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.

My prolonged silence, caused by certain pre-New Year family troubles, was made even worse by exam session. In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m currently studying for a master’s degree at the Classical Private University (Zaporizhzhia, formerly the “municipal university”), in the Public Administration program. Quite a shady operation, I must say. Not only have they failed to send the enrollment notice on time for the second session in a row — they change the schedule almost every day, and on top of that the schedule itself is posted in one building while classes keep moving around another. They forgot to notify a freelance lecturer (!) about our sessions, so two classes are being pushed from Tuesday’s 4th–5th periods to Friday’s 8th–9th. The biggest joke — or rather, the most infuriating thing — is the term paper situation. At the orientation session we were told that a term paper had to be submitted before the May session. Naturally, I didn’t think to rush or even start, especially since studying was the last thing on my mind. Then, when we arrived for this session, we found out that: a) the head of our department left the university (moved to ZNU, as I understand it…) b) as a result, the term paper has to be submitted by the end of this session (the 23rd) c) the new department head, who on the 15th cheerfully informed us that he’ll be away on a business trip on the 23rd, so we have to submit it by the 21st. I’m absolutely furious at this appalling organization. It’s a disgrace to higher education. And in the Bologna Process lecture the instructor was telling us that their university ranks in the top fifty in the country and is first (FIRST) among private institutions. And they spent 15 years preparing for the state-funded enrollment of students like us. Then, when the group tried to complain to the lecturer in charge of our specialization about the difficulties with writing the term paper, the whole thing devolved into a ridiculous mess. They summoned some deputy dean who came to sort things out. And my dear classmates, like market fishwives, raised an absolute uproar, a cacophony of shouting and jabbering. In the chaos, the guy heard only what was convenient for him and steered the conversation in the direction that suited him. The women kept harping on about having no computers or internet access to work on the term paper (many of them commute from out of town). The deputy dean promised to free up 2 school days (Saturday and Sunday — economics and law lectures) and reschedule them to the following Saturday–Sunday. Through the muddle of everyone talking over each other, it somehow turned out — in a way I couldn’t quite follow — that there’d only be one such day, and the classes wouldn’t be moved to another Saturday but spread across several days instead. After further clarification, the final outcome was: nobody will reschedule anything, we’ll sort it out with the instructors, computers will be available, come on in. Well, that’s what was declared. The women calmed down. I sat there brooding. Instead of standing up for their rights, they managed to get some classes cancelled. But the instructor will still test them on the material. So in the end, nothing was gained — and the term paper still has to be written in one day of light. And these are the people governing our country! I’m ashamed to be one of them. The crowning chord of the term paper saga was the day the classes were cancelled. The law lecturer showed up anyway, found 7 students instead of 60, delivered his lecture — because nobody had warned him and nobody had made any arrangements with him. As for the majority’s absence, he said it was disrespectful to the instructor. He noted who was there and who wasn’t. We’ll see what those women’s screaming has actually accomplished. And I’m trying to force myself to write the term paper, but nothing is coming. I chose a vaguely IT-ish topic, since it’s closer to my profession. But the title “Information and Communication Aspects of Management” strikes me as very broad and in need of clarification. There are no IT people in the department; I approached the ones who teach us Word and HTML. The first has no graduate students, the second isn’t interested in public administration — he considers himself some kind of hotshot systems guy who has enough on his plate. So I sit here, twiddling my thumbs, thinking. Mostly thinking: “do I even need this?”…