Month: November 2011

Day in brief – 2011-11-11

Brothers

Last Saturday I was up in the hills for a barbeque with a few of my friends. There were several groups of people at the picnic place, and all of them turned out to be Russian. More so, there were common friends between all of these groups. Eventually, people started moving from group to group and from table to table. That was a lot of fun.

As with any modern group of people, there were several digital cameras around. Slowly slowly, the pictures are making their way online. The image above was shot and post-processed by Olga Timofeeva. I think this is one of the best pictures ever taken of my brother and me together. There are more awesome pictures in her Facebook album, which is unfortunately not a public resource yet.

Other people shared pictures more publicly. Here is my brother’s album and here is an album by Dmitry Blokhin.

SysVinit to Systemd migration

Fedora 16 finalized the migration of the system start-up from SysVinit to Systemd.  The old commands still work, but as with any other new system, it is recommended that you get used to the new way of doing things.  I suspect, eventually, the old commands will get dropped.

If you want to prepare yourself to that day, or if you are just curious about the new way of doing things, Fedora people created a wiki page for you, with a very handy table that shows the old service or chkconfig command, thew new systemctl alternative and a brief description.

I am all for new ways and better software, but on a personal level, I really like “service httpd stop” better than “systemctl stop httpd.service“.

On Open Source developers

It appears that not all Open Source Software developers are pathetic losers coding from their grandmother’s basement.  Here is a paragraph from Dan William’s blog post announcing the new release of NetworkManager application:

There’s no better way to celebrate the release of NetworkManager 0.9.2 than a sip of ice-cold cocktail.  It’s something pink-colored — I don’t know what — and it’s phenomenal.  And if I ever run out, I just ring a bell and somebody fills it up!  It’s basically like Paradise, except Paradise doesn’t have the latest version of NetworkManager.  Here’s a hot tip: make your first half billion and buy yourself a private island.  Then move there and write open-source software for fun.  It’s a pretty great life.  After a hard day on the beach bending networks to my will, I wind down by building buried hatches solely to confuse the island’s next owner (I’m trading up to a private archipelago in a few years).

He also shares a beautiful view in front of him at the time of his tagging the release.  Whether it’s true or not, it’s a wonderful picture.

P.S.: I don’t really know who Dan Williams is and if he is in fact a multimillionaire sitting on his own island with a pink-colored cocktail in one hand and a refill bell in another.  Even if he isn’t, there are enough examples of other people who’ve made a fortune and are now enjoying work on the Open Source Software.  I’m not kidding.  Ask Ubuntu people if you don’t believe me.