Scand Contributes to Apache Batik 1.7

batik patch by scand

April 25, 2011Scand development team members built a patch for Apache Batik 1.7.
Batik
is a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets dealing with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content. With the Batik toolkit you can easily use SVG images for various purposes, including generation, manipulation or display.
The misfeature found by our SVG experts was the lack of radial gradient support in the svggen component. The corresponding feature was added and the results were sent to the Apache Batik team.

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April 11, 2011: Clouds and Skynet Attacks

Clouds - the fun, the rock!

Indeed, clouds are admirable! No datacenters, no power supply needed, and nothing but Internet required.
Sure, we use clouds frequently as demo platforms for our customers, also for quick testing of untypical environment, and for development (for example in case of additional build servers providing customers with direct access to nightly builds).
Yep, we’re touched a bit with the latest Amazon EC2 disaster, but nothing critical. We also use Rackspace and GoogleApps, so we’re now prepared for new Skynet attacks ;)

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Seminar for the SEO Crowd

April 01, 2011 our colleagues attended a SEO seminar (no kidding) organized by Webcom Media in the National Library of Belarus (Minsk). SEO gurus shared their experience of website optimization and usability practices, made forecasts regarding search engines development, discussed a number of specific case studies and their results and answered tricky questions asked by seminar participants. Anyone willing to get valuable tips and hints on SEO-related issues was welcome to converse with the experts  and  the peers during coffee-breaks and after the seminar.
national library of belarus

seo seminar scand

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More Fun with Agile :)


March 16, 2011 – another scheduled Agile Club meeting was held in Minsk.
The topic announced was “More Fun!” and the discussion covered the art of reaching balance between fun and productivity. Of course we attended the event and took part in the discussion!
Short lightning talks on the agenda were as listed:

  • “Making Fun: Hints and Tips Taken from Game Development Experience” by Denis Voikhanskiy;
  • “Guerilla Team Building: 9 Smart Ways to Weld a Team” by Svetlana Kolupayeva;
  • “Our Attempt to Add Some Fun to Working at Taucraft and Why it Almost Worked” by Anton Marchenko.

The lightning talks were followed by open space discussion and experience exchange on the topic. We are going to use knowledge and apply experience shared by our workmates from other IT companies.

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Groovy Seminar at Scand

March 10, 2011 – an in-house Groovy seminar was held at Scand. Our Groovy guru prepared an introduction and showed some tricks of programming in Groovy, described the advantages of this dynamic language and demonstrated its effectiveness and other benefits it provides to developers and QA specialists.
A PowerPoint presentation
underlying the seminar will soon be available for download. 

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Scand at Semantic Technologies Conference

February 10-12, 2011 – the annual International Scientific Conference “Open Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Systems” (OSTIS-2011) came around in Minsk, Belarus. The conference was hosted by the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics and welcomed participators from many countries.
Scand was among the partners of the conference and helped to organize the event. Our colleagues prepared a number of reports relating to intelligent systems design. They admitted a high level of scientific research works presented by OSTIS-2011 participators. The areas of the presented reports included hyper-toponetworks mathematics, analysis of resource flows and modeling based on them, cloud platforms for intelligent systems management along with other compelling scientific research realms.
The range of OSTIS tools displayed was really impressive – from SCPH programming languages to knowledge editors.  Students and post-grads attending the conference took the floor to demonstrate their know-hows in the sphere of semantic networks technologies, design and modeling.

As a bottom line of the conference, the participators determined further directions and toolkits  developed within the framework of the OSTIS project.
Not only did Scand help organize the conference and provide a selection of presentations, but it also awarded the best students’ scientific research works.

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Scand Table Football Championship

We could have launched an advertising campaign with a motto like “Tired of on-line office games? Want to find a new and free yet not less effective office time killer? Have no desire to exhaust yourself in a fitness center? Scand developers have discovered an amazing alternative –  off-line table football! Follow us!” – but we won’t do this, because we do not produce table soccer sets, we develop software.
Instead, we’ll provide a short report on table football championship being held at Scand.

March 4, 2011 – the First Ever Scand Small Chinese Table Soccer Championship (SCTS) took place.
According to the standings, the tournament will include preliminary and play-off stages. Two matches will be held during every preliminary session day.
13 volunteers dared to go for gold and the champion status in this simple yet challenging game.

The first game started after the qualifying draw had been held – traditionally, a coin helped to define the initiator.

The premiere match itself witnessed a non-compromising struggle. The players tried hard to aim at the opposing team’s gate and even succeeded in scoring goals. The match was broken open 5 minutes into the game. Both players demonstrated their will-to-win spirit and skill. The match ended 2-1. Fans surrounding the competition field provided encouraging feedback and supported their favorites and promised to bring vuvuzelas to the following games to cheer them up.

Stay tuned! We’ll keep you informed on the First Scand Small Chinese Table Soccer Championship!scand table footbal championship

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Happy New Groovy 1.7.9 Release!

The release of Groovy 1.7.9 was announced on March 09, 2011.
The Groovy development team made a 1.7 line release upon fixing several small, however, sometimes critical bugs that caused troubles in some cases. We at Scand faced those troubles while using Groovy 1.7.7 as our basic version – predominantly, they were minor bugs including bad regression (mentioned below in our blog), a garbage collection error in Groovy 1.7.7, a bug of a String handled incorrectly during array conversion, etc. A bigger bug caused Groovy to generate a new call site class at runtime for each method call, which resulted in rapid decrease of available permgen space. It was also fixed prior to the stable branch 1.7 latest release.

As a result, we managed to ice-rocket from Groovy 1.7.7 having a collection of minor bugs  through Groovy 1.7.8 to version 1.7.9 which has no critical issues for us.
Groovy 1.7.9 binary and source release versions as well as online documentation are available for download.

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Updated Grails framework is available

We have finished migration of our projects to use an updated Grails version 1.3.7 by SpringSource. Grails is a dynamic Java-and-Groovy-based web application framework allowing us to apply convention-based rapid development and benefit from the usage of the accredited APIs. We managed to detect a Groovy regression bug and referred it to the open source community, which helped to get the bug fixed and enabled us to jump from Grails 1.3.1 to version 1.3.7.

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Open Source Contribution: Groovy

Scand’s Groovy experts have contributed to the open source community experience.  We traced a bug and reported it to the community so that it could be fixed.
It was a regression bug – a change in the existing code modifying the behavior of the application so it does not meet a specification that was previously met. Regression bugs should be detected before releasing the project.

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