a blog of Taras Filatov

Here is my working place

Kharkov, “Juravlevka”
it says: “no swimming. mechanisms are working”

ha-ha, heil the robots!

The game we’ve been developing for two months is finally launched in Apple App Store.

Meet iCombat, a variation of old good Atari game, made for iPhone / iPod platform:

Visit the website of iCombat to find out more.

Have to send faxes internationally lately so I’ve just found a number of solutions to do that using voip and other online solutions including skype:

http://www.skax.net/

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/use-skype-as-fax-machine-send-fax.html
http://www.soft-switch.org/foip.html
http://fax1.com/
http://www.faxaway.com/

I’m going to update this post when I test these solutions.

UPD:

I have tried scax.com and fax1.com. I’ve tried to fax pages to US fax number (Apple Developers support office).

Both services give you free $1 credit. Scax requires installation of ActiveX plugin for your IE to work with your Skype. Fax1 works on its own. To fax 1 page in Scax costs $0.29, in Fax1 it’s $0.12. Additionally, Scax turned out to be useless for me as it reported “Incopatible fax machine” and “Telephony error”. At the same moment, Fax1 reported “SUCCESS” on all of my 3 fax pages.

So I would recommend www.fax1.com

So I have visited this Google Developers Day in Moscow.

Taras Filatov and Google girls

It was great event and all of our team have really injoit it.  Find more detailed report at our corporate blog: http://www.injoit.com/blog/2008/11/07/google-developers-day-moscow-2008/

http://www.project10tothe100.com/

this is a project Google launched - everybody can submit their idea on how to help other people - the chosen ideas will bring million dollar prizes to their authors

I’m personally going to submit a couple of my ideas - maybe this format will be more suitable to  deliver message to people than the way I’ve tried before - submitting to scientific journals, not much success in there yet, people continue calling my papers science fiction

Some people become curious what is Riviera project page in my blog.

I should explain this.

This is just my dream for a good vacation - to rent a car and hit the Spanish-French riviera coast with a good company some time. So if you’re interested let me know and we will gather some time and do it, all we need is:

• good company
• time
• money

A friend of mine has launched a website similar to ‘one million dollar home page‘.

His project is called “The richest banner“.

Well, let’s see how far does it go. I have once studied an effect of social promotion of such projects with my own project. According to my observations, it is really important to give it a very powerful boost in the beginning otherwise the effect of avalanche will not last long. Promotion is very important and its timing is important too.

  How long does the review process take?
Typically the manuscript will be reviewed within four months, but review time may be longer or shorter in individual cases

- a quote from Peer review policy page of one of the Elsevier computer science journals.

When the journals in Computer Science field as well as in other scientific fields find normal to review papers for 4 months it is obvious that the science is moving forward with the speed of a turtle.

The situation is following:

• you have to demonstrate an innovative research in your paper

• you have to submit the manuscript to one journal at a time, double submission is prohibited

• you have to wait for months until the editorial board decides if your paper is accepted or not. If it’s not accepted, you have to try with other journal and wait again.

Within this time nobody knows about your innovation, it is supposed that you don’t publish it anywhere etc. Years may pass. Researchers have to learn the turtle’s pace , they don’t have other choice. Science is moving slowly.

I think this is not right. There should be a possibility to publish drafts of the paper at some place for discussion and further collaborative development.  Some wiki-style interface could be implemented for that so that one author adds his innovative ideas and others can access them instantly and propose improvements.