Ralph Waldo Emerson quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson might strike the right chord:
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
That's very popular thought which I seen many times from different authors. There is no right and wrong, there is only life. The nature doesn't know what is right or wrong. Humans created those terms and try to fit everything into those categories.
P.S. I seen this quote over a year ago somewhere, so saved it and only now found time to mention it in the blog.
Mark Twain quote / Цытата Марк Твена
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
-- Mark Twain
Прощение – это аромат, который фиалка дарит тому, кто ее растоптал.
-- Марк Твен
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
Great novel, it's one of those which I could not wait to listen again. The audiobook was done with amazing quality, it's not a plain reader reading the book, but with different voices and sound effects. It's like watching a movie without a picture. Very cool. It's a completely new level of the audiobooks.
Novel itself has a lot of meaning and I think shows world quite accurately. I was enjoying every moment while listening to it.
On the negative sides, there are few obvious issues which break the flow of the story for me. I've got three:
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Very often and out of the context the different characters say "Who is John Galt?". Since it's out of the context it's very clear the author added it to glue the ending. That completely breaks the flow. Such out of the context sentences work as a wake up call for the readers immersed into the story.
-
Love relationship is very unrealistic. It's hard for me to believe that multiple man who finally met the true love of their life could not care and say something like - ah cool, no problem. I love you more than anything in this world, but i'm cool to be friends. We can live and see each other everyday. I will love you forever but you can be with that other guy.
-
The final speech from John Galt over the radio was waaaay too long. It felt like that speech was written first and the rest of the story was added as an addition. The speech repeats the same idea many times and could be much shorter or broken into multiple parts during the story.
The novel had a big influence for people, that's why it spiked my interest to read it. Now I know the story, I'm interested to see what was the influence.
Parallel rendering in Rails
I will continue to expand the features in the pagelet_rails gem. Since it offers a new way of composition in Rails I've found that there are so many new things we can do. In this post, I will focus on the parallel rendering. Yes, that's right, parallel rendering in Rails. Although, it may sound advanced the concepts behind it are extremely simple. This post however is only relevant to web page rendering.
Update 2: This post was featured in RubyWeekly #318
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The book can be summed up as 'Be there where you are'. It's a good reminder to stop running in life and stop regretting about the past. Just open your eyes and look around, the life is beautiful.
The book mentions that when people get serious health issues only then they start to realise the present and finally start enjoying it. I'm just thinking can I simulate that feeling without getting health issues. Think about and imaging you have 1 more day to live, how would you feel today? And like that every day.
Overall book is written in very abstract way, which I found very hard to conceptualise. It has very few examples which would be very helpful to understand all those good sounding words.
My first personal card
Hover over the image!
Finally got my first personal cards. I went for simplicity in design and a bit stylish look with black and white contrast. It's personal and not business card as I'm not selling my service to people but rather it's a quick way to exchange contact details.
Got them printed at vistaprint for 250 for $35. The printing quality turned out to be very poor, so contacted support service and now waiting for the new batch to arrive.
Dao of Life / Дао Жизни
by Irina Hakamada / Ирина Хакамада
Change is the only constant
It's very light and quick to read. The book talks from the women's perspective most of the time, but is relevant to everybody.
The main point from the book for me was to be flexible and enjoy the life. Life is too short to worry or be upset.
The book is full of advices and experiences from Irina's life.
That includes how to teach kids, be public person, how to grow career as a woman, have strong and happy family and others.
The book is short and straight to the point, while it's still very personal.
Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto
Interesting novel about relationship. It was interesting to listen (audiobook) but I feel like I didn't get the point.
On wikipedia it says there are two stories, but the audiobook I've listened had about 5. Not sure if that's new additions or just other novels.
Improve perceived performance of your rails application with minimum effort
at Melbourne Ruby meetup
Download Slides PDF or read more
Links:
- BigPipe: Pipelining web pages for high performance
- Engineering the New LinkedIn Profile
- Play Framework & SF Scala: Jim Brikman, Composable Applications in Play, 7/23/14
- Fluent 2014: Ilya Grigorik, "Speed, Performance, and Human Perception"
- Steve Souders' Ignite presentation, "The Illusion of Speed", at Velocity 2013.
Trip to Mt.Buller
my first snow in Australia
Had a great day snowboarding at Mt.Buller today.
Probably the worst thing was the buses between car park and resort. On the way back it took us 1 hour to get from resort to car park while it should take 5 minutes. The lesson learnt, next time I will be walking.
Sandy Point Half Marathon
- Distance 10km
- Net Time 0:51:37.2
- Gun Time 0:53:30
- Split Time 0:25:34
- Age Group M18-29
- Age Group Place 25/48 (52%)
- Gender Place 144/278 (51.7%)
- Overall Place 186/580 (32%)
Riding exercises meetup #3
can't keep everybody happy
Today was the third meetup. It keeps getting better, but can't keep everybody happy. Here are some highlights:
Riding exercises meetup
the second one
Last sunday I've hosted the second "Practice riding exercises" meetup. It's a definitely improvement from the first one but still many things needs to be worked on.
Favourite gems
from Rails Camp 19
I've been asking people for the gems they would recommend to others at Rails Camp 19. This is a compiled list of answers.
Math challenge
Last friday one of my friend gave me a math challenge. You've given four numbers 6, 6, 5 and 2, you need to find 3 math operations to get 17 as a result. You have to use all four numbers and only once each. Order of numbers can be any.
I couldn't figure it out in my head so have to write a ruby script to iterate over all combinations, which turned out as a great coding exercise.
Let the president lead
Proposal to Ruby Australia
TL;DR; I'd like to propose new organisation structure for Ruby Australia: decrease committee role and give more power to the president.
Recently I went to Rails Camp 19 in Adelaide and as always Ruby Australia General Meeting was held there. I've seen many committee meetings but only now realised that the organisational model for Ruby Australia is chosen incorrectly.
Gall's law
Gall's Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.
Bystander effect
The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.
-- Wikipedia
You never change things fighting existing reality...
You never change things fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-- Buckminster Fuller
Советы Олигарха (трилогия)
Сергей Кареев
Прочитал где-то 2 года назад. Быстро и легко читается и есть что подчеркнуть хоть советы и правда нацелены на сливки общества.
Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman
This is great book which I've read multiple times. First many years ago and last time about two years ago. Teaches you that relationships are hard work and not be to taken for granted.
The Sheltering Sky (1990)
- Are you lost?
- Yes
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times and a small number, really.
How many more times will you remember a certain
afternoon of your childhood... some afternoon so deeply a part of your being so that you can't conceive your life without it?Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps 20.And yet it all seems limitless...
The Romanovs / Романовы (2013)
This is one the best documentary series.
The Romanov dynasty played a hugely important role in world history, and the series highlights the life stories and characters of the tsars, recounting their rise to power and their contribution to the dynasty, their merits and their faults, their achievements and mistakes, their victories and defeats in war.
The series also examines the Russian form of 'Caesarism' as a system of state administration - its advantages and drawbacks and how the Russian state changed under the Romanov's rule.
THE ROMANOVS is told in eight epic one-hour episodes using a unique combination of magnificent CGI animation and dramatic reconstruction with careful and accurate attention paid to each period.
The great thing it's available for free in russian and english. Subtitles are also available, which is a great way to learn russian/english language.
Ruby Inline Tests
Did you know you can inline tests with your ruby code in the same file?
After reading the title Embedding a Test Suite in a Single-file Ruby App (Part 1) I thought: aha! finally somebody has done it and used ruby data block to store tests. However I was disappointed as there was another approach, which I think is less elegant.
Below I show you a proof of concept of embedding tests in ruby code.
Volunteering at RailsGirls Next
at Melbourne
Spend the whole today at RailsGirls Melbourne. Met many great people and had fun. It's the first time I've done it and would recommend others to do it.
I was helping RailsGirls Next group and should say exercises were too difficult and boring as they require minimum coding and mostly mathematical logic.
