Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

You are not welcome to Cyprus

Just a few days after I’ve posted “Welcome to Cyprus“, Cyprus News reports about the clash between the anti-racism festival goers and nationalist groups.

THE effects of last Friday’s fracas between nationalist groups and festival goers at the antiracist Rainbow Festival were still being felt across Cyprus.
With one Turkish Cypriot singer stabbed and at least 12 others – foreigners and locals alike – injured, it was commonly agreed that even this violent outcome was nowhere as bad as it could have been.

THE effects of last Friday’s fracas between nationalist groups and festival goers at the antiracist Rainbow Festival were still being felt across Cyprus.With one Turkish Cypriot singer stabbed and at least 12 others – foreigners and locals alike – injured, it was commonly agreed that even this violent outcome was nowhere as bad as it could have been.

The video, perhaps, can illustrate what happened a bit better (if you just want the action, skip to 5:35).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlXk4ogvrY4]

While I’ve seen nationalist and xenophobic Cypriots before, this is the first time I see so many of them at the same place, so organized, and so dangerous.  Actually, while I was watching this video, I had a strong feeling of deja vu.  I’ve seen this somewhere before.   Have you?  A crowd of young, aggressive guys, well organized, with drums and loudspeakers, with sticks and other weapons, throwing chairs and what not, and having no respect for police at all – sounds familiar? There is only one other group of people that I know in Cyprus that fits the description – football hooligans.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrPjJmiShUc]

Is there really a connection between football hooligans and nationalist groups?  I don’t know.  But they do look quite similar to the outsider.  And what else worries me is the police.  It seems that at the state the police is in right now, it can’t really stand against either football hooligans or violent fascist raids.

Day in brief

Adding flags to Gnome keyboard layout switch

One of the little things that has been bugging me for a few years now is the Gnome keyboard layout switch.  I am using two layouts – English and Russian – and instead of having two nice flags, like in KDE, I had to live with ‘USA’ and ‘RUS’ letters in my task bar.  Not that big of a problem, but annoying.  Icons are much easier and faster to understand than text.  And all the other things in my task bar are graphical, so the text stands out too much.

Today I finally decided to do something about.  Thanks to this forum post I had a solution in hand which almost worked.  The steps were:

  1. Download en.png and ru.png icons into ~/.icons/flags/ folder.
  2. Run gconf-editor.
  3. Change the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags to true.

The only thing that went wrong for me were the actual images.  Gnome scaled them to 24×24 pixels and they looked rater ugly.  So I created my own icons using Gimp.  I created a new image 24×24 pixels with transparent background and then dropped in the center of it the flag icon that I got from the FamFamFam icon set.  Saved the results back into the ~/.icons/flags/ folder and vuala!

FxPro Cyprus Rally 2010

This year FxPro Cyprus Rally is not the part of the World Rally Championship (WRC).  Instead, it’s a stage of some Intercontinental Rally Championship (IRC).  Not only that, but also it’s the last stage of IRC, by which both the winning driver and the winning manufacturer have already been decided.  Needless to say, there wasn’t much to see, so I decided to skip the even altogether this year.  And I almost did.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS17SePRFoM]

Yesterday though I went to spend some time with son at Yermasogia dam, which became somewhat traditional for us, before going to Pehnidotopos kids entertainment center.  While driving to the dam we were passed by a few rally cars, which gave me a suspicion that the rally stage was somewhere up the road.  That was surprising, because I thought the event finished on Saturday.

It turned out the suspicion was right.  There was some stage of the rally up the road and it had its finish line exactly on the dam itself.  Left with no choice, Maxim and I went to watch.  We were late, of course, but still managed to catch a few cars on the asphalt road.

Most Cyprus Rally stages are on gravel and I was wondering how much fun is it to watch the cars driving on asphalt.  Surfaces with less traction – gravel, snow and ice – provide a full range of spectator entertainment.  Asphalt, of course, is faster, but is it as much fun?  The answer is no.  While the cars still drift and skid, the pass you by much faster, and there is no aftermath, such as dust and flying stones.  Boring.  Even though the scenery is beautiful.

Having no camera with me, I shot a few short videos using my mobile phone.  You can see them at my YouTube channel.