Alex Radzishevsky homepage

Added photos taken during family vacation in Finland (August 2014), and also from trips to Netherlands and Germany (October 2012).

Added some photos from trips to Korea, Japan, Italy and Amsterdam.

I have been granted a U.S. Patent No. 8,116,514 for the watermarking technology behind AWT2.

Added some photos from trips to St. Petersburg (2010), Taiwan (2011) and Las Vegas (2012).

We are all going to hell in a shopping basket

manual gear in cars
cooling fans in computers
man tie
tennis

The following questions have been swirling in my head for years. Unfortunately, I’ll never know the answers.

1. If we assume that the Universe was created as a result of a Big Bang, does it explain anything? What exactly exploded and where it came from?

2. If we assume that the root source of all is a God, does it explain anything? Who is he, where he lives, what it consists of and where did he come from?

3. When I die, will I know the answers to the first two questions?

Several years ago I almost totally switched to Skype (from ICQ/Miranda). We also use Skype at work as the main communication tool between two offices.

During last 3 years I notice that communication via Skype is getting worse and worse. I’m not talking about voice quality, I’m talking about simple delivery of messages. Due to some reason (probably due to peer-to-peer Skype’s nature), I see my messages cannot be delivered to a person appearing online. It’s sometimes funny to see that two computers in one room can “see” some contact online, but with only one of them it’s possible to communicate normally with the contact. Funny, pity and annoying at the same time.

Additionally, instead of getting better in terms of GUI, Skype becomes uglier from year to year. I express my personal opinion and experience, but I hear the same notes of disappointment from time to time here and there.

Is there any better replacement?

…yeah, I heard many stories about how Linux has improved during last N years, and how user-friendly it is now, and that it will soon rule the world (and of course that Windows sucks and must d1e).

Wanna the real world story? Here we go.
I installed a fresh copy of the brand new Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. Right after install, I copied a small Linux program and tried to run it in the terminal. Look:

aradzish@ubuntu:~/Desktop/linux$ ls -la
total 13584
drwxrwxrwx 2 aradzish aradzish     4096 2010-08-31 02:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 aradzish aradzish     4096 2010-08-31 02:01 ..
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish      212 2010-02-16 07:43 awt2_gui
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish   212117 2010-08-30 06:13 awt2_gui-bin
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish  2542140 2010-08-28 07:05 libQtCore.so.4
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish 10494484 2010-08-28 07:22 libQtGui.so.4

aradzish@ubuntu:~/Desktop/linux$ ./awt2_gui-bin
bash: ./awt2_gui-bin: No such file or directory

What??? WTF?

I immediately discussed this issue with someone experienced in Linux and I was told that it’s natural since the program I try to run uses 32-bit libraries, and that I need to install a special package ‘ia32-libs’ to be able running 32-bit applications. So I did, I run

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
and got my app working.

Now tell me, do  you seriously think that normal user can know this? Do you seriously think that with all this crap Linux is really ‘user-friendly’?

P.S. I was additionally told that Ubuntu is the least crap of all existing Linux craps… Funny, huh?