The most awesome techsupport letter I’ve ever read

from BTGuard Support <support@btguard.com> 
to Владимир Захаров <vzakharov@gmail.com> 
date Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 1:20 AM 
subject Re: WEB: vzakharov

You idiot you didn’t tell me you were (…)

(…)

Best,

BTGuard

Things that suck in Guitar Pro 6

1. RSE

Those in GP5 were MUCH better sounding, and the biggest problem with the new ones is the unevenness of sound. For instance, a bass on one note may sound twice as louder as on another one. This makes GP6 almost unusable.

Wish they’d just made a GP5 with more keyboard shortcuts and without the annoying “Access violation” crash. But for now it annoys me less than the new RSE, alas.

2. Score-only tracks

In GP6, you cannot edit drum tracks in tablature mode, which makes the work about three times slower (cursor on the bass drum, then up to the snare, then back down to the bass, are you serious?!).

(the list will be updated as new major drawbacks are revealed)

So, Arobas, sorry, I’m not buying, literally.

xkcd’d 2

So much for dances, show us sex already!

xkcd’d

Am I the only one to see a couple dancing at doorsteps and a dazed cat watching them?

How to run a BAT file from a Unicode command prompt

For those who have faced the following problem: if Unicode is enabled in Windows command prompt (chcp 65001), .BAT and .CMD files no longer run. The solution is simple: instead of “file.bat”, use “start /b file.bat”. Voila!

P.S. The BAT file run will not support Unicode though

My two favorite performances at Eurovision 2008

Croatian Kraljevi Ulice and 75 cents with “Romanca”:

Turkish Mor ve Ötesi with “Deli”:

MIPT e-library captcha solution

Following a discussion in Reasonable Deviations, I spend some three hours solving a (quoting) “little school-level problem” posed in a weird Russian CAPTCHA system. Not that it is extra-difficult, but some people may find it interesting to see the solution of its generalized formulation, so here it is.

Problem: we have an electric circuit as depicted in the following figure:

The task is to find the altogether resistance from A to B.

The answer is (numerator and denominator split by “-”):
(n2+n4)*(n1*y+n5*x)+(n1+n2)*n4*x
—————————————
(n1+n2)*y

, where:

x = n3*n2-n1*n4
y = (n1+n2)*(n3+n4)+(n1+n2+n3+n4)*n5

The solution is after the jump.