Andrey Vystavkin Blog

Few days ago, my boss start going around the project deadlines, hoping that I’ll submit everything on time.Having a bad experience dealing with IT’s, a guy has been doing dump HTML with few PHP includes for about two years.No wonder, why he was amazed when I told him that all the projects would be finished by the beginning of August.

Keeping these deadlines in mind, the boss started to look for even faster alternative solutions. Well, and he found some.

Today’s working day started from the conversation, whether it’d be useful to buy a ready-made solution for his website, so I’ve decided to take a look at what he’s found:

1. Portfolio of 8 sites with “asdf” test data.
2. Admin is accessible with “admin/admin” username password combination
3. 7 out of 8 sites got partially finished control panels - working only 30% of it. (Data mismatch, no input validations, or JS validation only)

But the site my boss was especially interested in just rocked my heart. Here’s a screenshot:

It’s like: pay first, and you might get this CMS later

Chris Anderson from Wired Mag gives a great article covering some issues concerning Programming environment of Lego Mindstorms robots using different programming languages.

For anyone who’s ever programmed, there’s nothing better for understanding programming logic than properly tabbed and commented code, all in a column of text as God intended. And for your kids, there’s no time like the present to introduce real programming, using coding conventions that will be as relevant in the decades to come as they were in decades past.

Simple and straight advantage of RobotC platform - coding in plain C, with well written Documentation on each function used for NXT’s. For the last month, RobotC upgraded from v1.05 to 1.10, so there are some improvements and updates from Carnegie Mellon University developers.

A great news is that for our projects on Robotics and Automation subject, we have switched from Microsoft Robotics Studio to RobotC due to some reasons:

• Lack of documentation on MRS (Professional MRS from Wrox will be published at the end of the year)
• Missing some simulation sensors’ files for NXT (can’t test all the capacities of sensors without robot)
• Not all of students run Windows (but it can be managed via Wine)
• Full access to encoders and sensors data in simple programming manner.

As more sensors are about to come in stock, I believe NXT will become one of the easiest ways of implementing Robotics concepts and algorithms for students.

Some of you already know that for my senior Bachelor project I decided to do Robotics & Automation, since it is a brand new field of study for me.

Due to the fact that this project includes a lot of sensor fusion techniques and algorithms for positioning, I had to go through lots of IEEE research papers, since our university library in Limassol doesn’t have many books on the subject.

What I noticed was the fact that most of the research work goes from Northern Europe and Northern part of the USA:

• Germany
• USA (particularly UMC and MIT research centres)
• Finland

This is just a shallow list of countries involved in the research, however there are more to add. I’m not taking Japan or South Korea in account since this field of science is quiet popular there and it’s Asia - it’s completely different story. The main question of this article is: will this type of computer science and engineering become popular in Cyprus?

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Night. A thin line of seaside road’s light going along Limassol. A stormy wind at the sea, no people around, just a couple dancing waltz close to the pier of Kanika Enarios.

At these moments, I regret that I don’t carry camera with my - that was a beautiful picture!

As it appeared, in few weeks, somewhere in the old city part of Limassol, the municipality plans to open a Limassol University of Technology. Great idea, especially when the main studying resorts like Intercollege and Frederick Institute are planning to achieve the status of University this year.

After studying three years in the institute, I’ll be graduating already the university: sounds good, but already some changes started to piss off:

• Someone decided to start filtering Lab computers according to the Internet usage (they could have left at least admin logins unfiltered,damn!)
• The rumours about increasing payment fees up to the “university” level (will be equal to 1 year MSc payment fees).
• Free wi-fi over the whole building. (Did anyone tell where to find the installation settings, or it’s for VIP’s?!)

Well, in September, all filials of Frederick Institute should be prepared for getting the status of the university, which university, and who’ll be prepared by that time and how well - no one knows…

Finally, I’ve reached a gym. I was thinking of going there since January. But I managed to get there only today.

A funny thing is that trying to quit one of my bad habits, the rest disappear by themselves. But if I gonna start with one of them again, all those habits come back. Free of charge, the whole damn package!

This time, there will be few changes - hopefully, gym will help me to get rid of those habits.