path of the code monkey

Playstation ID

2011-07-14T00:19:00.000-07:00

nick: stereoit

living backwards

2011-01-28T05:20:00.001-08:00

My Next Live
by Woody Allen

In my next life I want to live backwards. You start out dead and fet that out of the way.

Then you wake up in and old people's home feeling better every day.

You get kicked out for being too health, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day.

You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement.

You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school.

You then go to primary school, you become kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in a luxurious spa with conditions like central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then, Voila!

You finish off as an orgasm!

I rest my case.

Dear Woody,
if you've seen the RedDwarf, you would know it is not just roses. Just think of Santa Clause! That bastard who is stealing the presetns. And after the orgasm, you would end-up as floating sperm in your father's balls...

Rad Kite Trip II

2010-08-31T02:12:00.000-07:00

.. a chance came by to join a friend on his EuroTrip, so I booked tickets to Malaga and three months later here we are, back to Tarifa and while we were there we took the possibility to taste a little bit of Africa..

Tarifa, if you like photos check out our Tarifa and Morocco albums.

Day 1 Thursday

Swaped with Marketa at the Airport, just enough time to get some coffee, pickup my heavy luggage and hurry to meet Radek and then we moved straight to Tarifa. We staged on the Rad advised free spot, pretty good community.

Day 2 Friday

Or lucky day, we got just enough wind to test our bigger kites (13m) and get warmed up for Saturday. Checked Tarifa just to find out my friend turned dreams into reality as we saw Rebels Kite Shop right on the main street. Got a new cap. Bought some stuff at Lidl, WiesBeer is NOT a beer.

Day 3 Saturday

I've tried one session in the morning, but the wind got too strong already so I was kinda lucky to get back to beach OK after few 35knots gusts on my 10m. Perfect day for 5-7m kites (which I do not posses). So we moved to our little french safe-hold and drink most of the day.

Day 4 Sunday

As the wind was still too strong for our kites we just stayed in the safe-hold, tasting another 6-7 beers just to chill out. Met bunch of czech guys which are working in Gibraltar and took some magic time off in Tarifa. Pepe was so kind and drank all my WeissBeer, he is a nice guy. Wind got so strong (in gusts over 40 knots) Rad managed to trash is train-kite lines...

In the evening I've tried to launch my 10, but wind was very unstable so I instead managed to cut my feet pretty bad from unwanted gust. Just to get more I landed one jump so badly something cracked in my left leg joint..

Day 5 Monday

Wind still strong so we moved north to Sancti Petri where Rad managed to launch his 8m and had some good time. In the evening we tried another session with 8m at Valdevaqueros beach resulting in loosing by board when too strong gust came and for a moment I was thinking I will be blown across the Atlantic. Rad then had a nice look-for-a-board session and about 30 mins later I found my board on the beach... lucky! Since there was no sign of wind dropping down I've started to look for a smaller kite in the shops.

Day 6 Tuesday

We moved to Los Lances to test on 7m kite and spend some nice session on Rad 8m. Met some mix (Canada, US and UK) of very nice people on the beach.

We definitely decided to go for a Morocco trip. So we got our tickets (ranging from 200-360€ depends where and how you ask!) and prepared the car for the trip. Managed to get 7m 2009 Best Waroo, hope I will use it somewhere..

Day 7 Wednesday

Day in Africa, more on Morocco album.

Here comes Africa! Early morning we boarded our F.R.S (Fast Ferry) and in 40mins we landed at Tagner harbor. Morocco is -2 hours compared to Spain. On the way out through customs we got our first lesson in 'tipping' the locals. Need to get some MAD (Maroccan Dirhams) quick. The rate is about 10MAD~1€.

We left Tanger and used the payed highway to get quickly as south as possible. Looking at our Kite&Windsurf guide we followed the coast and stopped on few places. There was no wind. We passed Rabat, Casablanca and took the main road to El Jadida. The coast line was beautiful, a lot of people just wondering at the shades others tried to sell some fruit or other stuff.

After El Jadida we took the coast road and headed down to Safi where we've been told of beach Lalla Fatna which should be our spot for today. On the way there we stopped at couple of spots, but either no wind or more like wave surfing.

At the end of the day we got close to Safi and found Lalla Fatna, very nice hidden beach with free parking and tents right on the beach. Got welcomed by locals. Waited for sunset and cooked the worst lentils tin I've ever had (bad Lidl!). Spent the night in the tent.

Playa Lalla Fatna

Day 8 Thursday

We've spent morning talking to locals which was fun as they spoke French and we English. Been invited to tea, got some soup and then up to noon we've been fishing. Shit, I got one fish. (check the photos!). Then we moved down towards Essouria.

We managed to do about 2h session in a 'Dead City'. It was a completely new village with pier, long sandy beach, but no-one was there. It looked like it was struck by recent economic crisis.

We moved further south, noticed the country is already different to fertile north with more water systems used to grow stuff. Later that day we parked our car at Moulay Bessah and watched about two dozen of WindSurfers enjoying about 3m waves with cross-of-shore wind. There was no place to launch the kite, but instead we got over-helmed by local kids trying to sell some hand made head caps using different techniques (from smilling to crying). "Une le'photo deux Dirham!!!". Decided to stay over night and got our first fish in local Lawama bar for prices about the same as in Spain..

Day 9 Friday

We moved to Essauira, one of more tourist city in the Morocco. We had excellent afternoon kite session with calm water and 1,5m waves wich was fun to tackle. Managed to get some decent jumps and few back-rolls.

After sunset (bit desperate of the lack of shower in the recent days) we tried to look for a camping area, but the bastard wanted to keep our passports for a stay which is a no-go for us. So another night in the car it was. We parked close to Medina ("old city") and had some excellent fish for two, salad and drinks for 140MAD (14€).

After that we've walked Medina up till midnight. Need to learn to haggle as I do not believe the T-shirt are for 18€, that is still cheaper then in EU, but not that much.

Day 10 Saturday

No Wind... Fog came from the ocean and visibility about 40m. We just stayed at the Mistral Club, chilling out. Got some cold, could hardly blow a nose. We've met Ian from France and spend few hours together tasting some vodka, Moroccan chocolate and checking his five months trip in Morocco.

Later on we walked to Medina to get some fish, but we were late (about two hours after sunset) so we moved more into Medina to get some food local food. We ended eating 3 course meal with Couscous and got so stuffed we could barely walk back to the car. We did about 5km trip. Not even a cup of coffee would help.

Day 11-14 Sunday-Wednesday

Those were pretty ordinary days with temperatures about 30 degrees of Celsius, no or some wind, lots of riding, fixing Rad's kites several times and riding again. Most of the days I had a cold which allowed me to progress with the "Girl with the dragon tatto" book from Stieg Larsson, its a good book.

In the evening we either got space caked, taste some Moroccan chocolate or just stayd in Ian's camping car. Last two days he was so kind he cooked great pasta which was more than handy after several hours in the water.

We were thinking about going to Marrakesh, but the temperatures there reach over 50 degrees easily so we rather changed the place and made a trip about 40km south to Sidi Kauki.

Where I had this soup

and it totally got me out of cold.

Did some shopping in Medina with various result, once you go home and feel you could get half the price if you were good enough, then you get used it and just accept the price you paid. But we are getting better as it just need experience to negotiate.

...

Wind is picking up, time to take my newly acquired 7m Best Waroo kite for a ride .)

P.S.: WE ARE GETTING VERY LOW ON ALCOHOL!!! Luckily Ramadan ends tomorrow.

Facebook killed my blog

2010-07-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

It was about the time to return the favor. I feel miserable for not updating the blog for a while, a lot of happened . But I guess that is OK, there were just better things to do.

So in short, Eva and I got married, almost a year ago .)

Check that out.

Then we planned our honey moon in Egypt, but we've got pregnant in the meanwhile so we canceled the flight and went for just few days to Croatia. Beautiful but quite expensive (I got 4000,- Euro phone bill which I had to pay ... bloody facebook .) ). Those are things you want to forget in your life ..

Fast forward in time I was sent on a trip to Japan for three weeks, just enough time to see the most famous places in Tokyo (35 millions of people, shit no kidding).

Then, sick of bosses (except for the very first one) I got a new one. This one is the worst, it is me. Started stereoIT , hope it lasts until my retirement .)

My very good friend died, only when the death is near one realize how fragile everything is. Makes you think about a life quite a lot.

And then best "thing" in my life happened.

Filip, my son was born, love him with all my heart. I can watch him for hours. Sort of makes me feel good there is someone else who has to carry all the hassles on now, yet there is plenty of time before that. weird though ;) Now we have to think about new flat ... again?

I've turned 30 and so I am having my last battle with my body before I let it go. Running, biking and now, here I am, in Greece, working through day, kiting in the evening. Refreshing.

Oh, I also keep ranting on twitter time to time. Peace, out!

Spring Break

2009-05-09T14:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, March was 200 hours just on company projects, April was pretty much about the same and upcoming installations during May and June will take some extra hours as well. With that desperate vision I booked flight to Malaga and the day before the flight it looked like: no wind forecast, no sure place to stay as the guy I was supposed to stay with had to move to Stockholm temporarily.

From Tarifa 2009

Friday
Got up at 1:45am, moved to Germany, hugged almost-wife and ola to Spain. Switched planes in Mallorca (that place is so German) arrived in Malaga, hired car, took A7 to Tarifa and enjoyed 3 hours of perfect wind. Met some Czech people and found very nice place to stay.

Saturday
Got to the beach just when it started to rain, met some Germany guys who takes old cars from Switzerland and move the to Morocco (one way) all the way to mountains Atlas and then fly there with hang-gliders and then come home with small back pack by plane. Enjoyed sort of up-hill rally and got back to the beach for some wind. Took out my 13m kite, but after 40minutes of riding the wind got much stronger, I was glad to land safely and refreshed with few beers in the city center later that night.

Sunday
Got late, moved to beach but no wind today. Few people (including me) were waiting if termic wind picks up, but it did not. Instead I got some interesting sun burns, ouch! Cooled down by few beers in PachaMama and met friendly British girls who lives in Morocco and wave surf there, wow!

Monday-Wednesday
Get up late, make sandwich, move to kite beach and enjoy it until late. Then come home, get shower, apply cooling cream for the sun burns, wash the kite stuff and explored the city as much as possible. Kiting was great, some waves came and even it took me while to learn how to get over them it was worth it. Managed to do some very first and small jumps with landing downwind, can't wait to get more :) I think I am hooked for life.

Thursday
Up 5:03, moved to Malaga and 10:05 flight to Dusseldorf and at 17:15 I kissed my pretty-soon-wife again .)

Refreshing, enjoyable those small little trips.
aloha

GNOME and The Cloud

2009-02-21T14:54:00.000-08:00

Recently I've read some thoughts on GNOME and its (no) integration with the Internet. Let me throw my 2 cents here:

Please allow user to fill its accounts in 'About Me' dialog. Distros (like Ubuntu) can make a nice wizard. possibly the first time GNOME starts (is installed). It can even simplify the install process a lot. User would fill Name, Password (also default from gnome-keyring) and was allowed to add its on-line accounts (possibly with templates for well known, reccomended and new online services out there).

First time user can benefit in following ways:

It is logical to edit this kind of information in one place. It will not have to be entered multiple times in various applications. User will be happy.

Gnome can automatically start Piding, Empathy or other IM if user has pre-configured at least one IM account.

Other applications can pull for this information (Ekiga, DropBox, Firefox Plugins?, Banshee-Last.Fm) and use it whenever appropriate.

The first time application wants to know about specific account, confirmation dialog for access gnome-keyring data is raised.

I am not a GNOME hacker but is this feasible? I guess store it in the gnome-keyring and write a DBUS service Accounts?

Internet HD TV

2009-02-20T02:01:00.000-08:00

I recently bought an HD LCD TV just to find out the only super picture I can get is from the PS3 console. I can't understand why are people buying those TVs, the picture compared to old analog CRT TVs really sucks unless you get and HD signal. In Czech Republic we have a DVB-T (digital broadcasting) already but as it uses MPEG2 compression so the resolution is still the same (or almost the same) as it was for analog broadcasting. Such a resolution has to be so called upscaled (converted, recomputed) and thats where the crappines comes from. Even if your TV does a good job in this, you are still getting low resolution picture. MPEG4 wich might bring HD signal to your TV is only supported on very few channels provided either via Cable TV or Satelite (DVB-S). Most of the people uses DVB-T.

Luckily we have the Internet. I put aside this 'illegal' content, which can be nice, but is too much of effort for me to do it. I rather reccomend Miro. Miro is an Internet TV. Via nice guide it allows you to subcribe to 'channels' (there are over 5000 already!) you are intereted in. Then whenever there is a new content/episode availabe it is automatically downloaded for you to see later. It includes some nice features like automatic expiring of episodes (until you click to keep them) so you do not have to worry about your disk space, rating, sharing and much more.

Miro was here for some time already, but last year it received one million of dollars for development from Mozilla (yep, the same non-profit company that makes sure the Internet is free, open and safe and gives you Firefox) and there is new 2.0 version out there. It supports Mac, Linux and Windows. So head to getmiro.com and test it for you today.

Dealing with bugs in Linux and Windows

2009-02-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

This afternoon Eva told me her Firefox crashes about 10 times a day on just bought Lenovo IdeaPad S10. We've checked that updates are enabled and that she is using latest version 3.0.6 and no extra add-ons are installed but nothing helped. In the end we installed a Chrome for a while. Now what to blame? Old Windows Xp running on netbook, mozilla, antivirus? No clue where to start or what to do next.

Contrary, on my Linux machine one super application stopped working. It is called gnome-do and it is unbeliable productivity booster. I worked for about two days without it and my work flow was seriously disrupted. Today I created bug in ubuntu and joined #gnome-do IRC channel on freenode server and got an answer which has solved my problem within few minutes.

You decide which system works better.

1234567890 is here, heureka

2009-02-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

Time on UNIX like machines (including Linux) is counted in seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, the moment when time began on the Unix operating system (aka the Unix Epoch).

Today at 00:31:30 CET (23:31:30 UTC) counter showed magnificent number 1234567890 (that happens once in an epoch !) and many hearts of the right geeks have been pleased ;) Congratulations.

Celebrations have taken on many places around the world. Sometimes its the little things I enjoy.

Sunday Linux adventures

2009-02-09T02:49:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it does not help how much you prepare ... the system is mighty.

To keep practicing and learning Linux with my friend we are running small business including hosting couple of websites and running about a dozen of virtualized machines. We are actually proud of our solution as we have managed to build kinda interesting infrastructure that runs for years.

If we have any problem with it, the it is usually with hard drives. We now have achieved 222 days without a downtime (I guess our SLA is now much better then London Stock Exchange powered by Microsoft). With this gained confidentiality we decided to upgrade whole SW stack on our infrastructure including major changes (XEN core, Linux Kernels and up-to-date to all services / packages). We decided to clean up everything for the next big thing.

We spent whole Friday and Saturday preparing all the packages and the process for smooth upgrade. On Sunday before lunch, we were ready just for the reboot. I asked my friend to get to site just in case anything goes wrong. In short we ended up at 1:00am on Monday morning. But we learned a lot, all the services have been restored and machines are ready to rock again.

Now follows Linux rant about the problem:

13:00 - Hypervizor complains about being compiled against wrong kernel headers. Solution was to recompile against latest xen headers. That means boot into usable environment using rescue CD. Our system has not CDROM, create usb stick and boot from that.

14:30 - Root partition is not detected. We use otherwise excellent Enterpise Volume Management System ( EVMS ) stack to manage our disks/partitions. But for some reason the root (main) partition was not detected. Too bad, after some help from IRC we reenabled EVMS flag on the partition and it was back online. Ok we can access everything to recompile the XEN.

15:30 - Hypervizor recompiled and is booting but now complains about mismatch with kernel. It turns out, kernel for some reason was compiled without PAE extension. XEN has dropped support for non-pae kernel in 3.1+ series. Took a while to figure out, but we recompiled the kernel with High Memory Support.

16:30 - Hypervisor boots, kernel boots but now init complains it can't switch root partition from RAM to EVMS partition. After some investigation it turns out something is worng with BusyBox (missing switch_root function). Edited initrd manually and used busybox from working initrd.

18:30 - System boots. We now have our main domain ready.

19:00 - 01:00am we spent in an effort to bring the rest of our services back on line. We allso had to recompile kernel for domU machines, modules for our FireWall to include support for iptables and TUN/TAP interface for VPN services, modify udev rules to create persistent rules for network interfaces.

What a learning experience. Anytime I hear a PM saying upgrade process has to be smooth, there has to be 0 downtime I have to laugh. World is not static, so is not development of the packages. The longer you do not touch your system, the more interesting things appears when you try to get it up-2-date. Linux is great.

UPDATE: One day later we probably could avoid the hypervisor booting and save about 5 hours! Everybody is a general after a battle :)

Back to Athens, Greece

2008-10-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

Well after my return from Kuwait, I managed to spent some time back in Prague and visit most of the friends I've been neglecting for a long time. With Eva, we bought some furniture and I've spent like a week to put it all together. But at the moment, the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom are almost finished. Hurray!

And then the good news came and I packed all my stuff (two kites and few t-shirts) and headed back to Athens to spend nice and warm autumn here. I kinda got used to sun this year (spring in Greece, summer was exceptionally hot in Denmark, then Middle East and now Greece again). Staying in the same flat with Petr Novak. Gotta visit Acropolis this time!

My friend Petr Drobny aka 'drobek' (which means tiny, but Peter is almost 190cm tall) arrived and we went to Paros to catch some wind at Punda. We stayed at SunSet studios (place I can reccommend to everyone). No wind on Friday was not at problem as we rented 150cc quads and it was a lot of fun to ride it around the island.

Rest of the stay was great, wind was up to 20knots and we managed to do some small jumps as well. Only problem was my kite, a local guy who knows how to ride told me: 'This is EVIL kite'. True, if I do not watch it for a second, the beast is already going another direction and I shortly fly-follow. Well as they said Nobile High Performance, turns fast, high power, superior hang time. If only I could say I match those prerequisites. Neverethe less I also tested 2009 Cabrinha Switchblade, this is excellent kite for beginners.

Now back to Athens, working for the customer and occasionally trying to catch some wind at Loutsa. Which is always too strong for me, so the whole point of riding is to get to the open water and then spend like 2 hours trying to get back to starting point. But I will manage!

I'm off to have my first lesson of scuba diving.

Kuwait, Al Kuwait

2008-09-13T03:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, few days ago I moved to do some tasks in Kuwait. I flew with Fly Emirates and yey, what an Airline. On 1,35h flight I got served like a king. It was this huge Airbus (no, not the 380), and the food was delicious. Three courses, compare that to sandwich I get on 1.1h flight to Denmark with CSA (I still like CSA a lot though;) ).

First thing I really enjoyed was the TAXI ride from Airport to the hotel. Perhaps it was because I tried to look like I do not care (or better like 'I own the world' - which was btw another advise from my Danish colleagues ! They said, every Arab behaves like that :)) this guy has impressed me. Driving old Ford (but with at least 5.0L engine) we were in 140+Kmh (or was it Mph?) going on the motorway from one lane to another and honking everyone around. What a ride, say WOW!

Al Kuwait city centre from the Marina Mall.

During a day I was mainly working and because the sunset is about 6:30pm most of the pictures were shot at night when I wondered around the city. Hotel was great and I spent a lot of time in this place ;)

Hotel's pool on top floor (23rd).

Most of the week I was starving. Ramadan in Kuwait is a litlle bit more seriously taken (at least when it comes to people just visiting the place) then in UAE. If they catch you drinking or eating during a day (Iftar starts about at 6 pm) you pay fine of 1000 KWD (about 4000$) and you go to jail until end of Ramadan (about three weeks from now). I really tried my best to not to miss my vacation. So the first day I was very happy to see the hotel service to forgot to clean my room. There were some leftovers from the breakfast .)

In the evening I tried to explore the surrounding areas but at the first sight there is just nothing in Al Kuwait. Only a few people wondering around, lot of dust and heat. This is what the Mall looks like at 7PM. At 10PM it got quite crowded.

Yesterday I got little bit of tired of thinking of Al Kuwait as a bad place to live. I asked the people where the locals go, there has to be some markets right? So I went to Souk Mubarakia. And that changed my mind completely. Temperature got down to about 37 degrees at night so it was 'comfy' to walk around in my full cotton trousers.
The whole markets is consisted of hundreds of small streets connected together. Those streets are full of small shops of various kinds. Interestingly same types of shops are close to each other. From spice shops, dates shops, fish market, meat streets to all kind of groceries shops.

Gold district :0 I am not into gold, but this place is magnificent.

Dinning place, I've really enjoyed local fish with rice, Arabic bread, salads, mango juice and Čaj a lot. Eva would be proud of me for the way I cut this fish and got rid of the fishbones (she is the real master in this!). And all this just for 2KWD, I could barely walk after eating here, delicious!

On the streets one can see the REAL cars! In some way the time is ticking slower than other places. What I also found interesting were the people. Very friendly. And you go somewhere, you think there has to be something special because you see crowds of people there and when you get close, you realize they are just standing there. Talking and nothing more.

I even managed to get to the Liberation Tower and everybody told me it is possible to go up and see the city from the top. Well that turned out not to be so true. Anyway it is magnificent construction, tallest in Kuwait. I've enjoyed the markets a lot, bought a lot of junk (like night vision binoculars which of course do not work and zooming 1:1, but don't buy it if it was 3KWD).

Well, time to say good bye to Kuwait. My flight to back to Dubai is in about 4 hours, then transit to Amsterdam and then back to Prague, home sweet home. Full album is here.

On the trip again, this time Dubai, UAE

2008-09-06T22:42:00.000-07:00

There was not enough of wind in Denmark so I took the opportunity to try Dubai.

(the picture is pretty bad, I know)

People said things like this is not a good time to come here (temperature, humidity and Ramadan). A lot of that is true. Yesterday on the beach, I got new kite F-one Revolt 13m and was desperate to try it. But the wind was only about 5-7 knots (about 3m/s) and it was not flying at all of course. The water was so hot, it almost felt like a shower temperature Eva is used to ;) I tried to stay in the shade of the kite, but was sweating too much. By coincidence there was a 'ultimate survival' show on national geography that evening that showed how to squeeze a seaweed to get some water, will try that next time.

Then you get into taxi, and you get cold immediately. I think Taxis here are like public fridges. The temperature in it is close to zero. Everything here is air conditioned, so while you are in the building, Dubai looks like a great place, until you go out of course. Like trying to catch a taxi for 30 minutes makes you learn how to swear in Arabic. My colleague says, it is ok, you just get a shower three times a day. I agree.

My Danish colleagues also said a lot of other things that you cannot wear shorts on public, one cannot see womens face and more of that stuff. It took me several days of sweating in the trousers to figure out this is not true at all (they were just joking, like always). Dubai is actually quite open minded in those terms. People are very friendly. Just respect some basic rules and you are ok. It is Ramadan, so do not eat or drink on public as that is a sign of disrespect to those who are fasting them selfs. But takeaway is doable (just use the curtains in the hotel room).

Food here is great, you can pick from Indian, Pakistan, Japanese (I recommend Wagamama restaurant ), Arabic and many other cuisines. Price are affordable. What is really cheap is the oil (of course) and the cars. Friend told me a new VW Touareg costs around 110 000,- Dhs (around 20 000 Euro). Unfortunatelly you can't bring them back to Europe. Shops are huge, the only one I was to is Mall of Emirates, but that is enough.

I can't take photos, it is too humid here these days. This is the best I got to.

The temperature is close to 40 in the shade, I am heading off to Kuwait in two days. There is 50+, will see.

While in Dubai I met another Czech guy living in there. His name is Honza, he is kiting a lot, likes bikes and he is a great company, follow his story here. His friend is Passi (Finish guy, I hope I got it right) and he gave mi a ride in his Chevy Corvette. That car has 505HP and can do 0-100Kms in 3.6s (I witnessed it ;) With them I visited a place called Barasti Bar. One of the top rated bars in the world, check it out if you are in Dubai.

Ok, off to Kuwait now.

and she said Yes

2008-09-02T23:58:00.001-07:00

Well it is probably time to tell everyone. Nine years ago I fell in love with Eva.

Our life together until now was like a video game with all the ups and downs. However last time I was in Czech, we took the boat and in the middle of the Máchas lake she said Yes.

And now, the game is over :)

(thanks to my lovely family for the perfect gift)

something about me

2008-07-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

so skip if not interested.

I've decided to post about me, mainly because I wonder how is it to read it when one gets older .)

so, at the moment I am 28 years old guy, living in Denmark and traveling a lot. Doing an interesting job and meeting a lot of new and intelligent people. Enjoying life with lovely girlfriend and I can't believe I haven't married her yet (got to fix that really soon). I also like Linux, Gnome, Python and Open Source thinking in general. and I love my parents (with all the quirks included ;)

The Job
Still when people asks me what do I do for living, saying "I work with computers" is probably the easiest way to go. However there is so much more to computers then just that, hard to explain though. At the moment I find the IT industry really interesting place with a lot of things happening (unlike Physis :)

I still dream about realizing my own business and slowly walking there. Yet many times I also find my self in the middle of million things (ideas/unfinished stuff..) but trying to reduce this lately (with various results).

Hobbies
Recently I started to enjoy the wind and a sea a lot. trying to catch up on some sports and health in general. My music taste is satisfied with streams from soma.fm and downtempo.org (I would like to know where djdusty is gone). Regarding movies, beside the regular stuff, the southpark online is worth it.

Otherwise, I still feel unwise yet a little bit more experienced. I think I have really great people around me and it means a lot to me.

So far so good.

the Fox did it again, Firefox 3 is out!

2008-06-17T23:48:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, when bugged Internet Explorer was dominating the web browsing area and was not aligning to the web standards and thus hurting everyone, a Mozilla was born.

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers
grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the
fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own
image as promised by the
sacred words, and spoke
of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was
naught but a follower.

from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

This is taken from Mozilla Manifesto:

The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. We have worked together since 1998 to ensure that the Internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone. We are best known for creating the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Indeed, Mozilla succeed and brought back the Web Experience it should be. Now they are back with Firefox 3 which brings a lot of new stuff whether it comes ti user experience, performance or security. Just check out the new features.

Plus one more thing, ever attempted to make a world record and always failed? There is another chance today, head over to www.spreadfirefox.com and try to help with setting in new world record of the most downloaded software in one day.

It is the WashingMachine!!

2008-04-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Many times I got bad talked by my girlfriend that not putting socks together is the main reason for loosing them. I was never sure, but I always had a weird feeling it has to be the washing machine, just never caught it, until today! I am really sure the machine ate one white sock! hahaaa!

Upgrading to Hardy Heron

2008-03-11T13:15:00.001-07:00

With 7.04 version of ubuntu I was quite happy, most of the hardware worked and GNOME was already very usable and cool. I was looking forward 7.10 to polish some issues and be THE DISTRO for masses. I even got new Dell Vostro laptop with mostly Intel hardware.

Ubuntu 7.10 is quite cool distro which delivered some very nice features but many things didn't work. It was probably because most of the open source conferences where held at spring and then came summer and not much time was left to polish and test. Laptop was without a sound at all, email client evolution gave a lot of nasty bugs, cisco vpn client didn't compile and few more. Similar situation with friend's Dell Lattitude which also includes problems with Boradcom wifi driver. However over time I managed to get everything working (except for the integrated microphone). But I had a wierd issue with Cisco VPN client which corrupted my username in config file whenever I presses Ctrl-C on login promtp. The microphone and this was the only thing I was not happy about. Otherwise the system was fast (I never experienced "window refresh is being rendered" feeling like I regurlary get when working with MS Windows), stable and joy to work with.

However I discovered new version of Cisco VPN client is out, so I compiled and it worked.... for a few minutes. Then hard freeze, only holding power button for 4 secs (I wonder how many people know this trick and how many are pulling the cable) helped, something really happening in the kernel. I managed to track it to:

recent upgrade of ubuntu kernel
recent wierd behaviour of ipw3945 (likely after the kernel upgrade)
cisco vpn client
SMP system (as others suggested)

One of the solution was to upgrade to kernel 2.6.24 so I tried. I got new kernel (2.6.24-12), compiled latest Cisco VPN client (4.8.01.0640-k9) and it worked. No more hungs. Nice, problems solved. Oops my sound subsystem is gone again. No wonder, there is new alsa out there and my system is inconsistent.

So I typed 'update-manager -d'

and updated my system to latest version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, scheduled to be out in about a Month. Rest of this page tracks what is not working and possible solutions.

First I was very pleasantly surprised by the update process (very simple, not error given), system was updated and while being updated most of the desktop still worked. After update I rebooted (it took a little bit longer than 7.10 but this might just be only a issue of not updating the progress bar) and was presented with working GNOME environment, working evolution, working VPN client, webcam, wifi and sound ;) Just integrated microphone refuses to work. After I got home I discovered couple of more bugs, but something might be because it is not integrated yet (Gnome 2.22 is to be released tomorrow).

Current bugs preventing "THE DISTRO" syndrom:

#182284 - slow scrolling of webpages (Xorg going to 100%), seems to be fixed by installing xserver-xorg-video-intel - 2:2.2.1-1ubuntu4
#176090 - no LED activity for wifi (Intel iwl3945)
#200950 - wifi cannot connect to WPA+WEP based networks, likely bug with WPA supplicant
#183968 and #180766 wifi is renamed to wlan0_rename
#201326 - Shutdown button does not work
#188972 - Integrated microphone does not work
#201338 - Evolution crashed with SIGSEV in camel_exchange_journal_delete()

So lets see what mighty ubuntu team can fix before the Hardy Heron is out.

bye Brussels, FOSDEM, I am back to work

2008-02-27T00:20:00.000-08:00

Times flies, weekend in Brussels is over (actually it is Wednesday now already!) and I am back to work. I hardly managed to put some pictures from my Monday's tripping in the city on-line. By checking the google earth measurement feature I managed to walk over 15 kms with more than 14Kg heavy backpack, in the end of day I was looking for any excuse to sit down for a while. PSP is very handy in those moments.

Brussels is very interesting city, de-facto capital of the European Union, hosting many of its key institutions. It also has beautiful wide streets full of any kind of shops one can imagine. It starts to wake up at 10am and tends to live up until late hours in the morning. I had whole Monday to explore the city. This time I skipped Grand Place and Manneken Pis statue as I saw it last time I was there and instead walked the city from Palace of Justice to the St. Mary's Church and then down to central station and from there to Basilica of Sacred Heart, 6th biggest church in the world. I watched the Zeitgeist the evening before, so I find it kinda funny to see all those huge buildings built in the name of God which might actually be just a worshiping of astrology signs. By the way I can recommend Zeitgeist to anyone, very interesting movie, scoring 8.9/10 on imdb, so check it out.

After long time I also managed to get together with a very close friend, so thank you for everything.

FOSDEM'08 was great, as it was my first bigger conference I consider it a huge success. I've met a lot of interesting people, managed to visit a lot of interesting talks and learn new stuff as well. I hope to post some more articles about FOSDEM if time permits. Looking forward to next year. Btw, the GNOME party on Saturday and GNOME people just rocks!

Going to FOSDEM

2008-02-21T00:06:00.000-08:00

While reading my favorite planet I noticed FOSDEM'08 is this week. As I am now living in Copenhagen which is relatively close, flights are cheap and I was always sorry I could not attend any real open source conference and meet the real people behind all this exciting stuff, I decided to go. As the conference is really close (this Friday) I have to act fast. Flights are sorted, now I am looking for some couch/sofa to stay at night, couch surfing seems like a great option. Agenda is really long list of exciting events and I spent whole yesterdays night just to try to pick some of them. There are still overlays but I'll try to sort it out as times permits.

So far I picked those:

Saturday:
10:00 - 10:30 Opening: Welcome
10:30 - 11:30 Opening: Tux with Shades, Linux in Hollywood
11:30 - 12:30 Opening: How a large scale opensource project works
12:30 - 13:15 Opening: Status update of Software Patents
13:30 - 14:15 LPI - LPI 2008 - a certification passage
14:00-14:45 Janson Perl6
14:30 - 15:15 Gnome Gnome Developer Kit
15:15 - 16:00 Gnome More Clutter - Animation Kit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Overview
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Web interface
16:45 - 17:30 Gnome Elisa
18:15 - 18:45 Gnome GUPnP
18:00 - 19:00 CentOS Pluggable real-time monitoring with dstat

Sunday:
10:00 - 11:00 Chavanne Xen
11:30 - 12:00 openSUSE - Kernel, udev, D-Bus, HAL, NetworkManager and Friends
12:00 - 13:00 openSUSE - Suspend
12:00 - 13:00 X.org - Fixing X input
13:00 - 13:45 CrossDesktop - Farsight 2: Video conferencing made easy
13:00 - 14:00 H.1309 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
14:00 - 15:00 Janson Conary
14:30 - 15:00 openSUSE - One Click Install
15:00 - 15:15 talk - IOGrind: locating I/O performance problems
15:15 - 16:00 CrossDesktop - Deb Packaging Introduciton
15:00 - 15:45 Packaging - PackageKit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Hosting custom applications on CentOS 5
16:00 - 16:45 CrossDesktop - GEGL
17:15 - 18:30 Janson The Endgame
17:00 - 18:00 CentOS CentOS 5 and Virtualization

Event is happening at the ULB Campus Solbosh, so I can check what the studies looks like in Belgium. And I see LPI certifications are available, time to test my Linux skills. Now if I just manage my phone to sync to Google calendar, both Goosync and Scheduleworld are not working for me now.

Being a Linux Consultant

2007-12-13T03:24:00.000-08:00

Ok, since I'm now traveling a lot I've decided to use this blog to expose some more details of me so those who want can catch up on me. For those who knows Red Dwarf series: Perhaps, in some distance future, on Sunday, I'll be drinking Cognac and reading those bits of my success story, what else better a man can do .)

I'm now working as an Linux Consultant implementing GSM/GPRS/UMTS (network you use when calling and using internet provided by your mobile operator) monitoring system. This means a lot of traveling, meeting a lot of people, installing the system at customer premises, solving any issues that appears and mainly being on your own most of the time. I am all excited about that, it is like being business man without doing that business staff I do not enjoy yet. Implementations last from couple of days to several Months depending on customer and state to work.

It also means wake up at 5:00am, catch up plane, work hard all day long and get dead tired to the hotel (really, yesterday, after walking Oslo for couple of hours I got to the hotel at 6pm and found myself at 2am still dressed up on the sofa), just to find out that my Maestro card is not accepted anywhere in Norway. And since there was Nobel Peace Concert happening that same day in Oslo and I was staying far away from Oslo I had to travel to the Airport to try the cash machine to get some cash. I got lucky.

So I have my new Master Card being ordered at the moment, looking forward what next ten days brings as I'm still going to stay in Norway for that time. And for those thinking Norway is expensive, you are right, Norway is way expensive.

Shell: CDPATH

2007-11-09T01:45:00.000-08:00

While in a new job I finally got some time to re-read some basics, like the shell scripting and some UNIX tips and tricks. So today I re-discovered the CDPATH.

I've borrowed the following explanation from somewhere else.

The CDPATH environment variable defines additional locations to be searched when you type the cd command. When you type cd A, cd will look for A in the current directory. If you define the CDPATH environment variable which consists of a list of directories, cd will look for A in the current directory and if it is not found, the search continues in the directories defined in CDPATH, from left to right, stopping at the first place where it is found. Your working directory is then switched to A.

Example:

smol@eclipse:~$ pwd
/home/smol
smol@eclipse:~$ ls
foo bar
smol@eclipse:~$ ls /tmp
baz
smol@eclipse:~$ export CDPATH=/tmp
smol@eclipse:~$ cd baz
/tmp/baz
smol@eclipse:/tmp/baz$

Quite handy, something every UNIX admin likely knows already. Here is some further reading on Bash scripting features.

Bits and bytes of my analog life

2007-11-09T01:30:00.000-08:00

Silly title, but what the heck, there are so many changes in my life right now.

Eva: After seven years of living together my girlfriend left me and I feel empty and miserable, I really do. Something is broken in me and I do not know how to fix that.

Work: I've quit my work at DHL. Last four years were excellent when it comes to my professional carrier and I'm really gratefull to DHL for letting me grow. Access to technology one cannot see anywhere else but what I really liked the most was the team of people and the "FUN" of a corporate life we shared. So, Lukas, Pepe, Marketko, Zdendo, Ondreji, Peetee, Honzo, Marku, Petre, Radime and all you many others I forgot to mention, thank you for being so great to me, thank you for being such a great team and friends. I hope we will stay in touch wherever we go.

Work2: And I got a new job. I should say it is a dream job. My current position is Linux Consultant for Denmark/Japanese corporation operating at monitoring field for telco companies all around the world. That means working with open-source technologies, learning more about GSM/GPRS/UMTS networks and lot of traveling and since I'm still below thirty, I'm really looking for that. Recently I had a feeling that my capability to absorb every happening in open-source movement is dropping and I should specialize on a subset of that. So lets try.

Virge - high level goals

2007-10-03T02:13:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of changes to my life recently, however there is one thing still in my mind. And it has been there for a while, but I never got any time to sit down, write a summary and start doing that. I use the blog mainly to create my opinion on various topics so I've decided to brainstorm it here.

With my friend we like technology, free technology. I always get quite quickly excited about what is possible to achieve with it. Gentoo, Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache foundation just to name a few. And I like to play with that. For a year or two we've been playing with gentoo Linux and Xen and we had a great time. Now there is one physical box running dozen of virtual boxes separated into various network silos, backuped, each with different functionality, monitored and there are several scripts that makes deployment of new machines quite easy. I take it as a proof of concept.

Idea is to have a Linux box where one can deploy virtual appliances with ease in a secure environment with advanced features for network, file systems, software packages and easy to use admin console. We would like to use Gentoo as (despite its recent problems) it is one of most advanced distributions of Linux out there, EVMS (for reliable data storage with possibility to do cluster EVMS), XEN to power virtualization and possibly www console for managing the machines, machines should use binary packages for quick setup. Usage? Home appliances, ISP machines, Datacenter in just one box. I short: the ultimate linux machine ;).

I'm aware of others doing the same (rPath,Redhat,VMware), but as I said, I like the technology so this is our try. Virge is simply Virtualized Gentoo.

Steps:

create LiveUSB with latest Gentoo2007.0 (updated), that would install Virge on the new box (including the Xen enabled kernel, EVMS setup, some appliances)
create admin console using Django+Python+libvirt for managing boxes
merge this application into portage

During the POF we've ran into some issues with portage, for example we are aware that it is not easy to do binary packages with different USE flags (gentoo feature). But I'll leave those to be solved during the FUN.

Any help is welcomed of course.

TimeOut 2007

2007-09-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, this years vacation is now over. We arrived safely home and just made it to sort the photos and put them online.

Vacation2007

In short we had a great time doing many things visiting many places. Weather was superior (except for the needed wind) and we've met a lot of nice people on our trip Czech->France->Spain->Portugal and finally to Tarifa (Spain).

CSS teasing

2007-08-14T04:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I realized that I need to jump back on web development wagon. I played bit with JBoss Seam and it seems like it is great Java framework to do things. However the learning curve is too high for me (it builds on JSF when it comes to html pages). Then I found Django, django is really one of the most exciting frameworks for building webapps I've met so far. Built on top of Python, great support and rapid development cycle suits me a lot. Check Django philosophy for more.

So I have written two simple apps for testing:

a syslogviewer used in our company
web presentation for one of our customers

Both works quite well and I did most of the work in a reasonable time. What is taking now most of the time is the desing of the pages them selfs (and make them look same in Safari, Firefox and damn you Internet Explorer with your weird understanding of CSS box model!!!). I've never pretended to be a great artist (or medium, or ..), although if the time spent on tweaking my desktop theme would count than I would be a star for sure. Anyway, these days CSS is what drives the look of the websites. In short: in HTML one describes the content and associated CSS describes the way the contents looks.

When dealing with CSS I ran into following issues:

box model a.k.a. the basics
floating of boxes a.k.a. how to position the boxes
selectors a.k.a. how to apply styling to correct elements

There are many tutorials on the net for CSS, this one I found particularly interesting :

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/

I've also learned some tricks:

To make submit buttons a bit nicer, give it a class and style the class:
submit-button{
border:1px solid #CECECE;
}
To avoid positioning problems put any dimensions in outter element. For example to center one element inside another:
#outter{ width: 80px; height: 50px; }
#inner { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-bottom: 20px;}
When two columns with different height need to look the same size, use the container with background set to image with "1px height repeat-y" atribute. With this technique one can create table looking layout. Nicely described at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/

#container {
background:transparent url('/images/background.gif') repeat-y;
}

Although learning CSS right takes a long time (and even more to practice) it pays off. Result is highly skin able pages with one place to modify the look and reduced amount of data required to load each page. It also separates the code from presentation which both developer and page designer will appreciate.

Gentoo two cents

2007-07-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

So after about a minute I replied to this post and suggested Daniel to return back to Gentoo I read his second post where he explains in details why he does not want to (or can't).

However I still have a feeling there is a lack of leadership in the Gentoo community. Community needs individuals with ideas, and because the way communities work at the moment I mean individuals who have ideas and make them reality. This is how I think of Gentoo, vision of technically advanced Linux distribution with features not seen anywhere else that became true.

Whether lack of leadership is the source of small innovation in gentoo recently I do not know. But as long as I know Gentoo it did not changed very much (that is not necessarily anything wrong). There is excellent idea of ports (borrowed from other OS), super package manager "emerge", technically one of the best distros out there. One would say THE distro.

But others have their point as well, Fedora being sandbox for RedHat (in good way of course), Ubuntu focusing on end users and laptops, Novell playing corporate games and many others.

As a user I feel there is no clear vision of where is Gentoo going to. "Meta" does not tell me much.

My two cents here would be:
Make servers the prime arena for Gentoo and get in touch with some big company. Aim for Google for example. This would bring commercial support. Many times I see enthusiastic admins running gentoo on a spare desktop box, leaving the big and interesting hardware for RedHat, Novell, and other players with "support" sticker included. I'm not aware of any commercial company providing large scale support for Gentoo linuxes. I wish LSB was more widely supported by every player in the field. Now we have every other Linux company tinkering with MS instead of pulling one string!

To do that several things need to be done

create package format specification (yet keep emerge as a reference implementation), this will lead to faster development of other packaging systems (faster, with better features) that can eventually replace emerge in some time
finish support for handling binary packages and different USE flags. as far as I know currently broken
create tools for managing vast amount of servers (different profiles compiled on one box,...), as Jonathan Shwartz says "The Network is the Computer"
support virtualization
perhaps run emerge as a daemon, machineXX will ask builder machine (emerge daemon running there) : "hey I'm using this profile and I would like to install Apache with those USE flags" and get the binary packages from the builder. But I think there is a long way to get there.

Just my two cents.

random life ranting

2007-07-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

...only for interested. Everything is ok, lot of things happening all the time. We moved again. This time to our new flat at Malešice. We changed the view of Prague 4 for a view of football playground and surrounding green area, yet still close to Prague city center. I started to like to going to OBI for all kinds of nifty things we need at the house at the moment. Learned something about house works. One of the things I failed to manage was Internet connection so far. I was blaming provider for not being able to deliver on time just to find out few days later that my name is not on the mailbox, stupid me. My side money for a decent digital camera has slowly but for sure dissolved into things like mattress, furniture,jalousie and many other small things. Anyway anyone coming to Prague for a sofa surfing, just let me know.
Our dvd player is down for repair so we can't watch Heroes at the moment. But that is fine as I finally managed to read a couple of books (IT related to be precise). I'm getting really interested in python+django at the moment so let's wait and see if something good comes out of it.

Ubuntu lovely, Gentoo cool

2007-07-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

Since last month I'm using Ubuntu on my laptop. Beautiful distro. Fast boot, working sleep mode and a solid desktop experience. Reasonable amount of packages, yet installing some newer applications might get bit tricky as only security and update patches are back ported. Support is on very good level and it has good momentum. Compared to Vista and Xp is offers simple but very intuitive user experience across the whole desktop. Personally all I had to do to was to enable activation of windows by moving mouse button over them. You just then hover your mouse over you music player and scroll the middle mouse button to raise/lower the volume. Use same technique for seeking movies and it works in many other areas as well. I do not know if there is any real reason why this is not default. Put it in one sentece I would say Ubuntu is just great for end users.
But I miss Gentoo. Gentoo offers unmatchable flexibility in configuration and system maintenance (at least as far as I know). Powerful tools and a large catalog of applications ready just to be plugged into the system. Yet, still very clean design and philosophy. Ideal distribution for developers, advanced system administrators and those willing to try. Unfortunately Daniel Robbins has left Gentoo a while ago and it seems, although there are many great people involved in the project, not many new great features came out of it then. Still it is one of the best advanced Linux distros out there.

Ireland ..reloaded

2007-06-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Well I do not know why but it seems I have developed some kind of an addiction to Ireland, very interesting island. Rough country but kind people and a lot of friends. So while the "review money" were hot I bought a cheap flight to see them all. Leaving all "the stress" (no not really as I didn't have stress for a while) behind and went last Thursday right from the work to the airport. Two planes of Aer Lingus and ČSA were heading to Dublin, one flew on time, I was in the other one. Well Laďa and Michal were kind enough and both waited for me patiently, chewing their time in one of Dublin's casinos ;)

We got to Carlow and I tried to do my best and stayed up to 4 am. Time schedule was pretty tough and this was just really the start of it. My friends in Carlow are all croupiers, pretty good one. So there they were Poli, Gabča,Meggie, Michal and Laďa ... time to drink. I got up at nine and others around 4pm. The very same thing happened on Friday's night, tried to stay up as much as I could and managed to get to bed around 5. During the day I spent most of the time fixing Michals computer and talking that nice and crazy stuff about Global warming and so on and yes in the free afternoon I sent couple of CV's just to see my chances. And I even got one call and scheduled meeting on Monday, what a productive day.

On Saturday we had a trip to Dublin to buy Poli new computer, unfortunately one do not see any kind of DatArt or Electro World in Dublin's major shopping center DunDrum's. Well we still managed to get HP Pavilion with Core 2 Duo and Nvidia Go7400 chipset. Vista included. I have to say right now, VISTA IS SLOW and SLOW. We spent like at least 40 minutes in the shop before the "first time" process was over and I do not want to go through it again. But is has Aero, the real reason why Poli bought it. Later the night I felt really tired and yawned all the time. But Poli and about 6-to-8 vodkas (sometimes double) helped me to stay up through the night again.

Sunday I was bit clever and got up about 1 pm, my friends are even smarter and got up about 5pm. Except for Gabca, lovely girl, she got up quite early, she rules the house. House is still clean and everything is in its place. Without her I probable would ended up in a place where people and bugs (all kind of them) tries to live in a synergy, just like the old times from the college. During this day I started to feel a bit dizzy, likely all the sleep lag I acquired during last few days. All I ate the day was veggie soup, but good one. Finished setup of Vista (it does not come with DivX codecs preinstalled and is still far from ideal user experience, mixing things from Apple and previous versions of Windows, sometimes it is better, sometimes not) and now I really feel confident telling people to try Ubuntu as it provides user with nice, coherent and intuitive interface to work with.

Monday was quick, I got up, said goodbye and got on bus to Dublin. Bruno was there, managed me a place to put my bags. Met friend of him Katerina, which is great companion and was about to see what is on the market. But the day was cursed and about 1 pm I realized my CV contact is partially wrong. What the heck. After four there was another beer with other Czechs in Blue Goose. As far as I remember Bruno,Babu,Petr,Katerina,Tomas(perhaps twice) were all there and then another couple of drinks at Bruno's house. Battery depleted...completely.. for sure

Don't know how, but got up at 4:50, and then it was quick ride to home... 12:00 lunch with Eva.

Love you, glad to be home....

Positive review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04

2007-06-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

The latest reincarnation of popular distribution is out for a while and I decided to share my own experience here. Recently there were two machines available for testing. My Mums desktop which we have at home and is used mainly for surfing the web and is Linux powered already for some time and keeps its users happy. As the amount of data is minimal (photos, few documents, settings) complete re-installation is done and user usually wont notice new version of Ubuntu as long as the Firefox icon is at its place. The other machine is company provided new toy (ehm production laptop of course), small, light and beautiful Dell D420.

Installation on both machines went without any problems, wouldn't we have non-standard disk layout setup I believe everybody can install that on empty box. Just few clicks and there you go. Boot process is fast and nice and animated logo is presented. In about 30seconds I was logged into the desktop.

Networking part is done right, there is NetworkManager which works perfectly for both setups. I've managed to connect to several WPA protected networks without any hitch, wired connection is perfect as well. Only problem with NetworkManager I ran into so far is asking for gnome-keyring password to access stored WPA keys. There are few posts on the internet on how to change it, but simple check box to allow NetworkManager to access some parts of Gnome Keyring (password storage) without further user involvement is something that is missing at the moment.

Graphic drivers, for some reasons there is Nvidia graphics card installed on the dekstop machine. After install I was presented with restricted manager pop-up telling me that Nvidia didn't have open sourced its drivers yet (so far only Intel did which I'm so thankful for) and binary drivers might be necessary to install before I'm allowed to take full potential of the system. But the nice thing ends here. I clicked to use proprietary driver and ubuntu installed that and restart was required. After restart I still had open source implementation of the driver in use instead of Nvidia one. This means no 3D Desktop effects and likely show stopper for and unexperienced user. Well few searches on the Internet and manual change of used driver in configuration file and it is working now. I assume this is because the first incarnation of such a manager and things will likely get better with future versions. On laptop I had to install i915resultion to get 1280x800 working by default, another thing if detected automatically would boost the "Wow it really works" effect. In 7.04 there are now Desktop Effects available. By default it provides wobbly windows (really Wow... for few hours), nice Alt-Tab switcher between applications and and quite usable 3D cube with mapped workspaces to each side. Unfortunately after using it, metacity window manager is not used anymore and many of the keyboard shortcuts do not work, so I reverted back to 2D desktop.

Now few things I miss. Ubuntu doesn't come with some nice sets of predefined applications or any other content. There is Examples folder but that is. How about to preload some bookmarks, add more of quality wallpapers, more icons for users so we can have graphical login manager by default. Install some templates for OpenOffice by default (even simple ones like CD covers would make difference). Give users a bunch of internet radios right into the Rhythmbox (which in this version works very well by the way). And I miss Java, it has been open sourced recently so why we do not have it installed by default? Firefox didn't come with any Java plug-in on my machine, the very same for Flash. First thing users usually checks is connection to popular sites like YouTube. How about get democracy on our desktops by default?

Final verdict: Clean, fast and one of the best Linux distributions out there getting better with every release. I think Gutsy Gibon (the next incarnation of Ubuntu) can be a perfect choice for many end users. A I also should not forget about great forums that helps users with almost any problem there. Well done guys.

Something good out of Microsoft

2007-05-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

It seems time to time Microsoft can produce interesting results. Grab while it is hot!

Happy couple

2007-05-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

It looks like there is another happy couple under this Sun. Congratulations to you both Dan and Daniela.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 - pushing forward

2007-05-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

I took the chance and visited Red Hat 5 technology demonstration today. It was called Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - Dynamic Infrastructure spoke by mr. Stanislav Polášek fro linWorx.
Firstly new features were introduced and among those:

Virtualization is now default
New and simplified licensing model (no restrictions based on RAM,CPU,...)
Only 2 versions (bye bye AS,ES,WS,...) Advanced Server and Desktop
Kernel 2.6.18, better SELinux and many smaller updates to about 1200+ packages

Well most important feature is virtualization and I have to say I'm impressed the way they did it. Such a complicated task of virtualization (and I know what that means, we've spent month before we got it right) is now simplified into well defined processes and controlled by various tools that could have some functionality lift up but works very ok for the basic purpose.
In the end there was real demo of starting of installation of RHEL5 on one machine, then in the middle of the process, migrate the machine to another physical host and finish the installation. Machine didn't have a clue what is going on.
Downtime? 2seconds!

Unfortunately it seems there are no pre-build predefined profiles of various types of machines (i.e. Intranet Server, WWW server, FW appliance,...) yet, but recently announced RedHat Exchange seems to fill the gap here. One can find pre-build images from SugarCRM (CRM), OpenFire (IM) , Zimbra (Messaging and Collaboration) and more. Very exciting, now all you need to do is to install this core Linux in your enterprise and then install those binary, instant on systems to add new features for you company.

It seems that Enterprise Linux could be the MS Small Business Server killer! Well done.

BIll Hicks - the Comedian

2007-05-15T04:30:00.000-07:00

In 2001 while I was visiting my family in USA, I've greatly enjoyed all that band of folks around Saturday Night Life and stand-up comedians that appeared on the same channel. I could watch that for hours. And I still do that on Google Video today. Recently I discovered Bill Hicks, and his style suites me a lot, straightly addressing issues of all kind (religion, politics, sex, smokers,wars,...) , yet with interesting style of humor. What is nice, is that most of his talks still apply today, even he passed away in 1994.

See :
www.billhicks.com
Wikipedia entry
some videos on youtube

the Computer Language

2007-05-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

I'm diving. Yes thats is right, in my free time I'm now diving into Python. Finally it seems I found THE language. I grew up on Pascal and C and even it takes an effort to code something useful in it I like it (most parts of GNOME is written in C). Java is now mature but I never had enough time and will to follow up with it. But I have to say with things like J2EEv5 and above frameworks like JBoss Seam, web development in Java has bright future. Then there is Perl which I love, it is like extended bash with OOP in it. But I'm not skilled in any perl web framework and I'm unsure how to do Webservices in Perl and I'm even not sure I would like to do it Perl. So this leaves Perl to my Unix related skills where it works great for managing machines and automating small tasks. I've missed the Ruby On Rails hype.

And now Python. Something I heard about many times already. Something that has OOP built in from start, Interactive and is highly mutable (easily shape able) into anything you need. For some small project I'm developing I needed something simple and easy I looked into django. Because of great documentation and good people on IRC I've decided to stay with Django for some time. With Django you need python (well it is so simple you do not need it for tasks like CRUD) so here I am. So now I'm in the middle of diving into python eagerly reading how to do polymorphisms, SOAP and more in just few lines if you get to code right ;)

Google Tech talks about Django and several more videos from Alex Martelli aboyt python is definitely great way to start.

off topic

2007-05-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

For last two weeks I managed to be mostly without computer and I'm still alive! Firstly, late skiing on iceberg with my colleagues at Hintertux in Austria was excellent. Surprisingly I could breath in 3000 meters above sea pretty well. I've managed to drink a lot of beer cans, sprained my ribs and completely exhausted all vitamins in my body (like there were any). Then small sickness and right after I got fit we spent whole extended weekend with Mira, Jita and Evicka in Kochel Am See in Germany visiting Eva's friends. Kochel Am See is interesting place, mainly for tourists, just before Alps. Two lakes right next to each other, one about 150 meters above the other one. Fantastic view of Bavaria area. It was mostly raining and we slept in caravan. Next day we had trip to Neushwanstein beautiful neo-romantic castle facing Austria.

Hint: get the Bratwurst !

slashtime - handy and powerful

2007-04-30T01:32:00.000-07:00

Due to nature of my work, time to time I need to know the current time in different timezones. I was scared when I saw various applications on my colleagues desktops consuming megabytes of memory, slowing down startup of laptops and the money its costs. Luckily for Unix likers there is simple perl script called slashtime. Get it here, save it to /usr/local/bin and make it executable. Then edit ~/.tzlist (sample file is on the webpage as well) to suit your needs and then anytime you need to know:Small but handy and powerful.

endless webpages are here

2007-04-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

Being fan of aggregators like planet.gnome.org I've always enjoyed that I do not have to search all the posters blog manually. Sometimes when not visiting the planet websites I might have skipped few news in the area but this is over now. Recently when reading dzone.com, I scrolled down to last few posts and was ready to jump on other area I'm interested in but then I saw this AJAX fancy animations saying "loading 125 of 8353". And second after I was right back in the middle of the page. This is almost scary and I guess others (i.e. digg.com) will follow soon. Internet just got a way bigger.

more on gentoo

2007-04-13T02:42:00.000-07:00

This is reply to this post by Alexandre Buisse.

Hi, this is really good piece of vision. You are right that there is lack of direction. I have to say I agree to most of what you've written, let me get through a bit other point of view on gentoo.

I love gentoo, but I spend to much of my time just building it. What I miss is some rapid deployment of gentoo. Not everybody enjoys compiling from source especially when you have multiple gentoo boxes deployed and mostly you compile the same stuff all the time. Hence focus on binary packages is important. At the moment with my friend we built some scripts and processes around gentoo that allows us to have two compiling machines and many binary-only deployed machines. But it is not polished and cumbersome in many ways (and I'm sure others have done it better). For example we hit hard problems when we needed different flags per machine. No fun there.

This problem led me back to gentoo mailing lists and the discovery of paludis and all the not so cool status of current gentoo development at the moment. From my point of view, there are some devs that are not behaving accordingly to others view of nice a polite behavior. Ok. But I see they are also trying to do some nice things like write alternative to portage and fix current issues gentoo have. Btw complete rewrite of apps from zero once in a time is a good practice. I couldn't even finish reading the thread based on which Daniel decided to leave again, to me that thread was about arguing about small things. But lets skip this my incomplete picture of things.

Another thing I miss is virtualization in gentoo. Would it be possible to somehow project gentoo that some core system (lets say XEN or KVM enabled) exits and then there are binary stage4s (again XEN or KVM enabled) ready to be deployed with customized setup? This means webserver, intranet server ( apache+wiki+ldap ready), backend server (samba+printing+LDAP+MAIL......), you name it. I guess here it is almost perfectly aligned with overlays.

3D desktop management, not ready yet

2007-04-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

Three months ago, when I decided to give those 3D eye candy stuff a try, I couldn't work out Compiz so Beryl was installed and since that it occupies my desktop. Well occupied, I've just turned it off today. After some hype period when I enjoyed those 3D effects I've started to turn them off. I like the 3D cube, but the overall number of effects turned on by default kills the experience. For example those wobbly windows are really nice to see but not so cool to have it on all the time. There are still some features that actually makes the work-flow a bit harder compared to classical 2D management (I'm referring to semi transparent windows when they lose focus). I know these can be turned off, but this makes you go through huge list in Beryl menu (now I have to admit this seems to be easier with each release of Beryl).

On the bright side, the performance is great. On my Intel915 integrated VGA everything runs smooth up to 1024x768 and is still usable in 1280x1024. I was really surprised in a nice way, specially when a friend of mine told that Vista has those "wow" features as well but requires way more power to do that. Btw anybody running Vista? It has been out for few months and I still haven't seen it. Perhaps there is something true about Paul Graham's statement Microsoft is dead.

Anyway, 3D management is coming, no doubt about it. All is needed is better selection of default plugins turned on by default and it is back on my laptop for sure. Lets wait and see what brings recent announcement of merge between Compiz and Beryl projects. And why not give Metisse a try? It comes with latest Mandriva which can be obtained as a flash memory disk. True Plug and Play.

tests in Perl are easy and funny

2007-04-03T04:05:00.000-07:00

and it used to be my nightmare. Many times I see my self scared of things that are actually easy. Probably problem in my head. I used to think that anything new is way above my limits. With this in mind actual learning takes a lot longer and in the end I many times scratch my head that it wasn't that hard. So let's change this attitude and move on to Perl tests.

I've touched Perl first time in my current job where something more powerful than bash scripting was needed to automate all we do. Firstly we had some easy perl scripts doing one task, spread around the boxes. Soon we've realized this is not going to be maintainable. Took some time and learned how to write Perl modules. There are many great articles on the web that tells you how, this one is sounds like nice summary to me.
Today I've decided and went one step further and write tests (I know they should be written in first place, but hey at least I'm writing documentation first).

So I went to perldoc Test::More and after some reading this line has stopped me:
"STOP! If you’re just getting started writing tests, have a look at Test::Simple first."
Ok, move on to perldoc Test::Simple :

"** If you are unfamiliar with testing read Test::Tutorial first! **"

And finally this seems like the one to start. First sentence there is:

" AHHHHHHH!!!! NOT TESTING! Anything but testing!
Beat me, whip me, send me to Detroit, but don’t make me write tests!
*sob*
Besides, I don’t know how to write the damned things.".

I feel like home now, anyway don't let that scare you, writing tests in Perl is actually easy in the end.

going loud

2007-03-20T05:49:00.000-07:00

Many times I wanted to contribute to community by any means. Recently I spent two days by installing Joomla! and VirtueMart as an multilingual eShop for a friend of mine. By exactly following manuals and guides posted on the internet I only got a mixed results that site had two languages, but switching to eShop component has crippled everything. Then I found this bug and things started to work as expected. So I took the opportunity and shouted loud into Czech Joomla! forum. Now I just hope I didn't make too many grammar typos/mistakes to ashame me.

I'm still playing with N800, it is cool device. Battery life is excellent, much more of what I would expect to get from such a device running full Linux system under hood. For a first day I was having very bad experience with my 2GB mini SD card, uploads to device were constantly failing. Next day I got another one just for 600Czk (30$) and since that everything is smooth. Installing new application is just a breeze, integrated web browser renders most of the web-pages correctly and the screen is brilliant, Canola is looking to be good companion, especially when mixed with UPNP somwhere on the LAN. I was unable to play my locally streamed mp3 and DivX avi files though, but I guess this is just a matter of time until this is fixed.

Eva likes it even more, when I see her quietly surfing the web from sofa, listening to mp3 songs stored on the internal card, listening to radio, I think I'm not going to be the owner anymore pretty soon.

N800 has arrived

2007-03-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

And it is beautiful, small , bit heavy but it gives a better feeling when having the device in hands. I cannot judge battery life yet, it is still very hot and new. Haven't done that much work today, but I guess toy like this doesn't come everyday. Wanted to do a small review, but this post is way much better.

What comes next?

play with it
play more with it
become bug reporter
spread the word :)

Well a lot of work to do.

N800 is on the way

2007-03-08T01:05:00.000-08:00

and while it is, I browsed the web to see how to utilize this gadget to the max. N800 is an internet tablet from Nokia equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, crisp, clear and wide display (800x250) bringing the surfing and staying on-line to another level. Power of laptop without the weight of laptop. Small compact device is all you need. While at home, connected to wifi, check you your TV guide or stream a multimedia content from your UPNP enabled server. Make video calls, download music to device and surf the web.
It is nice to find out that Nokia provides official navigation kit for it. I can't understand why does Škoda Car provide navigational kit for 50 000,- when all you need is an integrated bluetooth enabled GPS device. Dear Škoda, we already have a PDAs, Smartphones and many other devices capable of running latest versions of TomTom, iGo or any other navigation SW out there. What is better, sell 100 kits per 50 000,- or 10 000 kits for 5000,- ? Anyway this Nokia navigation kit includes some really cool things like downloading POI (points of interests like hotels, police radars,...) automatically as you need them, or possibility to surf the web when you are on the highway (ok not driver, but co-pilot can). Only issue here seems there is no buy button on the Nokia site.
And it runs on Linux! Sweet.

gentoo domination postponed

2007-03-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

Gentoo has been my favorite distribution for some time (found my first post on gentoo forums around 18th March 2002). Before that I was switching between RedHat, Suse and Mandrake based on the current level of applications that came with it. Later, I started to compile packages from source (because the most recent version was not in the repository yet). This had led me to the LFS (Linux From Scratch) and I learned a lot there. I'm not sure about current status of LFS, but it was sometimes pain to have it up to date and not break when something basic needed update. Then I saw post from Daniel Robbins (the father of gentoo) and quickly realized Gentoo is all I need.
Great support, innovative, excellent documentation and perfect source of skills and knowledge for all Unix admins. Gentoo brings some BSD ideas (ports) to Linux. User compiles the whole system from scratch with possibility to customize the system on a level that I didn't see in any other distribution yet all that in fully automated form.
Gentoo is great for servers. Through past few years I've learned how to maintain Linux Desktop as well, but there are other distributions that focus on End user and they do their work much better (e.g. Ubuntu Linux). One thing I think is not finished in Gentoo is the handling of binary packages. Binary packages becomes handy when one have to maintain multiple servers. Why to compile the same package on all servers and waste CPU time (lets cool the planet!) on this redundant task? Sometimes (mainly when we talk about security) it is desired to have gcc removed and perform update of machine via pre-compiled packages. Emerge can handle this (sharing the PKGDIR over network) but with flaws.

metada - when central machine creates new package and store it on the shared drive, there is no way to notify slave machines to update its metada file about packages. I believe we solved this by also installing http server on the core machine and using PORTAGE_BINHOST variable on the slave machines. We still utilize shared drive for /usr/portage and /srv/packages as PKGDIR (eliminating the download of binary packages).
USE flags - this seems to be bigger issue we haven't find solution yet. Generally, packages can use this variable to determine additional functionality provided by the package (i.e. linking to Qt, Kde and not GNOME and vice versa). Sometimes it is handy to compile apache with LDAP USE flag and sometimes not. However both binary packages have very same name (e.g. apache-2.0.58-r2.tbz2) and what USE flags were used is determined after the package was downloaded and unpacked (too late) and then update is failing on machines based on their package.use settings.

I haven't found any clever idea how to solve the issue yet. Perhaps different naming convention for use flags in binary packages is needed and server daemon running on core machine. Client machine would then ask the Core machine for binary package with specific USE flags and Core would either look it up in its repository or compile. This would rock, really. Gentoo domination would be unstoppable, until then it is postponed.

Today when I was surfing the web to see whether paludis (C++ replacement for emerge) is handling things differently I discovered that Daniel Robbins is coming back to gentoo. Congratulations and welcome back, you've made my life a lot easier (maybe not easier, but definitely more enjoyable ). Rock on!

photo Illusions, MP3 stores, Open Source Top Ten Innovators ...

2007-02-23T00:03:00.000-08:00

While doing my morning session of my somewhat addiction to surfing the web, I found this link to very clever photo illusions, check it out! Can't wait till I pay off the flat, the furniture, the kids and finally save some money for a decent Digital SLR (like Nikon D80 ;)

In dark ages of DRM (now) I always appreciate to see that others are just not following but coming out with alternative ways of funding our beloved artists so they do not die of starvation. One I know about is Magnatune, as they say they are not Evil. A lot of good stuff to hear, download for free or money. One can even buy CD's. What I like in particularly is the way of buying downloads. The price is completely up to your pocket. Ranging from 4$ to 18$ (marked as "we Love you") for whole Album. What is even better is that this is mp3 free of any DRM, so take it to you friend, make your Mam listen to it or just to spread the Authors fame and glory. Last but not least, this is integrated into very good Rhytmbox music player, I just wish that bug #327042 is fixed soon.

Today I see there is another Indies store integrated into Rhythmbox, it is Jamendo. Another DRM free market out there. Go support it!

Lastly there is great article on slashdot about Top Ten Opensource Innovators. To no surprise it is about SugarCRM, Scalix and virtualization. But ZenOSS is completely new to me. This is OpenSource first class Systems and network management suite. Something our team in work is dealing with every day and have been writing for the last two years. I just finished couple of slides about the next version, time to reevaluate, save some company's money and redo the whole work. I love it. Hope I manage to do some review soon.

9/11 Doubts - more and more

2007-02-14T01:51:00.000-08:00

While reading slahdot today I clicked to see more about new baby of Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia). Wikia.com is an attempt to create worlds biggest on-line newspaper which may shake the magazine industry (time will tell). I've tried the politics subsection and read through, I was surprised that most discussed topic is 9/11. This topic is becoming hot recently. Independently of this I randomly hit this topic more and more. It looks like people are still interested in their freedom and rights, rights to know the Truth.

The official story has so many weak points that only those who are not interested can believe in it. Since I was in US that time I never believed that plane has crashed into Pentagon. From the first shots of the place it was quite obvious. Likely because of that for the rest of the day only the WTC was on the main news.

Husband of my sister has pointed me to to nice website about the Pentagon, called Hunt the Boeing. Interesting story. Many other rumors float the Internet that works like a small pieces in a huge puzzle.

Also a lot of interesting full time movies can been found on the Internet, like 9/11 Mysteries or Orwell Rolls in Grave, but there are so many others (just try GoogleVideo, YouTube or any other deliberated video sites).

Less and less I believe in terrorist background and more and more I'm thinking about Oil, Money, Politics and ThirstForPower is behind it all. Maybe this is one of the greatest tests of freedom for American people out there.
I also never liked that anybody saying something against the official story was accused of being anti-american pro terrorist. This is just so not true. People have rights to ask questions and get answers. By saying that I do believe that USA is one of the most beautiful countries to live full of great people.

Having good sources of information is very essential for any good decision. In times when corporate owned broadcasting medias fails to deliver this other sources should be review. And here come the Internet with still pretty not that much under control of any power, except the power of people. (now I'm being too optimistic, time to end this article)

small Seam review

2007-02-12T01:58:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to learn Seam for past couple of months with various results. After reading JSP and Servlets fundamentals few years ago, I realized Java server side programming was far away from what I expected/needed at that time and put my my efforts into operating systems and network related skills. Recently we've finished small business project coded in Perl, PHP and other open source technologies. As we (team in work, not me the first!) try to be ready for the future as much as possible (I guess this one of my characteristic) new revision of current product is carefully planned. And Java is likely the only one option (I know there are at least several other viable alternatives, but Java is most familiar to me) . Still with Java there are so many possible frameworks to build on it can cause headaches.

Anyway after reviewing possibilities, endless discussions with friends that Spring is the way to go I'm more and more looking into Jboss Seam. From Gavin King, father of Hibernate. Inter operable platform working in many containers (even those not adhering to J2EE v5.0 yet), delivering significant ease to developers work by implementing Bijection (objects are injected and outjected from components) and applying "configuration by exception" pattern as much as possible.

Seam also comes with a lot of predefined classes to simplify the development even more (although I'm still having problems to understand them, but that's my another nature). Developers will love the seam-gen tool which can generate complete project skelet, with possibility to generate Form+supporting component, Action component or generate complete frontend for tables stored in DB. Others will like fact that Seam includes implementation of JBoss rules or plays nicely with most of the IDEs out there. And it comes with great number of very well written and understandable examples too. And it supports AJAX! There is much more about Seam just check out some of reviews .

What I like about it is that it looks like all I have to do to finish my simple syslog front end is to wait.
With 1.1.0 I was struggling with implementing search functionality for EntityQuery component. 1.1.1 came with working implementation of how to do it. Ok that moved me forward and I finished simple application. But then I wanted to add Authentication so users could customize the application, and I've struggled with that as well (poor, bad coder!). 1.1.5 came with with JAAS and even working example implemented right in seam-gen! 1.1.6 is out now and brings bug fixes, email and PDF generation.

Well all I have to do now it to create some nice CSS style with that would replace the simple Orange theme included with seam-gen. Or maybe just wait :)

skat3rbot

2007-02-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

While waiting for my boss, as he has something to discuss with me I had a look at youtube.com. And look what I've found:

Robot that can do skateboarding, nice! Can't wait till it get into Tony Hawk series. I just love this hi-tech Japanese stuff.

update: It turned out that my boss just wanted someone to watch over his things while he was on the party one floor bellow. That's why he asked me whether I'm staying for another half an hour. Dam it!

photosharing

2007-02-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

Another post for my friends that are still struggling with technology. No wonder, technology is still far away from ordinary users and you either do it your self (if you are geek on Linux), "enjoy" half way done implementation in Windows or buy a Mac (at least they are famous for having things working out of the box) or wait for better times.
Many times I see my friends with digital camera and tons of pictures on computer and I do enjoy this kind of peeking into their lives when someone is showing me pictures on PC. But hey it is 2006, there is better way to do that. Sharing is good (and you know that!) so lets see the possibilities.

There are several web sites dedicated photo sharing. All of them allow users to create an account and then upload pictures and presenting them in a nice collection/slideshow. All this with unique and often very readable URL so you can share with your friends immediately. Some of them offers more.

Flickr! - Is the same as YouTube to video sharing. One of the first web sites to ride on the wave of success. Later bought by Yahoo and still one of the best (and likely the best) site for photo sharing. Many applications supports export of your PC gallery straight to Flickr!. Besides classical functions Flickr! offers services like printing of pictures, make favorites, albums, by geotagging your photos you can actually see world map with pictures positioned to the actual place you've taken them. What I like on Flickr! is the streamline, you do not have to create albums just take the pictures and save them in your photostream. Also the community is great, you can search for your friends, people with similar interests, join various groups and enjoy this sharing revolution!

Picasaweb - Relatively new player on the field, but very capable. This one is owned by google which means one big plus. You can use the same account you have for you gmail, google talk, docs and spreadsheet, your blog, Calendar or any other service run by Google. This is one of the reason I prefer this one. It is then very easy to setup your (google enabled) Mum and show her how to post photos online. Picasaweb offers great amount of space for pictures for free. If you shrink you photos to 1024/768 pixels 250MB is enough for couple of hundreds of photos. Need more? Go Pro with just about 25$ a year for 6.5GB. Flickr! offers similar service as well. With PicasaWeb you can create albums, tag your photos with labels, search (it is google!) and print as well. The number of features is still growing as PicasaWeb is live project. Nice feature I like is you can make some other people favorites and them have any activity on their albums emailed to you.
PicasaWeb has also nice complementary program called Picasa and you can get it here. This program runs on PC and nicely handles importing of all your photos, slide show and basic photo operations like cropping, red eye removal and contrast settings. Picasa offers export to PicasaWeb, Flickr! and couple of other web sites.

I'm sure there are other websites dedicated to photo sharing, but I guess these two are the most popular ones. Once you decided where you want to store photos, process is easy.

obtain account - for Flickr! it is Yahoo account, for PicasaWeb get and Google Account
install software - Not sure about Mac (but I think iPhoto should be ready for both of the services), on Windows this is clearly Picasa. On Linux you can use either Picasa or F-spot
import all you pictures, select the ones you are interested in and export them vie menu to one of those services.

Voila you are done!

on the movie front

2007-02-05T03:35:00.000-08:00

I've managed to bite another piece from a cake of missed and stored movies (I usually archive the movie to view it "later"). Recently I re-watched Steview Griffin in "Untold Story", funny piece that actually made me watch whole series one of Family Guy. I think imdb.com tag line says it all :
"In a wacky Rhode Island town, a dysfunctional family strive to cope with everyday life as they are thrown from one crazy scenario to another."
One think I noticed compared to later seasons is Brian sitting on all four legs, in later seasons he acts more like humanoid, standing mainly on two. Later today I found family guy quotes site something for Peetee.

Blood Diamond - Appealing story about conflict in Sierra Leone which suffers from civil war where everybody goes after their interests. Story begins when imprisoned farmer by RUF finds a huge diamond. Story then shows how brutal and beautiful Africa can be at the same time. When you buy a diamond, please ensure yourself it is conflict free one, otherwise you might have some blood on your hands too.

An Inconvenient Truth - A very interesting documentary movie about the global warming issue which can lead to a catastrophe. This one is almost scary presenting scenarios that Europe can go for another 900 years though Ice Age again. What is more troubling is that this is actually based on facts and scientific measurements. Film is about Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming recognized. I did not know he gave so many of these presentations. It would be interesting too see what would happen if Al Gore won the elections six years ago (whoops I'm pretty sure this sentence has reached my English limits !). Instead USA has this pro OIL business oriented president, who started war based on false facts and who knows what else is he up to.
But I guess this is all to the ordinary people to fight for their rights and nobody can do that for them. When I just tried to make some awareness of this movie and tell few facts to my friends, they were not interested at all, more, they almost fight back. I know I'm bad story teller. 7/10

Although holidays are over, and I'm getting back to work which means hardly a movie a month, I've seen one more just yesterday night. Super Size Me is another documentary movie about fat diet. Morgan Spurlock is confused whether Fast Foods are great/good or not. On one side there is epidemic of fatness (that is how it is presented in the movie), on the other there are advertisements broad casted daily about how fast food is great.
Ok fair enough, this guy decided to eat only fast food for whole month. Nothing else. I have to say this is not happy story, but it is definitely worth watching as it tells you what fast food does to your organisms. 7/10

ntfs drives in Linux

2007-02-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

To be able to share data with my friends I used to have my external hard drive split in two. One FAT32 and one EXT3 partition. Fat32 so my friends can see data from their windows machines and ext3 due to speed. For still unknown reason any time I have disk connected to windows, speed about 10Mb/s is achieved only for some time (i.e. 10 secs) then the speed is degraded to about 3-4Mb/s. Under Linux I was not able to reproduce this scenario, constantly reading/writing at 10Mb/s all the time.
Anyway, Linux kernel is still missing proper write support for NTSF (Windows XP) formated drives. Luckily due to support of FUSE (Filesystem in userspace) available in kernel since 2.6.14 and ntfs-3g this is not true anymore. Albeit the ntfs3g is still marked as beta, many are using it now without any problems. Installation is smooth on gentoo by allowing FUSE in kernel and running:

#emerge -av ntfs3g

Then edit /etc/fstab and mount the drive:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/puppy ntfs-3g locale=cs_CZ.utf8,rw,uid=1000 0 0
#mount /mnt/puppy

I'm still struggling to have udev and hal to play nicely here and when you move the directories, they are copied instead of quick move but besides this the file system works fine.

erase and revind

2007-01-31T15:00:00.000-08:00

... famous song from The Cardigans has recently got real meaning for me.
Awhile ago I've heard a friend of mine talking about his own web log. He requested unique URL, specific theming and possibility to have an inline gallery. It took a while and hirschberg.cz was born, since that only my first entry
occupies the front page. My friend has always something else to do, that doesn't surprise me though.

But let's get back to point. When I explained parts of the system and introduced him "links" section he pointed me to another's blog. After awhile I found it nice and funny blog about people I know or so. Nice example of what social networking looks like. What has surprised me was that by the end of January, most of the entries have disappeared, leaving just two for (I guess) historic moments. For a moment I thought a technical issue appeared, but then understood that was not the case. I thought that with Internet and mass storage available today humanity will be able to store and archive everything out there for ever. I was wrong again.

who would believe it, there is snow on mountains

2007-01-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

... and me as well. Thanks to my buddy Pepe, I'm off for whole week at Spindleruv Mlyn. Planning to do nothing besides snowboarding, beer, watching movies and digging more into Seam.
I've been playing with Seam for good two months already. After I read JSP and Servlets couple of years ago, tried to play with Struts and ended up in XML hell when trying to put together simple WWW application I gave up. For me the fascinating world of Java was not ready as I wished for and I didn't/couldn't dedicate all my power to understanding the world of J2EE. Times have changed, Seam delivers significant reduction of time needed to create and deploy WWW J2EE based application. Funny is, even it seems to be so simple, I run into things that slow me down every day. How does Facelets works, what is different between "value" and "binding" in JSF world, do I need to understand Hibernate or will I survive with EJB3.0? There are so many still evolving and fascinating technologies that it likely takes a while before I catch up again. But I'm going to, I do believe that really small team can do a lot these days.

Meanwhile I've enjoyed a couple of movies (another topic I'm trying to catch up):

Y tu mamá también (a.k.a Mexická jízda) **** - Easy going, funny and sometimes touching story of two young guys on a trip to hidden beach, together with older (around 30 ;) attractive woman. It is all about sex, friendship and more. Great movie for Sunday evening/morning when you and your partner are too lazy to do anything else but staying in bed.

Syriana - ***** Just watched this one. Story about how it probably is. See dirty oil business behind everything. I would say this is not that much made up. Realistic story slowly exposing of what is corruption, politics and money capable of. Well played, very good one.

The Departed - ***** Another great shot of Martin Scorsese, proving that good movies can still be done. Great storyline with decent music and very well acting stars like Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and also by Leonardo di Caprio. Hands down, I've really enjoyed this one. Two mens in Police, each playing different game found themselves in great danger when someone third appears on scene.

How to get poor

2007-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

If you want to get poor and live in Czech Republic, just sign in to Vodafone. I'm switching provider because of company phone and I just wanted to see my last monthly bill. Good they have on-line access to all your information/services and this was always appreciated. Not today.

GPRS, 3 data accesses , 31MB downloaded charging 1699,- KC + VAT (around 90US dollars). 31MB come on! It was likely bloody network driver for HP laptop I had to download when Windows failed and were reinstalled.

Funny is when I officially asked to switch, they asked for reasons. Advised that Vodaphone's (Czech Republic) Data services are poor and expensive (no UMTS/3G, mainly GPRS and somewhere EDGE) and today this.

I guess I just got bit more poor again. Very expensive experience.

last.fm ...it is all about music!

2006-12-28T03:23:00.000-08:00

I'm a computer guy for many of my friends/family. Besides cleaning system from bad, bad and nasty things , installing better software and educating why to use it, this also includes promoting of useful services that exists on the web. Many times I am disappointed to find out that most of my friends now a little about them. A lot of people use computer only for Web surfing, email poking and music playback. This has inspired me to write down the list of services I use and might be generally useful to others as well.

Most of them use principles of Web2.0 (which in short is about socializing the web using latest technologies to provide dynamic rich content/services). There is a lot of Web2.0 services around, from famous google maps, picture sharing at flickr to massive tagging systems like delicious or digg.

Today I introduce last.fm, at first it looks like web radio station. Type the name of artist and it plays it for you. Behind is much more, this site falls into social bookmarking category. Users listen to the music just like they did, information about what they listen is send to the service and stored in the user's profile. When listening to music every other day (like I do) during few months there is enough data about user's taste so the system is able to recommend new never tried artist or someone who shares the same music enthusiasm. From already played songs that are free to broadcast over the internet system creates radio. So when next time someone asks "What are you listening to?", just give him your last.fm profile.

What I do like about this service is that it is non obtrusive. Just listen to your music, statistics are generated automatically. Also I found it great site for checking for background info of who you listen to. For example you get some music from your friend, throw it on your last.fm enabled player (i.e Rhythmbox or Muine on linux), play it and if you like it, open your profile (mine in this case) on last.fm and click on the name of recently played artist. Many times a lot of information about the band is revealed including similar artists that may interest you as well.

There are also many other additional features provided by this site like joining groups, chatting with friends and blogging about recent music actions, even those are rarely used (at least by me) you can use them anytime later.

enjoy

Office documents? Just throw them onto your browser

2006-12-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

For a while I know about google Docs service. One can upload/create/edit various types of office documents. It has very good compatibility with MS Office and is able to talk OpenOffice formats as well. Once you are done with your editing you can save into PDF file and send to friends.
On line collaboration is of course supported as well, documents can be read-only or shared among friends by sending them invitation email. Besides corporations this means you do not have to have Office tools installed on your PC as long as you have Internet access or you do prefer to have solid and robust OpenOffice installed (free of course). When it comes to corporations, this might not work as some obscure macros are usually deployed in this sphere.
Today when reading about GoogleToolbar 3.0 (still in beta yet) I found out new cool feature. When applied one can throw documents on your browser window and they are automatically opened in GoogleDocs and ready to be viewed/edited. When you have you google account ready, there is even no need to sign in anymore.

Microsoft? What a bright future.

2006-12-18T02:09:00.000-08:00

Recently I talked to a good friend of mine and we discussed Microsoft. She met some good people from this company and asked me why I am so skeptic about this company. For some time I'm now sorting my mind on this topic and found two great sources where everything is expressed in a much better way than I can do.

First is Why Does Everyone hate Microsoft? posted on slashdo t, where some serious facts and nice opinions are posted. Here I admitted to myself, I do not hate Microsoft. But I used to, I swear, every time when commanding probably the biggest battle in time and a game crashed back in 1996 it could drove me crazy, really. I still do remember those frustrating moments when something crashed, or not worked at all and I spend endless hours in effort to debug the problem. People say their desktop does not crash anymore, well done Microsoft, we have not crashing MS desktop after almost two decades of coding. Now we have it full of viruses, spy-ware, malware and more. Microsoft people says that this is because Windows is #1 operating system and if other OS's were used as much they would suffer from the same issues. I do not think so, I believe there is something rotten, hidden in the system.

Then today I've discovered 1990-1995: Microsoft yellow road to Cairo posted on roughlydrafted.com. This guy seems to have very good overall knowledge about the history of the company and points out many unknown facts about the company. It gives a perfect idea why the system is rotten inside and how the company works.

In short, monopoly tactics used everywhere, killing other companies that offer innovation, FUD, poor products, missing interoperability (yes sharing is good!), frustration, locked users/companies all covered in very shiny and juice wrap promising heaven on PC (just stay tuned). But try to explain this to uninterested user in two minutes and not bore him into death.

time to move over it

Wexford, Ireland

2006-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

Vacation is over now, what a crazy week. Friends, parties, alcohol, fast foods, Fiifa06, Playstation, more playstation and no hacking at all. I have to say, all people I met in Wexford were great. And girls, always smiling, even when they took the last penny off me while playing BlackJack in Casino. Well I got back next day, with more luck then and earned my money back!
Another must is Michal, after I've consumed the best hamburger in the world, Poli leaned to me and asked: "How did ya like SOYA meat!" Fantastic.
While doing nothing, I had time to explore YouTube.com, go straight to Top Favorites, All Time and and look for Chad Vader, hilarious. Will Ferrel on Google video as George Bush is funny as well.

Well, glad to be home again, in one piece, ready to do some coding again.

Some pictures from Ireland:

Wexford, Ireland

Off to Dublin, again

2006-12-01T04:18:00.000-08:00

The speed of this year is amazing, to my surprise it is already end of it and I still had 10 days of vacation left. Well not anymore, took the oportunity and I'm off to Dublin again. Last time it was exactly a year ago, I was visiting Eva, this time it's a friend of mine Poli.
I guess to sprinkle things a bit I got sick just a day before the leave, not so funny. Then I spent 400Kc for 3 teas and mineral water, still in Prague, unbelievable. Dublin is beatiful, maybe because of this we took several roundabouts twice and couple of extra miles more before we got right on N-8 to Wexford.
Time to relax, watch some movies and who knows, Google is here!

Well done, Mr. Bond

2006-11-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

We just got back from Casino Royale and I have to say it was very nice surprise. Despite all the rumors and specially my first feelings when I saw Daniel Craig about a year ago, he did very well and movie is far better than the previous fairy tales. Realistic script, dynamic story and a balanced action scenes are characteristics for this movie.

Bond this time starts from ground zero and is tougher, much tougher. Some actions scenes are maybe too much action for my girlfriend, but I liked them very much. There is about right number of these scenes spread through out the movie. Bond get some scratches, but nothing he cannot handle, maybe the nail was a bit much.

We've recognized a lot places from Czech Republic, Karlovy Vary, Prague and also couple of actors seemed familiar, nice distraction.

My rating? 8.2, let me say again

Well done, Mr. Bond!

Sun Tech Days

2006-11-16T04:34:00.000-08:00

At first, list of Christmas wishes sounded like a great idea for a first post, but then something that makes more sense came in.

What a nice surprise when on Monday I realized there is FREE Friday this week in Czech Republic. And what a surprise to find out on Tuesday, there is Sun Tech Days happening from 15th to 16th November at Prague's Congress Center. After I missed last Java Developers conference in Prague, this became must attend to event.

This year, more than 1100 mainly technical oriented people are attending various seminars and presentations. Event was spread into two days.

Day one
Jeff Jackson during his keynote talked about importance and growing usage of Java and SUN these days. He introduced project Glassfish which is a reference implementation of J2EE 5 where many companies contributes to this opensource stack. Ubuntu will be shipping Glassfish as their J2EE server. great. Then followed by courses about Java DB, simplified persistence in J2EE5 vie EJB v3.0 which eases a life of developer a lot. For example, one can use POJO's implementing business interface as an Session bean. No home or remote interface is necessary, this is being taken care by implementing container, all possible due to Annotations (new feature in JAVA5). Great and in-depth seminar about Web Services and Java and XML was held afternoon and after that we've enjoyed great buffet. Leaving about 8pm.

Day two
First session: Future of Java and open source communities in a vision of Sun. Monday 13th October, Sun after 10 years of development of Java has announced Java and even Duke are going open source. Sun's business model was introduced. There are 5 milion Java developers around the world. Today SUN is recognized as one of the most contributors to Open Source Community, by opening many of their products like OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, NetBeans and more. Sun's business is whole platform (HW+operating systems+environment where applications run) strongly depending on creating strong communities around their products thus leveraging running cost significantly. Sun likes sharing. Sirhar Redy had nice talk about importance of software freedom, open source momentum and license issues. Then attended a J2ME session and this reminded me time of sprites on C64 and ZX80. In the afternoon I got to in-depth session about building JSF and AJAX enable web pages held by Dr. Doris Chen. Really nice talk, full of hands on examples about jMaki, Dojotoolkit, Google Web Toolkit and more. After all these events, I realized that probably the biggest show stopper for new Java Developer is the CHOICE. There are so many great technologies, platforms and toolkits that it takes a time to get used to all of them and pick the right one for your project.

Summary: two t-shirts, one Duke, met many friends from University of West Bohemia. Great two days!

More info and slides at SUN Tech Days web page:

And oh yes my wish list:

7 iron golf club
hand glow (golf of course)
I'll come up with more

Some pictures:

SUN Tech Days