Wow! I learn new things almost daily, when I'm using the Opera browser. I just noticed that it's possible to check spelling in Opera by installing Aspell.

Aspell, by the way, is a great open-source product.

In just 36 lines of code (including comments) I created an mp3 streaming server, which can serve multiply clients and stream multiply mp3 files one after another from given source directory. I'm using it for my private talk-show "radio station".

Tcl as a scripting language just doesn't stop amazing me.

Last weekend I upgraded my Linux firewall from Slackware 9.0 to Slackware 10.0. The problem was, I don't have a monitor. And this upgrade process included replacing a harddrive and partitioning and formatting it, so upgrade over the network connection wasn't an option. Only tools I had at hand were a keyboard and a CD-ROM drive. So, what to do?

1. Plug in the keyboard.
2. Get a bootable Slackware CD.
3. Insert the CD and boot the machine with it.
4. Get and install the Bochs at your other machine.
5. Create a disk image for Bochs with identical geometry information as your new hard drive.
6. Start Slackware installation from the CD ISO image at the Bochs.
7. Do all required steps at the Bochs environment and mimic all key presses with your headless box.
8. Remember to carefully configure the network connetion and leave the sshd on.
9. Reboot and log in to the freshly installed Slackware box over the SSH connection.
10. Finish the installation and configuration over the SSH.

And that's it. Smooth installation, which reminded me, why command line user interface is so cool. With graphical installer this kind of thing would not be as easy to pull through.

Afterwards I realised, that it would have been so much easier to just plug in the new hard drive as a slave and partition it and install the base system and then switch the drives and finish the configuration. Oh well, at least the experience was cool and I learned a lot how to use and configure a computer blindly.

Isn't this just great? I tried to exclude all stories about U.S. politics from my homepage and that stupid Homepage Preferences page doesn't work. I tries every possible combination of settings and I'm still able to see all Republican/Democrat/Politics/United States stories at the Slashdot Homepage.

All I want is news about technology (and other geek stuff) but now I'm force feeded with politics by Slashdot. It seems that the only option to avoid politics overload is to stop to read Slashdot at all until the presidential election is over.

* * *

Update (2004-11-02): It seems that the Homepage Preferences page has been updated and now I'm able to select sections for my homepage. Oh, the irony! Today is U.S. presidential election day and this kind of filtering is not so important for me anymore. Oh well...

What the hell is wrong with people? Isn't the normal English enough anymore? Or is it somehow "cooler" to use words like "boxen", "unices" or "virii". Last time I checked the English grammar, using the -s/-es suffix was still acceptable.

With this new "logic", the plural of the word "cactus" would be "cactii". Or "hoax" would become "hoaxen" or "hoaces". Now that sounds really stupid...

Worst thing is that there are no scientific or linguistic basis on any of those fucked-up plurals. Even if these geeks or hackers who use these do normally love to rely on rules and logic.

Damn. I shouldn't have posted a link to the Bloglines. I think that the slowness is because of me and my comment at the What is Your Favorite RSS Reader? story :( Now it's slow as hell and I wanted to start my day with a big cup of coffee and some juicy RSS feeds.

Hmm... That's odd. Last journal entry seems to be from "02 May 2003" which is over a year ago. Well, it's time for a little catch-up.

Happened since the last episode:

I spent six months at the military training. It was interesting, intensive and frustrating experience. But I learned a lot about phones and telecommunication stuff (among other things). But I don't want to talk about that or anything related to this subject.

I bought a new laptop. With Windows XP Home Edition. And I'm still using the XP at the machine. Which is pretty creepy. I'm worrying myself. Fortunately, I still have my good old Linux box, so there is still hope.

I'm still working at the same old "big bad corporation" as a software engineer. This time my job is to examine old C code and improve it and make some house-keeping (bug fixes, cleaning up, documenting). I could write a whole rant, how terrible it is to try to read other peoples code. But I won't, because I've ranted enough.

The last year or so has been extremely hard both physically and mentally. A lot of bad things have happened to people around me and I have had to re-evaluate my values and views of life. I think, that now I can truly appreciate life itself and my loved ones. And I have realized, that work isn't everything. Fortunately, things seem to be getting better step by step and hopefully the summer will be great and everything will be OK again.

Slashdot seems to be the same old nest. Some things don't ever change, I suppose.

... or why the hacking skills are essential for the survive of the human race... or something.

I bought a Magic Star MP3 player in February as I bragged about some time ago. The player worked pretty well. However, it sometimes formatted itself.

Finally I was able to bring the player to the store where I bought it. I got a replacement player and got back home. Because I don't have a car, I had to use public transportation to get to the store. It cost me six euros (six dollars) to get there and back.

The f*cking player doesn't work at all! For some reason it's unable to load the li-ion battery. So, now I have to travel back to the store and pay another six euros because of it. For the record, the price of the player was 100 euros when I bought it and now it costs only 80 euros. And I'll have to spend extra 12 euros to get a working version of that damned device. So, basically I've spent 112 euros to the device which now costs over 30 euros less :(

F*uck!

And now to the topic. Hacking skills - and now I mean the real hacking skills, not any "|\/|4d h4x0r 5k1LLz" or skript kiddie things or anything related with computers for that matter - are essential in this kind of situation. With the ability to tinker with electronic devices and to get them working reliably is one of the most valued skills in modern society in my opinion. Now I have to travel and spend money just because I'm too wimpy to try to fix the device myself. Any kind of tampering will void the warranty and I'm sure that I can't fix the device without leaving clear marks to the wiring or to the case.

After long, long time I decided to test Wine. I grabbed the latest source code, compiled it and installed with the script provided by the package.

Wine is one amazing piece of a software engineering work. Unfortunately I have been able to run only one game so far under the Wine. But what game... Unreal. The game that I was barely able to run under the Windows 98. It works perfectly under the Wine. Even the sound effects work. The game play is flawless under the 1024x768 resolution.

I'm not able to play SimCity 3000 or Fallout 2 and that's the big minus. Not entirely a minus for Wine but for the game developers who create weird code with some custom hooks to the underlying system.

The only things which seem to work almost perfectly are setup programs. For example Install Shield setup will work nicly with Wine. Wine even offers uninstall.exe/uninstaller.exe tool for having a replacement for Add/Remove panel which can be used to run uninstallers.

Apparently the latest version of the Wine is a tool which deserves more examination and experimentation. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to play SimCity under the Linux some day...

Update:

I got Fallout 2 working. I had to install a patch provided by Blackisle. Only thing NOT working right now is keyboard. I can't give descriptions to game saves :(

I got today a new heat sink. Cooler Master HHC-L61 Heat Pipe. It kicks ass! Silent, beautiful, efficent and well finished. And expensive :( But, Wow, it's cool. Literaly. It can achieve same results as cheaper heat sinks but with much lower noise level. The sink is made of copper and has two heat pipes sitcking from the side of the sink. At the top of the sink sits a 60mm fan. The promised noise level is 26 dB. And, well, I think that it's as silent as promised. However, I can't be sure because I actually can't hear the damn thing. Now the harddrive is keeping too much noise :)

Slackware 9.0 was released last week. And at the last weekend, I installed it to my "production machine".

Slackware 9.0 is nice. But not as polished as 8.1 was. Some annoyances are still around (even more than in the 9.0rc1 which I installed to my old-timer laptop).

The worst thing in this release are fonts under Mozilla 1.3. I had to switch to Gnome just because I was unable to tweak anti-aliasing settings for Mozilla (which is a GTK+-application) under the KDE environment.

To my surprise, Gnome is pretty mature nowadays. Last time checked it, it was buggy and slow and I was unable to make any changes to the default settings without crashing the whole thing. This newest version (ver. 2.2 I suppose) seems to be pretty stable and it's well polished and clean. Older versions had quite a lot of garbage (duplivated featured, useless applets etc.) but this version seens to be spartan enough for my taste.

But the best thing in this new release is the ability to upgrade the whole system from 8.1 to 9.0 without reinstalling everything.

Ah... I'm too tired to check spelling. If the text is unreadable, then just deal with it.

The company I'm working for has an HTTP proxy with censoring. It's very annoying.

I have to give credit to that person who has come up with this idea of multiply checks (the proxy checks for single words, content and URLs). It's pain in the ass and ruins legitimate surfing efficiently.

There seems to be (at least) three stages of checks made to the pages:

First, the proxy checks if the URL is prohibited. If it is, then the banner telling that the page is "illegal" is loaded instead of the page. I cannot figure out any way to bypass this without outside help. When I have to reach this kind of a page, I have to create an SSH tunnel between the university and my work computer to get the page loaded.

Second, the proxy checks all contents of the requested page. If the page contains questionable words then the proxy will replace those words with "----" mark. If there seems to be too many of these words, the whole page is censored out and the banner telling about "prohibited words" is loaded.

Third, if the page seems to be clean but there is some special words at some place of the page then the rest of the page is censored out and the banner is placed there where the first occurrence of the "prohibited word" has been found.

The second and third cases are surprisingly easy to bypass. Just reload the page ten times and the proxy will allow the page to be loaded.

By the way, the proxy server in question is made by Symantec. And for my opinion, the server sucks. It can't handle moderate load efficiently, it just starts to generate "proxy errors". And under heavy load, the server crashes.

I think I have a problem.

Slackware 9.0 RC1 was annouced monday and for some totally unknown reason I just had to install it to my Oldtimer.

What kind of a sick obsession forces a human being to reinstall a whole operation system to a machine, which doesn't even have a cd-rom drive? I think I'll need some professional help or something.

The worst thing is that I did the installation literally last night. I was able to go to the bed at 2 AM. Now I think that I'm going to fall asleep in my cubicle. I hope that no one can ear me snore...

"Blogging"... I wonder, what is the difference between this journal and weblogs. At least I'm trying to keep this as a diary or a journal (or is it same thing? I'm not aware of the differece between these two words).

Some sources state that the term "weblog" means that the owner of the 'blog writes entries about current events and publishes interesting links to various web sites. Well, what I have seen lately in several weblogs haven't been anything news-related or even remotely interesting. It seems that people just rant about different kinds of blogging applications or web sites or blogging in general. It's odd to read stuff about weblogs day after day. Doesn't these people have anything more interesting in their minds? Do they only think about weblogs? Is it some kind of a drug, which seduces you and after a while you can't talk about anything else than 'blogging?

Oh, well.

However, there seems to be one weblog, which is refreshing and quite nice to visit daily basis. Kasia in a nutshell. It has some pretty pictures and quite insightful log entries.

There seems to be two other radio shows in the Internet: Brain Damage (archived material 1991-1995, the show was aired from 1988 to 1995) and Off the Wall, which is a brand new show. Both shows are hosted by the same man, Emmanuel Goldstein (known as Eric Corley in the Brain Damage), who is also behind the show Off the Hook.

It seems that I'm not going to run out of listening material in a long time...