Right... countries i don't think i'll be visiting soon.... like Iran... or Somalia :)

It's my birthday today. I can finally drink alcohol in any country in the world :) (or at least the most important ones).

It seems i managed to upset at least one person with my previous entry. Sorry for that.

I am sure students at famous uni's do A LOT more work than us, and in no way did i want to offend them. From now on, I'll restrict myself from posting school related stuff.

Every year there are four weeks i totally hate. The last two weeks of every semester.

This year, i had to do about 5 projects, 1 assigment, and take 2 tests, at the same time having 3 final exams. Also during this period i managed to implement phamm and test it (actually pretty happy with it, we are moving the primary MX's to this solution soon); managed to fix #348721 (i really have to thank Steve for doing the uploads, this was the most fun i had this weeks); take care of support for some of my hosting clients (helping them read mails on i-mates, and installing roundcube since it looks 'fancy').

The projects were, well, interesting. For one subject I turned in something like 'Keeping a small ball suspended in air by using a magnetic field', but a pretty basic version, nothing wow-ing.

I am really, really tired, but thank god it's all over and everything went out ok.
The exams are not over, i have another three to take, but at least now i can actually sleep :).

It's official. My semi two week vacation with Internet access ended yesterday.
For once i really had fun going home, spent an err...interesting New Year's Eve, and it only got better after that.

As all fun most come to an end, i started working today, working on my huge TODO list. First order of bussiness is Debian work. I uploaded a new xen-tools yesterday night, and I'm preparing an upload to backports.org. Also, there are the libmysqlclient fixes that i have to take care of (bleah).

After that comes paid work, having to implement phamm, and fix a weird problem with a client. Then i have to think about school, the second asm test is thursday and again i have no idea what i should know. Hope two days will be enough to catch up...

After that, my exams are start next week, so... no more fun :(

I've been looking for an online web based IM for a while, for those times when i am not home and just want to quickly login to talk with somebody. Meebo is really cool.

A while ago we received the promised server, an IBM xseries 346, 2x3Ghz Xeon processors, 2 GB Ram, but only 3x70GB storage. Of course it has that damn Adaptec 79xx scsi controller.

With the default installer it doesn't work at all (it can't find the drives). With this installer image i found two problems. First hardware RAID doesn't work. Since it's a crap controller (only raid 0 and 1) i decided to go with software RAID anyway. After i created the software raid and defined the partitions, the installer fails with unable to create ext3/xfs (doesn't matter) partition. I wanted to dig deeper but didn't have time.

With the image from here nothing worked. It didn't detect anything, no drives, no network card.

Last time i had to work with this controller i ended up using knoppix + debootstrap. I just hoped it would be easier, and i could actually use the sarge installer which is great.

Well, someone just submitted an article on our local slashdot like news site saying that Google is coming to Romania, Poland and Russia, and is now looking for 'talented people'.

I mean, why wouldn't they want to come ? Cheap and loyal labour. The interesting thing they are going to find is our educational system, which is still living the 90's. I still remember one of our most influential professor at my uni stating that he doesn't understand all this linux 'hype' and we should be learning Visual * and Java, of course concentrating on Windows. Out of 8 subjects per semester (i am a CS student), 6 are hardware. One is software and the other one is optional history or management or whatever. Well in the 4th uni year i heard we can choose some more software.

I'm not saying hardware is not important, but still it's a CS specialization, it should at least be a balance.

Anyway, it's mostly influential. Almost all graduates are hired at Siemens VDO, the "leading international supplier of automotive electronics and mechatronics", and the rest at Alcatel.
.

I live in Timisoara which is second after the capital Bucharest. Most companies go to Bucharest because there are more money there. IBM is there, Cisco is there etc. Probably Google will go there. I will study hardware another two and a half years, and in my free time work and learn for things i actually want to do in the future...

Then move to Bucharest :)

I was thinking of building a web application on top of Google Local, however i couldn't find out for sure if i can ask money for some kind of service like this. It would probably be a free version and a subscription based one. All i found on google laws was something like:
"Except where you have been specifically licensed to do so by Google, you may not use Google Local with any products, systems, or applications installed or otherwise connected to or in communication with vehicles, capable of vehicle navigation, positioning, dispatch, real time route guidance, fleet management or similar applications".

Does anybody know if this is possible ? If not with Google Maps, maybe with something different (Microsoft has something as i recall, Yahoo too).

Frank Sinatra is cool...

A couple of days ago, a client decided that he wanted one click unsubscribe for all his mailing lists. We used mailman and from what i found googling about it, this is mostly an idea in the minds of the developers. Unfortunately i could not wait until Mailman 3 or 10 appeared. I had to implement it this week.

Actually in the end, the result was pretty simple to do, even though it's rather basic. The idea was that the client did not like the mailman web interface, and wanted to integrate it with his own website (just basic subscribe unsubscribe features).

So i wrote a small patch (3 or so lines) to mailman, that adds a new field to decorate called %(hash) that is the users password crypted.

The interface between the web address in the mail and mailman is done through a directory where requests are placed. For example when a user clicks a link, a php script does some basic checking and places a file in $client_web/list_requests, or a global requests directory. The idea for this part was to be very easy for the user to implement.

Another small python script looks (through cron) in those directories, checks hashes in case of unsubscribing, and procceses the requests.

A couple of years ago i watched a really interesting movie. It was apparently about nothing, but in fact it was rather deep, and not a cliche. The story of two persons, stuck in an unfamiliar place who found each other and started spending time together in this pretty magic place. The action was placed in Tokyo, and the whole idea was based around it's beatiful scenery. The movie is called 'Lost in Translation'.
'.

I really enjoyed the movie, and most of all the two actors. One of them was Bill Murray, and the other one Scarlet Johansson. Scarlet Johansson, even though she was only 18 (i think) when she shot the movie, portreyed a young woman left alone in this unknown universe, who tries to find herself (sounds cheesy, but it's not).

And then came this day, when i had some free time and dediced to see 'The Island'. I have never wanted to kill myself more. Basically ObiWan finds out he's a clone, escapes from the military bunker while in the proccess taking his cloned girlfriend with him, and then frees all the other clones. Also in the movie you can find out that MSN will rule the world, Cisco the telephony, and Puma the shoes industry.

Now about Obiwan's girlfriend who is interpreted by miss Johansson. She is the regular stupid innocent blonde (too many adjectives?), who everyone wants to have sex with. Her role in the movie is probably to look good and have a sex scene with Obi. I mean what the hell ?

The movie thing is probably nothing new under the sun, and i accept the quality of today's movies. I think it was just sad to see somebody i really liked, and thought maybe i would enjoy nice movies with, become another random actor.

Bleah...

Honestly... It's saturday night and if you don't want to go to a noisy club you really can't do anything interesting after 2 in the morning.

Well, throw a party ? Sure, but where ? Where i live the walls are so thin i can hear my upstairs lady neighbour do about everything(EVERYTHING...). In the dorms ? Somebody always calls the police about the noise.

All the places in this town are either caffes or clubs, and i am really bored of clubs.

I wonder what other people do when they have a free night, reserved for fun.

In other news, we are probably going to get a new IBM server for work (don't know exactly the model yet) and i have to decide on using either vservers or xen. I've only worked with vservers but heard great things about xen. Maybe we can finally bring ftp.timisoara.roedu.net back online, hurray...

This is just wrong.

"The bill, which has bipartisan support, would change the basis for awarding patents from the current method which credits the person or company that can prove they invented something first to one that credits the person or company who first applies for the patent."

Preparing to patent the wheel...

I recently discovered Faithless sounds pretty nice. By some weird circumstances i got my hands on a Faithless Live At Alexandra Palace DVD.
Knowing only a couple of their songs, i was pretty convinced the show would be boring. I was so totally wrong. I've watched it about 10 times already, and i'm not bored yet.

In other news, i had to take an asm test thursday. It was pretty weird, since i woke up that morning not having read any of the material. Thank God for Google, and the couple of asm tutorials out there. The subjects were easy (count the number of times a character appears in a string, reverse a string).
Still, I didn't make everything perfect. Having little time, i just read through the tutorials and didn't actually write any code until the test. In the end i remembered something wrong from the examples, and the program was not ending properly...

About having great ideas in weird moments. In my case it usually happens right before i fall asleep. At least with showers you can take as many as you want :).