Month: October 2004

Shaping up KDE all the way

I think that by now everyone who touched KDE can pretty much figure out how to customize the appearence and shortcuts. Plenty of settings can be changed via kcontrol. Numerous themes can be downloaded from sites like www.kde-look.org. All of these are pretty trivial.

There is more to customizing KDE though. Much more. KDE has a very modular block-type design. This is great because you can easily use these blocks to build something that you need and that noone has created yet or at least not shared in a way easily locatable. I am talking about kdialog and kdcop.

Continue reading Shaping up KDE all the way

Feeds from PerlMonks.org

I found that PerlMonks has a something to feed me too. RDF feed for new nodes is at http://www.perlmonks.org/headlines.rdf. There is also this node that explains how to get XML feeds for parts of the monastery. I’ve tried a couple of them but there is something broken in there, since they work in Firefox and don’t work with BlogLines. Broken feeds are not something shockingly new there – plenty of complaining nodes have been created.

If anyone can explain how I can feed only Perl Monks Meditations to BlogLines, please, be my guest and use the comments. Until that happens (or until I will find out by myself), I’ll be eating all the headlines. I know how to skip.

Mr. Nice Guy

I’ve just watched yet another Jackie Chan movie – “Mr. Nice Guy” (known also under a few other titles). It’s a bit old, but works nicely as many other Chan’s movies.

The dialogs are strange. The movie is American, but all the dialogs sound like they are from Chinese action. Most of the sentances are stating the obvious in unusual words. The characters also behave like they are from Chinese flicks – make funny faces, spread legs while running, and fight excellent kung-fu.

The story is a bit boring, undetailed and underdeveloped, but lots and lots of action compensate for that. Jackie is fighting his usual style while utilizing anything that comes handy. He also utilized a megahuge truck for the final fight. That rocked you know.

Overall, I’ll rate this as a solid 6 out of 10. Good entertainment if you like this kind of movies.

Picture of the day

Luna Park

Olga and I went for a walk today in the Luna Park. It is one of the biggest attraction parks that I have seen in Cyprus, but not as big as the ones I’ve been at in Russia. This park is the same one that we saw in Paphos when we were staying there. It moved to Limassol than. I was afraid that I will never get a chance to photograph it, but I managed. Heh.

Anyway, I need more experience with photographing such places. Lots of light and lots of darkness do confuse the metering system of 300D a lot. Most of the times I used the camera as estimation and shot in Manual mode. Focusing was a bit off too, but manual focus is something I’ve practicing a lot recently.

All pictures were postprocessed in Gimp. Cropping, USM, levels and saturation are all the menus that I touched. Enjoy the rest of the pictures here.

No Way Back

Having DVD club as neighboors proves to be worth a while. We’ve just watched “No Way Back“. It is a bit old to cause any major shivering in the crowds these days. And even if it wasn’t, it is a pretty average movie.

Russell Crowe playes main part there even before he became popular, so if you like movies with celebrities before they became celebrities, this is one to watch.

Overall, the film is slow and mostly boring. There are a few nice scenes and a couple of funny jokes, but it lacks color. I’d give it a 5 out of 10 which tries to go into 6 out of 10, but fails. Get something else if you have a choice.