Month: June 2005

One place I shouldn’t go

I have a special relationship with all bookstores. Since I feel an unstopable urge to buy half of the books every time I go in to one, I try to avoid them as much as possible. Actually, I’ve been pretty successful at that. I decided to buy all my books from Amazon, but since I am too greedy to pay for shipping and since I don’t have a credit card of my own, I don’t buy that often. All my book shopping ends with my wishlist.

Today though I made a strategic mistake. I had to visit my bank and instead of driving, I walked. And I totally forgot (or didn’t want to remember) that there is an excellent Kyriakou bookshop on the way. I passed it once on the way to the bank and pushed myself not to enter. It took all my powers, but I passed by. Since I didn’t have any powers left, I couldn’t take another road home. And on the way back, I went in. Ouch.

I spent less than 3 minutes inside, but I managed to buy 3 books, paying over 50 CYP (Now you can understand why I try to avoid these places). Here’s what I got:

  • “Digital Photography Special Effects” by Michael Freeman. It’s been some time since I wanted to buy some book that would explain few tricks of digital image manipulation. When I saw the book by Michael Freeman I just had to buy it. I’ve read his other book “Complete Guide to Photography“, which is still the best book on the subject that I’ve read. The Special Effects book is in hardcover, with lots of illustrations, and costs about 19 CYP. “That’s value for money” I thought and picked it up.
  • “Mediterranean Island Dreams” by Jeremy Horner. This is another book that I picked from the Photography section. It has almost 250 color pictures of Mediterranean islands and I want it for some inspiration and ideas. Plus 21 CYP is not that much for that many pictures. Picked that up too.
  • “Rough guide to Cyprus” by Mark Dubin. This book is very well tested, since my good friend Vladimir has a copy. We used the book to investigate Cyprus and to open way more places here than we could imagine – restaurants and beaches specifically. I wanted to order this book from Amazon anyway, but when I saw it in the local bookshop for a mere 12 CYP I decided to buy it.

Additionally, I’ve discovered that this bookshop has an excellent Photography section with lots and lots of books. I’ll have to revisit it next month for sure. How can I stop this fever now?

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)For more than a week now I was trying to find time to go to the movies for “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith“. Today was my last chances to go see it on the big screen so I asked Olga if she will manage alone with Maxim. She replied something along the lines: “If I will ever be devorcing you and there will be an argument about with whom Maxim will live, I’ll have a good statement on my side. I’ll tell the judge that once, for example, he left me alone with the three month old baby and went to see Star Wars.” Of course, depending on the judge, this argument can have a different outcome. So I decided to take my chances. For moral support I joined forces with Lev and Hazard. And we went…

Directed by: George Lucas
Genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits, Frank Oz, Anthony Daniels, Christopher Lee, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Silas Carson, Jay Laga’aia, Bruce Spence, Wayne Pygram, Temuera Morrison
IMDB raintg: 8.0
My rating: 6.8 [rate 6.8]

Continue reading Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Subversion vs. Gnu Arch

I’ve spent some time today fighting with both Subversion and Gnu Arch. After the first few battles, it was decided that Subversion is not going to be used for the project, and that we’d go with Gnu Arch instead. There were three reasons for that.

  • Subversion is a pain to install. Especially on older machines. It requires a whole bunch of libraries and static compilation is not that easy. Gnu Arch is a charm to install.
  • Subversion does not keep owners/permissions information about files and directories. Gnu Arch does so.
  • Subversion does not support distributed development, which is practically a must in our case. Gnu Arch does so easily.

If you are confused about distributed development term above, here’s what I mean. We have bought a piece of software. We want to do some customizations and additional functionality development internally. Meanwhile, we also bought an upgrade plan, and it turned out that the vendor is releasing patches pretty often. Merging our internal development with vendor patches on a regular basis can be a real pain in the bottom, unless software version control system supports it natively. Gnu Arch does so and hence we’ll use it for the project.

But Gnu Arch is not perfect aswell. One of the things that we want to keep in the repository is the complete source package from the vendor. The source package consists of a couple of thousand files in few hundred directories. Files come in all variety – ZIP archives, GIF and PNG images, MS Word, PDF, RTF, and plain text documentation, PHP source code files, HTML pages, and so on, and so forth. Importing all these stuff into Gnu Arch repository turned out to be, well, slightly more difficult than it should have been.

For now, I’ll leave you on your own and give you some time to write a bash script for importing of such a source tree. You can post it in the comments. You have time until I will finish with my script some time tomorrow. I will post it here than.

Update: I decided to create a new post with the script.