August 31, 2004
Just a bit more...
Pics from the Whirlwind Tour will be posted tomorrow. Actually, I will only post a few pics, but anybody who asks will receive a CD with the full indexed HTML-converted 637MB of full-scale pictures, or a smaller one - 76MB of pics scaled down to 1024x768. The CD's have been ready for a couple of days, just waiting for somebody to find the time to pick the pics to be posted and write a couple of comments... well, I've picked the pics now and transferred them to the server (not online yet though), give me just a bit more time for the comments :)
Of Bears And Beers
Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground
A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday...
Read the CNN article for more. Via Ivan Tumanov.
I just wonder if our Bulgarian bears will follow the time-honored traditions of those American bears, or skip to the chase and go straight for the rakiya bottles in the backpacks :)
August 30, 2004
Nikolay Nedyalkov: an interview
Students in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at the Sofia University are probably familiar with the Network Security elective (and if they are not, they ought to be ;) Nikolay Nedyalkov, one of the course's organizers and a founding member of the Association for Information Security, gave a brief interview in Bulgarian touching on the recent Kaspersky "the-Internet-is-dying" hype, the Internet and security in general, and the pointlessness of any attempt at Internet regulation by the state. The interview was also linked to by the big.bg portal.
Disclaimer: I am also among the lecturers in the Network Security course, as well as a founding member of ISECA.
August 27, 2004
The Guardian: Best SF authors, Best SF movies, etc.
The Guardian's online edition has published a couple of "best of" lists - top ten sci-fi authors and top ten sci-fi films (movies for those weirdos across the Atlantic Sea ;). What makes those lists particularly interesting is that they were compiled by about sixty top scientists, at least some of which ought to know what they are talking about :)
I heartily agree with all the authors chosen and with pretty much all the films. The only thing that leaves me just a little bit sad is that Robert A. Heinlein did not make the authors list, but then there were only ten places after all, and there are certainly a whole lot of other authors in the 'would have been nice' category... All in all, a great job by the Guardian's editors!
August 26, 2004
Software Freedom Day
Just picked this up from Slashdot: seems like there will be some fun happenin' on Saturday, declared Software Freedom day by the United Nations and its IOSN.
As I'm writing this, there's no mentioning of Bulgaria at the team pages, and time is running kinda short... still it would be fun if something were arranged, even if it were only a small beer party ;)
August 24, 2004
Oops... 6.0? :)
Gee, take a week off and people come up with the strangest things :) First, there are three new FreeBSD committers in a single 24-hour period (congratulations again, Cheng-Lung, Dejan and Alexey!), and then this - do the daily CVSup, cvs -q up src/, build/installworld/kernel, reboot, and...
[roam@straylight ~]> uname -sr FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT [roam@straylight ~]> uname -a FreeBSD straylight.m.ringlet.net 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #4: Mon Aug 23 15:33:28 EEST 2004 roam@straylight.m.ringlet.net:/fs/5/usr.obj/fs/5/usr.src/sys/WAYLIGHT i386 [roam@straylight ~]>
Welcome to the brand new world of 6.0-CURRENT, have a nice day! :)
However, at present I (and I suppose a couple of other developers) am more interested in the stability of the 5.x-STABLE branch (RELENG_5 in CVS), which is currently in code freeze pending the release of FreeBSD 5.3, so right now straylight is busy doing a "cvs -q up -rRELENG_5". Guess I'll be back with -CURRENT a couple of months after 5.3 is out, but then you never know :)
August 23, 2004
The Whirlwind Tour
Well, our whirlwind holiday tour of Bulgaria has ended and now we're back in Sofia. It all started a bit funky, since I had to go back to Sofia on Monday after just a weekend in Chiprovci and various reasons kept me here till Wednesday, which made the rest of the holiday kind of hectic. Still, we were able to leave on Wednesday and do a Sofia - Troyan - Lovech - Pleven - Tutrakan - Rousse - Srebarna - Silistra - Dobrich - Balchik - Varna - Pliska - Madara - Sofia tour in five days. In the words of some mountain bikers we met on the way to Musala a couple of weeks ago (for some reason I didn't blog about our second, successful attempt to climb Musala), I've got to start wearing a sign saying, "Yep, I'm crazy alright, please don't ask!"
It was a great tour all in all, as witnessed by the fact that I just didn't have neither the time nor the desire to take a couple of minutes each day and write up some notes for this blog. I guess I'll have to do it tomorrow, and also put up some of the pictures - just some of them, since with the new 512MB flash card for the camera one thing kinda led to another and now we have about 800MB of pictures for the past week :) And now it's back to plodding through the wads of e-mail, news articles, blog entries and whatnot that have piled up - who woulda thunk that so much could happen in just one week?
August 13, 2004
More funny spam
I've expressed my amazement at the stupidify of spammers before. Sometimes, there's a funny twist to it :)
It's common knowledge that they have started mining mailing lists and other sources of information, not only for the addresses, but to grab "keywords" and stuff them into the message subject. Most of the time, they also add a word or two, usually with... mmm... should we say, "risque" connotations, to further grab the reader's attention.
Well, today, a subject line of Red Hat Linux 7.3 willingly certainly did grab mine :)
Matter of fact, although some of my interests might seem to contradict it, I actually kinda like RedHat Linux 7.2 and 7.3 - they are also the last releases of RedHat Linux that I like. Still, the notion of consent implied in the subject line was intriguing in its own right :)
And just as fate would have it, Newsforge published an article titled Warez spammers discover Linux just about when that message has reached my mail server! Talk about coincidence...
Still alive.. I think :)
Yep, no blog entries for quite some time. And no, I'm not dead - just gettin' older and stuff, what with the recent birthday brought to you (or rather, to me) by the digits '2' and '7'... Funny part is, I don't feel any wiser - but it *is* a bit strange to say something like 'yeah, so-and-so was great when it happened just about 20 years ago', and suddenly realize that it *did* indeed happen 20 years ago and that I really do remember it - and remember it quite clearly, thankyouverymuch :P
And now for the bad news - there may not be quite a bit of activity on this blog in the next week or so, since Iva and I are going on a vacation, travelling around Bulgaria to see a lot of places and things that we really ought to have seen already, but we haven't yet. Maybe, just maybe, there will be pictures afterwards (just yesterday we bought a 512M CF card for the camera, so yeah, it's quite probable that there will be pictures), but until then, enjoy the silence - unless something really crazy happens and I decide to blog about it on the road (kinda reminds me of the color white and The Beatles - and no, *that* was *before* my time ;)
