I recently read An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon.  Even if you are not interested in photography, this book is well worth reading; it is a brilliant and an unusual look at things that most people don`t even know exist.

Also, check out Taryn`s presentation on TED.

A few days ago my AlienBees CyberSynch wireless setup failed - the transmitter stopped working during a photo shoot.  Luckily, I always carry two 30-foot PC chords in my camera bag, so the transmitter`s failure was simply a minor inconvenience.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Stephen King – I read about 10-12 of his books and I only really liked The Stand, Needful Things and a short story Quitters, Inc.  Now I can add Under the Dome to this list.  I really loved how throughout the book you got to know each character, how their personalities changed and developed with the story.  The town where a series of horrible events take place is so well described that you can easily imaging being there, navigating the streets, eating in restaurants or buying a used car. The only negative thing I could say is that I was disappointed with the ending – 1000 pages of story lead to a somewhat preachy anticlimactic conclusion.  The End.

I`ve been bitching about ebooks for years.  The current business model for electronic books is akin to what the music business model was about 10 years ago, and the publishing industry is refusing to learn lessons of the past.  Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of Second Life, pretty much summed up what I`ve been saying for the past 3 years - http://ondrejka.net/stupid/2010/06/27/1244-doomed-to-repeat.html

In the last few weeks I’ve been on a bit of a reading bend.  Between trying to get my baby daughter to go to sleep, finishing up work-related projects and editing thousands of photographs, I managed to read eight books, four of them definitely worth mentioning.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
I’m not a huge fan of the mystery genre, but this book was excellent.  A journalist who though that his career was over because of a lost libel suit suddenly finds himself with a strange job offer – writing a family history of a wealthy Swedish industrialist and finding out the details of a mysterious disappearance of a girl from 30 years ago.

Old Man`s War by John Scalzi.
I am not even going to go into the details or the plot – there are simply too many.  I read this book in one night – if you like space exploration-style sci-fi, you should definitely check out any/all books by John Scalzi.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran.
About a month ago one of my co-workers sent me a link to the University of Pittsburgh library website (http://pittcatplus.pitt.edu/).  If you run a text search, the left-hand side of the page displays a great visual representation of your search results and how close/far other articles and/or search terms are related to it.  I wanted to see if I could reverse-engineer this little application, so I went to see my grad school advisor, Dr. Spring (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~spring/).  After I explained what I wanted to do, he told me that I should read Segaran’s book.  It was the best technology book by far that I’ve read in a long time.  Not only did I find a great overview of all algorithms needed to accomplish my task, I learned quite a bit about developing “intelligent” Internet applications.  The only negative thing that I can say about this book is that all examples are in Python, and I’m not a huge fan of that particular programming language.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.
This book is about the never-ending conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Instead of delving into the minute details of the politics and how we can “fix” things, Filkins presents a series of short stories about his experiences in the Middle East from a very human point of view.  Even if you are not interested in politics or what’s currently happening in the Middle East, I think that everyone should read this book just to get a better understanding of the whats and the whys of decades of violent conflicts in that part of the world.

Up until a few months ago I hated math.  All throughout my school and college years I took the path of least resistance when it came to math courses.  I more or less skipped algebra, slept through geometry and struggled with calculus, firmly believing that math was a totally useless subject and that anything I might learn would never apply to real life.

Surprisingly, I was almost right.  For 11 years I worked as a software developer and web designer, and I never had to use anything more complicated than 2 + 2. 
A few months ago my lab began developing an interactive application for medical education (I cannot go into too many details about the actual software).  A large part of the application consists of a web-based Visio-like Flash UI designed for drawing diagrams.  As we were testing this software for a potential demo/beta release, we found a small but annoying issue.  When a user draws more than one connecting line between nodes, the software automatically offsets the lines so that they do not overlap.  However, if a user drags Node 2 so that it is at a 45-degree angle in relation to Node 1, all the lines will overlap.

When I began going through the code to solve this issue, I realized that that was happening because I was offsetting coordinates on both x- and y-axis by the same amount.  However, if I were to offset only on the x-axis, this problem will reoccur when both nodes have the same x-coordinate.  If I were to offset only on the y-axis, the problem will creep up when one node is directly below the other.
The only way to solve this problem was to vary the offset based on the position of the two nodes relative to each other.  That’s where math suddenly became very important.  After sitting down with a pen and a notepad and forcing my brain to remember 7th-grade geometry, I came up with two possible solutions.

1. Calculate the slope of the connecting line and adjust the offset based on the slope
2. Calculate the angle of the connecting line by drawing an imaginary right-angle triangle and adjust the offset based on that angle.

Solution one was discarded pretty quickly.  On a normal coordinate plane coordinates start at the bottom left corner, but in Flash, point (0, 0) is at the top left corner of the stage.  So, I decided to go with the imaginary triangle/angle idea.
A quick Google search gave me the necessary formulas:

• Calculating right triangle angles (http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/Math/rtritrig/LtrigA.htm)
• Converting radians to degrees (http://www.analyzemath.com/Calculators_2/convert_radians_degrees.html)

The rest was easy (the notation is not quite right): 

To clarify:

If you have a right angle triangle ABC where the connecting line between two nodes is the hypotenuse, ABC is the right angle (i.e. ABC = 90 degrees) and you need to calculate the BAC angle, the following steps should take care of your calculations:

1. Line AB (adjacent side) = |y1  - y2| (absolute value of the change in the y-coordinate)
2. Line BC (opposite side) = |x1 – x2| (absolute value of the change in the x-coordinate)
3. AC (hypotenuse) = SQRT(AB2 + BC2) (Pythagorean theorem – AC = Square root of AB-squared plus BC squared)
4. sin(BAC) = BC/AC
5. Angle BAC = sin-1(BC/AC) – result is in Radians
6. Angle BAC = BAC * 180 / PI

This is what the code looks like in ActionScript:

Many people consider Russian literature on the of greatest in the world. Every advanced literature class you`ve ever taken at either high school or college at least mentioned great Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. I`ve never been a huge fan of Russian classics - maybe it was the way they were taught to us in Soviet schools, maybe I simply cannot appreciate the subtlety of Tolstoy`s description of a Russian peasant`s soul. In any case, as a print junkie, at least I`ve always been proud that that Russia had literature.

In the mid 1980`s, with the birth of Gorbachev`s perestroika came the death of Russian literature. Actually, it was the death of Russian culture altogether. Very few movies were made and there were virtually no original literature being produced. Bookstore shelves were filled with fairly crappy translations of Western mystery/murder novels or, even worst, Daniel Steel.

When I immigrated to the United States in 1994, I could not wait to learn how to read English books so I could actually enjoy books once more. In the last few years this grim situation finally began to change. New writers began to emerge - Boris Akunin with his wonderful detective novels that take place in the 19th century Russia, Sergei Lukiyanenko with excellent sci-fi and Maria Semenova with "Russian fantasy" that`s actually not a Tolkien knock-off. This morning I made my weekly pilgrimage to the Barnes & Noble, and I saw both Akunin and Lukiyanenko books translated into English. And, oddly enough I felt proud and elated.

Even though I have all of Akunin and Lukiyanenko books in Russian, I bought their books just to support the new emerging Russian literature.