F = T ∇ Sτ

My results: Listening: 7.5 Reading: 7.5 Writing: 6.5 Speaking: 6.5 Overall Band Score: 7.0 My wife's results: Listening: 7.0 Reading: 7.0 Writing: 6.5 Speaking: 8.5 Overall Band Score: 7.5 Results are acceptable in despite of the problems with the equipment during the exam, and that it was boring and tedious, especially writing section.

Trac is the wiki and issue tracking system that is the most used for my software development projects. Let me share few hints about its ticket workflow, especially about the statuses, the roles of the participants, and let me give an example of the workflow config. But if you are interested in other things like Trac plugins, source browser, customizing, etc, let me know. All the information given below regards the workflow described at the end of the article. The original Trac workflow is missed vital features like the support for ticket verifying, or the required ticket statuses range, so I do not use it in my projects. The description of the main statuses: new - the ticket has been created; in-progress - the developer has began to work with the ticket; fixed - the ticket is fixed (the problem issued in the ticket is solved); verified - the ticket is verified (tester or PM has verified that the ticket is fixed correctly); closed - the ticket is closed (it's not...

Alexander Slesarev Calgary, AB | XXX-XXX-XXXX | alex.slesarev@gmail.com | https://nuald.blogspot.com Software Engineering Technical Leader - Cisco Meraki | 2021 - present Assisting in deployment and optimization of Secure Threat Services ecosystem (Snort, Talos Intelligence integration, Click, C/C++, Lua, Go, Python, Ruby, Redis). Extend and redesign MX Security Features (AMP, STS) to work in IPv6 and mixed IPv4/IPv6 networks (Click, C/C++). Extend and redesign MX Security Features (STS, NBAR) to efficiently work on high-end MX appliances having multi-core Click (lockfree algorithms, Click, C/C++, Lua, Go, Rust). Upskilling the company employees and new hires on MX Security Features, Click configuration, cryptography (including FIPS and PCI certification) and performance optimizations. Lead Software Development Engineer - NuData Security/Mastercard | 2014 - 2021 Designed and created a codegenerator for the shared classes and enumerations (Go, Java, Ja...

I'm going to immigrate to Canada, and the first step is complete – I have received a reference number from the FSW Centralized Intake Office. I had applied as Computer and Information Systems Manager due to my job position now (Project Manager) which I hold more than 5 years. The next challenge is an IELTS exam that I have to pass in the next few weeks.

Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis. (Who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means) Hermagoras of Temnos Quotation above is created by Hermagoras for defining seven "circumstances" as a way of the formulating or analyzing rhetorical questions. But it is useful for many other areas, like for composing brief software requirements. Sometimes it's essential for us to analyze the perspective project as fast as possible, without creating tremendous SRS, but merely ask few questions and begin to work. Especially, it relates to Agile Development, and can be easily used as a reference point for starting a project. Let us interpret these questions to ones of the sample meanings: Who will use that project? What kind of software does the project represent? When should the project be delivered to the end users? Where is the project intended to be used? Why would the project be successful? In what way is the project supposed to w...

Official Thunderbird Grammar Checker add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/14781 Back-end functionality is based on LanguageTool functionality (in particular, the add-on uses its webserver). Though it can work without any further customization, it is strongly recommended to setup a local LT server (see below), and change the add-on preferences to use your server. By default, the add-on uses the local server and falls back to public LT server (that can't handle the high load and can't guarantee the privacy). The grammar checking is available via Tools menu, the context menu and the corresponding toolbar button. Language and server settings can be changed using the add-on preferences: Supported languages : English (en), Dutch (nl), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Ukrainian (uk), Asturian (ast), Belarusian (be), Breton (br), Catalan (ca), Chines...

I have published several articles on eellc.ru website. I hope you'll find them useful and interesting: Software System Requirements Questionnaire SQL in large-scale systems Architecture of large-scale systems Django speed, stability and security The website doesn't allow to post comments, so you can leave your remarks, suggestions and complaints here. Enjoy!

Sometimes it is required to send someone multiple images. Of course, you can send these images as they are, or you can create and send an archive of these images. But it will be more convenient to send a PDF document. In that case the recipient can easily open the document and he/she will see these images in the sequence you assumed. There is a powerful software suite called ImageMagick . It provides various utilities for any graphics processing demands. Now we are interested in a convert utility. It has many useful features and it is really irreplaceable for the image batch-processing like in our case. The command for converting images is pretty simple: $ convert -define pdf:use-cropbox=true -density 72x72 -resample 72x72 -compress JPEG *.png result.pdf The convert utility takes all PNG-images in the current directory and creates a PDF-document from it. You can modify any options as you want. Let's have a look at some of them: density and resample - these options...

Updated list of the projects I'm working on: Mail Dispatcher (role: admin, platform: Python/PyGTK) - A tool for dispatching (basically, deleting) email messages on POP3 server via Plain or SSL connection with advanced filtering capabilities. DHCP Explorer (role: admin, platform: Python) - A console cross-platform tool for locating all available DHCP servers. sdict2db (role: admin, platform: C#/WinForms) - Parser for SDict-based format dictionaries with ability to save in a SQL server (with creating table, index and filling data) and in a text file (SDict text format). DNN Dictionary (role: admin, platform: C#/DotNetNuke) - A DotNetNuke module for translating texts using SDict-based (http://sdict.ru/en/) dictionaries. It works using AJAX mechanism so there is no pages reloading during translating. Geek Workspace (role: admin, platform: Python/PyQt4) - Geek Workspace is a desktop environment aimed for developers, scientists, engineers and students. The key point is a progr...

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing. GStreamer is released under the LGPL, so it can be used in commercial applications. The power of GStreamer is in its module infrastructure - you're working with certain "blocks", combine it with "pipes" and got results without any coding (via gst-launch utility). Of course, after playing with gst-launch you can write an application in any language you prefer (GStreamer supports various bindings and due to fact that GStreamer is written in C, I do not see any problems to bind it with an application that is developed in any serious programming language). I do not want to explain GStream basics, but move forward to the blog topic - creating videoconference application. If you want certain tutorial, please take a look to the P...

Surprisely, there is no any good advice in the Internet how to programmatically upload a file to the FileField field in the Django. I want to cover this issue with the sample that shows how to upload a generic file from the Internet to a Django application. The code is simple: import urllib, mimetypes, os from django.core.files.base import ContentFile #... filename, msg = urllib.urlretrieve(img) ext = mimetypes.guess_extension(msg.type) name, original_ext = os.path.splitext(filename) new_filename = filename if ext != original_ext: new_filename += ext obj.file.save(new_filename, ContentFile(open(filename).read())) First of all, we retrieves a file. urlretrieve returns a tuple <filename, msg>. filename is a name of a temporary file with the downloaded content. msg is a HTTPMessage class instance that contains headers of the file. We use msg to determinate the type of the file. For this guess_extension method is used. It is required for the case when the file is gene...

Overview Let me introduce PhoneyC - pure Python honeyclient implementation. It is a perspective project and it has a huge potential. All features and advantages are described in a corresponding article . Briefly, PhoneyC is a low interaction, virtual honeyclient that emulates the core functionality of a web client and emulates specific vulnerabilities to pinpoint the attack vector. It consists of two core components - a simple web crawler ( honeywalk.py ) and an analysis engine ( honeyclient.py ) with all required auxiliary modules. Further I'll describe installation and usage procedures. Installation As a sample platform I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope for x84-64 processor. Following the README instructions we have to install python 2.3 and upper, clamav, spidermonkey, vb2py and curl (it is not mentioned in the README file, but it is used internally by the analysis engine): $ sudo apt-get install clamav spidermonkey-bin Python is already installed in the syste...

Due to latest changes in projects hosting situation (like FTC Sues, Shuts Down N. Calif. Web Hosting Firm , Adobe acts against Flash video stream recorder ) I started thinking about moving on to some DVCS system. Now there are only two serious alternatives: Git and Mercurial . First of all, here are two good articles where these systems are compared: Chosing a distributed VCS for the Python project Analysis of Git and Mercurial In both of these articles Mercurial wins due to: lack of good Git support in Windows system; having Python API. But also in both of these articles it is said that Git has more features and is more powerful than Mercurial. Actually none of the issues above does not concern me personally because I'm not developing in Windows OS now, and I do not require any integration with DVCS. But let me notice that these issues are not so critical right now: there is an awesome TortoiseGit project and it works really good; basically only certain hooks ...

In my free time I have started working on the new GPL project named "Geek Desktop Solution" (GDS). The project is a desktop (like KDE or GNOME ) aimed for keyboard jedi and other technical geeks. It was inspired by SciFi movies especially "Stargate Atlantis" . Rodney McKay, Chief Scientific Officer of the Atlantis Expedition, created his programs (or macros as it was called in the movie) interactively and very fast. I thought how it can be done and found a solution that makes this interactive and fast programming possible. The main concepts of GDS are: All environment items can be programmatically modified by user. The interactive shell is an entry point of the desktop - all operations can be performed using the shell. There is no mouse requirements - the user can operate the desktop using shell or keyboard shortcuts only. But at the same time almost all operations can be performed with the mouse (for touchscreen-based devices without keyboards)....

Linux is a power :-) I made sure of this again when trying to find a legal way to convert various video files in Windows OS to QuickTime format acceptable by iPod. Actually I do not use Windows, but iTunes is working only on it and MacOSX, so I didn't have a choice. But googling gave nothing, so I turned on Linux and easily found an appropriate way. The main magic of video processing in Linux is collected in FFmpeg solution. And it saved my life again. But before reading further please make sure that you will not violate any author rights and other license issues. Please examine the legal information on FFmpeg site. In most cases all video files you converted must by used only by you and can not be transferred to other users. The process of converting is very simple - just run ffmpeg with required options (of course, ffmpeg package and all auxiliary packages should be installed): $ ffmpeg -i /path/to/input_movie -f mov -sameq -s qvga /path/to/output_movie The main magic is...

Python - один из немногих языков программирования, в котором лаконичность и простота гармонирует с мощью кода, который можно на нем написать. Хотя по сути Python является императивным языком, в нем есть функциональные элементы, упрощающие разработку и придающие коду больше выразительности. И чтобы не быть голословным, хочу это показать на примере простой задачи. Итак, есть следующая задача - подсчитать количество строк в C++ коде, в которых есть комментарии. Есть два метода решения этой задачи: Разработка state-машины, которая анализирует текущее состояние кода (комментарий это или нет) и ведет подсчет числа строчек, в которых состояние кода было "комментарий". Использовать регулярные выражения и подсчитать количество строк кода, которые удовлятворяли условиям в регулярном выражении. Мы рассмотрим второе решение, т.к. оно будет более лаконично и читабельно. Плюс к тому же это может быть неплохой задачкой для собеседования. Если разработчик сможет написать решение пример...

Ни для кого не секрет, что сервис ICQ принадлежит компании AOL . Как и для любой коммерческой компании, для нее важна монетизация своих сервисов. Если сервис не приносит прибыль, то его либо модифицируют таким образом, чтобы он все-таки приносил прибыль, или закрывают. Основная прибыль от ICQ - это реклама, баннеры, которые показывают официальные клиенты. Однако, в России эти клиенты не приобрели популярность - баннеры либо режут с помощью специальных плагинов , либо закрывают фаерволом, либо используют альтернативные клиенты, как, например, QIP и Miranda . C другой стороны, именно российские пользователи составляют подавляющий процент от всех пользователей ICQ. AOL, конечно, это не особо нравится и она борется изо всех сил, чтобы все использовали официальные клиенты. Недавняя серия отключений - яркий тому пример. И не факт, что отключения не продолжатся (или вообще не прикроют весь сервис ICQ) - никто не может заставить AOL поддерживать неприбыльный сервис, особенно в наше время ...