The problem of selecting text inside a link in Webkit/Blink engines has existed for a long time. At least for me. Somehow I missed that it could be solved with a browser extension. I found such an extension, called Select like a Boss. But it was only for Firefox, Opera (Blink), and Chrome. Since the source code for the Chrome extension was available on GitHub, I simply took the js code and packaged it as a Safari extension. Now I'm happy and can properly select text inside links :)

Source code + download link: GitHub.

I had wanted to write a post about Geohash for a long time. I've had screenshots for it lying around for several years, but never got around to it.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here; this will be more of a note-style post.

Geohash is an algorithm for turning 2 coordinates like 37.571309, 55.767190 (longitude, latitude) into 1 string. You can read about how it works on Wikipedia. There are also plenty of libraries on the internet in different languages for converting coordinates to the Geohash format and back.

And at work we used Geohash to show nearby venues on a map. Suppose we have a restaurant and know its coordinates. The task is to display venues that are nearby.

What we did was convert the restaurant coordinates into a geohash and get a string like «ucftqbne6vww».

Accordingly, for every restaurant we had both coordinates and a geohash. And the whole point is that restaurants that are close to each other have geohashes that partially match. For example:

ucftqbne6vww
ucftqbne6vat

The more precise the coordinates are (the more digits after the decimal point), the longer the geohash. The more matching characters we require, the closer to the original point we search. By chopping characters off the end of the geohash, we get a certain rectangular area. The more characters we cut off, the larger that area is. The nice part is that if we compare 2 geohashes and the required number of characters matches (the precision we need), that means both restaurants fall into this rectangular area. Accordingly, we can consider them to be nearby.

In the screenshot above, we set lower precision (fewer characters for the geohash) and got an area so large that it does not even fit on the screen.

And here we increased the precision. More characters in Geohash means higher precision and a smaller area/spread.

In the end, on AllCafe (well, back when it was ours) the results of selecting nearby venues on the map looked like this:

It seems this solution still works to this day. Since we had CouchDB, Geohash was calculated once for all restaurants there with Map/Reduce. Having that dataset, we then searched for nearby venues with the required precision.

An obvious downside of this solution is that if you remove 1 character, the search step changes. In other words, you cannot set an arbitrary search area size. And those steps can be huge.

Later, for the mobile version, we started using Bounding Box to show on phones only those venues that fall inside the map area currently visible on screen, without loading extra markers that may not fit on the screen and only eat memory. So there are options :)

Well, that's one more long-pending item done :) I could not write this note for several years, and even the screenshots are from the days when I still used Ubuntu.

By the way, for playing around there is the site http://geohash.org - you enter coordinates and it gives you a Geohash plus a link. So that is another possible use for it: giving an http link to specific coordinates. If you are interested, go play with it.

I'll just leave a joyful post here. Hooray, the prayers/requests/cries of those who love the old Opera browser have finally been heard. One of the creators of the old Opera built a new browser. It is modern, based on Chromium, but a lot of what the old Opera had in terms of interface and usability has already been done. I went over it in more detail here on Habr. It is still rough in places, but even now joy and happiness have filled the world :) I'll be following it and using it. Hooray!

I ran into an unpleasant issue on one of the work servers here.

Historically, when the site's PHP engine starts up, this value gets set:

session_save_path( PATH_TMP );
ini_set( 'session.gc_maxlifetime', 1800 );

In other words, we have a custom directory for storing sessions, and its lifetime is set to half an hour for the garbage collector.

The server uses php-fpm. I noticed problems in the logs - as if the disk had run out of space. Even though there was still plenty of it. My first thought was that somewhere a huge number of tiny files had been created. As it turned out, session files in our custom directory were not being deleted. I started digging and found the session.gc_probability parameter on php.net, which in php.ini is supposed to be set to 1 - this is the probability that the garbage collector will also run when a script executes.

In the user notes there is a note that Debian sets this parameter to 0. Googling says this is related to the permissions on the default folder /var/lib/php5, which do not allow PHP's garbage collection to clean up old files there. So Debian disables PHP's garbage collector and apparently runs some cron job of its own as root for cleanup. It seems to look for files in the standard directory, and since that does not match our PATH_TMP directory, the sessions were not being removed.

That's how it goes. The options are either to set up your own cron job for cleanup, for example:

0,30 * * * * find /path/to/tmp -mmin +30 -exec rm {} \;

Or specify the default folder in php.ini. But, for example, if a site has 2 projects that use different temporary folders for storing sessions, then you will have to configure something for both of them.

Or add this line when the script starts: ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);

Personally, I like having my own cron job more. Although maybe adding one more line to the script is better, since it could save you from this problem in the future. Still, cron somehow feels more reliable. Now I just have to figure out how to delete the files that have piled up over 6 months. Midnight Commander spent about 2 hours scanning the folder. When the counter went past 49 million, I gave up on the scan, started deletion, and went to sleep.

That's that.

The recap will be brief.

We spent New Year’s in Sweden. I thought that if we drove farther north there would be snow there. Nope :) There was snow only on the way back. But we did get to visit Stockholm.

At the beginning of the year I finally launched the new version of Dolphin Fan Club. Too bad I still haven’t filled it with everything I plan to.

I was planning a vacation in the spring. Work got in the way. On the bright side, that spring I released 2 new iOS apps:

A Yandex.Metrica client for iPhone.

A Yandex.Subscriptions reader for iPad.

And the AllCafe iPhone app I wrote even made it into the «All About Moscow» selection in iTunes.

Then AllCafe.ru was sold and we continued working on the second project, AllNice.ru. Too bad about the vacation :(

That spring we launched The Most Horrible Show about horror and sci-fi movies, made 4 episodes, and that was the end of it. Andrey (the host) joined Zabitye and is now trying to appear on camera there, and we basically gave up on the show :) The show didn’t work out. Filming was funnier than the finished episodes :)

We recorded a cool interview with Dolphin during the two-day concerts at Kosmonavt in the spring :)

In June we made it to Helsinki. It was good :)

From Helsinki we took the ferry to Tallinn. Trips like that are exhausting, of course. Too much activity, and you never get enough sleep, but it was worth it.

One summer evening I ended up in Pushkin staying overnight as a guest. It’s nice there in summer. Going home at 6 in the morning by commuter train — that had never happened to me before :) I even slept through Kupchino and ended up walking home from Pushkinskaya.

We went out to the gulf several times.

Masha and Vanya got married :)

We went to Green Fest for Die Antwoord and Prodigy. We got soaked, but jumped around a lot and were insanely happy :)

The three of us made it to Lake Ladoga, but only once this year.

I went to a BEM meetup and checked out Yandex’s office in Saint Petersburg while I was at it.

In autumn I did a lot of work on Dolphin’s site. Promo pages and a new site, because his book of poems and a new album supporting that book were coming out in the autumn. And now, at the end of the year, I finally redid the site for Pavlik, Dolphin’s guitarist, too.

In October we had a great vacation trip to Vietnam.

That seems to be everything I can remember off the top of my head.

This turned out to be a year of worrying about work. My vacation at my current job fell through for plans that never materialized, then AllCafe was sold, and I started thinking more and more often that I should change jobs. Now I’m finally ready. In autumn, by the way, I successfully failed an interview at Yandex. It turned out that at that moment I was a pretty terrible frontend developer. On the other hand, I started studying Javascript and Node.js. I was going hard on iOS programming, and I plan to keep doing that, plus I want to learn to write for macOS. By the way, I also applied to Google for a Developers Relations Engineer position, but during the HR call it turned out that if a list says there are 5 programming languages and you need to know «1 or more» of them, and Java is on that list, then without Java you are not needed.

But my personal life changed for the better. I no longer go out to Ozerki as a guest, now the two of us live at my place :) And I actually like it :)

And over the whole of 2014 I didn’t photograph a single concert. Not one. I don’t even know whether that’s good or bad :) I guess the hobby has passed.

Album of the year: Dolphin — Andrey

Movie of the year: Interstellar

I can’t choose the concert of the year; it was probably still Green Fest with Die Antwoord and Prodigy. Although Dolphin’s two spring shows were interesting. But not so much because of the concerts as because of what was happening around them :) We had quite a night walking around Dumskaya then; on the second concert day a lot of people had a hard time working :) Besides, it was Cosmonautics Day, Dolphin played at Kosmonavt, and after the concert 2/3 of the band Moi Rakety Vverkh went partying with us. Everything aligned perfectly :)

So those are my results for the year. Happy upcoming New Year to everyone, I’m off to get ready. I’m meeting the new year with my brother, just as I wanted, family-style. And tomorrow I’m going to PTVP at MOD. And then I’ll start looking for a new job. By the way, does anyone need an iOS developer? :)

Updated the Safari extension. It now shows 5 releases in the toolbar instead of 3. And the design now matches Safari 8.

Source code on GitHub.

Install extension.

Hooray, it finally happened. TELE2 launched 3G in Saint Petersburg today. They will enable it for everyone gradually over 3 weeks, but if you can’t wait, you can call 611 and ask the operator to turn it on right now. I’ll leave this screenshot here so that in a couple of months I can measure the speed again and compare whether it got better or worse :) They say they want to launch LTE in summer 2015. Progress finally reached TELE2.