“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 No Comments

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 No Comments

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 No Comments

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 2nd, 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 1 Comment