Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Today is last day of the longest winter in the last four years, in case anyone forgot. :)

Accidentally, I came over an excellent piece of software called gramps. Which is, as title abbreviates, “Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System”. Something like this has been on my I-really-need-it list for a long time.

During the last visit of my and Olga’s parents, which was in summer 2002 for wedding, we extracted a real heap of data about our ancestors. I was planning to digitize the whole thing and publish it on the web for a quick reference. :) The software was missing and I was too lazy to write my own.

Now that I’ve got gramps, I jumped on the task and within the last couple of days added somewhat 190+ relatives. That’s not all that I have, but it’s a good point to pause and reflect on gramps. :)

First of all, the interface. With recent Eric Raymond’s rant about user friendlyness of open source software, I started to pay a bit more attention to the matter. Gramps has perfect interface. Yes, I meant it. Perfect. Default settings are decent and I didn’t have to change anything at all, as far as I remember. People are nicely grouped by surname. List of these groups is nicely broken into pages by the first letter of the surname. First name and gender correlation is immidately noticed by the program and used for defaults. For example, if I specify the name of the person to be Serguey, and gender to be male, then next time when I will enter another Serguey, gramps suggests male as a gender. There is a whole bunch of nit suggestions. For example, when I want am specifying that Mr.Serguey is married and I want to choose his partner, the list of choices has only females. Of course, that’ll be a problem with gay marriages happening all over the world, but this does not concern me at the moment. :)

Functionality of gramps deserves additional comments. Gramps keeps all it’s data in the XML database and can easily export it into web and many other formats. There are few import options, but since I had only pieces of paper to import from, I didn’t truly tried these operations. There are plenty of tools for analyzing the data, counting ancestors and doing all sorts of statistical crazyness. Automatic database integrity verification and repairs can be done.

Overall, I am rather impressed with the quality of this program, considering the fact, that I have never heard of it before. There are even few user manuals, but I haven’t touched them until now. :)

Evening in the movie with Olga. This time we went to see “Paycheck“.

It was a rather disappointment. There are few interesting ideas, but there is also a load of crap that this movie doesn’t need. Ben Affleck fighting with the stick while being a genuis computer engineer is really stupid. And overall Ben Affleck has nothing to do with this movie. They needed someone more geeky-looking. :)

Couple of pints in Central with Vladimir. The good thing that we found out is that Central is rather acceptable on Friday evening. The music is louder, and there is much more people, but we still managed to get a table without a reservation, and it was in the corner where we could talk despite the music.
Guiness machine was broken though. :)

Later we ended up at Vladimir’s place to see some awesome advertising movies for BMW by Guy Ritchie & Co.

Totally unexpected trip to the movie. We’ve got to see “Big Fish“. Neither Olga, nor I could remember the trailer. No promotion what-so-ever. Very unfortunate, because the film is really great. I’d say that it is one of the best films made in 2003. It’s kind leveled with “American Beauty” for me. I am sure I’ll get it on DVD one day. :)

The day went by really fast. That means that Olga and I slept through it mostly. :) Waking up was in the movies watching “Lost in Translation“. Surpsingly, that is two films with Bill Murray in two days. :) The idea is old, but the movie is fresh and kicking. Recommended for a home collection.

Having nothing better to do, I’ve played around with site’s CSS. But I didn’t have to tell you this, or did I? :) (Unless, of couse, you one of those in the minority using console browsers).

Hazard, Olga,and I are for a meal at Pizza Pepperoni and a bottle of wine. Afterwards, we’ve spent like a half an hour trying to decide which movie to see at Hazard’s place. Finally, the choice drops at “Caddyshack“, which is a collective humor comedy from 1980 with Bill Murray. The movie is what it is – a collection of jokes barely tightened together by common characters and weak scenery. Sometimes really funny, but sometimes kind of slow and boring.

Today I’ve made yet another attempt to ease the use of my photographic material. This time around it was JAlbum. Alexander Avanesov recommended to try it so I thought ‘What the hell?’ :)

It turned out to be a bit more difficult to install then I would expect from a so much boasted Java platform independance. Finally it turned out that documentation should be read twice or more before the installation procedure is started. Thankfully, we’ve got a somewhat Java guru in the office, so he helped me a bit. :)

The software is free, but the only thing which is open about it is the API. Yup, no sources. Program seems to be very well supported. There is a FAQ list on the site, link to the forums with a bunch of questions and answers, and few resources from the ‘Extras’ category.

Few customizations were done to the BluPlusPlus theme, extensive documentation reading, and few album regenerations. More might be reported later on. :)

Visit to Rayan’s Bar and Grill House together with Olga, Lev, and Hazard. It’s been a long time since we tried to get there, but never succedded until today for one or the other reason.

Mushrooms, it seems, is something enjoyed by the chief. Menu has starters like ‘Fried mushrooms’, ‘Garlic mushrooms’, and ‘Rayans mushrooms’. Maybe some other mushrooms that I missed. There was a 50×50 success with main courses (out of four that we’ve ordered). My Mexican steak was tough and dry. Olga’s barbeque ribs were very similar to something Pizza Hut was serving until recently. But there were a lot of those ribs. :) Hazard got a rather enjoyable Rayan’s stake, while Lev went the pork way with the fillet, which was also tender and yummy.

The question of the day is “Would you like jacket potato or French fries with you meal?”, so you’d better be ready with an answer. :)

There are few kinds of draught beer in the menu, but nothing special apart from draught Heineken, which was no more today. Tough luck. :) Selection of tea, coffee and ice cream for dessert. Banana split was rather good and visually much more appealing then Rayan’s ice cream (which looked like an offensive mix of strawberry and chocolate ice cream with lots of chocolate sauce on top).

Overall, a nice place to visit once in a while.

St.Valentines Day! Olga and I went for a walk around Pano and Kato Lefkara. It was freezing outside (with only +3 degrees Celsius) and very windy.

Romantic dinner in Ladas fish tavern near old port. :)