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Oleg's Blog

by Oleg Melnychuk

Posts tagged with "work"

Month of work — and here's first beta!

Tuesday, 4. December 2007, 20:45:40

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Well... One month of work on the online map of my city and now it's first beta is out:
http://map.krivbass.info/

We did a great job actually... Two guys 'measured' almost every piece of our city by themselves. Every disctrict, every street, every building... And just two guys with theodolite — Yury and Igor! (their work took several years actually)

Another two guys — Andrey and me brought it all to work. Andrey made all server-side scripting and configuration and I made a very simple design, XHTML coding, CSS styling and user intercation through JavaScript (AJAX).

This was my first 'serious' web project with AJAX and DHTML.
Andrey also has his first experience in developing web applications. He's application software developer.

Now it's just regular GIS that allows you to search streets and districts and navigate through a map: zoom-in, out and move it. Well, sure... There are some small aberrations and bugs there, but they will be fixed soon :smile: But even more functionality just haven't been added yet! Like user accounts, advanced search feature, rich user feedback, business search etc. There's no any other content now except the map itself :frown: But it'll be added asap. The main aim — the map itself.

By the way, we placed there some social advertise banners: one against AIDS and another is for donor association support. It's such a great feeling to do something beneficent, actually!!! Even if it's not so much, but... It's something you CAN do within yours $300/month salary. And I think it's good!

P.S.: We also added a small Opera banner :up: at the top of the site! :smile: Hoping it'll also help to spread the word about this great browser!

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— I'm dying, and I wanna take all your work files with me! © Adobe Illustrator

Friday, 9. November 2007, 10:07:46

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Damned Adobe! I've never expected to get something alike from the Adobe's flagman products! Here's the brief story:

I was working on some great illustration for two days. This night I thought it will be done. I had three temporary versions of that illustration (I making them while I'm working on something big enough) — each one is the snapshot of the 'critical' stages of my work. The picture was almost photorealistic because of the big amount of vector objects, layers, different bleeding modes, opacity, gradients etc. and, thus, the file weight was about 60 Mb (Adobe Illustrator had grew up to 650 Mb in my RAM).
And when I was attempted to create another layer, Illustrator just crashed.

— Well.. Ok!
I simply relaunched it. I haven't been disappointed at the moment because I knew that I saved the file just about a minute before the crash. I was surprised a bit when the file I worked on wasn't listed at the startup dialog into the 'Recent files' section. So I pressed Ctrl+O and pointed the Open File Dialog to the project's work directory. It was empty... I thought there was wrong file filter chosen by default at the dialog, but no! It was set to 'All supported formats'!

— Hm... :-| It's not funny at all!!! Where's my files? ]:->
No one of these three different versions has left... That's very weird! It's even mystical for me!!

— Well, Ok... I'm working with some PARTICULAR file... Something went wrong with the program? WHY DID IT DELETE ALL THE FILES IN THE FOLDER? Here's my versions:
  • The file is too big for further operations?
    But I have 2 Gb of RAM on my workstation and Illustrator took only 650 of it — where's the problem? I've even closed all other applications! Even Opera =-O
    And what about other files in this folder? What was their fault?
  • Some hardware memory bugs?
    I don't think so... I have 2x1 Gb of Kingston DDR RAM working in dual channel mode.
    And what about other files, again? They were not in the RAM at all!
  • There was not enough HDD space?
    First one — for what?? I have enough free RAM to operate in, and the second — I have MORE than enough free disk space!
    Khe-khe... And what about files that are ALREADY stored?
  • Maybe "Morphine" I was listened to?
    Yeah! That's the only eplanation to what have happened this night!.. or
  • Some *VERY* stupid software bug made by Adobe
    Crash? Okay — go to hell! *BUT* leave the work files alone!!! Especially the one you haven't worked with during the crash...

I tried to recover the files on that logical partition but all vain :frown:
I think the problem is in myself too... I've forgot about the KISS-principle [Keep It Simple, Stupid] and now I'm down in the dump...

5 Comments

Music listening and work performance

Saturday, 15. September 2007, 16:23:08

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In this post I'll try to gather some of the most interesting facts and researches I've found in this area.

The one from the SAGE Website:
Effects of music on work performance, in this case, software design, may be explained by increases in state positive affect. Data from 56 (male = 41, female = 15) developers were obtained from four different Canadian software companies. Data were collected in the participants’ actual work environments over five weeks. Results indicated that state positive affect and quality-of-work were lowest with no music, while time-on-task was longest when music was removed. Narrative responses revealed the value of music listening for positive mood change and enhanced perception on design while working. Evidence is provided of the presence of a learning curve in the use of music for positive mood alteration.

Another interesting research by Christine Phillips:
Interestingly, participants in the Classical music condition performed better despite the fact that they contributed more off-task comments to one another than the No Music condition and about the same number of off-task comments as the Punk music group. Most of the off-task comments were personal in nature (i.e., emoticons, jokes)...

And yet another interesting article by the member of masterpapers.com. Sharon White:
...music can improve efficiency in repetitive tasks. They also concluded that any music that is played should be “lively and upbeat”, and the length and scheduling of the music are important. Some of the experiments involved the music being played in intervals rather than continuously. The results suggested that this was the best way to improve the efficiency

and more of it:
The original statement “The use of music enhances the working environment of the IT professional” may be the case in some instances, however, as shown, the odds of pleasing every employee are very slim. In the attempt to please every single employee, some essentials are lost. For example, giving every employee headphones to listen to his own music on, keeps everyone happy, but employees who don’t hear conversations may lose some efficiency, and the workplace can even, possibly, become a dangerous environment to work in due to alarms or warnings not being heard. If music is going to be played across the office as a whole, considerations have to be made. The considerations such as speaker placement, music genre and whether music is played in intervals or continuously, have to be well thought through so as not to annoy or aggravate certain employees. All decisions need to be carefully thought through, so as to please every employee, therefore getting the most efficient workforce possible. As studies have shown, the best music to play to get the most out of the workforce is soft, slow, instrumental, repetitive music, rather than fast, loud, lyrical music.

See also: my blog post about the music for a work.

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Music For Work

Thursday, 30. August 2007, 13:50:52

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I don't know how about you, but "work" and "music" for me is not only some kind of synonym, the one unit, but it's something like the synergy. If I could select the music that will be the exact reflection of my current mood or the project I'm working about — I bet the 90% of my work is already done :smile:

As far as my mood could be very different I need to keep a large music library at my workstation. Now it counts 17 409 songs. It is equivalent to approximately 55 days of non-stop listening and takes 105 Gb on my hard drive.

To organize such amount of songs I'm using Apple iTunes. It looks like Apple developers engineering that program had the same problems that I had before choosing iTunes :wink: What could I say about it — Apple is Apple :smile: No any other media player can boast such a level of intuitivity, usibility, simplicity, sound quality and performance at one time.

With the help of the Media Browser you can choose, for example, only one or more genres to play from. The same could be done with artists and albums. You can choose albums you want to play right now even if it would be from different artists and in different genres.

That's so handy — only a few clicks and it's done! You can quick search whole library and play songs from the search result or filter them even more till you get what you want to listen to.

iTunes can even keep your music folder organized. Just after adding files to the library iTunes creates a folder with the name of the artist, then the folder with the album name in it and copying all the song files into if. That's all. You don't need to search your hard drive to find your song file. Btw you can just drag that file from your iTunes window to any folder or other program (instant messanger :wink: for example) if the recipient supports drag'n'drop.

If you don't know what to "feed to" your current mood — iTunes could help you to figure that out. You can use it's feature called "Party shuffle". It mix (shuffle) all the music in your library via some interesting algorythm and you getting a list of the songs from different genres and different artists (and albums of course :wink: )

And at the end — you can toggle iTunes to the Mini Player mode and back that is very cute :smile:


So, enough about iTunes right now. If you want to dip into the work you need the music that would be all the time at the background. That's why I'm prefer not to listen to the songs (and genres) that too often (or always) founded at the foreground at work.

Well, here's some of my favourite music I like to listen to when I'm working:
  • Nino Katamadze & Insight (Jazz)
  • Morphine [all albums] (Indie Rock) /* must listen */
  • Rob Dougan - Furious Angels (Electronica & Instrumental with incomparable vocal)
  • Robert Miles & Trilok Gurtu (Acid Jazz)
  • Unreal Tournament 2004 Soundtracks (mix of almost every modern music genres without vocals)
  • Therion - Vovin (Symphonic metal)
  • Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out of Season (Folk)
  • Marcus Miller - M2 (Jazz with great bass guitar)
  • Fourplay - Heartfelt (Jazz)
  • The Cranberries [all albums] (Rock)
  • Arch Enemy - Doomsday Machine (Metal) /* when i need to get awaken :wink: */

The list isn't top-to-bottom. Some genres may be assigned not correctly but... You may get the idea about it at least :smile:

EDIT:

Adding next item to the top of the list! Favourite one!
  • Pink Martini (Latin Jazz)

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