Kirill Kurkin's blog for the E-SPEAIT course

In this post I would like to provide two examples of designs: one with bad ergonomics and one with good ergonomics.   Bad design: Keyboards Many PC users are used to keyboard shortcuts. It makes their life much easier, for example, CTRL+C and CTRL+V is probably known by everybody. Instead of clicking right mouse button, repositioning your pointer and clicking "copy", you can just use CTRL+C shortcut. We got used to the fact that CTRL is located on the left bottom of the keyboard. This proved to be quite convenient and we can always find the key without looking at it. Another handy key is a Fn (function) key. It is undoubtedly useful in many situations, but it is not used as regularly as CTRL. It is usually placed to the right of the control key, as seen in the picture below. However, some manufacturers decided to swap Fn and CTRL key and place Fn at the bottom left of the keyboard for some reason. In my opinion, it is a horrible design solution, since we are used to the fact ...

  In this post I would like to provide my own thoughts on who is a professional and who can we call a professional in the world of IT. Also, I would like to compare a modern IT professional with an IT professional 20 years ago and reflect on some ideas mentioned in the Wiki of the course. First of all, professionality has no specific meaning and may mean different things for different people. In my opinion, professionality is still more connected to the work itself than social aspects. If you are a professional, you know how to solve any problem related to your field and how to do your work effectively. Some people need to work in a team to solve a problem, some can manage it alone. Therefore, ability to work in a team is not a professional trait to me, though it may help a lot. So, I would say that professional traits are those traits that are needed to effectively solve any problem related to your field of work. This also applies to the field of IT. These are: adaptability, analy...

 In this post I would like to take a look at commandment 3, which claims: "Know where you are in cyberspace" that is a part of Ten Commandment written by Virginia Shea. What's important to mention here is that in different "parts" of the Internet different rules apply. It depends on what is the channel of your communication and who you are communicating with. In our society, these two problems are now more or less united into one. For example, we use messengers to chat with friends and sometimes colleagues, emails are used to write letters to your managers, Zoom and Skype will be used for business meetings, but you will use Discord for a relaxed talk and gaming sessions with your friends. This way, it is much easier for us to pick appropriate language in different channels of communication. Chatting with your friends is clearly informal and may even involve topics and language not appropriate for other segments of the Internet society, though it is still importa...

In this post I would like to evaluate how different copyleft licenses can have an impact on projects and what are the advantages of each type of licenses. Open source licenses can be divided in two main categories: copyleft and permissive licenses . The difference between these two types is that copyleft licenses are persistent (all derivative works must be licensed and distributed under the same license as the original project), but permissive licenses are not. Also, copyleft licenses have a viral effect and permissive licenses do not. Viral effect means that combining copyleft licensed work with a work licensed under a different license leads to the resulting work falling under the copyleft license. Though, not all copyleft licenses have a viral effect. Copyleft licenses can be divided into two subcategories: weak copyleft and strong copyleft licenses. Both strong and weak copyleft licenses are persistent, but only strong copyleft licenses have a viral effect, which means that wor...

In this post I would like to provide my opinion regarding the 6 points in Chapter 2 of The Case for Copyright Reform . To my mind, the copyright reform is really needed right now, since even non-commercial use of someone's ideas now violates copyright laws. To me it seems that soon we will have to pay for talking, since "someone has already said that". Of course, this is an exaggeration, but copyright laws are getting stricter and stricter. This means that people now can't freely share information because of the fear of copyright violation. But isn't free access to any information for everybody has always been a humanity's dream? Free exchange of information is the key to human development, and with all these strict rules we stopped it.  This is why I think that the copyright reform is needed. The one described in the book " The Case for Copyright Reform " seemed interesting to me. I agree with almost every point of the proposal made in the book, e...