Nice whitewater video

The guys rafted down the river of Chulyshman in the Altai Mountains, Russia using 2x- and 4x-catarafts (note: paddlers of catarafts commonly used in Russia are sitting on the hulls rather than in between).

The nginx web server has more than 3.6% of the worldwide market share

According to Netcraft’s June 2009 Web Server Survey the nginx web server has more than 3.6% of the worldwide market share which makes it the fifth most used web server worldwide. Among the million busiest sites the nginx is doing even better: it is on the third place (after Apache and Microsoft). Well, it is very impressive! And I am even more impressed by the fact that it has been developing by just one guy, Igor Sysoev of Rambler (a Russian web search engine).

P.S. Technically, it should be noted that, as far as I know, the nginx is often used as a front-end web server, i.e., the nginx is serving a static content itself and passes requests for dynamic content to a back-end Apache server. So, this means that the sizable fraction of abovementioned 3.6% of servers are actually using the nginx+Apache rather than the nginx only.

An interview with Leslie Lamport

It is a shame that I knew Leslie Lamport as the creator of LaTex only. In fact, the LaTeX system is just one of his remarkable contributions. Anyway, here is the interview with him, worth to read. What he says about the process of writing is specifically interesting. But I disagree on his treatment of “drawing pictures” (for understanding what/how a program should do before starting to code). The proverbial wisdom has, in fact, quite opposite meaning – “A picture is worth a thousand words”. So, while the process of “drawing pictures” is, clearly, not a substitute for thinking it facilitates thinking.

Nice example of data visualization

I am really impressed by the Gapminder approach to present statistical data (mostly, economic and demographic data) in a highly interactive and visually compelling way. For instance, watch the video discussing the world population growth. By dynamic monitoring and visualizing only two parameters (life expectancy and number of children per woman) the graph delivers more information about the world demographics than a proper article with a number of charts, tables, etc. Particularly, it is very entertaining to see how the countries are tend to move towards upper-left corner, where life expectancy is high and number of children is around two. Another interesting thing is to inspect countries’ trajectories on the graph: one can clearly notice demographic differences among countries, e.g., Tanzania of 2007 is demographically at the position of Chile in 1950.

Perhaps the best thing here is that you can create your own dynamic bubble graphs based on your own data! Actually, there are even two ways to do that: Google Motion Chart helps with relatively simple visualizations while Google Visualization API covers more advanced needs. How come Google? Because the visualization technology of Gapminder was acquired by Google in 2007.

“We need foreigner’s skills”, says the nice video made by Finnish Ministry of Labour

You can see the video via this link. I would say, it is a quite honest advert. Didn’t see any specific embellishing or something like that. Though, “brilliantly-organized day-care system” is certainly an overstatement

PhD Comics: We’re all doomed

It’s too bad that I had no idea about PhD Comics when I actually was a PhD candidate Very entertaining! E.g., enjoy the following strip:

Link to my website

See my website here