ilya haykinson >> blog

There are a few defining technology moments for me. The first was when I saw a computer for the first time (I remember playing Frogger and Moon Patrol). The second was when I got a 486 as an upgrade to a PC XT; I was just not prepared for the speed increase. The next was when around 1995, when I realized that a three-block pedestrian street near me had a website. If a street could have a website, then the future surely had arrived.

I think that I had a fourth defining technology moment the other day. I got my cellphone to stream music from the Net. It’s not a major achievement, but here I was, holding a little box in my hand, receiving more data in a few seconds than I could have fit on any storage device just fifteen years prior. I could go anywhere in my home with this box, and my music — some music — would always be with me. And it’s not really the music that got me — after all, you could do this with radio for decades now. It’s the fact that I really do now have the jukebox-in-the-sky; I can listen to exactly what I want and where I want, without wires and with just my personal helper device. It’s also the fact that it wasn’t just music that was streaming; it was 40 kilobits per second of highly compressed data. I was connected; I was really part of the network. I took this further the next day: I plugged my jukebox-in-the-sky into my car’s auxiliary stereo port. Listening to my streaming station at 70 miles an hour, I was on the Internet, still part of the network.

I was receiving. This was definitely the fourth defining moment for me.

I’d eaten some nova smoked salmon today, only to bump into a food safety story at Wikinews saying that a brand of nova smoked salmon was recalled for being tainted with some evil germs…. I had to dig the food wrapper out of the trash to make sure I hadn’t eaten of the recalled brand.

Talk about a scary story. I don’t even eat smoked salmon all that often.

I’ve written a utility that syndicates CVSNT commit logs as RSS.
The idea is that it’s a lot easier to subscribe to an RSS feed of commits than to manually hunt through the repository, or to use a similarly-hokey commit emailer.

The software is still kind of raw, but if you are really missing this functionality then it might come in handy. It is licensed under the GPL.

I am a Software Engineer in Los Angeles, California. I was born on August 4, 1978, in Moscow, Russia, and moved to the U.S. with my family in 1990.

I’m married–my wife Linda is finishing her dissertation in the English department at UCLA. We’ve got two cats (Ansel and Teagan) who both need to lose quite a bit of weight.

I went to Santa Monica High School and then attended UCLA majoring in Computer Science. During high school and college I interned (and contracted) for Microsoft, working on Visual FoxPro and Windows 98. In 1998, however, I left UCLA to be the first employee at Scour–one of the first multimedia search engines founded by my friends from UCLA. After three years of ups and downs, we got sued out of existence by the MPAA and the RIAA. I then worked for Red Swoosh, and then a (now-defunct) consulting firm Skematix. I spent a few years leading technology at Kareo, building pretty cutting-edge software for the medical billing market. I also dabbled again at getting an actual degree from UCLA (this time in Economics, though). As of October 2007 I work at Hulu.com where I try to figure out how on earth to not get any more excited about working with a bunch of really bright folks doing very cool things with online video.

My technology interests include web services, application platform development, and mobile devices. My platform of choice is .NET (C#), though I was a big fan of PHP, and have developed software in C/C++, Visual Basic and a variety of other languages. These days I mostly work with MS SQL Server though at other times I’ve dealt with MySQL and Oracle, both of which I liked. I have a soft spot for PowerShell and am a long-time user of Linux.

My outside interests on the internet revolve around collaborative software and services. I’ve been somewhat addicted to Wikipedia, and more recently to Wikinews. I’ve written some minor open-source software, and run a few minor web sites.

If I think of something to say else about me, I’ll probably update this text.