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.
If it so happens that your Fedora install suddenly fails to boot, giving some error messages or a simple “GRUB ” string, then I advise you to boot into rescue mode, install all updates, regenerate initrd image and reboot. All should be nice and sweet now.
Those of you who need more info, scroll through Common Fedora 10 Bugs wiki page.
Yesterday I’ve heard the bad news – my uncle, Alexander Sorokin, passed away at an age of 44. He was on a business trip, almost a 1000 kilometers away from home, when he had a stroke. He was a really good man.
He was the person who got me into computers many years ago. He was always involved with technology, and it was him who first arrange a PC for our house. At first it wasn’t for me, it was for my mother. But he encouraged my curiosity. More so, it was him spending countless days and nights in our house, trying to fix the consequences of my curiosity, when important documents got missing or system would get stuck with no way to boot. All he said after would be “Don’t do this again”. And on the next occasion: “Oh, that’s OK, I see it’s different this time”.
Strong, kind, smart, and funny. A very good friend, and an example of a Good Man. That’s how I will remember him.
Rest in peace…
I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I am a big fan of Perl programming languge. However, most of my programming time these days is spent in PHP. The languages are often similar, with PHP having its roots in Perl, and Perl being such a influence in the world of programming languages. This similarity is often very helpful. However there are a few difference, some of which are obvious and others are not.
One such difference that I came up recently (in someone else’s code though), was about variable scoping. Consider an example in Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @values = qw(foo bar hello world);
foreach my $value (@values) {
print "Inside loop value = $value\n";
}
print "Outside loop value = $value\n";
The above script will generate a compilation error due to undefined variable $value. The one outside the loop.
A very similar code in PHP though:
#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$values = array('foo','bar','hello','world');
foreach ($values as $value) {
print "Inside loop value = $value\n";
}
print "Outside loop value = $value\n";
?>
Will output the following:
Inside loop value = foo Inside loop value = bar Inside loop value = hello Inside loop value = world Outside loop value = world
In Perl, variable $value is scoped inside the loop. Once the execution is out of the loop, there is no such thing as $value anymore, hence the compilation error (due to the use of strict and warnings). In PHP, $value is in global scope, so the last value “world” is carried further down the road. In case you reuse variable names in different places of your program, counting on scope to be different, you might get some really interesting and totally unexpected results. And they won’t be too easy to track down too. Be warned.
None of the sites hosted on my sever were accessible for most of yesterday. That was caused by some emergency maintenace done by the hosting company. They didn’t warn me before, so I weren’t aware of it coming and for how long it would last.
This is the third downtime for this month. Needless to say, I am not satisfied with the service no more. Firstly, the downtimes are too frequent and too lengthy. Secondly, total absense of notificatios – either before the downtime or after. No explanations. Nothing.
I’ve been with this hosting company for more than two years now and it was OK most of the time. But now, once again, I am thinking about moving somewhere else. Suggestions?
A couple of days ago I got my hands on a PlayStation 3. Boy, was that a wrong day of the week! But let me tell it to you properly…
I am not much of a gamer. I like games and all, but somehow I don’t spend all that much time playing. Most of my gaming activities in the last few years were spent either in Quake III or OpenTTD (open source Transport Typhoon Deluxe clone). There were also a whole bunch of simple games like mahjongg, Desktop Tower Defense, and the rest of the flash entertainment goodies.
I never had a gaming console. A few of my friends had though. And back then consoles were very different from PCs. PCs were in the form of huge and heavy desktops, that were booting too long. Gaming consoles were of a much smaller size factor, and they were booting faster. All you had to do was put the game cartridge in, and you were in a game. And that was fun.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I get this huge laptop bag, which is pretty heavy. I take it home. PlayStation 3 is in there, with a bunch of cables, and a few games. My first impression – PlayStation3 is not much different from a computer. It’s large, it’s heavy, it’s noisy, and it’s blowing hot air to its side. And, I guess, it costs pretty much as a PC too.
Then I connect this thing to my recently bought Sony Bravia 32-inch flat screen TV. With HDMI cable. When you hold an HDMI cable in your hands, you feel the solid quality. You know that whatever comes through this must be really good. It’s hard, it’s thick, and it’s long. Like a coaxil cable or something. And that was true – the moment I got the first picture from the game, I was stunned. I was just looking at it speechless. No television channel or DVD had the quality of the picture that I had in front of my eyes. Absolute brilliant stuff.
So, I played “Need for Speed” just a bit. I had to get used to joystick – form factor is weird for my hands that are used only to keyboards and mice; and it has so many buttons and controls that it takes some time to manage. I like “Need for Speed”, it’s a nice car racing game, which I used to play on PC some years ago. But since I got a Genius wheel and pedals for one of my birthdays, I don’t like playing car simulators without them anymore. Joystick is OK, but not that much fun as having a real wheel and stuff.
I check the bag for more games, and among unfamiliar titles I noticed “Grand Theft Auth IV”. Now that was something I wanted to try. I’ve heard a lot about the game, but never had a chance to try it out. It was Tuedays, 11:00pm when I started the game. The next thing I know – Maxim woke up. It was Wednesday, 7:30am. Now if that is not a sign of a good game, I don’t what is then.
Coming back to that comment above about the wrong day of the week. It’s a well known fact that no new games or gadgets should be opened or started on any day of the week except for Friday or Saturday. Cause it’s too easy to get carried away and spend a night playing with the new stuff. This time I forgot that, and a sleepy, half-focused Wednesday was a good reminder to me. Gladly, the weekend is ahead of us…