Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort

Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort

Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country’s space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

On one hand, it’s nice to see that they are at least pretending to pick the good causes.  On the other hand, it sad that history shows that very little of these money, if any at all, will make it to the space programs.  Most of it will disappear in the same way as before…

One million views

It’s been a while since I posted any milestones for this blog, so here you go.

1 million views

 

Yup, according to WordPress stats, my blog pages have been viewed a 1,000,000 times.  Now, they were probably viewed way more than that in the full version of the history, but the plugin that counts them was only installed in 2007, if I remember correctly.  Also, there used to be a period of time when this blog was served via an external cache, so only a few of the visitors triggered a real page request.

Still, it’s nice to see the number build up.

According the graph above, I’m getting significantly fewer visitors in the last year or so.  That’s because I’ve been running between several jobs and side projects, and at some point nearly stopped blogging completely.  But I am back now, so that should go up as well.

Facebook Android app update is insane …

… even for me.  I’ve been saying for a while that the privacy is pretty much dead, but this new update of Facebook Android app is asking for way too may permissions even for my taste.  Some of the things that it “needs” now are: access to make phone calls without user intervention, accessing information about other running applications, and drawing over other applications’ screens, so you won’t even know anymore who is responsible for what you are seeing.

When I got an update notification, I thought, at first, that that was a mistake of some sort or a really late and lame April 1st joke.  Albeit it’s not.  Even Slashdot runs the story.

For now, I’ll hold the old version.  Maybe Facebook will rectify this new change.  If not, then I’ll get rid of it and go back to Twitter and, possibly, Google+.

WordPress version check

With all the news of brute force attacks against WordPress, I thought I’d at least update the installations running on my servers.  Since there are quite a few instances of WordPress on some of them, I was in need of some automated way to check the installed version, hence – the WordPress version check script.

I have some really old versions that I wouldn’t update automatically, so that functionality is not in the script yet (hopefully in the future). But as they say, knowing the problem is half of the solution or something like that.

If you don’t like mine, build your own, using WordPress.org API.

I can’t stand that this is what America is; that w…

I can’t stand that this is what America is; that we trade our children’s lives for the opportunity to purchase items specifically invented for killing. I can’t stand it. It’s pathetic and embarrassing and barbaric.

Jason Kottke