Tag: tourism

Back from Malta

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to all of you reading this! I just came back from my vacations which I’ve spent on Malta (small island not far from Italy). Nice place. Lots of castles, fortified walls, musiums with knights and all that staff. Plenty of places to see. Some pictures from the trip are here.
Unbeleivable, but I haven’t touch a computer for 10 days. Have seen plenty of Internet caffees though. Basically, every place where you can eat or drink has a sticker with “Internet inside” and at least 1 computer. Expensive though.
Came back to a huge mailbox and a long todo list, so had to sort out some priorities. Found out a new policy on backup tapes and offsite storage: now everything is in a really secure place with water-, air-proof bags used for transportation. Excellent!

Christmas updates

Long time no updates again. I have put the reminder in my ical, so now updates should really be more often.
Meanwhile, I have been busy with few things and here we go:

  • OpenOffice.org office suite appeared to be VERY much like StarOffice – same code base, help and printing available, etc. Good alternative if you want to stay free and open.
  • Running different online game servers may be fun. In particular Quake III Arena servers with Rocket Arena and/or OSP mods. For those, seeking log analyzer’s for games.log – the only one I managed to force to work was Q3LA (Quake 3 Log Analyzer). My samples are http://games.thunderworx.net/q3osp/ (OSP) and http://games.thunderworx.net/q3ra/ (RA).
  • I spent some time with perl/tk programming. Tk appeared not bad at all for something more advanced than xmessage type of things. Clear, object-oriented, readable code, especially when done for Tk perl module (check out CPAN for more information).
  • Coming to surprises: it was a big one for me to find out that xsnow actually has a manual page and a handful of options. Thanks to certain someone I can now nostalgie about real winter with winter background and xsnow with -notrees and -nosanta options on.
  • It looks like finally one of my old dreams will come true and I will be working during the night time, being additionally a techical support guy during that time. Nice anyway.

That looks like all. Last thing I wanted to mention is that I will be out of the island for the first time in several years – Christmas holidays is a good time to visit my mom and bro in Malta (another small island in the same sea…hehe). I will be out from 24th of December until 3rd of January, so I guess there will be no updates during that period.