2012s

Speech bubble custom border control in Silverlight

Recently, I was trying to find a Silverlight control, which works like a standard Border, but looks like a Speech Bubble instead. This means the border would have a "leader" triangle, which could point to a related visual element.

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Machine Learning class at Stanford online

Several days ago, I've received a Statement of Accomplishment document from Andrew Ng and Machine Learning online class team.

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Hunting memory leaks in Silverlight

Recently, I've spent a couple of days seeking and fixing memory leaks in our Silverlight application. It might be tough sometimes, but it's a good 'brain-teasing' practice and it's a good way to learn how inner things work.

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Gauge control with two values (Silverlight)

While developing the dashboard to display several performance indexes, I bumped into the task of visualizing the pair of numbers on a single gauge. One number would show a person's performance metric, while the other one would display the person group's performance indicator to compare with. I couldn't find a ready control to use, so I decided to design my own.

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Books that I've recently read

My reviews of "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki, "How to Become a Businessman" and "I'm Just Like Anyone Else" by Oleg Tinkov.

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Multi-level telerik's TileView

We were investigating the options for visual representation of hierarchical dashboard in our Silverlight application. This means, we want to display the number of gauges with tree-like structure. Here is a sample...

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Google Transit API research

Recently, Google has launch a Transit service for the biggest cities of Russia: a service to caculate routes with public transport options. As a part of RnD for upcoming project, I need to understand whether there's any feasible way to calculate public transport route programmatically. I.e. I need Google Transit API.

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Books that I’ve recently read, part 2

Reviews of "Rework" by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams and "The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur" by Mike Michaliwicz.

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API to get the list of hotels

In our travelling application, we need to show the list of hotels in a city (St. Petersburg, Russia at the moment, but more will be needed in the future). The idea was to find a hotel information provider, and then upload the complete list into our own database.

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Model Thinking class at Coursera

I've recently received a statement of accomplishment document for Coursera's online Model Thinking Class that I took in April-May this year.

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Enable jinja2 and i18n translations on Google AppEngine

My initial goal was to make our new application (based on python/AppEngine) translatable. All strings in the application must be translatable. Translations should preferably stored in separate files. It should be easy to use the translations both in .py files and html templates.

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Google adds Public Transit into API

Now, both Google Directions Web Services and Google Maps JavaScript API include building the routes with Public Transit.

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Use Fiddler to debug urlfetch requests in Google AppEngine

We use a lot of web crawling to get data from third-party websites. Some crawling is not as easy as just a simple GET request, so we have to send specific POST data, cookies and HTTP headers. And all this needs to be debugged. Fiddler2 is the gold standard for web debugging tools, so I'd like to use it in this case too.

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Gamification class at Coursera

I've recently received a statement of accomplishment document for Coursera's online Gamification class that I took in August-October this year.

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Introduction to Finance class at Coursera

I've recently received a statement of accomplishment document for Coursera's online Introduction to Finance class that I took in July-September this year.

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One certificate missing, one received unexpectedly

Today I want to give a note about two more online courses that I completed. The last one (10 weeks in September-November) was called Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics and was lead by Eric Zivot from University of Washington. First of all, it was the most intense course out of all that I took to date.

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