Sergey Pisarenko

I am fascinated with photography. A picture inspires, tells a story, expresses an author’s view, captures a fleeting moment, gives an aesthetic pleasure. But there’s a way to kill inspiration and make this art forever painful for oneself. Ever since I’ve purchased my own digital camera 4 years ago I’ve been both blessed and burdened by photography. I have even purposefully abstained from taking any pictures for at least a couple of lengthy periods. [Read More]

I honestly would not anticipate writing about Microsoft Windows. Not after I have irrevocably and irreversibly switched to Linux and OSX years ago when I was studying at the university.

But here I am, happily typing this in Sublime2 editor on my desktop computer running nothing else but Microsoft Windows 8. Yes, the same computer that had been running Gentoo Linux a week or so ago!

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A couple of weeks ago I have deactivated my Facebook account. I’ve been intending to do that for months. Finally, I’ve left the service for good. Looking all the way back to 2006 I don’t have much to show for it. You can’t call me an addict because I’ve never been hooked as much as people around me. Nevertheless, whenever I had cared to open Facebook’s trendy blue interface I have been bombarded with meaningless status updates and viral junk. [Read More]

It’s 1:35am right now and something really bad has happened about 4 hours ago. First, Time Machine on my Mac Mini complained that the backup network disk became inaccessible. Then network shares have stopped responding on all computers. This means something wrong has happened with the wonderful reliable NAS server that I had built weeks ago.

First, I connect to the server via SSH and start poking around. Once I notice that file-system commands, such as ls, cause sessions to hang I become worrisome. I do a reboot hoping that solves the problem. 10 minutes pass. The server does not start.

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I’ve been working on a simple hobby project. The goal is to build an Android application which, as it turns out, requires a backend. The most important task of the backend is to perform certain things at specified times in future.

In this post I will explain how I’ve designed a simple scheduler which relies on AppEngine cron, tasks and the datastore. We will make a new trivial AppEngine application that ties everything together. Although I normally prefer Python but I’ve chosen Java for this project. I guess that’s because I wanted some consistency with the Android counter-part that I’m also developing.

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You may notice that I am somewhat obsessed with reducing the number of possessions in my life. This directly contradicts another, though negative, characteristic of mine - to get more gadgets and possessions.

Recently, I have had a lot of good progress on challenging the negative trait. Not only I’ve been more successful on overcoming the purchasing obsession but I’ve also found ways to enjoy more and get creative at reusing what I already have.

One of my recent projects was to combine several devices into one. I’ve got rid of Sony Playstation 3 and merged 2 computers together. Here’s the end-result:

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Recently I came up with an idea for a mobile application. To be honest, it’s more of an excuse to try my hand at writing Android applications and do something new. Since I had almost zero experience with Android I have started by reading the official Google guides and then doing some napkin grade designs of the application architecture. Immediately I have realized that app requires a back-end as some of the things cannot be reliably performed on the handset itself. [Read More]