Nice Weather

I can't believe my eyes. It's sunny outside! Dark season is over!

Kallinkangas

Everyone had a hangover after Friday's party but only Alex wasn't able to go with us. So Masha, Ovidiu and me went to Kallinkangas to have some fun in the snow. Ovidiu borrowed Esa's snowboard and broke one of its bindings the day before. He tried to ride it anyways and broke another one. The rented board's binding didn't last for long either and there was nothing left of his wish to snowboard so he rented skis and giving up snowboarding once and for all.

Here's the video I filmed:


And here are some photos:

Keep Trying

I didn't feel like blogging about it and I still don't but somehow I feel I have to write about it. The job interview went fine. Actually it went quite good as I was confident and I knew that I have the skills and I have nothing to be afraid of. The interviewer seemed to have quite a good impression about my background and me in general but he wasn't the one to decide. He tried to reach CEO several times but he wasn't picking the phone so I was told to wait until the next week. I waited. On Monday I got an email saying that unfortunately they can't hire me at the moment. So the only thing I have left to do is just to keep trying.

The Mana World Buddy List

Something I've been busy with lately. I hope I'll finish it before I loose all the interest. The buddy list looks like this:


And it has a nice tray icon and notifications:



There are still few features to be implemented. I hope it'll find its users when it's ready.

MacBook Air

I'm gonna drown in my own saliva soon.

You Wanna Piss On Me?

I am not a perv, not yet a woman. I couldn't resist typing that. I am not dreaming about golden showers but this Brithey's song just sounds way too disturbing. And it has been playing in my head all day long! I'd better listen some Kraftwerk. Simple lyrics, catchy melodies. The best way to give your brain some rest. Giving it some sleep would be a nice thing to do also and surely it will get some rest this way but it's not sending proper signals yet so I guess it's ok. Well, it can switch off itself if it needs so I'll just let it take care of itself.

Compiz Fusion

I am not a fan of eye candy and my relatively old computer isn't either so I didn't bother to install it earlier. I don't get any kicks out of using bleeding edge software but when it's available in the official distribution repository why not to try it? So I did. I've been making some screenshots of Compiz earlier which can be found here. And here are some of the nice features you get using Compiz Fusion.



You can switch between the windows this way.




Or this way. Or in many other ways available.




The cube can be made transparent with its reflection beneath.
It's useless to take screenshots of other effects. They should be seen live or at least on video. On YouTube there are plenty of such videos.

Esa

Taking a nap in Kemi airport.

Svalbard

The homeland of panserbjørne. Beware of bears.



Applies to the whole Svalbard.

Panssarikarhu

I want to be penserbjørn. Panssarikarhu. It's way better than Pupukarhu. I want to possess an incredible strength and be way more valiant and brave.

4 am

I ran out of cocoa powder. This is no good.

Up And Running

It wasn't very hard to deploy a web, NFS and mail server on FreeBSD. Loads of documentation helped a lot and the system is way less scarier than I thought. Lars advised me to take a look at OpenBSD as it supports more architectures, doesn't allow BLOBs and non-free software and has better track record for performance and security as he says. I have no reason to doubt that so I gave it a try. It was a bit more pain in the ass but I still managed. The only thing I couldn't do is to compile Python 2.5 from ports tree. Python 2.4 compiled just fine. Now it's serving two accounts and two domain names. It's kind of useless as I don't have proper hardware and fast enough internet connection but I'm considering renting a virtual dedicated server. The next step will be to set up a mail list software and interbreed it with GnuPG.

Fuck!

I was within a hairbreadth of smashing my PDA against the wall. I typed quite a long post and accidently pressed back instead of space bar on the screen keyboard. They are like couple of millimeters away from each other and it's not the first time I'm losing posts this way. I need to find some proper blogging software or start using email to post as Internet Explorer really sucks. Especially the mobile one.

Polish?

I was talking to some chick in bar last night. She left and came with a friend.
- My friend doesn't believe that you're English.
- Well, I'm not.
Friend:
- Where are you from?
- Russia.
- Oh, nice, I don't know that many Polish people!
- WTF?

Boxing Day

I should move away from here. I should. I am sick and tired of this. The country itself is forcing me to eat out. Shops are closed once again and I didn't get prepared at all. It's humiliation of human right to get food! It's a conspiracy between the government and public catering! And most likely they share the profit! It's not enough for them to close the shops at six or nine. It's not enough to force them to stay closed on Sundays. The shops are closed today after four just because it's some religious holiday. I'm atheist and I want to go shopping but I can't. It's not fair. I have no food and I an hungry. Seems like I'll have to go get some burger or pizza once again. I miss shops being open 24/7 where you can buy strong booze at 3 am being just 18. This will never happen in Finland. Stupid Finnish laws.

Merry Christmas

Being Orthodox makes this Christmas nothing significant for me and being brought up in Russia with its Soviet past makes even Orthodox Christmas nothing significant either. Communists didn't like the fact that people believed in god and celebrated Christmas but they couldn't eliminate the holiday completely so they just replaced it. Basically, it's the same thing just on a different day and without any religion being behind it. Christmas tree is called New Year tree, Russian version of Santa Claus comes on the New Year night instead of Christmas eve. People give presents, eat a lot and celebrate pretty much the same way.

But living in a country where Christmas is one of the most important holidays makes me follow the local traditions and celebrate with everybody the way they do it. So we went to Ylläs last Saturday and came back today. I'm back with a bottle of Glen Parker Single Malt Scotch Whisky, a bottle of Absolut Disco Limited Edition Vodka, Leatherman Multi-Tool and 800 grams of Fazer chocolate sweets. Nice. I'll have something to do before the school starts in the middle of January. :)

On Sunday I went to slopes to snowboard and it was no good. Lack of snow felt even in Ylläs. Slopes were icy and hard. I hope this spring it will be better.

Esa & Ovidiu

Wednesday. Around 4 am. Ruxi's place.

Deluge

I changed my BitTorrent client from Azureus to Deluge and I am quite happy about that. Python with GTK works way faster than Java with SWT and loads my poor little CPU way less. The features are sufficient, it has everything you might need from a BitTorrent client. I was surprised that Deluge installed by yum from Fedora repository didn't work. It started few times successfully but most of the time it didn't start at all or was just showing empty windows and not responding. Removing the package and building it from the source helped.

Courses

I'm done with Embedded Systems Project and Advanced Java Programming. Java was piece of cake to make and Embedded Systems Project's product didn't quite work but at least we tried. Digital Filtering and Advanced Finnish are left and I'm on a holiday till next year.

FreeBSD

I tried it few years ago and I didn't like it that much then. It was a bit different from Linux I am used to and quite unfriendly. I gave it another try and seems like it's staying. It's up and running and running quite well. I can even feel the vibes of real Unix heritage and reliability. Just took some time and patience to read the handbook and everything became pretty clear. I was surprised how easy it was to rebuild the whole base system including kernel from cvs just by few commands. Gentoo Linux is built from sources also but it's not as easy and I didn't like it that much. I'm more into rpm-based. Maybe because of my lazy nature though having little troubles might be too boring sometimes. Deploying a mail server will make me busy for awhile as I tried once on my Linux box and I didn't succeed. Everything seemed right but I still couldn't receive mail. I guess I screwed up MX record in DynDNS making the entry pointing to an IP address. This time I'll take my previous mistakes into consideration.