Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

Geroskipou Beer Festival

I came across the announcement for the Geroskipou Beer Festival somewhere in my Facebook stream.  Being a big (literally) fan of beer, I couldn’t not post it.  Even with the heavy heart after all the previous beer festivals I’ve been to in Cyprus.  This one seems to follow the general pattern: 5 EUR entrance buys you one beer.  You’ll pay for the rest, and there are about 40 different ones to taste.

As these festivals usually go, you’d probably overpay for the beers, and the variety won’t really be of 40 different brands.  Judging from previous experiences, small can of Keo, large can of Keo, small bottle of Keo, large bottle of Keo, and a draught Keo – are five different varieties and not one.  Heck, I’m not even sure I can list 40 different brands even if I’ll remember all the beers I ever drank or saw on sale in Cyprus!

Just for the fun of it, I’ll try .  First of all, the local ones, obviously: Keo, Carlsberg, and Leon.  Mythos from Greece.  Then the usual suspects: Hoegaarden, Guinness, Krombacher, Stella Artois, Warsteiner, Veltins, Heineken, Beck’s, Budweiser, Pilsner Urquell.  Then slightly less usual suspects: Kilkenny, Caffreys, Erdinger, Konig Ludwig and Konig Ludwig Dunkel, Weissbier, Franziskaner, Amstel, Grolsch, Fosters and Bavaria.  Then a few Belgian beers: Blanche, Duvel, Kwak, Leffe (blonde, dark, and red), Chimay. A touch of Mexico with Corona and Sol. Ciders, although not technically beers, are almost always present at beer festivals – Magners, Strongbow, Woodbecker and Somersby.

How many are these? 38.  Throw in a couple of non-alcoholic names that I don’t know, a coupe of Asian (Chinese and Japanese names that I cannot remember), and, just to get rid of any doubts, a couple of nice ones from Bavarian Delikatessen shop – those names are tough even for Bavarians.  There you go – 40 or so varieties.  Now, can you imagine all of them in one place?  I can’t.   Not even in supermarkets which offer a great variety these days.

Somehow, the more I think about this festival, the more I think it’ll be like the others.  What do you think?  Is it worth driving all they way over to Geroskipou just to get the same beers you can get in any Limassol pub or supermarket?

Matt Mullenweg – State of the Word 2012

If you are involved with any kind of software development, this video is a must see.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic fame speaks about the state of WordPress – community, releases, user interfaces, problems and solutions, etc.  One of the coolest things about Matt is his attitude towards the end users.  He seems to appreciate that they are just regular people, with their own needs and problems, and that they all don’t have to be geeks to use a piece of software.  Even in this video, he repeatedly points out that it’s not the user’s fault that something is difficult to use, but the developer’s.  More so, the developer is the one who can actually fix the problem.  That’s the kind of attitude that I am trying to teach myself in the last few years.  I’ve made progress, but, sadly, I am still way too far.

Gmail saga : forwarding, filters, and POP-3

A few days ago I’ve mentioned that I have a problem with some of my email accounts.  The thing was that I have a few mailboxes, and all of them forward all incoming messages to a single account that I use for everything.  Some of the accounts forward emails using Gmai’s forwarder, some forward emails using a filter, and some mailboxes are checked for email via POP-3.  That’s not because I like variety, but because all these accounts were created at different times, back when Gmail wasn’t as full featured as it is now.

Anyways.  I realized that one of the accounts stopped forwarding the emails.  I logged into it, and found that there were thousands of messages waiting for reply.  None of these messages made it through the forwarder.  The mailbox is also quite old, and has plenty of email history – most of which I already had in my central mailbox.

I tried to create a new filter so that I could only forward the ones that didn’t make, but that didn’t work.  I played around with filters, IMAP access, and a few third-party scripts, but nothing was giving the result that I wanted.  The only option left was POP-3.  So I went for it.

The thing with POP-3 access in Gmail is that when you enable it, you have to choose for which messages – either only the new ones from this point, or for all of them.  I had to go for the “all of them”.

The mailbox in question contains a history of 50,000 conversations.  I cleaned up a bit, so just before the POP-3 pull started, I had around 35,000 conversations.  Gmail’s POP-3 mail check works interestingly.  It fetches a maximum of 200 messages per session.  And it takes a few minutes’ break between sessions.  It took just a bit over 48 hours to import all my messages to another account via POP-3!

Gladly, most of them were not duplicated.  Gmail was smart enough to know which messages I already had and which I didn’t.  And the ones that I didn’t went through the filtering process in the central mailbox, as they should.  So after about 2 days of waiting, I’ve ended up with a couple of thousands of new messages.  Sorted through them in a matter of an hour (thank you Gmail team for keyboard shortcuts!), and now I am up to speed again.

Thinking over this experience, I will probably go through the settings of all my other accounts and make sure that I am using POP-3 rather than filters or forwarders.  Somehow I think it is a little bit more reliable.