About the project and myself

To the left you can see the face of this site's author. My name is Konstantin Vlasov, and currently I work at ISP RAS (Institute for System Programming) after studying at the MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology). I met the world of programming in about 7^th year of school, and, as many other programmers, I started with Basic on such legendary machines as ZX Spectrum and BK-0010. Later, in 10^th year they started teaching us Pascal and I became an adherent of this language. But after my aquaintance with C and C++ I switched to them and continue to like these languages, sharing dislike of most of C/C++ programmers for the newfangled trends like C# and .NET that may be convenient for programmer but are real disasters for user who has to suffer from everlasting machine slowdowns and download huge .NET packages for the only reason that a tiny 1 Kb program could be launched.

At school my experience was limited with programming for MS-DOS only. After my entering the institute, I knew about the development environment Visual C++ 6.0 and the MFC class library. Maybe this is not the best library, but I liked it very much for its simplisity and for not having to distribute additional DLL files: all the necessary files are already included into the standard Windows distribution. (Unfortunately, for the newer Visual C++ versions this is no longer true.) For example, applications written in a widely known library Qt need DLL files of about 8 Mb size! This could hardly be acceptable in Russia, where in most regions Internet connection is either extremely slow (modem at 56 Kbit/sec), or extremely expensive, or even both. That's why VC++ 6.0 with MFC still remains my favourite set of development tools.

Some time ago in our country there was large groth of popularity of so-called japanese crosswords. I was carried away by them too; it is very interesting how from chaotic set of numbers one can construct some picture, and quite often these pictures were very beautiful! The only thing I didn't like was the need to spend much time painting over many cells instead of thinking about later part of solution. At that time I decided to write a program for work with japanese crosswords: a mouse click is much faster than painting square cells on paper.
The first version of this program I tried to write on Pascal under MS-DOS, but I did not finish it. The next version I wrote using MFC, and it was much more serious project than the first one. And then I thought: why not distribute this program over Internet?.. That's how this web-site's idea was born.

At first, there was only the program itself plus several packages with the crosswords. Then, as I was implementing new projects, the site have been being filled with new handicrafts. Some of them remained almost uncalled for, the others found their lovers. Unfortunately, because of the lack of time most projects are frozen. For each program I have a large list of wishes and future plans, but I don't have enough time to implement them all. However, some of programs are being slowly developed, and the chanses are that new versions will appear in the future…

And in the end I'd like to say several words about web-browsers. In the first place, my site is designed for the latest version of Opera (at the moment of writing these words this is 9.64). Also, I try to support Mozilla Firefox (checked in 3.0.10). What about Internet Explorer, I refuse to support this miracle of nature. I'm really sorry to say that (especially taking into account that there are almost 35% of IE users among my site visitors), but its behaviour does not follow any known logic. If I tell it to create a table cell with height of 8 pixels, and it stretches it to 20; when I tell it to put text at center, and it moves it to the left; when 2/3 of all the development time is spent for adjusting the site exclusively to this particular engine — I'm losing heart. I'm creating my site according to the approved international standards (particularly, XHTML 1.0). All normal browsers must support standards (and normal browsers do support them!), and if IE wishes to be so specific — well, it's the problem of it and its users, and not mine. Of course, I try to check that the site remains functional even in this browser (if it may be called so), but I don't intend to clean up the desing for the last detail specifically for IE, so if you notice some artifacts in it, just don't take to heart.