Year: 2004

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

Now I have a scanner

My brother brought me a scanner – Epson Perfection 1250. I will be scanning lots of pictures from my (and Olga’s for that matter) college years. It is time to digitize all those numerous photo albums.

I was surprised how easy it was to install and configure the scanner. It is a USB device, so I just had to plug it in and it was working. My Fedora Linux Core 1 machine had a number of applications to work with the scanner straight away – Kooka (from KDE guys), XSane, and Gimp (via XSane).

Picture of the day

Green wall

Today was a bit tough on ideas. But I am not giving up easily. 5 images alltogether go in here.

What I’ve learned today is that flash is a kind of hot after it flashes. Interesting effects can be obtained by closing the flash with different things (paper, hand, etc) in a small room (like bathroom). Also, a polarizing filter can be used without bright sun and reflections – it does decrease the amount of light passing through the lens producing interesting results. This calls for more experimentation though.