These include: public and publicly guaranteed external debt – 195 billion 286 million 531.99 thousand UAH (64.76% of the total public and publicly guaranteed debt) or 24 billion 407 million 155.45 thousand dollars; State and publicly guaranteed internal debt – 106 billion 252 million 215.29 thousand UAH (35.24%), or 13 billion 279 million 535,00 thousand dollars, the press service of the Ministry of Finance.

The public debt of Ukraine amounted to 212 billion 133 million 243.04 thousand UAH (70.35%), or 26 billion 512 million 678.50 thousand U.S. Public external debt amounted to 119 billion 939 million 835.96 thousand UAH (39.78 %), or 14 billion 990 million 230.97 thousand U.S. State domestic debt amounted to 92 billion 193 million 407.08 thousand UAH (30.57%), or 11 billion 522 million 447.53 thousand U.S. dollars.

Publicly guaranteed debt of Ukraine amounted to 89 billion 405 million 504.24 thousand UAH (29,65%), or 11 billion 174 million 011.95 thousand dollars, including: guaranteed external debt – 75 billion 346 million 696.03 thousand UAH (24.99%), or 9 billion 416 million 924.48 thousand dollars; guaranteed internal debt – 14 billion 058 million 808.21 thousand UAH (4.66%), or 1 billion 757 million 087.47 thousand dollars . During January 2010 the sum of public and publicly guaranteed debt of Ukraine has increased by UAH equivalent to 26 million 010.36 thousand UAH (0.01%) mainly due to excess of proceeds from the bonds of internal state loan repayment over a public domestic debt.

In this case, the public external debt decreased by 614 million 278.69 thousand UAH (0.51%), internal debt increased by 1 billion 123 million 330.31 thousand UAH (1.23%).

Publicly guaranteed debt of Ukraine decreased by 483 million 041.26 thousand UAH (0.54%), which is associated with a depreciation of the euro against the hryvnia, and in excess of repayment guaranteed debt over the amount of borrowing.

Step 1: Compile FUSE support into the kernel and install s3fs
Step 2: Mount S3 bucket to a local folder on the server. To achieve this create a file /etc/passwd-s3fs and put your Access Key and Secret Access keyseparated by the colon there.
Step 3: Edit your fstab and put the following line there:
s3fs#your_bucket_name       /mnt/s3_storage       fuse    auto            0 0

This script leaves only the most recent copy of the backup in the BACKUPSDIR and 7 copies (for 7 days in a row) on the remote storage. All backups on the remote storage are encrypted with your password. Don’t forget to change it (–passphrase pwd ). Enjoy!

#!/bin/bash
#
# Back up CVS
#
CVSDIR=/home/cvs
BACKUPSDIR=/home/andrew/backups
S3DIR=/mnt/s3_storage
#
# Get current date and time
set `date +"%Y %m %d %H %M"`

# Remove any backups older than 1 days
echo "Removing backups older than 1 days..."
TO_DELETE=$(find $BACKUPSDIR -atime +1 -name "cvstree*")

if [ -z "$TO_DELETE" ]; then
    echo "No backups to delete"
else
    # remove them!
    rm -f $TO_DELETE
fi

#echo "Backing up CVS tree..."
/bin/tar -cj -C $CVSDIR --totals . > $BACKUPSDIR/cvstree_$1-$2-$3.tar.bz

echo "Encrypting the backup"
/usr/bin/gpg -c --batch --passphrase pwd $BACKUPSDIR/cvstree_$1-$2-$3.tar.bz
echo "Moving to the remote storage"
/usr/bin/mv $BACKUPSDIR/cvstree_$1-$2-$3.tar.bz.gpg $S3DIR

# Remove any backups older than 7 days on the remote storage
echo "Removing backups older than 7 days from the remote storage..."
TO_DELETE=$(find $S3DIR -mtime +7 -name "cvstree*" )

if [ -z "$TO_DELETE" ]; then
    echo "No backups to delete"
else
    # remove them!
    rm -f $TO_DELETE
fi

exit 0

• If we want to create passionate users, we need to help them get better.
  • ‘Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at.”
  • Many people still have their cameras permanently set on “P” – automatic mode — even though those cameras offer finer control over things like shutter speed and aperture
  • What would it mean to our users if we unlock the door and help them be awesome?
• In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, a major theme is the “10,000 Hour Rule”, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something.
  • 10,000 is a long time – it’ can be a depressing prospect
  • [Joey: According to Outliers, 10,000 hours makes for about 3 hours of focused practice every day for 10 years.]
  • To get good, you have to practice all the time.
  • Anything that makes it easier for your users to get practice – any time, anywhere – will help them get their 10,000 hours (and get good) sooner.
• Give your users patterns for success
  • In any pattern you give your users, make sure that there’s “the one thing” that they can take away as a lesson
  • You need to answer the question: “What’s the one thing you can do to be amazing?”
• Give your users better gear
  • They’ll work better
  • “Spend the money!”
  • Give people a way to justify the better gear you’re offering them
• Motivation is important
  • Treat motivation as a gift
  • Make a product that people will actually use
  • “Your treadmill is not in the corner gathering dust because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.”
  • “Make the right thing easy for people and the wrong thing hard.”
• And now, some anti-patterns:
  • We focus on the tool and not the thing the users want to accomplish with the tool
  • “We treat people really well before they buy, and afterwards, we treat them poorly.”
    • This is also the reason people don’t want to upgrade
    • If we want to help people upgrade – which is what they’ll need to do if they want to go forward – we have to accept that it’s a loss and a hit to their self-esteem
  • We write FAQs as if our users they were intellectually curious and have a tablet PC handy
    • People hit the FAQs and help because they’re having a horrible experience
  • “Don’t let the ease-of-use police” step in an dumb something down
    • You don’t feel awesome when you’ve mastered something that a 3-year-old can master
  • Hiring a social media consultant is the wrong thing to do
    • They focus in the wrong direction
    • Social media consultant are focused on making your users love you, which is the wrong thing – nobody is awesome because they love you
    • They think the goal is to make users want to party with you
    • The true goal is to make your users want to party because of something you did that helped them become awesome. They should want to party because of you, but without you
    • You want to connect users with other users, not with your company
    • A much better use of social media is to find out:
      • What role we play in our users’ lives
      • What role our competitors play in our users’ lives
      • What the pain and pleasure points for our users are
    • By trying to be competitive and focusing on our competitors, we end up being uncompetitive
      • This leads to featurities
      • We end up building things that end up harming our users
      • The best thing we can do is to look at the bigger, cooler thing – the world in which our products and our competitors’ products exist, the problems that the products are trying solve, the things at which our users are trying to kick ass – and blog, tweet and use social media about that
  • Getting WOM (Word-of-Mouth) may be the social marketers’ holy grail, but the true goal is WOFO – Word of [Effing] Obvious.
    • If your users are so good, you get WOFO.

I’ve been using Coremoid plasmoid since KDE 4 was available only in SVN and it provides everything I want. The plasmoid sits in the tray and displays processor usage on all cores (in case your processor has more than one core) plus the processor governor and frequency. It is useful to see whether your computer is doing something CPU intensive that you didn’t want it to do (for example there is a program hanging in memory and consuming your CPU).

The look & feel of Coremoid plasmoid

It hasn’t been actively supported since last year and the sources from kde-look.org don’t compile with latest KDE 4.2.x stable. I have made few adjustments to the code to make it compile and decided to share it with you

Download coremoid-0.3.1-andrew.tar.bz2

This time I decided to tune Aptana’s Java virtual machine to achieve top possible performance. To do that I edited the file AptanaStudio.ini usually located in “C:\Users\<YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Aptana Studio 1.2″ if you install it on Vista using default settings. You may just search for AptanaStudio.ini to find out where it is.

So here is the contents of my file. I will explain the meaning of each line I added or modified. The arguments added or modified are located after -vmargs (arguments to the virtual machine).

-name
Aptana
Studio
-vmargs
-Xmx384M
-Xms128M
-Xverify:none
-XX:+UseParallelGC
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
-XX:CompileThreshold=100
-Djava.awt.headless=true
-Djava.awt.nativeDoubleBuffering=true

• Xmx384M – maximum heap(memory) size Aptana can consume (384Mb). This value is set automatically by the installer based on the amount of memory installed on your computer. You may adjust it to give Java machine more memory to cache compiled code
• Xms128M – the initial heap(memory) size. It is the minimum amount of memory Aptana will consume. Increasing this value will speed up start up a little
• Xverify:none – skip the class verification stage during class loading . Using -Xverify:none disables Java class verification, which can provide a 10-15% improvement in startup time
• XX:+UseParallelGC – use parallel (throughput) garbage collector. Can provide significant performance boost on modern computers with several cores or processors. Surpisingly, it shows good performance even on single core processors
• XX:+AggressiveOpts – turns on point performance optimizations that are expected to be on by default in upcoming releases of Java machine.
• XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods – turns on fast method entry code for accessor method. Improves performance.
• XX:CompileThreshold=100 – this switch will make startup time slower, by Java machine to compile many more methods down to native code sooner than it otherwise would. The reported result is snappier performance once Aptana  is running, since more of the UI code will be compiled rather than interpreted. This value represents the number of times a method must be called before it will be compiled.
• Djava.awt.headless=true – this line is present in the .ini file by default
• Djava.awt.nativeDoubleBuffering=true – tells the UI to use hardware double buffering instead of drawing everything in software. Not sure it have any effect because of the switch above (headless=true) which tells Java there is no monitor or keyboard connected to the computer

The result of the modifications of AptanaStudio.ini is faster and more responsive Aptana. I also use the Port of Ruby Blue color theme for Aptana which looks very nice See the screenshot below:

Aptana Studio with color theme "Port of Ruby Blue"