Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

This is one of those Maxim’s charming smiles.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-04-30_POTD

While BlogLines is a wonderful service with all bells and whistles, it is not a panacea. For example, it can’t help me with internal company feeds (like development wiki RSS feed), which aren’t open to the general public.

In situations like this, a standalone RSS/Atom feed reader is of great help. KDE provided NewsTicker, which could use RSS and Atom feeds, but the display of new items is terrible. The scrolling thing just doesn’t work. In the latest release of KDE (3.4) a proper RSS/Atom reader was integrated – amarok. It is a really nice application, which integrates beautifully with KDE.

The problem is that KDE 3.4 will be a part of Fedora Linux Core 4, which is not released yet. For those of us, who are using Fedora Linux Core 3, a ready made RPM package is available.

With this post I’d like to celebrate my yet another blogging milestone – 2000 posts. And I am talking about published, public, archived, and available to everyone posts. Not pages, not comments, not drafts. My blogging history goes as far back as October 2001, but that might look a little misleading. More than 1500 posts were written within the last year of blogging – approximately from the end of March 2004, when I decided to post at least one article every day. I am proud to say that until now I didn’t have any gaps, and you can indeed find at least one post for every calendar day from that period.

Needless to say that from October 2001 my blogging tools and habbits changed a lot. I went through a few versions of hand made website, through a number of third-party utilities, to my current installation of WordPress. Originally, I didn’t have any categories. At this time, I have 37 of them. Before no one could comment on my posts. Today I have 570 comments in the database, out of which I wrote 203 as replies to other people’s sayings. My average posts went from few words to few paragraphs. I spend anywhere from half an hour to ten hours blogging every day (reading stuff, writing stuff, fixing stuff, linking to stuff, commenting stuff, moderating stuff, replying to stuff, coding stuff, etc).

I blog primaraly for myself. I keep important information closer to myseslf, logged and organized well. My blog already helped me a few times to locate bits and pieces of information that I’ve long time forgotten. Additionally, there are plenty of people who find things I write useful. Currently I am getting about 2,500 visitors daily. About a half of them are coming back more than once.

Let’s see how far I can take it…

Many parenting books say that at the age of about two months a child starts to recognize family members. Some go as far as describe the reaction – smile and the rise of activity. But none of them can describe it properly and thus don’t spoil the surprise.

Yesterday, I woke up and went to check upon Maxim. He was taken care of by his grandma and so I didn’t have to rush, but I did anyway, because I missed him too much (he was sleeping when I got back from work). He was in his cradle and he was awake, but silent. He looked kind of bored – didn’t want to sleep and didn’t want to play with his toys. But the moment he saw me everything changed. First, he gave me one of his Hollywood smiles and than he started waving his hands and legs as fast as he could. He almost jumped out of his cradle, so glad he was to see me.

I picked him up and looked straight into my eyes with the look saying something like ‘Dad, where the hack have you been for the last 12 hours? I was all lonely here without you! Let us go play now!’. And he smiled. Even if I somehow can misunderstand his looks, his smile is rock solid definite. And when I see it, coupled with the looks, I feel like a Japanese cherry garden blossoms inside of me. Kind of like they show it on Discovery, in fast forward mode with millions of flowers opening at a split second. Amazing that is, I tell you.

Later Maxim repeated his recognition smiley dance several times both for me and Olga. Not yet for grandma though.

This must be on of the most hilarious things I’ve heard in some time…

My mother just called me and said that she has a problem with her newly acquired notebook. The bloody Windows XP got stuck while booting up and there is no way to shutdown the computer. She pressed the Power button, but it didn’t work. She did than the next logical step – pulled the power plug from the socket. To her surprise, this didn’t help, because notebook’s battery was charged and the damn machine didn’t react in any way.

It’s been a while since I talked to regular computer users. Most of the people around me are professionals and have other fun problems. This one though reminded me of all those technical support jokes, but in a new, refreshing way. It also reminded me my frastration with ATX motherboards, when I first met them. I remember wondering why the Power button doesn’t work and who was the idiot who came up with this idea.

P.S.: If you came across this post trying to figure out how to switch the damn thing off, it’s actually easy: just press the Power button and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds and it should do the magic.

I’ve modified the site theme a little bit. Calendar of posts is now only displayed on the main page. Additionally, when looking at some category, the category description and the link to category RSS feed will be displayed at the same place where calendar used to be.

Categories RSS feeds were a long time TODO list entry and were requested by many people. Hopefully, they’re all happy and celebrating now.

My Firefox gave up on me today after I played a bit with its settings once again. I am still hoping that it will return from the NoGo land without the reset of the profile. In the meanwhile, I fired up Konqueror and decided to use it for a while. It has matured a lot since the last time I used it for web browsing and I can even say that it can handle most of the sites that I use correctly.

The most annoying problem so far is with BlogLines. Clicking on items in the left panel does not work at all. The only way to read new stuff is by clicking on the folders which is way too far from convenient. I have over 500 new items in some folders and loading them all at once doesn’t do me any good.

I’ve googled for the solution for a bit, but didn’t find anything. If you know by any chance how to overcome the issue, please let me know. If I will find the solution myself, I will update this node to include it.

P.S.: I am using Konqueror 3.3.1 from the Fedora Linux Core 3 installation.

Accidentally, I’ve found an excellent shop for magazines and newspapers. It is located in Limassol, on the Makariou III avenue. It is in the same building as New York Sweets, on the left side if driving from the sea towards the city.

There is really a great choice. There are magazines on any topic out there, from cars and computers to photography and fishing. There is also a choice of languages for many editions. I have seen magazines in English, Greek, and Russian.

Also, I’ve noticed that all these magazines and newspapers are updated frequently. I am getting fresh issues of a couple of photography magazines every month.

I came across this excellent resource with a bunch of WordPress plugins. It doesn’t display very well in my Firefox, with titles being written in green over the green background, but if you can get over that, it has a lot to offer. For example, I’ve immediately downloaded and installed two plugins:

• BAStats. It provides a nice way to see site statistics in a Dashboard tab. Browsers, referrers, hosts, requests, search strings and all the usual bits can be displayed over a selected period of time.
• Comment Quicktags. This one provides buttons that help in editing comments. Making text bold or italic, linking to URLs, striking through words and blockquoting paragraphs can’t be any easier now.

And there are a few others that I am looking at and thinking if I need them or not and if I should try them on or or not.

I’ve bought new shoes today. My mother would be way too glad to hear this.

You see, I’m not that kean about new clothes, or footwear for that matter. And I hate shopping. That is why I tend to choose something very comfy and practical and wear it until it tears into pieces. Even than, if it can still hold on me, I’ll wear it.

My old shoes kept holding for quite a while. My mother was pushing me into a new purchase as far as two years ago. Needless to say that she spent every free second during her last visit convincing me to visit the shoe shop. She didn’t manage to get me in though. When she realized that she was failing, she tried to scare me with the promise that she will send me something from Moscow without consulting me and withoug me trying those shoes on first. And that she’d insist on me wearing them. Oh, well. That didn’t scare me at all. She actually went into the shop trying to find something suitable and realized that it wasn’t that easy. Anyway, no she doesn’t have to.

Goodbye, old shoes, you served me well.

I’ll wear you only once again – for the upcoming KSP. :)

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-04-28_POTD