First milonga

It happend indeed! The other day I visited the first in my life tango milonga. After three unsuccessful attempts.

Well, I’m astonished, not deeply impressed. But I think I’ll like them in the nearest future. The music of good quality is not loud, one can just seat and have chat with others.

I felt that dancing on milongas would give me a masterfulnes and some certainty that I’m doing well, that my experience is portable indeed. It’s not an assumtion, it’s a fact!

It happens sometimes...

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Two Olyas

“Sit down between two Olyas, make a wish, and they will make it real in the evening”.

New job

I really like my new job! I’m free to choose technologies and tools to use, I can decide what’s right and what’s wrong on my own. It’s really amazing!

Because of my bosses being abroad, no one stays behind my back and watches what I’m doing. Probably they can do this by means of remote desktop, but do they need to?

The only awful thing is inevitable: I want to sleep, just fall down asleep and don’t wake up only until I feel strong and fresh enough again.

The French

Because of the orthodontic treatment, I can’t pronounce [ts], it sounds very ugly from me. What I’ve just thought of is it’d be very suitable and comfortable for me to speak French, because they don’t use that sound at all.

New job

New job, new problems, but the world never changes: the existing code is awful, but it works!

Let’s make the language cleaner!

Only clever head allows itself to carry a modest hair-cut. One should diverge by his intelligence!

I’ve just added ability to send me feedbacks about typos or other orthographical errors. Just select erroneous text with mouse pointer and press Ctrl+Enter. Thank you in advance!

Using DocBook XML from now

I always disliked HTML because of its oddities. To post previous table I tried three times to mark it up. Then I gave up, and switched to the thing I really know, that’s DocBook XML.

First, the posts have very clean logic structure, there’s no mixture of content and representation.

Second, all sources of my posts can be stored in my repository now. That has promising advantages for the future.

My next goal is to find an offline blogger client, probably a plugin for the vim, so that I could avoid using html forms and automate the process of posting.

Typing text is getting easier

It was always complicated to type some beautiful text characters, for instance quotation marks ‘’ or “”. Actually, I’ve never known how to do it efficiently enough. When I worked under windows, I pressed the alt key then typed four-digit code of the character, and finally released the alt. That was six–seven keys to press!

There was no such possibility under Linux at all. So I tried to use the OpenOffice.org writer first. After years of software development I decided that there’s no better editor than the Vim. So I started using it everywhere. To edit a text in a web input field, I use the ViewSourceWith add-on for Mozilla. To type an exotic sign ’, I pressed <c-v>u2019. That was another seven keys.

And finally I discovered so called digraphs. This beast can help to type almost any character by pressing only four keys. For example, the same apostroph ’ can be typed as <c-k>'9. Moreover, two-character abbreviation of a sign is very easy to remember:

'6, '9	‘, ’	Digits 6 and 9 are very like the sign itself.
"6, "9	“, ”w	The same story as above.
-N, -M	–, —	En and em dashes respectively.
N0	№	Numero, number.

I haven’t found the ellipsis …, so I had to define it manually in my .vimrc: :digraph 3_ 8230.

Guests

We often say that an uninvited guest is worse than a tatar. But my yesterday’s occasion was just opposite. They had had come and fallen asleep by the time I returned home in the evening, and they had had disappeared by the time I woke up in the next morning. May it have just seemed to me?

Laziness can save us!

The ATI has just released new version of their video drivers, so I pretended to install them. But then I newly discovered that the driver isn’t installed under linux-2.6.20. The problem was much more severe this time, so I just refused to dig down any more. I downgraded the kernel to the previous version, and everything went just smoothly. How much time would I save if I did this when I was installing the previous version of drivers?..

How I applied for information

Yes, it’s very easy, every kyiv man knows it’s nesessary to call 09 and to ask a phone girl. So did I when I took on the bus:

—Would you please tell me where is a military store?
—Which street is it situated on?
—I’d like you to tell me that.
—Sorry, I can’t help you...

But because I was speaking loudly enough, two passengers turned to me and prompted politely exactly what I wanted. Next time I shan't call the 09 at all, I’d rather just ask people around me.

Think global

Hi there! Recently I've been looking for the suitable way to connect to the internet. Actually, I've been already using gprs connection for two months, but the way I did it was very awful. First, I logged in as a root than in console I typed wvdial umc. And finally, when the connection was established i copied /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf to use just received DNS nameservers' addresses. But this approach completely contradicts to my developer's nature: I'm lazy (in a good sense of the word), that is my credo is "It's better to spend an hour and reach in five minutes". So when I digged deeply into system configuration, I discovered that there were a simple way just from the beginning. I just had to use the system network configuration utility (it's called system-config-network), add new ppp connection, configure dialling parameters and that's it! Now to connect to the internet, I just launch another system utility that's called Network Device Control, choose desired connection (ppp0) and click on the Activate button. All this operations are performed from within my usual user account. And what is the most important, the DNS resolver gets configured automatically, I don't need to do any dangerous manipulations on the system manually. The conclusion from the story was for me to think sometimes as usual user, to think global and to regard the system as the whole ignoring its parts.

Dancing with teachers

I really like dancing with teachers! They treat me very carefully, just like my mother does. The fear of failure goes away when I'm dancing with a teacher, so the dance become much more clear and fluent. Tonight I liked dancing with Anya (the teacher of NY) very much, just can't recover my sense!

Dancing with tambourine

This little story tells, how I installed driver for ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 under Fedora Core 6. Well, everything worked just fine primarily with the generic open source driver called radeon. The universal linux test for OpenGL glxgears showed that my new laptop processes near 450 fps, that's to say there was no hardware acceleration at all. Offensively. So I went to the ati.com, downloaded their native driver. It doesn't matter that the 'radeon xpress 1100' doesn't even appear in the list of supported hardware, the driver is as generic that it can work with many others. It turned out also that there were the only driver suite for any configuration, and I had to download near 60 MB. So I became a happy owner of a copy of new ATI hardware driver with version number 8.33.6. Very well, we begin shortly. First I have to confess that I've just customized my linux kernel and installed the newest version available at that time, that was 2.6.20. Actually, this let me have spent MUCH MORE time getting the driver to work. 1) Launch $ ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --listpkg showed that my system distribution should be well supported. 2) But when I tried to build RPM packages, I got first surprise: ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6 .... (lots of compilation errors go here) The short look at the messages revealed that the version 2.6.20 of the linux kernel isn't supported by the driver. Actually, there were no macros _syscallX() anywhere. But deep investigation in the web found out that that problem can easily be solved by defining missing macros either in the source file where they're used or in the kernel source. In my case the latter was more suitable. 3) I tried to build desired RPM packages again. The second problem prevented me from success, it appeared that my system lacks the fireglcontrolpanel application. The web helped me again: the source of the program can be extracted from the driver package and compiled manually. It appeared that to do so, one must solve some easy programming puzzles ;-) 4) At last, I succeeded building RPMs for my system: $ ls *.rpm ATI-fglrx-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-control-panel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-devel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.20-19.02.2007-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm $ su # rpm -ivh *.rpm 5) At this point everything seemed to be ready to restart X Window system, so I pressed ctrl + shift + backspace. The X server started, but nothing interesting happened. The glxgears showed the same 450 fps, fgl_glxgears refused to start. That was the best time to look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There were errors! So I disabled the option AIGLX in the section "ServerLayout" of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 6) And that was the turning point! The glxgears printed out that my system was able to produce 2000 fps, almost four time increase! Enough about computers. I spent for that process near 24 hours, two times I decided to give it all up. But every time I came back and tried again. This insistency made my success, so I can safely say: "Never give up!"

Dangerous thoughts

Be careful with your even non-dangerous thoughts, aspecially when you're going to share them. I've posted a notice about women cloths on a web forum. I just supposed those cloths were reused from another performance... I didn't even had time to turn around, as I was plied with stones. It doesn't matter that I appreciate "reusing" in life very much... So I had to beg pardon.

Ski season 2007 opening

The winter has come to us at last. So I prepared my nordic ski, and just tried out the snow coat. After long summer season, I've lost knack, and it took me near an hour to wash out the previous season klister (it'd be much more better if I did this in the previous year!), and to apply new ski wax. But I was endowed for my effort with very smooth skiing experience. A small distance (but enough for the first time) showed out that my skiing skills and power remain on the good level, so I'm going to more interesting hillycountry tomorrow.

Welcome back to Ukraine!

The last five days in Hungary passed very quickly, because it was very interesting. The days was spent for excursions, nights for dancing and getting home. I slept only few hours every night, but nevertheless I felt very fresh. I used the Hungarian for communications if I know how to express myself, the English was used otherwise. It appeared that Hungarians are very friendly people, they speak very good English, German, sometimes Russian. I've found a female friend, we danced together. I've taughted her to dance the Los Angeles style of salsa, she showed me the night city, presented young wine of her own production. I adore her!

It happend indeed!

I danced salsa with Tanya Yur'yeva today. As long as she is my teacher, the fact itself is something like a ceremony of initiation for me. Actually, I've been trying to catch her for two last months, but she was too busy to visit salsa parties. "The ambition of an idiot" became true ;-)

Magyarországra megyek!

Hi there! "Who can do something does it, but who can't teaches",-- I heard today. It appears that my next dream is becoming a reality, yes, the day after tomorrow I'm going to Hungary. Hurray!