Category: Technology

This whole week was dedicated to my family. No, I mean all my relatives and their families. Currently I know of 260+ people that are related to me in some way. There is still so much information to get. I am missing few large branches, but that is on the way.

I am also falling in love with gramps, which is one excellent piece of software. I’ve went as far as started to patch some code (Python) myself and submitted few Russian translation improvements. I guess at least some of it will show up in the next release.

I’ve finally put some results of Gramps manipulations for the last few days. Check out my Family Tree (Russian, UTF8).

After a somewhat extensive usage of Gramps, here are few complaints to add to the almost perfect review I did a couple of days ago.

Russian translations are way off in some cases. I have started the correspondence with current maintainer and he already approved a couple of changes. Maybe we’ll be able to improve it a bit. :) Web site output is rather simplistic and omits a whole bunch of data from the database. Luckily, Gramps is very pluggable and customized filters and importers/exporters can be written. I will need to look into it in the next few days.

Today is last day of the longest winter in the last four years, in case anyone forgot. :)

Accidentally, I came over an excellent piece of software called gramps. Which is, as title abbreviates, “Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System”. Something like this has been on my I-really-need-it list for a long time.

During the last visit of my and Olga’s parents, which was in summer 2002 for wedding, we extracted a real heap of data about our ancestors. I was planning to digitize the whole thing and publish it on the web for a quick reference. :) The software was missing and I was too lazy to write my own.

Now that I’ve got gramps, I jumped on the task and within the last couple of days added somewhat 190+ relatives. That’s not all that I have, but it’s a good point to pause and reflect on gramps. :)

First of all, the interface. With recent Eric Raymond’s rant about user friendlyness of open source software, I started to pay a bit more attention to the matter. Gramps has perfect interface. Yes, I meant it. Perfect. Default settings are decent and I didn’t have to change anything at all, as far as I remember. People are nicely grouped by surname. List of these groups is nicely broken into pages by the first letter of the surname. First name and gender correlation is immidately noticed by the program and used for defaults. For example, if I specify the name of the person to be Serguey, and gender to be male, then next time when I will enter another Serguey, gramps suggests male as a gender. There is a whole bunch of nit suggestions. For example, when I want am specifying that Mr.Serguey is married and I want to choose his partner, the list of choices has only females. Of course, that’ll be a problem with gay marriages happening all over the world, but this does not concern me at the moment. :)

Functionality of gramps deserves additional comments. Gramps keeps all it’s data in the XML database and can easily export it into web and many other formats. There are few import options, but since I had only pieces of paper to import from, I didn’t truly tried these operations. There are plenty of tools for analyzing the data, counting ancestors and doing all sorts of statistical crazyness. Automatic database integrity verification and repairs can be done.

Overall, I am rather impressed with the quality of this program, considering the fact, that I have never heard of it before. There are even few user manuals, but I haven’t touched them until now. :)

Accidentally, I’ve spent the whole day playing a bunch of Linux games. That is what happens when you just pass by the Happy Penguin web site. Here is the top three games:

• NetPanzer – multiplayer network tank game. Nice graphics and sounds and live chat. Also there was no difficulty finding the server. I’ve been mostly dead though, but I still enjoyed it very much. There were even some people that Allied with me. :)
  
  
• LiquidWar – a somewhat doom/quake mixture. Some nice graphics, but balance of the game is a bit off and my sound of was lacking behind a second or so for some reason. Still nice. :)
  
  
• Open Mortal – that one should is actually on the first place. :) As you might have already guessed, it is a clone of Mortal Combat – a well known game. But this one is totally rewritten, looks similar, but heros are real fun! :) Evil forces are set to still Saturday from people and are about to leave the humanity with 5 working days and only one holiday for ever! Good forces should prevent them. Real fun. :)

In the evening we went to see “Love Actually“, which was better then we expected. There were some laughs and few nice shots of scenery. Not too bad.

For the last couple of days I played a bit more with apt. This time, the goal was to setup a local repository. There are two excellent documents which together cover everything there is to it: FreshRPM’s guide to setting up an apt server and this Red Hat apt Repository HOWTO. I’ve managed to setup repositories with Red Hat 8.0 and 9 operating systems, updates for them, and appropriate FreshRPMs archives for them. All that is now needed is extensive testing. :)