Month: September 2004

Scanned pictures from trip to Malta

Malta buses. Postcard.

Since I now have a scanner, I decided to wait no longer and start practicing my mad scanning skills. I jumped into a heap of photo albums that Olga and I gathered over the years and discovered that we actually have a few pictures from the trip to Malta. We lost our camera that time and I thought that all the pictures were gone. Surprise, surprise, the camera was lost with a new film. Not only we have a bunch of pictures (not very aesthetic though), but we also have a few postcards that we bought there.

I took all of these pieces of paper and scanned them at once. It took me about 2 or 3 hours, but I don’t have the experience yet. It was getting faster towards the end. The scans are OK, but I will read more about the process and hopefully it will get even better.

The resulting photo album is here (about 50 images). Stay tuned for more graphical documents from my crazy past.

Picture of the day

No smoking

Ok, today I almost missed it. First half of the day I was in Nicosia because of some paper work that we needed to do with Olga in the Russian Embassy. The second half of the day I was fixing and studing my home workstation after upgrade to Fedora Linux Core 2. I also was doing a lot of scanning of old pictures. Tought and busy day.

But I managed it. On the way back from Nicosia, Olga and I passed by McDonalds, where I made a couple of pictures. Both of them turned out pretty good for the ‘Picture of the day’ project. Check them out here.

I also think with sadness about two missed opportunities. First, there were a lot of yellow cars near KEO factory. All of them were staying in line and had a KEO logo on the side. I was too bored and lazy to stop and make a picture. Second opportunity present itself nearby the St.Mary’s school, which is close to my place. School started today it seems, because I saw a couple of kids with parents, all dressed up, walking in the direction of the said school. All four looked really nice. But I was still bored and lazy to stop. Now I am punishing myself for that.

Happy Programmer’s Day

Programmer

New jobs are born pretty often, especially in the fast growing IT industry. We are still trying to convince people that SysAdmin’s Day is a real holiday. It seems that there is another new holiday which people should know about – Programmer’s Day. Selebrate Programmer’s Day on the 256th day of the year (September 12th or 13th most of the times).

I am very easy at accepting professional holidays, so congratulations to all programmers around the world. Let the source code be with you all the way. :)

Home workstation upgraded to Fedore Linux Core 2

I have upgraded by home workstation from Fedora Linux Core 1 to Fedora Linux Core 2. Everything went nice and cool except for the X server. For some reason, X.org didn’t want to use my old XF86Config. After I played around with it trying to convince it, I gave up and regenerated a new config file with ‘X.org -configure’. I had to backport minor bits, like Russian language keyboard setting and mouse wheel configuration from the old file, but that was easy.

I have been running Core 2 on my office workstation and didn’t have any problems for some time now, so I decided to try it at home.

First impressions are rather good. Applications startup faster, especially native KDE stuff. I haven’t noticed it in the office since I have a very powerful machine over there and nothing makes a difference anymore. At home I am still runnnig on Pentium III 800 MHz with 256 megs of RAM, so any speedups are noticable. Another improvement is nicer fonts. Firefox shines. :)

I do recommend switching home machines to Fedora Linux Core 2, since Core 3 is coming out really soon (in a couple of month or so). It will be easier and safer to upgrade, I think.

Excavator Bagger 288

Revolver.ru links to this article (in Russian) at Membrana.ru, which talks about the biggest excavator ever – Bagger 288. I am not particularly interested in excavators or Guinness book records, but the size of this thing is really impressive.

Unfortunately, all the information I find on the web is mostly either in German or in Russian, so, I guess, I will have to make a rough translation for you. While I will be doing that, I do suggest you check more pictures.

Continue reading Excavator Bagger 288