Starting today, spring has arrived for us: earthworks completed earthworks begun, the house is being chipped away at for repainting, we are clearing rubbish from the garden plots and burned it at night. Hot water (autonomous) is a bit lacking, and cold water — which is also still absent — is expected to appear any moment now.

I pulled out the bicycle, replaced the tyre on the rear wheel, rode around a bit — still a bit chilly, but manageable if you don’t push too hard. I need to think about getting a second bike, otherwise I suspect someone will want to claim this one :)

I’ve decided to take up yoga. Ksyusha even found a couple of books on the subject, though I haven’t looked at them yet. I thought I’d ask my esteemed audience — does anyone have any recommendations?

As part of the fight against piracy, I today switched from the decent VMWare Workstation 6 to the free VMWare Server 2. Besides being free, its significant (and, probably, main for me) advantage is the ability to start virtual machines automatically when the host operating system boots. Since my virtual machines have graduated from toys into infrastructure tools, it became a pain to RDP in every time after a power outage, launch Workstation, and click through the machines one by one. The last time that happened it was right when I was sitting exams, and I had to walk someone through it over the phone.

On a tip from comrade nil59, who said: 3) if I were setting up a mail server today - I would try http://www.citadel.org/doku.php. And would report back to the community :) ru_root: Need advice on a mail server for FreeBSD. I decided to try Citadel. Started installing it today on a test machine, which, admittedly, has a lot of random junk running on it. In parallel, I’m downloading the appliance for VMware.

Today, on Forgiveness Sunday, I want to ask forgiveness from my friends whom I rarely reach out to, or have stopped contacting altogether. Please forgive me. I remember you and I feel truly sorry that things turned out this way. Certain life events that have been ongoing since the beginning of winter have been consuming almost all of my attention. Add to that my innate carelessness and the scatteredness that is so characteristic of me :( However, there are good things happening too — I met my Oksanka and am now spending more time offline (in particular, searching for housing and work). So I believe that the pause in our communication, which arose through my own fault, will definitely come to an end very, very soon.

Discovered DropBox for myself — kind of like SVN for the lazy. On the downside — its interface is GNOME-style On the upside — it works on Linux, Mac, and Windows Currently giving it a try, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for it :)

Tema Lebedev’s work on the LiveJournal interface is bearing fruit. For instance, this very post was made using their new bookmarklet. A small thing — but handy, and it will definitely come in useful.

Bookmarklet: posting to LiveJournal

Thanks to friends and God’s help, I finally managed to write the abstract, and today I received a reply that it had been accepted for the conference.

Now the main task is to unite the Jabber servers at work. There is one running central server (~300 people); I need to pull my users off it and move them to a local server. For now just for one branch (mine), with plans to extend it to all branches (14 departments, I think).

For the second week now I’ve been racking my brain trying to write a thesis abstract for my master’s program. Since the university is very disorganized, I still don’t have a supervisor for my master’s thesis, and there’s no one to ask for guidance. I’ve chosen the topic “Software of Automated Systems” and need to write two pages of abstracts for a conference presentation (apparently no actual presentation is required). And now I’m tormented by the agony of choice — which specific problems of software in automated systems should I write about in those two pages. My thoughts categorically refuse to work in that direction :(

if you want your communication with friends to stop depending on ICQ’s problems, get yourself a Jabber account and add me to your contacts :)

Switch to Jabber!#

Imagine that there is only one mail server in the world — www.email.com — and all fans of electronic correspondence are forced to use exactly it, install its client software, and watch its ads. That’s roughly how things work in the world of ICQ. And lately the owners of this service (AOL) have been pulling various tricks on users of third-party software. This results in me losing contact with half my friends. The business models of AOL and Rambler are built on the assumption that I am a lazy, limited creature, hooked on their precious ICQ, and will obediently watch their stupid ads and use their ugly programs. But the world doesn’t revolve around ICQ. There is a far more advanced and open system called Jabber, and a host of more convenient programs. Switching to Jabber takes just a few minutes.