Author: Sergey Vasilyev

Canada to lose IT

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One of the goals of my voyage was a research (not scientific research, of course, but mostly personal, subjective research) on what Canada is for me, what long-term and wide-range opportunities it can give to me, both in life and in work. And as a software developer, I’m very interested in what the Canadian Information Technology (IT) sector is like.

All hail infrastructure!

Maybe I am not the best IT professional of all time. Maybe I have no experience in running a business. But I do know the very key point for success of almost any business in any place: infrastructure. Every business is delivery: delivery of goods to buyers, delivery of services to customers, delivery of resources to partners. And every kind of delivery needs an infrastructure: roads, flights, a mail system, Internet, communications, and so on. It needs a cheap and reliable infrastructure.

Before I came here to Canada I was expecting to see some progressive country, a smaller brother of the U.S. What I see here in Toronto is disappointing me very much. The most significant things look even worse than in Russia, where I am from; worse than in that third-world, prehistoric, corrupted “mafia state” with bears on the streets and vodka flowing from the taps.

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COM Surrogate has stopped working in Windows Photo Viewer

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Suddenly my Microsoft Windows 7 started to throw “COM Surrogate” error when I try to view any picture with its built-in Windows Photo Viewer. The advices which you can find in the internet says to reinstall Nero or codec packs. I have neither of them, but only more or less clean Windows installation and all its usual updates.

In a nutshell, “COM Surrogate” is DllHost.exe process created by any other process, which wants to execute some code from any DLL (code library), but it doesn’t want to execute the code in its own space since it does not trust the code in terms of stability. So it creates a “surrogate” to execute the code. If that DLL code dies during execution, only DllHost.exe surrogate process dies (giving us this “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error) and the initial process stills alive. If this killing code were executed in the initial process directly, then the initial process dies instead of surrogate.

Though actually we have no need to care what it is and what all this means and how things work. We want our photos being shown.

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Loose Leaf Tea Shops in Toronto

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I used to buy leaf tea in regular grocery stores in Russia. You know, on one side there are tea bags, on the other side there leaf boxes. It was some kind of surprise here in Canadian groceries to find tea bags only. No weighed, no loose tea. Don’t know why.

If you will ask me what’s the difference, I’ll hit you in your face with my fist. Really. This is obvious. Bag tea is not a tea indeed, it is a sawdust with artificial aroma. Technically, tea bags are made of a waste which comes out of normal tea making process. I drink that sawdust too, so as instant coffe — when I’m in hurry or too lazy. But they are two different kind of beverages.

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Here comes the panic, here comes the cure

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Don't Panic - Marvin android robot from Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy

Recently I’ve found one funny aspect of myself: I am not okay when everything is okay.

Moscow

Once in a while, few years ago, I had a very long period of depression for maybe 3-5 years. It was not that medical depression with anti-depressant drugs to eat all the day as in some movies, of course. Just a “writer’s block” applied to a programmer (programmer is a writer in some meanings). Then, once in a while, I decided to stop being miserable, made a plan, and started to implement it, step by step.

That is how I’ve relocated  from provincial Krasnoyarsk to the rich and perspective Moscow. It was not easy for such a hick to move to the capital and almost the only prosperous city in the country. Rent, job, friends, funds – everything was a problem. And I’ve solved them all, one by one.

After 3½ years in Moscow I was as prosperous as the city was. Well, maybe I wasn’t rich businessman or whatsoever — it is just not my field. But as a hired webdev professional I was fine: I could find good job in 2-3 interviews only, I could earn 1.5-2 times more money than average developer earns, I could make a career from ordinary developer to head of department in 1 year (that is surprisingly fast indeed), so on.

The Malady

At that point I decided life has became too easy, and thus too boring. So instead of eventually growing further, I intentionally invented new big problem for myself. I decided to relocate to another country. What a challenge!

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Security and Safety of Sensitive Personal Files

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locks with pictograms

In the previous post on categories and priorities of personal files I described how I do classify my files by the ways I handle their safety and security. Now it’s time to describe some of the specific approaches: security of sensitive (private, secret, classified) information.

The difference between security and safety may be non-obvious for some people, so I will describe my vision on this (I may be wrong – correct me then please). “Safety” means the information must not be lost; the loss of information is a fail. “Security” means the information must not be leaked; it is better to be lost or destroyed, but not leaked.

As it is seen now, these goals conflict with each other a bit, but one (me or you or someone else) has to find a balance of security and safety for each category of the files or for some files directly. And here is the essay on how I solve this dilemma and ensure the security.

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Categories and Priorities of Personal Files

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As I’ve written earlier in my story of files losses and methods to prevent this, I’ve tried to keep all possible information throughout the time and space. But soon I understood this information is not homogeneous and different kinds of files differ significantly in the manner they should be handled.

So I decided to make some background classification and prioritizing of files I have and I work with. Well, actually, it was not done strictly before my researches, as science requires, but evaluated during this research. But who cares.

Classes of information are formed on how I do handle it, how I do access or modify it, and how I do share or do not share it. Priorities are subjectively weighted based on the cost of the information loss and leak, and these costs include both money and torments.

Here they are: [Read more…]

The Luggage I Lug

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For the last decade I’ve produced tons of personal information: photos, documents, drafts, notes, ideas, etc. Almost all these files are unique, since they were never published, and probably will never be. In most cases they are private and sensitive either for me or for other people I contact with.

Here is the short story of the ways I handled the information I had, of my mistakes, losses and torments up to the nowadays, and what I’m going to write about in this series of blog posts. [Read more…]

What Is All This About

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So, after a couple of weeks of solving real life issues, I’m back. The second step that I wanted to do in this blog is to determine its subject area. This is required not for you as readers, but mostly for me as writer. Without borders I run the risk of falling down to describing of everyday life and trolling. I like to troll, of course, especially for political topics, but that is not what I want to do in this blog.

Since I’m a web developer, this blog is about web development. But not web programming only or site making only as you could think. It is about development, building, constructing of information systems in and for the Web. Development includes all stages of the product lifetime: analysis, design, coding/programming, testing, deployment and support. That is the first main subject of this blog.

The second main subject comes from my strong desire to migrate from Russia, where I live, to other countries. Current primary goal is migration to Canada as a skilled IT-worker. Secondary, but still wished goal is USA. That is why I am learning and practicing English so much. Anyway, English is not the only problem on the way to those countries. Bureaucracy is. Breaking through immigration law barriers is the second main subject.

The third subject, but not least, follows from the second one. Finding a job while being abroad is a very very very hard task to solve. On a highly competitive market of IT specialists I have significant drawback: I have no work permission in neither of noted countries, so I can not be hired as easily as “local” specialists can. But that won’t stop me too.

That’s it. In short, this blog is about professional life of yet another web developer with his successes and failures, problems and solutions, wishes, goals and the only way to glory.

Maybe you will find nothing new and interesting here. And maybe you will find a piece of gold here – me in person ;-) Who cares? Anyway, you are always welcome to comment and to discuss, to suggest new topics and to criticize existing ones. Just because I am calm and friendly.

The First Word

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Hello everyone reading this blog.

Most of you will never ever look at this post, since it is the very very first post made, when there were no any readers in this blog. But for the purpose of testing my new standalone blog platform, I write it. And I have to say the WordPress is awesome!

Lets finish now, because this is just a test and wouldn’t be too big. A bit later I’ll try to formalize what this blog will be about, and will try to follow these guidelines in future.

Hope you will be interested.