Aug 14 2008

Breakdancing with friends at LO-FI

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 12:17 am

Dancing with Free and Orbitron (Circle of Fire crew), and other local bboys at club “LO_FI” (Seattle):

Orbitron is freestyling on the second half of the video.

Listen to 4:23

“… great to see release - my man goes
Dmitry is in the circle — he spins and let goes
with the palm on a hand over jacket

grant stand I can grand slam when I got here
Tip the beat, rock and nod, spot the block, till I get off to my forehead
Ya’ll know where its at, ya’ll spin on a hat …”


My ankle is feeling much better! I can finally start dancing again!!!


Aug 10 2008

Klimb Movie Project: Random Footage!

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 8:37 am

Just uploaded some footage to youtube

Continue reading “Klimb Movie Project: Random Footage!”


Aug 10 2008

Found a video of me on youtube

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 8:30 am

I was uploading our climbing movie project and found this video of me on youtube. I think it was shot by UW students for studying dynos?


Aug 08 2008

Time goes by faster the older you get?

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 2:48 am

After having a discussion earlier today about this, as I was driving home … I realized something about this saying - its just not true.

Any kind of excitement and anticipation make it feel like time is sloooowing down. Think about it. Lets say you’re so excited to do something with your friends on Friday. You have these huge plans. The whole week is going to feel like a month, because you just can’t wait for it to be that day!

Continue reading “Time goes by faster the older you get?”


Aug 04 2008

Evolution: Keep the wing or go wingless?

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 2:44 am

What do you guys think? Should I keep the stock wing, take it off, or get a little “trunk lip” for my car?

Stock Wing

So, here is a picture of my car (first pic). I think the stock wing is kinda big and silly, but it is functional … if I am taking 90-degree corners at 160 mph.

This car isn’t meant to be “pretty” — its all purely functional. But I think taking a wing off might make it look more subtle.
Continue reading “Evolution: Keep the wing or go wingless?”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Jul 20 2008

Campusing Training Videos (Climbing without feet)

Category: Rock ClimbingDmitry @ 7:45 am

Johnny Goicoechea Campusing

Campusing is a climbing exercise or “move” depending on your style :-) where you climb up the wall without using your feet. You don’t have to be able to do this in order to climb — There are plenty of climbers who can climb very hard but can’t even come close to doing what you’re about to see in these videos.

Climbing is not all about power and strength, but it is sure nice to have endless supplies of it!

Continue reading “Campusing Training Videos (Climbing without feet)”

Tags: , , , , , , ,


Jul 17 2008

Finding a balance in Life

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 2:31 am

Dmitry KalashnikovI am going to share some of my very personal ideas on being balanced and staying on top of things. These things I figured out on my own a while back and I have been perfecting them every day. Being a software developer, I constantly trying to find an improved “algorithm” for … well, Living. I can’t give it all away because it’s too personal but here are a few practical tips and ideas:

Continue reading “Finding a balance in Life”

Tags: , , , , , , , ,


Jul 16 2008

Powershell and .NET

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 6:55 pm

PowershellPowershell gives you full access to Microsoft .NET framework objects. There is a special syntax for accessing static methods and properties (it uses square brackets). For creating new objecects and instantiating .NET classes you use Net-Object commandlet.
Continue reading “Powershell and .NET”

Tags: , , ,


Jul 16 2008

New Climbing Movie Project!

Category: Rock ClimbingDmitry @ 12:53 am

Highball at GoldbarAs many of you already know my friend Johnny Goicoechea and I are making a climbing movie. We have been going climbing every weekend in areas around Seattle (and further) and capturing the best climbs we can find.

It’s all being shot using a very nice hi-def camera, so 10 years from now when everything is in HD, we’ll look back at it and be glad we did :) The plot of the movie is about us, and is about our training for climbing, using gymnastic rings, campusing and other methods. After showing different exercises, we are showing how they apply in real-world situations.

Continue reading “New Climbing Movie Project!”


Jul 13 2008

Powershell vs UNIX Shells

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 11:15 pm

PowershellFirst of all, I love Powershell. For those of you that don’t know, Powershell is (relatively) new command-line and scripting language for Microsoft Windows platform. The Powershell team has spent a lot of time looking at existing UNIX scripting tools and in my opinion cherry-picking the best features from them. Its the best of Ruby, Perl, Zsh etc. The language syntax is very similar to Ruby and Perl. I am a big fan of both. In this article I’ll try to compare it to other unix shells and scripting languages.

Continue reading “Powershell vs UNIX Shells”


Jul 13 2008

Jackie Chan and Mitsubishi

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 6:59 am

Jackie Chan has the same car as meJackie Chan loves EVOs (Mitsubishi Evolution) and owns all generations of them (which is 1 through 10). Most of his movies have an Evo chase seen - watch “Who am I”, “Thunderbolt”). As you know, he does his own stunts and most of he is also a great driver.

Continue reading “Jackie Chan and Mitsubishi”

Tags: , , , , ,


Jul 12 2008

Foods to get you ripped

Category: Rock ClimbingDmitry @ 7:40 am

Foods to get you rippedPeople are always wondering what I eat, or if I do any other training besides climbing. I do lots of other stuff, like martial arts, dancing, gymnastic rings, etc. But as far as foods, I actually do have a system that balances my energy.

Continue reading “Foods to get you ripped”

Tags: , , ,


Jul 12 2008

Insertion Sort Explained

Category: Computer ScienceDmitry @ 4:13 am

Basic Idea: You have a deck of unsorted cards. Lets start a sorted pile. So you take one card at a time from unsorted pile and appropriately place it in sorted pile. You keep doing it until you just left with a sorted pile.

OK, now lets break it down in high-level pseudo code. Lets assume we’re talking about arrays as a data structure.

Continue reading “Insertion Sort Explained”


Jul 12 2008

Mergesort Explanation

Category: Computer ScienceDmitry @ 3:26 am

Mergesort: Split data in two halfs, mergesort each half, then merge these already sorted halfs back into a single piece.

Mergesort and merge are two separate functions. Think of merge as a helper function that does most of the work. Its much easier to explain with a very high-level pseudo code:

Continue reading “Mergesort Explanation”


Jul 11 2008

iPhone upgrade to v2.0 problems

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 5:13 pm

Network TimeoutYep, I just made my phone into a brick: I tried installing v2.0 firmware update. It partially updated my phone and left it in locked state. It says to connect it to itunes, but iTunes can’t connect to its servers for whatever reason. I am getting network timeout messages. Probabily too many people are trying to update their phones … but how is that my problem? Now my phone is completely dead and I need to make some calls! This sucks.

Continue reading “iPhone upgrade to v2.0 problems”


Jul 09 2008

Logarithms Revisited

Category: Computer ScienceDmitry @ 6:49 pm

You might remember that a logarithm of a number is the power to which its base must be raised to produce your number. OK, that was a mouthful. Its much easier to describe with math examples. English just doesn’t cut it for things like this.

Continue reading “Logarithms Revisited”


Jul 09 2008

Create Unix Aliases in Vista

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 6:47 pm

Its kind of funny –commands like ls, grep, find, cat etc are so wired into my hands, I always make a mistake of typing them even when I am using Windows. Its even a bigger problem for me, since I work for Microsoft and I develop on Windows all day. So what I usually do it (1) avoid cmd.exe completely :) and use powershell since it already has these aliases. (2) if I have to use cmd.exe I run these settings to remap things for my brain :) Enjoy.

Continue reading “Create Unix Aliases in Vista”


Nov 20 2007

Hagakure

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 10:53 pm

Hagakure, The Code of the Samurai

Hagakure is a very interesting book I picked up — it has a lot of historical value since it describes life during ancient japan, when the shogun and samurai ruled the country. I’ve been a student of Aikido and other martial arts for some time now, so this is very interesting to me. Some of the stuff in this book is too wild and gruesome to mention but I thought these quotes were great.

Continue reading “Hagakure”


Nov 10 2007

Sprained Ankle

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 3:43 am

Bummer! I injured my ankle while climbing at Stone Gardens. They just got done upgrading the floor at the gym – now it has a padded floor. No more rocks. As I came off the wall, my foot got stuck in-between pads and my body pivoted around it. I’ll be on crutches for a week and wear an ancle splint for a month.

Continue reading “Sprained Ankle”


Nov 06 2007

The best climbing day of the year

Category: Rock ClimbingDmitry @ 12:54 am

This weekend went to Leavenworth again and I’ve had a really good day of climbing. It was one of those perfect temperature zero-gravity days. I warmed up by ripping a hold off the problem that everyone was trying. Haha. Felt kinda bad about it, since we were all going to do it. Then we went up the hill and I ended up flashing some v8 and also flashing the harder, direct version of it!

Continue reading “The best climbing day of the year”


Jun 05 2007

Reserved filename in Windows

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 6:21 pm

I just found out, you can’t create a file/directory named “con” on windows. I thought I was going crazy for a second there.

Continue reading “Reserved filename in Windows”


Feb 27 2007

C# Events and Delegates for UNIX developers

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 9:52 pm

In this tutorial I’ll explain events and delegates the easy way! The intended audience is UNIX people with minimal C and Java experience. Sending events is super simple in .NET framework. The C# language has “delegate” and “event” keywords.

Continue reading “C# Events and Delegates for UNIX developers”


Feb 23 2007

Seattle Impressions

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 11:55 pm

img_0316.JPGI’ve been in Seattle for about a week now. I love it. Should have done it a long time ago! Its going to be hard to live anywhere else now, especially in a small town. I really like the city life, all the people, constant motion, traffic … everything. I am starting over.

I was going to continue running my own business from Seattle, but decided to take a job offer form Microsoft — it seems really fun and its a totaly different environment then what I am used to (me). Continue reading “Seattle Impressions”


Feb 16 2007

Moving to Seattle

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 6:08 am

DmitryI am moving to Seattle. Its sad because I am leaving all of my friends and family, but at the same time its a really good change for me, especially in the long-run. I am very excited and looking forward to new opportunities and challenges.


Dec 24 2006

Ubuntu 6.10 impressions on Toshiba Satellite A105 S4134

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 9:08 am

UbuntuMy very first experience with UNIX/Linux was Red Hat 2.1, when it first came out in 1996. Since then, I “lived and breathed” it. When I was in high school, my friends and I started a Linux User Group in Spokane, and later on, founded Toolbuilders Labs LLC. After our business moved towards security/cryptography applications, I switched exclusively to OpenBSD for a few years and used it as my primary desktop and development platform, so 1998 was the last time I actually used Linux (as a desktop machine). Since then, I’ve also purchased 3 Macs, so basically, I’ve been using BSDs all of this time (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin/OS X) but I’ve always been curious about whats going on in Linux World.

Continue reading “Ubuntu 6.10 impressions on Toshiba Satellite A105 S4134″


Dec 15 2006

Regex Notes

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 8:29 pm

Regular expressions (regex) let you search for a particular pattern. Regex consist of literal characters, and special characters, also called meta characters. Regex syntax has 2 modes, one inside of character classes, which is inside [ ] and one outsided of character classes. Continue reading “Regex Notes”


Dec 08 2006

B-Boy Performance at Big Easy for Red Bull “Flight Club” party!

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 7:41 am

Flovolution CrewToday was one of those memorable days I’ll always remember! My bboy crew, “Flovolution” performed at Big Easy for the RedBull “Flight Club” theme party. We shared the stage with breakers from Tri-Cities, and the “Circle Of Fire” (Seattle). Crazy Legs was there too, but he didn’t perform. Everyone was pretty sore from his workshop a day before. The Red Bull and Big Easy kindly provided us with Davenport hotel rooms, hats …

Continue reading “B-Boy Performance at Big Easy for Red Bull “Flight Club” party!”


Nov 28 2006

Crazy Legs of Rock Steady Crew will be at our studio

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 8:59 am

I got to teach a hip hop / footwork class tonight because my buddy Shanner was gone. Heard some great news … “Crazy Legs” of the Rock Steady Crew is going to be teaching a workshop at our dance studio (Simply Dance). I am pretty psyched about it. This guy pretty much invented breaking, windmills … etc.

Continue reading “Crazy Legs of Rock Steady Crew will be at our studio”

Tags: , , ,


Nov 26 2006

jEdit for Emacs fans

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 1:07 pm

jEditIf you’re a big emacs fan like me, and you like good things, then you should check out jEdit. Is an open-source editor written in Java that is super-fast (unlike most of Java software that is typically bloated). I am a very long-term emacs fan. I’ve written emacs modes, and all kinds of elisp tools for me in the past. The way that I look at it, jEdit is just the next Emacs. It takes all of the things we love about emacs a step further. Continue reading “jEdit for Emacs fans”


Nov 24 2006

CakePHP vs Ruby On Rails

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 3:37 am

CakePHP is a MVC (Model-View-Controller pattern) framework that tries to mimic the way RoR (Ruby on Rails) does things. After developing a large web application on CakePHP platform, I decided to write a little bit about it and compare it the real thing. Haha, as you can tell, I am just a little bit slightly biased towards Ruby.Being a ruby programmer, and having to make a web app that uses php+mysql I immediately started looking for something similar to Rails. There are many rails-like frameworks for php, and I ended up narrowing down my search to cakephp and symfony. Because my client specified php4 (symphony only works on php5), I went with Cake. Continue reading “CakePHP vs Ruby On Rails”


Nov 24 2006

Making of Klimb, Rock Climbing Training Software

Category: Rock Climbing, Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 2:52 am

Klimb ScreenshotWhen I was in college, I had two computer classes in which we had to do a major final project. One of them was on relational databases and another on Java/Swing GUI programming. I also needed some kind of journaling software to keep track of my climbing and training. I wanted something that helped me visualize my progress and help me train more efficiently. So, I made Klimb, the very first Rock Climbing Training software. It helped me pass my classes, train smarter for comps and make some cash on the side!

Continue reading “Making of Klimb, Rock Climbing Training Software”


Nov 23 2006

New Ruby On Rails project

Category: Software DevelopmentDmitry @ 11:58 am

Ruby On RailsToday I started on the new Ruby On Rails (RoR) project. Its a personal/business productivity suite of web applications, packeged as a service, that will be released in the begining of next year. I got a lot of ideas for it from Dr. Covey and his awesome books, such as “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and other sources on personal productivity.


Nov 19 2006

Breakdance Performance

Category: PersonalDmitry @ 11:08 am

This weekend we did a breakdance performance at Simply Dance Studio (Spokane). The studio did a show on every type of dance they teach … salsa, swing, belly dancing and hustle.

Tags: , , ,