Alexey Smirnov's blog

I have visited Moscow last week to do some business. Luckily I got things done at half past 10 in the morning and had plenty of time to enjoy Moscow attractions.

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!

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.

I love this company.

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!

It is well known that Google spends a lot of effort on various cool things. Its advances in technology make it possible for people to do things they could not do before. I always wanted to express myself in art but when I was in school I never managed to draw a decent painting. But with Google Sketchup and Building Maker I can build models of everything with the assistance of computer and the web. A great combination of a number of technologies: satellite imaging, graphics, web programming, user interfaces.

Google Earth is a program that many people have spent hours playing with. But those attractive 3D models of buildings were a privilege of qualified engineers and designers until recently. Given the ambicious goal of modeling every city on Earth Google had to ask for help of the community. Because not everybody is a gifted designer, Google has created Building Maker, a tool that presents an image of a building to a user and asks to find a shape that matches its best.

A few basic shapes are available: box, prism, etc. A box is used to model the body of the house whereas a prism is used to model the roof. It is possible to define relationships between elements, that is to specify that one is situated next to another.

Once the user has aligned all visible points on one image she can move on to the next one. After aligning the model you can submit it for review. Once it gets accepted to the buildings layer you can see it using Google Earth and also everybody else will see it. All this beauty (including Google Earth) lives within a window of your browser. I wonder which language it was written in. Obviously, browser applications are matching desktop applications in their capabilities and functionality.

But this cool technology relies on so-cold bird-eye views of cities which are not available everywhere. Another limitation of this technology is the basic set of shapes that building maker has. This is why if you want to model more complex buildings you have to use Sketchup, a 3D drawing program.

Of course, Sketchup facilitates the process through image-matching technology. You can load a photo into Sketchup, align axes and use the image essentially in the same way as in Building Maker. However, a lot more shapes are available: circles, arcs, as well as tools to manipulate them. After constructing the first version of your model you can use additional photographs as textures of its faces. As with Building Maker, it is possible to get the model added to the buildings layer of Google Earth after review.

I have created models with both tools. Obviously, using photo matching in Sketchup takes longer because you have to apply textures to each face of the model manually. I have spent several days creating a model of a school next to our house. The model consists of several boxes. The main problem was connecting the boxes to make sure that there were no holes in the model. At one point I had a seemingly good model except that when I tried to build the roof it was breaking up into pieces. It turned out that the problem was in one wall which height was slightly less than heights of other walls, and therefore, there was a crack between the roof and that wall. Once you get used to measuring heights and widths of everything constructing becomes a lot easier. I would estimate the learning time of Sketchup as one week. But I have not started working with circular shapes yet! That’s the next level of skill!

These are the models that I have built so far. Click on the image to see 3D model.

I have read the first three issues of Communications of ACM of year 2010: January, February, and March. Overall, I have noticed that CACM is aiming at a broader scope, not only CS-topics but also biology and physics. Therefore, nowadays it is more like Science magazine or Nature. But of course in every article there is a computational aspect that connects computer science with another area of knowledge. I found out that cross-disciplinary articles are more engaging than purely technical articles. The nature has lots of secrets that computer science helps reveal.

Jan 2010
Rebuilding for Eternity. Bundler – open source version of Photosynth.
Automated translation of Indian Languages
New Search Challenges and Opportunities
Data in Flight. Implementation of StreamSQL. Stanford streams, MIT Aurora, SQL Stream.
Other people’s data – XIgnite

Last but not least – two articles that discuss Google’s parallel engine – Map-Reduce. I have noticed that CACM contains lots of articles dedicated to Google’s technology, for example there is an article discussing the evolution of Google file system in one of the following issues. At the same time there are no articles from other software giants, for example Microsoft, Apple, or IBM. This is not because those companies do not innovate. Everybody knows that programmers went nuts writing iPhone apps. The reason of Google domination is I believe that amount of sponsor money that it gives to ACM. It is fine, Google has created lots of innovative frameworks but other companies deserve attention as well.

Map Reduce and Parallel DBMSs: Friends or Foes?
MapReduce: A Flexible Data Processing Tool

Feb 2010

The best issue I have ever read! To start with, its cover story is dedicated to new model of computation, quantum algorithms. This topic is not new. When I was an undergraduate student in Russia in late 1990s there was lots of buzz of how quantum algorithms can change the cryptography. With its strong mathematical tradition, Russians were trying to explain quantum algorithms from the number theory point of view. To me it was totally incomprehensible. Or I should say that my mind was more inclined toward an algorithmic perspective of quantum computers. In this article CACM does a great job on explaining the notion of quantum algorithm at the level that was most appropriate to me as a software engineer. It briefly mentions computational complexity challenges and explains how quantum algorithms might help tackle those.

Recent progress in Quantum algorithms

Type Theory comes to age. Aura, Jif for security. Philip Walder
An interview with Michael Rabin

A few billion lines of code later.

Another great article in the same issue! When I was a student (again) but this time in a graduate school in the United States I was lucky to witness the emergence of a new technology – practical bug detection using static analysis. But I will start with a brief introduction on how industrial research is transformed into a widely adopted mature technology.

In my life so far I saw two such events. More experienced people might name a few other cases but here is what I can say. In late 1990s computer graphics has advanced rapidly because of increased processing power. Researchers began experiments with massive amounts of data or images. This is how light field mapping technology was developed simultaneously at several universities as well as at Microsoft and Intel. Its idea is to build a 3D model of an object from a number of images taken with an inexpensive camera. I was lucky to participate in the development of this technology as an undergraduate intern at Intel-Nizhny Novgorod in 2001-2002. However, it was only a research project which was soon abandoned. However, in year 2010 there is a commercialized version of this technology Photosynth that Microsoft has created.

When I joined graduate school in Stony Brook in 2002 application security was a hot research area. Everybody was thinking how to protect the programs against viruses. This is why we have created DIRA – a dynamic protection tool that instrumented programs with additional instructions that made it resilient against buffer overflow attacks. But again, the project was soon abandoned. However, Dawson Engler was able to transform the technology landscape with his static bug finder. In this article he describes his experiences with making commercial tool from a research project.

Software Model Checking takes off
Assessing the Changing US IT R&D Ecosystem

March 2010
Chasing the AIDS virus

Cover story is another must-read article! It explains the mechanics of AIDS virus. I never thought that it can transform itself to avoid the medicine it is exposed to.

Making decisions based on the Preferences of Multiple Agents

This article describes various algorithms of voting with applications to social networks. Very comprehensive discussion.

Engineering the web’s third decade
Orchestrating coordination in pluralistic networks
GFS: Evolution on fast-forward
Global IT management: structuring for scale, responsiveness, and innovation

A few days ago I went to Oulu, a city in the north of Finland to attend Linux Symposium which was featuring Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++.

I left Helsinki on Monday night and arrived to Oulu at 7:30 AM on the overnight train. It was so-o-o co-o-old in Oulu! We did not have such freezing temperatures during the whole winter in Helsinki. On that early spring day it was -20 centigrade. Because the train arrived early initially I planned to walk to the Oulu University which is located approximately 5km from the train station. I actually walked there but I froze like I have not frozen for a long time already. What was surprising to me was that local people were walking and even riding bikes normally. Apparently, they got used to such temperatures. In Finland there is a special word sisu which means persistence and stubbornness in a good sense of the word. Now I know that the city of Oulu is the city of sisu – sisu students, sisu workers, sisu everybody.

I barely had time to warm up in the university lobby before the conference began. It had a keynote speech dedicated to the looming C++ 0x standard as well as two tracks: business and technical. Before the conference I have spent lots of time studying the agenda trying to decide which track I want to go to. But there were interesting talks in both tracks. So I needed to remember the order in which I would visit the tracks. It turned out that there is a simple algorithm which tells you which track to go at any moment of time. The idea is that it is best to always switch the tracks, for example if you are listening to a talk in the technical track now then the next interesting talk is in the business track. So I followed this algorithm and I enjoyed every talk that I attended.

But the first was the keynote. Bjarne is a great speaker! He was describing his work in the standardization committee and the features that were selected in the new C++ 0x standard. He said that name of this new standard comes from the year in which they wanted to get it approved – anytime before year 2010, but at this moment the standard is in the Final Draft phase which means that it will get approved in year 2012 probably.

Bjarne pointed out several criteria that they used when selecting features for the standard. Basically, keep it simple was the main criterion. Any extra functionality should go to a library. Keep the run-time as small as possible. One of the goals was to make it possible to use C++ as the first language during teaching in a college. It is an ambitious goal as most of US universities are using Java as the first language. New set of features for writing parallel programs was described. Mostly, it was related to locks, semaphores, etc. and avoiding deadlocks and other problems, as well as inter-process communication. To me it sounds like a pretty low-level stuff. After his presentation I asked whether the committee thinks they’ve chosen the right level of abstraction. Nowadays there are a few interesting parallel programming frameworks such as Map-Reduce and transactional memory. Bjarne said that it is too early to standardize any of those which is probably true.

The funny thing is that the committee does not necessarily accept the features that Bjarne proposes even though he is the inventor of C++. For example, he was trying to get lexical_cast into the standard which is basically string tokenizer. But the committee voted against him because of possible problems with locale. On the picture above Bjarne is trying to persuade the audience that lexical_cast is a cool feature.

Here are the notes from a few other talks:

Sami Paihonen. Implementing cross-platform UI

The core of cross-platform UI is UI style.
Lots of research. Empty screen is the best place to start.
6 design principles: avoid clutter. Too many things on the screen. Two hands is not mobile usage.
IPhone open-source contacts has a better UI than official app.
UI style defines core UI identity
Smoothness and stability are most important. Steven Frei blog.
blog: dizzyhorizon.com

Mikko Välimäki, Tuxera. Open source and IP licensing

This is the guy who won Espoo half-marathon!

Tuxera – is company doing filesystems on non-Windows systems
GNU GPL – free of charge to everyone.
Is it possible to use Android UI on another hardware? Apple is suing HTC for Patent infringement.
Jonathan Schwartz blog. Bill asks royalty for every download of OO b/c of patent infringement.
Microsoft sued TomTom over usage of FAT file system.
Mixed, dual-licensed, open & proprietary models will win.

Alexander Bezprozvanny. Traditional vs agile/open source

different roles that a person takes in multiple team in agile.
key differences in OSS projects: no project managers. Project leaders are models.
Healthy community is the key.
Definition of healthy community, various paths that a project might take depending on how developers interact with users. Nice diagram.

Examples:

1) Too late means never. Affix and bluez bluetooth stacks. Commercial vs. open-source. A company that missed release.

2) High admission price: OpenBSD community. A success at a high price.

3) OSS contribution from software company: bureaucratic barrier too high. Disclaimer of rights is difficult to explain to management.

4) Maemo case: combining proprietary and OSS SW.

Ari Jaaksi’s speach and consequences in his blog.

Google is the most intriguing company ever. This book sheds light on the reasons behind its unprecedented success and describes lessons that we can learn from it.

Even though I use Google on a daily basis and think that I know this company, my perception of it changed a lot after reading the book. For example, some time ago Google released a product that had a glitch. I got disappointed and switched to a similar competitors offering. In the meantime Google’s product developed into something very useful while the competitor’s stayed where it was. If I had read this book earlier I would have made a better decision.

According to the author of the book there are several forces that steer Google as a company: the triumvirate of executives and user
community. Each of these parts has its share in Google’s success.

The founders challenged many traditional methods of managing a company. To start with, a governing triumvirate is very uncommon. The biggest advantage is that they compensate each other when making decisions. Another difference is how Google went public – the founders used then uncommon Dutch auction model to distribute initial set of shares. The author analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of Google management style.

Over the past, many companies have accumulated devoted user bases. This was achieved in different ways such as more traditional – offering a discount or less traditional elitism. The author of the book analyzes the reasons why so many people admire Google:

• Using Google is free. However, many people asked to charge a nominal price in exchange of support.
• Google releases beta versions of its products. It relies on large user community to report bugs and generate improvement ideas.
• As a company whose revenue is based on online ads, Google has simplified the process of placing an ad. The process is totally automatic – the people bid for certain keywords which are associated with their ads.

Google has improved the way in which customers interact with it. Another important component is innovative environment within the company. Google is different from traditional companies in the following ways. Its HR department has highly variable size. Google fights bureaucracy by keeping the team size small. Instead of asking managers to evaluate the employees, peer reviews are used in Google. Fellow developers evaluate the projects written during the 20% free-time rule and select the most promising. The ability to work on what you like allows experienced developers to advance in the career ladder without being forced into becoming a manager.

In addition to the interesting content, the book has unique style of presenting it. Blogs are cited very often. Using this book I discovered many new interesting blogs.

This book is a bridge to understanding processes going on in the Internet industry. It will help improve your own company or evaluate other Internet companies.

I have attended a concert of Jean Michel Jarre in Helsinki, in Hartwall Arena. I arrived to Helsinki in the afternoon and had fun attending several museums. I will describe that other part in the next post.

Hartwall Arena is a medium-sized stadium with a roof. Therefore, this concert was indeed private as typically Jarre performs in front of multi-million audiences using city landscape as the background image of his laser shows. I guess the music that he played was specially designed to match with such in-doors environment. To start with, I was impressed that the sound was of very good quality in every part of the stadium. That’s because of the backstage sound system that he uses. In classical music, lots of effort is spent on designing the shape of concert hall ceiling to improve sound quality.

The music itself revealed the great talent of Jarre the composer. To me it sounded a bit like Shostakovich. Jarre uses lots of traditional folk tunes and reinforces them with electrical instruments. A few of his instruments sound like church bells, others like French accordeon played in Paris. Obviously, Jarre has processed lots of music in his head and compiled it to present to the general public.

The audience in Helsinki was more ordinary than I expected. We have to admit that the concert hall was half-empty, especially the upper rows. I guess the classic music audience decided not to attend this pop music show. They were wrong. Jean Michel only tries to promote the music as art no matter which genre it is. His performances are above such division. Thus, the people who attended the concert looked like office workers, or even factory people. But during the concert they were raving. They loved the music that Jarre played. Thus, the goal of unification people with music was achieved. Chances are that these people will decide to play music or even become composers themselves.

The instruments used in the concert were fantastic.

The laser harp is a powerful instrument which is intuitive to play. In computer science, everybody is trying to simplify the computers and operating systems. For example touch screen cellphones do not require any learning before becoming an essential tool. And so is the laser harp. Reinforced with artificial intelligence it starts shining when the musician approaches it. When it is being touched, a background music is played to match the tune that the musician improvised. I read on Wikipedia that this is not a new instrument but I saw it the first time. I think that such instruments can start a new phase of composers. Everybody is listening to the music of Mozart and Bach for several centuries. But new classical composers do not appear. This is because the environment for which the classical instruments were designed has changed. New environment demands new instruments and laser harp is a perfect example of such instrument.

Another important component of the show were the lasers. I also liked the huge backstage screen that changed its color arbitrarily. The trick of combining images with music is used nowdays even in classic music concerts, for example in Carnegie Hall a portrait of the composer is displayed when his music is played.

With lasers and lights, Jean Michel was able to display complex images resembling Egyptian pyramids or extraterrestial landscape. In addition to processing lots of existing music he made a huge step forward because it looked like his music came from space.

There is only one drawback of attending a live performance. Its quality is so good that you cannot listen to any home sound system afterward. After I arrived to home I turned on the radio. It was playing a song. To me it sounded as if it needed energy badly, as if its batteries were running out of power. But it was connected to electrical grid. Nothing can match the power of sound and beauty of lasers that Jean Michel Jarre was able to achieve.