“Space in typog­ra­phy is like time in music. It is infi­nitely divis­i­ble, but a few pro­por­tional inter­vals can be much more use­ful than a lim­it­less choice of arbi­trary quan­ti­ties.” So says the typog­ra­pher Robert Bringhurst, and just as reg­u­lar use of time pro­vides rhythm in music, so reg­u­lar use of space pro­vides rhythm in typog­ra­phy, and with­out rhythm the lis­tener, or the reader, becomes dis­ori­en­tated and lost.

On the Web, ver­ti­cal rhythm — the spac­ing and arrange­ment of text as the reader descends the page — is con­tributed to by three fac­tors: font size, line height and mar­gin or padding. All of these fac­tors must cal­cu­lated with care in order that the rhythm is main­tained. The basic unit of ver­ti­cal space is line height. Estab­lish­ing a suit­able line height that can be applied to all text on the page is the key to a solid depend­able ver­ti­cal rhythm. It will engage and guide the reader down the page.

Con­tinue reading →

29th May, 2008 Comments Off

May 9 — Vic­tory Day all over East­ern Euro­pean coun­tries, a national hol­i­day which remem­bers the Vic­tory over Nazi Ger­many in World War II and hon­ors 20 mil­lion Sovi­ets who died in the war.

Vic­tory Day marks the capit­u­la­tion of Nazi forces to the Allies (the Soviet Union, the United King­dom, the United States and other prin­ci­pal Allied nations) in Berlin on May 8, 1945. It is cel­e­brated in the suc­ces­sor states to the Soviet Union on May 9, because when the Ger­man Instru­ment of Sur­ren­der was signed (in the mid­night), it was already May 9 in the USSR and East­ern Europe. The US, UK and most west­ern Euro­pean coun­tries mark Vic­tory in Europe Day on May 8.

The main rea­son for the cel­e­bra­tion of Vic­tory Day was to remem­ber the peo­ple who died in the war. On that day, flow­ers are laid on their graves and vet­er­ans that are still alive go out on the streets wear­ing their medals and orders. There are few of them left now days and the num­ber is get­ting smaller every year. Rus­sia mainly fought a war to defend itself, which is called a “Great Patri­otic War”. That is what most Rus­sians call WWII. In Rus­sia almost all the fam­i­lies have at least one per­son who took part in the war. The other old cit­i­zens who did not fight dur­ing the war had to work in fac­to­ries to make guns and prepa­ra­tions, which wasn’t eas­ier than fight­ing. They too are hon­ored on Vic­tory Day.

I’ve lost my Great Grand Father to the bat­tle of Stal­in­grad. Although he was kom­div or divi­sional com­man­der (cor­re­sponds to present day lieutenant-general), he was reported MIA. On this day, I take time to remem­ber him and be thank­ful for every­thing that I have. Because I live in a bet­ter age and place.

9th May, 2008 Comments Off

Finally, I man­aged to trans­fer my web site to the new com­puter and upgrade WP to the lat­est release. This com­puter is not ter­ri­bly new, but ded­i­cated server. This is neat, any­way! Did you men­tioned, that the web site is respond­ing much faster right now? There­fore, gigaflop counter on the bot­tom should be quite low. Sure, this blog is going green:) 

Unfor­tu­nately sev­eral ugly bugs pup-up dur­ing the upgrade process. Mys­te­ri­ously, all “pi” let­ters dis­ap­peared in pi-day news. Per­man­link struc­ture col­lapsed, and I was not able to restore it in the old shape. It causes mul­ti­ple 404 errors:( Sev­eral fea­tures are still off. I hope to work on these issues over the weekend.

Last night, I pro­grammed new quick-n-dirty imple­men­ta­tion for “Colophon” and photo gallery. Next, “Design” part will be com­pletely re-aligned and updated too. So, a lot of new and excited stuff is com­ing. Stay tuned!

8th May, 2008 Comments Off

Sorry for neglect­ing a site for almost two months. There were many rea­sons for that. These days were extremely busy for me. First of all, I attended a 235^th Spring ACS National Meet­ing & Expo­si­tion in New Orleans. I gave two quite suc­cess­ful talks on the meet­ing. The first one “An ab ini­tio mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics study of the ini­tial chem­i­cal events in nitramines: Ther­mal decom­po­si­tion of CL-20” and the sec­ond one “Struc­ture of liq­uid water from ab ini­tio mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics at the com­plete plane wave basis set limit”. As I expected, the later one inspired a lot of “after ses­sion” dis­cus­sion. We spent almost half of the lunch break.
Later, I pre­sented the same talk, on 8^th South­ern School on Com­pu­ta­tional Chem­istry and Mate­ri­als Sci­ence. Although, the con­fer­ence has ended, you can still access the full pro­gram as a PDF compilation.

Last, but not least, I suc­cess­fully defend my Ph.D. the­sis on May 2^nd, 2008:) I am pretty excited about that. I hope to put some pic­tures from these events. In the mean time, a friend of mine, Dmytro Kosenkov high­lighted some of these events in his notes.

6th May, 2008 View Comments