting people are mentioned including Nicholas Carr and Daniel Shirky. I have read books of these authors. The magazine advertises their new books which I definitely need to check out. There is an interesting research article as well called Traffic Cop. It describes brave attempt of few people to build a model of traffic in NYC as a giant spreadsheet. By introducing a number of parameters to the model and adding an ability to fiddle with them it becomes possible to optimize traffic in NYC. This work is so necessary for lots of cities with traffic jams!

To summarize, Wired magazine is always fresh and surprising but not necessarily what you want to read. I can only explain this as an attempt to attract more readers, for example causal technology enthusiasts are more interested in space junk and organ transplants whereas computer specialists are appreciating computer technology content. To me Wired looks more like Popular Mechanics nowadays, at least earlier it was more related to geek culture. On the other hand, the definition of geek is also changing.

Semyonov is known for its craftsmen. The whole northen area of the region hosts Khohloma painters in numerous villages. The idea behind Khohloma is to show the abundance of forests and fields of this part of Russia, various kinds of grass, flowers, and birds that are living here. However, Khohloma is known to exist in other parts of Russia as well but this medieval craft has survived only in this remote area. It is well known that the forests at the north of our region were home to various kinds of religious groups that separated from the official church during the reformation of 17th century.

Semyonov is known for its museum of Khohloma. The museum as well as Khohloma shop are located in a two-storied building. The earliest works in the museum are related to 19 century which is not necessarily very old. But the most impressive part of the museum is not Khohloma history but rather Khohloma present. There is one room in which every piece of furniture is painted in Khohloma. It looks gorgeous!

We have also visited cultural and church fair that was happening in Semyonov. A number of monasteries and religious organizations were taking part in it, including even representatives of Old Believers. Btw., there are still lots of Old believers in Semyonov, a very rare branch of Orthodox Church elsewhere. One of the most interesting parts of the fair was where they were selling books. I have noticed that last Tzar’s family is attracting lots of people, new books are published quite often. The attention to the Family grew when their remnants were found in Siberia in 1990s and then transferred to Saint-Petersburgh, even though their authenticity is still questionable. The books related to the Family that are published nowadays deal with historical evidence of various people who got to know them. I was more interested in the books that deal with Church directrly. I bought the following books: life of Patriarh Kirill, history of Diveevo Monastery, and Old Russian architecture.

As usual, I read a few chapters from each book only to tease myself. I will read the books after finishing few other books which I am reading now. I will also remember the amazing craft of Khohloma. In the museum we were told that it is possible to order anything we have seen. I wish I could get that wonderful Throne!

But what follows sounds like total abuse to its products. To start with, I always wanted to get Apple products even though I cannot describe myself as fan of Apple because I never owned any of its products. However, earlier I have bought a few books of Leander Kahney which deal with Apple culture. They are quite interesting because of their unusual formatting as well as content. I have been waiting for two years before there was a chance to buy an Apple gadget. I have been spending money on various things such as a laptop with a touchscreen similar to iPad but it works as a normal laptop as well (btw. I am very happy with it after 2 months of usage even though it is more expensive than typical laptop).

But on June 28th 2010 I turned 29 years old. What a nice number of years, it is not even 30. I guess next birthday will require me to draw big conclusions from the part of life I have lived so far because this stretch of years was by far the most important in my life.

But 29 years is also quite important date to get a special gift for yourself. So I thought yes I should get an iPhone! And I went to the only store in our town that was selling it. Suprisingly on the one hand and quite predictably on the other, most people are still using the kind of phones they were using 5 and even 10 years ago! Nobody here wants to buy an iPhone. Not necessarily because it is expensive but also because it is not trendy, at least in Russia.

But I thought it is trendy and cool and nice to have this amazing gadget. The unboxing ceremony went with lots of excitement:

Then I was able to turn on the phone. It asked me to insert the SIM card. Here is the interesting part. When I got the SIM card and removed the plastic frame that was protecting the hole to which I was supported to insert the card I realized that I had to insert the card with the plastic frame. I tried to do it but unsuccessfully because the frame got stuck in the middle. I removed the card with the frame and then I thought that I needed to insert only the SIM card (what a mistake) which is how it works in many other phones including those that I was using earlier. Of course, I was doubtful because of the plastic frame but I thought that it was possible to always eject the card from the hole or if that does not work to remove the cover of the iPhone to get direct access to SIM card as again is the case in many other phones.

However, when the SIM card got into the hole it got stuck there. There was no obvious way of removing it. Then I spent a horrible half an hour trying various ways to release the SIM card. It was possible to lift it up but during the final attempt to get hold of it it was falling back deep into the hole. I used various kinds of screwdrivers and needles to get into the hole. I have scratched my gorgeous iPhone. It looks so shiny after you buy it but when you treat it with needles the nice paint disappears and the phone gets a tough appearance.

Then my parents asked me why amn’t I enjoying the dinner and they realized what I have been occupied with. They joined me with their set of tools! They have used smaller needle and finally after an hour of intense fighting the SIM card was freed! Whoo-hoo! Now everybody was wondering if iPhone is still alive. Yes, it is working! Apple is such a great company, its products are so tough. On that day I even managed to get a free account at iTunes and downloaded a few apps to my iPhone.

Well, after using quite few other phones I should say that iPhone delivers. It is great and simple, and this is the only gadget that my parents found intuitive to use. I agree, its user interface is exceptional. And so is Apple’s hardware!

When I lived in Finland I visited every castle it had: Hameenlinna, Savonlinna, Turku Castle, and Suomenlinna. I liked those trips a lot because every castle had a museum which always mentioned connection to Russian history.

Nowadays I am living in Russia and therefore I used an opportunity to visit a monastery located on the other bank of Oka river on which our town is situated. In order to get there I got an inexpensive boat for only 2,500 roubles (approximately 70 USD). It is funny that all the other boats of similar size costed three times as much! The name of the boat is Challenger 2.

Oka is a wide slowly moving river with almost no boat traffic. It is funny that we had some kind of cruise boats until very recently when the river transporation in Dzerzhinsk was apparently stopped. Quite sad, but the river looks nowadays as wild as it probably looked in 15th century when the monastery was built.

Previously I visited the ruins of the monastery when I was in high school. Back then the frames of 17th century buildings were still there but the interiors were destroyed as a result of October revolution of 1917. The actual destruction was happening probably later on, in the end of 1920s. After years of oblivion, the rebuilding of monastery began in 2000s.

The monastery is located in the middle of the hills which are approximately 150-200 m in height and are quite steep. The horizontal area in the middle accomodated three churches as well as entrance gates and cemetery. It was a very densely packed area. But nowadays only one church has been rebuilt along with a bell tower. During last few years I have visited a number of monasteries many of which have been destroyed during Soviet era. It keeps me wondering over and over again that what was destroyed during a couple of days takes decades to rebuild.

I have looked at old photographs of the monastery. It turns out that the new white building on the photograph above is actually smaller than its predecessor. In particular, the old building was 3-storied whereas the new one has only 2 floors. I was suprised when I discovered what I thought was negligence to the history but then my mom exlained to me that they don’t have enough donation nowadays to build as large a building as they did in 1600s. It is a worrying sign that back then one merchant called Dudin donated enough money to build the whole monastery but these days Russian people as a whole are not willing to donate as much.

But still, it is good that such a large-scale effort is going on. The rebuilding of monastery has a few additional tasks associated with it such as building a road to this remote area. It turns out that this sparked intense discussion in the media because the machines used in this process have excavated the ground and part of an old cemetery. Now I think that it is a good idea to perform a careful examination of the soil which contains 600 years of Russian history. If a team of archeologists attempted to do a field trip to this monastery I think they would find lots of artifacts.

On my way back I discovered another artifact on the shore of the river which I cannot think the meaning of. To me it looks like organ pipes but obviously Catholic Church never managed to get that far. Therefore, the pipes pictured above have some technical meaning. To summarize, Dudin monastery is a great remote place. Every human will find interesting stuff here, either historical or technical mysteries.