Month: June 2005

Housewarming party

Olga, Maxim, and I went to a housewarming party today. Nadia and Sergey (vs) were hosting the party in their recently rented house in Agia Fila. While I am at it, I must say it’s a very nice place to live in – quiet neighborhood, seaview of half of Limassol, and lots of space in two-floored three bedroom house are all excellent.

There were about 20 people at the party. Some I knew, others – not. Some couples brought their kids too.

We had lots of food and drinks as usual. I especially enjoyed home-made lemon liquore, which was very light and refreshing.

Overall we had great time. We’ll be visiting this house more in the near future.

Family tree updated

It’s been a long while since I lasted updated my family tree. Meanwhile, my mother has sent me a huge part (about 30 persons) of Lutso branch – complete with birth dates and pictures for some of them and my father has sent me pictures of his parents (my grandmother and grandfather). I’ve integrated all of these information, except for pictures of Lutso guys, since they are not annotated and I forgot who is who. I’ll identify them and add to the database. The pictures are cool and really old though. They were made in one studio in St.Petersburg, Russia. Silver plates, copied later on to paper, and than scanned to digital format – now that’s genealogy!

On BlogLines origins

I always find it fascinating how some people get an idea, develop it, implement it, and then turn it into a real success. Bloglines is a good example. Today I came across an interesting post that shows where from the Bloglines started:

I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.

I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.

What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).

Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.

That’s from Mark Fletcher’s blog. Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines. The post was written on 4th of March, 2003. That’s slighly more than two years ago.

Computers aren’t stupid

Sometimes I have a feeling that computers aren’t that stupid. They know things. Here is a fresh example.

My office workstation started misbehaving. During the last few days it got to alsmost unbearable. It hangs every 20 minutes or so. I did all the troubleshooting and debugging and everything looks OK. I’ve monitored the motherboard and CPU temperatures – neither ever got above +34C. I ran a bunch of tests on the memory – everything is good. I checked both harddisks for bad blocks – none found. I removed all unused hardware and drivers. I have changed drivers for my video card, which is a normal NVidia GeForce MX 32. I did nothing fancy with the PC.

Still, about every 20-30 minutes it would hang totally dead. I got bored with the situation and ordered a replacement. One was going to happen sooner or later anyway, since my current workstation is pretty old.

We all know what jealosy is, don’t we? Well, guess what happened. The very next day after my purchase order was approved, I come to the office, login, and my workstation crashes on me. I reboot it as usual, but it refuses to come up. I get a kernel oops. And a one I haven’t ever seen before. Yey! I boot with the rescue CD and realize that my root filesystem is terribly broken. Coincidence? I think not.

fsck.ext3 was running for more than two hours trying to repair everything. But that didn’t help. The machine is coming up to some really strange state – it does not load any services on the startup an proceeds directly to the login screen. It does not allow in noone, even local root. Plenty of errors are getting dumped on the console about missing shared libraries and stuff like that.

In about one hour I’ll be out of ideas…

P.S.: I’ve mentioned the Murphy’s Law recently. Well, it struck again. Our backup library died a few days ago and we are in the process of replacing it. So even if there is any fresh backup of my computer, I can’t restore it at the moment. Cool!