Leonid Mamchenkov

Happy 10th birthday, WordPress!

Today is the WordPress Day. Thousands and thousands of people gather in hundreds of cities and towns all over the world to celebrate WordPress’s 10th birthday. In 10 years, WordPress went from just another PHP application for bloggers to a feature-rich platform that runs a huge chunk of the Web. WordPress came a long way, grew and matured. As did the community (of which I am a proud member) that developed, designed, translated, documented, optimized, argued, sponsored, tested, troubleshooted, and generally improved the system in so many different ways.

A big thank you goes to each and everyone involved in WordPress.org, Auttomatic and all those gadzillion projects. But, I also want to specially thank Matt Mullenweg, without who, I think WordPress wouldn’t be the same, if it would be at all. Thanks man, you are an inspiration to many. Keep it up and happy birthday.

P.S.: As I was writing this post, I realized that there was no meetup organized in Limassol, so, albeit with a very short notice, let’s get together and have a pint at Alio Olio after work. I’ll be there from around 5:30 until whatever. Here is a quick link to Meetup event.

UA Testing with Selenium and PHPUnit

Java 101 : file handling

From Geek and Poke.

I love you, MATE!

Three seconds after switching to MATE Desktop, I am in love. It’s been a long while now that I’ve been trying to get used to Gnome 3, gave up, switched to KDE 4, which is better, but nowhere near as good as Gnome 2. All of a sudden, all those distant memories of a useful, stable, working desktop environment which is completely out of your way are a reality again.

I’ve only done it on my home laptop for now. But with positive feelings that strong, I think my work laptop will be switched over on Monday. Huge thank you goes to both everyone who made Gnome 2 an awesome desktop and those who forked the MATE. Please keep it up!

Inside an atom

Imagine a chamber. Now flip on the switch that creates a strong electrical field inside that chamber. Now imagine not one, but two laser guns mounted inside that chamber. Flip the switch that activates both of these guns and their targeting system. It does sound a bit scary already, doesn’t? Well, all we need know is a target. Imagine that. A moving one, inside the chamber. BZZZT! Laser guns zap the target, which now rips apart and hangs in the middle of the air, because of the magnetic forces of the electrical field. Snap the picture!

Cool, isn’t it? Well, now do a bit of scaling. The target that you just zapped in the chamber is the size of the hydrogen atom. It’s not tiny. It’s beyond tiny. You probably will need an industrial size telescope to even see the chamber! Slashdot points to the story that covers the experiment.

But, maybe, I’m just way out of sync. According to one of the Slashdot comments, it’s not as exciting as I picture it:

Now this would have been a fundamental breakthrough if it would have been done many decades ago. These days, we have extremely high confidence in our theoretical/computational models of the wavefunction of atoms and molecules. “Just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists?” Naah, this stuff has been well-known since before most of us were born.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to belittle this accomplishment – it’s all kinds of cool that they pulled off this experiment in the first place, and notwithstanding the huge body of other experimental evidence, it’s a beautiful direct confirmation of longstanding quantum mechanics theory. And as mentioned in TFA, provided they can scale this up to larger and less well-understood systems than the hydrogen atom, it might make it possible to obtain unique data on nontrivial materials like molecular wires. The only problem I have is that the Science editor is overselling it a bit; at the end of the day, it’s not going to change our quantum mechanical worldview the slightest.