Tag: announcements

Happy Birthday, Perl!

My favorite (so far) programming language has been born 20 years ago.   It’s been loved and hated.  It’s been praised and damned.  It’s been complimented and criticized.  But all that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it has been helping people all over the world to solve problems.  Tricky, boring, annoying problems.  It provided enough power to build enterprise grade applications, while still being easy and flexible enough to be the super-glue of many systems.

I’m sure Perl will still be with us in another 20 years.  I wish it to be as useful in that time, as it is now.

Thanks, respect, and best wishes to everyone who created and supported Perl, its community and tools all these years.  Happy birthday!

Wagamama open for Cyprus noodle fans

Wagamama franchise opened the doors of its first food spot in Cyprus.  Located in Nicosia, close to other famous food brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Costa, and Burger King, it’s the first of the planned three restaurants.  Financial Mirror provides some details, such as:

Noodles are also the ideal fast food offering a nutritionally complete meal in a bowl, in addition to the rice dishes and a range of fresh juices, while for the hungry, the restaurant offers a variety of side dishes including meat and vegetable dumplings, skewered chicken, deep-fried prawns and raw salads.

New features from Flickr

Flickr Blog has two good news:

  1. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is available.  Those of you using Flickr Uploadr to send pictures to you Flickr photo stream might want  to upgrade.  The new version offers a bunch of handy functionality, such as tagging, naming, and describing photos, as well as reordering.  These are much faster to do on your computer than over the network, so it should speed up your processing quite a bit.
  2. Statistics for Pro accounts.  If you have a Pro account, you can enable statistics and enjoy some graphs.  It takes about 24 hours for the stats to appear once you enable them, so be a little patient.  Finally, you’ll know  how people are finding your pictures, where from they are coming, and what are looking at the most.

Twitter limits outgoing SMS to 250 per week

I just noticed that there is now a limit of outgoing SMS messages from Twitter to your mobile phone.  Current number is 250 per week.  Apparently, this was introduced some time ago (a couple of weeks?), but only noticed it now.  There is no mention of it in Twitter Blog.

Twitter is not currently running any ads or membership services, so it’s hard to see how they can pay for all those outgoing SMS, except via a few investments that they got.  So, this limitation was somewhat expected.  It’s still sad to see it come, even though it’s high enough for most people not to hit it at all.

I think that Twitter will (or at least should) introduce some commercial packages with some extra features and several options for SMS limitations.  250/week for a free account sounds like a reasonable amount.

Going for Fedora 8

A new version of my favorite Linux distribution has been released recently – Fedora 8.  I got my hands on the installation DVD (thanks bro!) and tried it straight away.

It didn’t go very well – the installation was hanging up during dependencies check.  I thought maybe it was something simple to fix and checked it with strace, which showed that the installation was looping constantly creating some temporary files and then removing them.  I tried to create these files by hand, but they were immediately removed.  I asked around on #fedora IRC channel, but it was over a weekend and it was rather empty.  No tips were given.

Then I came across Michael’s post that reminded me that I could do an upgrade using Yum package manager, bypassing the installation altogether.   Following the steps in the guide was simple and soon yum started downloading the new packages.  But my Internet connection is pretty slow, it would have taken me about two days just to get the files.   Not much fun to wait.  Instead I decided to copy files from the DVD to /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/ directory and restart the upgrade process.  Now all I needed to download were the updates that were released since the distribution went public.

A couple of hours later I rebooted into Fedora 8, running the new tick-less kernel (the biggest reason for me to upgrade).  I also noticed that a few fonts packages were updated – fonts are sharper and cleaner.  NetworkManager was upgraded.  And a few other things improved.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about sound problems due to a new sound server, but I didn’t have a chance to test it yet.  Other than this though everything seems to be running just fine.