2006 here I come

Happy new year everyone!

Let the next year be even better for all of you.

First summer day (part 2)

This time I want to tell you about the history of Kadriorg, what is this place, and how it was created.

1 June 2005 - First summer day (part 2)

Tallinn, Kadriorg.

After a few minutes on the viewing stand, I froze so much, that even started to shake, so I decided to go out and warm up a bit. I don't know how other people managed to stay there, the stand was made from concrete and had a big cap on the top, so it was good place to stay when it was raining, but definitely bad place when trying to find a warm spot. Anyway the sky was clear, so it was a matter of seconds that I got warmed up.


So I continued shooting the surroundings. And there were still plenty of things to notice.

Here is another early summer flower:


But as usual I tried to find any possible target for my camera.

Here is a nice shot of a lock that holds main gates:


And here is rusty pillar from the same stadium:


After the match, me and my father decided to go and visit Kadriorg park, and take some pictures. Here is more info from city tourist guide .

The Kadriorg

Kadriorg is one of the popular places to check when visiting Tallinn, but not only, it is also popular place for everyone who wants to have a timeout from every day life. Kadriorg Palace is currently residence of The Estonian President, some foreign embassies are located there also.

A little history, mostly quoted from www.tallinn.ee:


Peter 1 the Russian tsar, started building the Palace in 1718. It was called Ekaterinenthal, or Catherinenthal, in honour of Catherine I. The architect of the temporary summer residence palace and park was Italian Niccolo Michetti.

Some people believe that the Peter 1 himself laid the first foundation stones for the palace. Maybe these ones ?


Currently, the baroque Kadriorg Palace is housing the foreign art collection of the Estonian Art Museum. More information here.

The Kadriorg Park was originally nearly 100 hectares in size, but is not preserved in its entirety, but it is still beautiful place, and allot of effort is put to maintain and improve it.

One of the most popular places in the park is the symmetrical Swan Lake and its surroundings. Originally, the park included a dignified formal Italian-French garden on the other side of the Swan Lake from the road, but not anymore :)

There are always people, who come to visit it, with children and friends. Not much swans can be seen at this time, but allot of pigeons as always :)

---

Anyway we walked across the park. As you can see it is in a very good shape. The park in summer is always presented with beautiful flowers of all sorts.





There are some fountains working also, not all of them yet, maybe some are still in maintenance or are going to be operational soon, I think.



Here is an interesting thing we found at the entrance of the palace park:



It is some sort of a head. It is not working now, but I think there should be a small fountain blowing from the month.

There are much more things to see, too bad I didn't take enough pictures, and my batteries died, good that I had a replacement. I took about 80 photos so far, and some videos also. But it is not over yet, still the day is not over :)

To be continued ...

part 1  part 2  part 3

first job interview

Yes I recently had my first job interview for a C++ software developer position.

Anyway it was an interesting and new experience, due to the fact that I hadn't had any job at software development field before.

I was pretty stunned after that, kinda strange feeling, can't even say why :). Overall I wasn't satisfied with interview result personally, mainly because I didn't know what to expect, and how I should prepare myself. But I am planning to improve this in the future, this is one of my strong personal abilities - analyzing the result, and improving it even further.

So here are some few points, that I am going to look closer into, at the future interviews:

1. I was a little bit nervous, mostly I am, every time when I am in new, and unknown environment. But at least maybe there is a way I can make it less visible in the future.

2. It is really important to know as much about company where you are planning to get a job, as possible. That was one of the things I didn't put much effort in it. I did took a brief look at the things company is working but, I didn't get much deeper into details. The thing that might make a big difference are the details actually. I think it is highly possible that during interview you might get asked about what do you know about our company ? Now ask yourself this question, and try to get a brief idea, how much you actually know. It is clear that the more information you have the better.

3. Off course it is common practice, that before getting to the interview stage, you must finish one of the tasks. But be ready to tell the interviewers how you actually finished the tasks, what techniques you used, and why it is better then other techniques.

4. Another widely asked question is about any recent or interesting project you worked on. It is really important, to talk about it in as much simple as possible form, why because for you the project is the thing you know like your own hand, but other people have no idea. Even better idea would be to use blackboard or paper, to draw something that might be interesting to show. As everyone knows the visual form is much more understandable than any other.

5. There might be another questions - what are your strong and weak points ? It is hard to answer it sometimes, for me , so It would be a good idea to find a good answers before the interview.

So these are probably the points I missed or didn't give much attention, but I will be working on then for sure. The key is to make templates before the interview, structure the answers carefully, think of possible questions and answers. Anyway for me a good interview is a matter of how well I think I personally did the best I could.

First summer day (part 1)

I thought it might be a good idea, to show some pictures explaining what are conditions and what was going on when I took them , I would like to give it a try.

1 June 2005 - First summer day (part 1)

Tallinn, Kadriorg.

It was kinda cold day, sun was hiding in the clouds, temperature dropped to +5 degrees so I put a jacket on. There was a football match going on and my father was working at that time, so I made him a visit with my new camera. It was my first attempt to try out camera outside my flat. The conditions are quite different, the lightning is much stronger, which gives a good selection of exposure times, that I just can't get in a house with normal lightning conditions.

I also wanted to play with camera focus a little. So I decided to shoot some objects nearby - concrete , posts , plants, grass , fence and manhole cover, that came up pretty good with nice focus falloff.







After a few minutes, surprisingly for me, the sky cleared, exposing beautiful high clouds and warm June sun. So I did a few shots of sky. Some birds accidentally got in to the shot, and gave it really unique look:



The football match started. So I went to the viewing stand to see how teams are going to play. The match was interesting to watch, tight competition at the start with a goal on first 10 minutes, and allot of interesting moments with good passes and safes from both goalkeepers. There wasn't much people on the stand but fans did their job well, shouting and playing drums, to support their team. I managed to record a few goals on the video also.



to be continued...

part 1  part 2  part 3

new things from Opera

I am active opera browser user, and while visiting their site, I found that they are providing blog service for free. Yes they are plenty of such things for free on the web, but what is the main difference, I haven't see in any other free service.

The photoblog is really amazing one. I spend quite some time searching for service that will provide me with easy to use gallery, (blogger lack this BIG time), high quality pictures (up to 1600x1200 and more), and ability to customize the appearance and content. The opera photoblog does it all (except the last point which doesn't give much freedom to customize links and position of objects, but I think it would be possible to do in future versions).

Anyway it is great.

Check out my new photoblog (only my best high-res 1600x1200 pictures!)

And my first posted picture. Looks great !

P.S. It is also possible to upload files , maximum space available for storage 300 MB!

Looking for a job

Yes I am looking for a job, in a software development field.

Mainly I would like to find a C++ related position, but any other language can do. Currently I am candidating for a few positions, and I think eventually I will find something, it is just a matter of time :)

Photo Gallery

Some of my best photos are now featured at my college:

The works are mostly from summer 2005:

downloadgooglevideos.com is no longer online

So after a nice start. The downloadgooglevideos.com is no longer operational:


DownloadGoogleVideos.com

It was brought to our attention that the actions of this site violate Google.com's Terms of Service. For this reason the service has been discontinued.


Thats not much of big surprise actually, the download option is kinda not a good choice, but the ability to link videos and play them on blog should be made available.

GOOGLE VIDEO

Here is nice and conviniet way I found to use the google.video features, offered by :
downloadgooglevideos.com.

An example:

DownloadGoogleVideos.Com

MSN chatbot

Here is one interesting chatbot, made by one of my friends from Australia.

To use this bot, you must have MSN installed. Just add joanstable@hotmail.com to the contact list, and you are ready for chat.

Enjoy.

Bugs

Here is an interesting bug my friend has found. After installing fresh WinXP on notebook with ATI RADEON 9200. It took him about 6 hours to finally set it right, with different drivers.

Deus Ex 2 soundtrack

Well It is not new, but I just found it.

The Deus Ex 2 soundtrack is available for download for free, from official site.

Or you can just visit the fileplanet and download the whole archive
from here

I also found the "Alex Brandon Interview" at music4games.com available here. He was working on Deus Ex , and Unreal series music.

Here is one quote from interview:

"M4G: The music in DX:IW is definitely more ambient in nature than the original. How was this decided on?
AB: Throughout my career I've been doing primarily thematically oriented pieces. "Unreal" had the odd ambient tune but almost every piece used a theme of some sort. This worked well with the amount of action based gameplay in that title. "Deus Ex" also used this model, with more subtle thematic presentation and a few more music switch behaviors."

I think the soundtrack is good, more ambient then the first title, and more balanced, but I liked the first Deus Ex music more, maybe because I liked the game allot more.

Paintman3

Here is another one of my earlyest projects.

Paintman3:



Some features:
- 16 colors
- 12 fill styles
- 4 line styles

Tools:
-Pen
-Flood Fill
-Eraser
-Point
-Line
-Rectangle
-Fill Rectangle
-Circle
-Fill Ellipse
-Air brush
-Custom pen
-Arc
-Shadow
-Copy/Paste
-Zoom
-Undo/Redo
-Text

It works pretty well, all feature are working right, but no save/load is added and pictures are only at fixed size. Anyway I made a Ggame graphics with it.

The progam can be downloaded from here paintman3.zip

If you have problems running this application , I recommend using DosBox

More info about Skype

It is amazing where simple search by google can take you.

By searching for parts of recent job offering, I came to Vincent Oberle’s blog. He is currently working for skype :). Anyway I want to show some interesting info, about early pioneers of software development in Estonia, that initially lead to Skype.

Here is the story of Bluemoon Interactive

JOB POSITION BY SKYPE

Here are few interesting job requirements I found. Offered by skype :

Position offered:

BACKEND C/C++ DEVELOPER
* You will be writing Skype serverside software, which interfaces end users to other networks and databases (think SkypeIn, SkypeOut, Voicemail)
* You have wet dreams about elegant C++/Python code and You think that UDP/TCP sockets are sexy
* Your own code is better than that of your dreams
* You take pride in delivering rock-solid software that works flawlessly the first time and you deliver it before deadlines

This is really one uncommon way to write it. I have seen standard: 5 years of commercial C++, ability to work in the team, and learn new things. But this is something special and strange at the same time.

I think the guy who has written it had a good sense of humour.

"You have wet dreams about elegant C++" and " UDP/TCP sockets are sexy" are classic. But how about "Your own code is better than that of your dreams" this makes my day for sure.

Anyway I can't even imagine how much should I code to get even close to these requirements.