Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2

Ok, guys.  I’ve been planning to do this for about three month now. WordPress 2.0.2 is way too sweet (I know this from using it for my other projects) for me to use 1.5.2, so here it goes.

I’ve upgraded this blog.  It was easier than I expected (I tried it on another, simplier installation o’mine).  The secret was in the cleanup of unused plugins.  Since I’ve tried a bunch of things, there were cluttering up in my plugins/ directory.  As soon as I removed all unused ones, I had only a few plugins to check for compatibility.

Sadly, not everything works after the upgrade.  One of the plugins that I heavily rely on – phpexec – doesnt’ work.  I’ll fix it ASAP, but for now it means that archives and blogroll are out of reach.

If you’ll notice any other strange behavior, please let me know.

P.S.: The WYSIWYG editor and AJAX admin interface are so shweeet…

Some problems never get old. Or do they?

A couple of years ago I went through all our (Olga’s and mine) printed photographes, selected the good ones, and ordered scans from the studio, so that I could have them all in digital form. One of the annoying problems I came across when catalogueing those images was the date.

Most images didn’t have any date reference what-so-ever, so I had to guess when it was or date these images as very uproximate. Others, did have a date added by the camera. The problem though, was that in many cases, the date was way off. That’s because the camera was never properly configured (users hate manuals).

Today, while importing images to Flickr I realized that the same problem applies to digital cameras too. Many images in my gallery had a really wrong timestamp in the EXIF data. Useless. Good thing I was keeping them in the directory structure, which referenced the date (2005/2005-04-15_My_birthday). I could easily fix it with a tiny script.

This got me thinking. How can the problem be solved once and for all? Is it even possible? Is there a way for digital camera to know what time it is, without user telling it? How about people who travel a lot – do they have to reconfigure their cameras at every time zone?

The travelling bit gave me an idea – GPS. Some cameras already use GPS to add geolocation coordinates to the meta data of the picture. But GPS receivers can be also used for maintaining the precise clock, which can be autoconfigured, and autoconfigured with time zone of the actual camera location. This is sweet!

Hopefully Canon (and other vendors who I don’t care about) already does it, or plans to do it in the nearest future. That could be an excellent technology application – useful, and invisible to the user. Just as it should be.

All software has bugs

Anyone who had ever wrote more than 3 lines of code will tell you any time that all software has bugs. That’s just the way it is.

And while I don’t need any reminders of this fact (mainly due to me writing a lot of code at any given week), I got one special today.

A SPAM comment was posted to this blog, although you haven’t seen it because it went to moderation, that was clearly a result of a bug in SPAM software. The message contained a long list of phrases like ‘Thank you’, ‘Very interesting’, and ‘I bookmarked your blog’. Obviously these are intended for link SPAM. But they were supposed to be used one at a time. Oops.

Threaded dreams

There is an urban legend that drinking tequilla before going to sleep will guarantee you some really cool colorful dreams. Unfortunately, that’s more than an urban legend. I’ve tried it myself several times and it never worked out.

But another thing that I’ve tried myself and that worked out just fine, but which I haven’t heard anyone talking about, is threaded dreams.

What are threaded dreams? Well, threaded dreams are those that you (or should I say – I) have after programming threads or forks too much. I’ve always had a suspecion about the existance of threaded dreams, but I never had to program threads often enough to notice the trend.

This month though confirmed my suspecions a few times in a row. Two of these dreams were particularly interesting.

Continue reading Threaded dreams