Personal

New wheels : Suzuki Splash

With me now working in Nicosia and Maxim’s school year about to start, the need for a second car has emerged. We’ve been planning it for a while any way, it’s just that the priority of it raised recently. Our Mitsubishi Galant is more than 13 years old now, and while it works fine, it’s probably not the best idea to push it into daily 160+ kilometers journey mode.

So, with that in mind, we bought a second car. Olga picked it up on Friday and I’ll be using that for my daily travels instead. The new car is a Suzuki Splash, which is very similar to Suzuki Swift, but in a different body. Here is how it looks:

… and a bit of the front and back:

I’ve been taking it for a spin during the weekend, and I have to say that I am rather surprised as to how comfortable this car is. It’s a bit slower to accelerate (1.2L engine and automatic gearbox versus 1.8L and manual gearbox of the Mitsubishi Galant), but once it gets going, it’s very stable. I also expect it to need much less petrol, which is a definite plus for my daily trips to and from Nicosia.

Hopefully, it will last us as much as the Galant did.

Goodbye Easy Forex, hello Qobo

I’ve spent the last two and a half years working for Easy Forex. I went from a consultant through senior web developer, team leader to the director of web development. I’ve worked on a variety of projects and managed several teams. I’ve had great fun and I’ve learned a lot. (Thank you all! You guys are awesome!)

But the time has come to make a change. Today is my last day at Easy Forex. Tomorrow is the first day of my new adventure – Qobo, where I will assume the position of the Chief Technical Officer. Qobo is a Nicosia-based company that develops mostly web-based software for the enterprise needs.

I worked in this industry before, and I think now is a good time for me to return.

Upgrading Fedora 14 to Fedora 20 is always fun!

I’m upgrading my wife’s laptop from Fedora 14 to Fedora 20. That’s plenty of fun! I’ve done this before with other machines, but memory isn’t my strongest suit. First, preupgrade fails complaining that there are no repositories anymore. That’s to be expected, with even Fedora 18 being passed end of life. The replacement for preupgrade – fedup – isn’t yet available for the releases that old. Digging around I found a DVD with Fedora 19, which would work just fine, if only upgrade option hasn’t been removed from the recent Fedora releases.

So the only option that I see, except for a complete fresh install, is to follow the yum upgrade path. Which is a bumpy ride, but it did get me to the destination before. So here we go …

$ yum clean all
$ rpm -Uvh http://.../releases/16/.../fedora-release*rpm
$ yum upgrade
$ yum update
$ reboot

That’ll get me to Fedora 16. Try the preupgrade/fedup option to go to Fedora 18. If not there, repeat the above. Then go to Fedora 20. Jumping more than 2 releases at a time is not recommended.

Good luck!

GitHub contributions graph

After reading Mark Story‘s “Coding every day” post, I started checking my own GitHub contributions chart once in a while. Until today, I haven’t noticed that the chart has two different modes. One is your public contributions, seen by people who are not part of your organization’s and private projects. Here is how mine looks. (Notice the “Public contributions” title of the graph).

Yeah, I know, pathetic. And here is how the full contributions chart looks like, for me and people who have access to see my private projects activities. The graph is for the same period. (Notice a simpler “Contributions” title of the graph”).

Could be better, but not as bad anymore. Now with that I’ll try to push more stuff to the Open Source side of things again.

Recharging batteries

There are very few things that I enjoy more than 15 hour long sleep.