Georgi’s Blog

Title

I need to edit my blog not то ask me about a title, but to put the date of the post as one. Very often, when I want to write just few lines, I stop at the title and give up writing the post, because I cannot figure out what title to put. If I don’t have this “title” field, I will be able to put just some ideas without having to wonder “now what title to put for this one…”

MirrorMask

Mirror Mask

Tagline:An extraordinary dream quest to rescue a world out of balance.
This movie was recommended to me by Geo. I saw it on his web site and I decied to rent it and see it. I liked that the movie is different. Nothing special happens in particular, it is just very different. It is not for people who do not like fantasies

There is always something…

There will always be something, that you have to do prior to the things you need to do… I have a paper to write on AAA with FreeRadius and eDirectory for my independent study, and I was planning to do it after I return from Bulgaria. But when I arrived, I realized that I have to start preparing for the ACA meeting in Hawaii ( writing software and posters ). Then there was the meeting, and I said, when I come back from Hawaii, I will start working on that paper… But guess what, during the meeting, our Computer Club server Alien, decided to play dead. So when I came back from Hawaii, I had a failing disk to recover. But things kept getting better, in the process of asking the school for help, it turned out, that there is no Computer Club, according to the SGA. So I was involved into that too. After I thought alien is OK, I spent a weekend installing OS X on my Desktop. Then I got a new laptop ( just couple a days ago ) and I had to move my stuff from the old LT and to install some software and development tools… During that same time, he SGA decided, that they want the hardware of alien back, so yesterday I had to configure a new machine to serve as alien… And there we are now. it’s 24th of August, and I have to install SUSE + eDirectory + FreeRADIUS and see how the 802.11x authentication will work, and finish my paper. On top of all that, Dr. Bernstein requested that we learn latex and bibtex, in order to write some eventual papers for publishing, so I started writing the paper in latex, which results in yet additional delays… Tomorrow arrives the new Bulgarian in Dowling, and I will have to help him register, take placement exams, figure out what is where and how in the school, and he will stay at our place for few days until he finds a place to live… There is always something that shows up…

At least it keeps me alive ( and very tired ). I guess it will be boring if there is nothing to do.

Success!!!

After some long and sleepless nights, at the end I have the needed patches and drivers in order for my Radeon to be working properly. In the beginning, it used to be detected as 16MB PCI video board, no resolutions were available, but now, after few drivers and patches, I even had to modify one and compile it myself (for which I had to download xcode ), my video board is detected as AGP with 256 of Ram, CoreImage and Quartz support.The results from Xbench changed from 4-5 in the UI and 30-40 on the rest to 110-120 on the UI and 80-90. My total result now is about 80. This morning I installed awstats, to make the people that check their statistics on my machine happy (including me).

Still Crazy

http://imdb.com/title/tt0149151/

Still crazy is a british movie telling the story of an old rock’n'roll band, which brakes apart and reunites after many years for few concerts. There are problems in the band, there is a girl, there is a drug addict… and there is some very nice music ( the soundtrack is great ). In the end the guitar player reunites everyone for one final “The flame still burns”

Rating 5 of 5

OS X on Geodar

I’ve had few ideas of selling Geodar and buying a mac Mini, but I remembered how last year I found about the os x 86 project. It did not support my hardware at that time, so few days ago I decided to check it where it stands right now. The guys haven’t waste their time. For 10.4.6, the list of supported hardware is quite big. My mother board was now supported, and the biggest problem - SATA drives - was solved. I cleaned up 40 gigs right away, deleted the partition, created a new one and marked it as Active ( bootable ). Than I rebooted and started the OS X installation from the DVD. Before the installation, I had to create the actual HFS+ Journaled file system on my partition using Disk Utility from the menu on the top. The installation was quick and painless. I added an entry in lilo.conf for OS X and rebooted. Everything worked as they have written on their web page. Even fast! After few commands in the Terminal, I had 1280х1024х32 resolution and all was fine. The next step was to find a network board that works with this os X (VIA Velocity is not supported yet ). I bought one for $15 and I think it will turn out that I have a working OS X on my desktop! And if that is not cool… I have to fix the network problem only and I’m in business. Everything works very fast, for example Safari loads with half a jump (compared to about 6 jumps on my iBook ) Thank you very much OS X 86 guys, keep up the good work…

Sleeeeapy

In the last few days I’m on a marathon of not sleeping. If I get 6 hours a night, I am happy… I promise to go to bed early tonight and sleep all nigt and all day until about 4pm when I have to go to work… The last thing last night was that digikam stopped working with my Canon 350D, and I had to write a small Kommander script that uses gphoto2 to download all images from the camera… But before the script I compiled like 10 versions of digikam and libgphoto2…

Travel reimbursement

Similar to last year, after the meeting some travel papers have to be filled out to find out who spent what and who gets to return or receive money. The rules in Dowling are as follows in our case:
You have a per diam that includes 3 daily meals + incidental expenses. The amount varies with destination and time of the year and where you sleep that night. Than, if your travel is purely business, you are entitled of reimbursement for the amount of the tickets ( airplane (at most average economy class ), taxi, cars, buses, trains etc.). Also, you are entitled of the money for the lodging. On the other hand you can charge work hours while at a given meeting.
The good thing is, that when I did the final numbers, I get to get money from the school ( because we got travel advance plus some money from the ACA… ). It is not that hard, as long as you don’t mix business with vacation. In that case there are percentages involved, you start dividing things… Ours is done, tomorrow we are going to submit the papers to accounting and start waiting for some money

Bilingual

I just installed polyglot - multilingual plugin. Recent events made me expand the audience that can read here. More about these events later. From now on, there should be a country flag next to the translated translated posts, that point to the corresponding translation. Also, located at the top of the sidebar is a general link to the Bulgarian and English versions of the blog. This plugin also handles localizations, and switches the entire wordpress, which is cool.

Здравейте деца!

И така, мина 1 седмица откакто се прибрах от Хавайските острови и доста неща се случиха. Сървъра на компютърния клуб беше обявил война и отказа да работи точно след като тръгнах за хавай, администрацията в даскалото реши, че няма компютърен клуб… забавна история. В крайна сметка, след 4 дена мъки с умиращия диск на alien, успях да измъкна файловете (не всички, но почти всички), да ги сложа на нов диск и едва вчера, успяхме да пуснем машината да работи. За щастие повечето неща си тръгнаха без проблеми и с изключение на забавянето, нямаме проблеми. От друга страна, решихме, че ще искаме пари за Компютърния клуб директно от училището, а не от SGA-а, които се водят администрация за всички клубове, така няма да трябва да им се кланим за да ни отпуснат мизерни $1000 за 1 година…

Друго интересно май не се случи, вчера Стив Джобс ми напълни душата с презентацията на новия OS X Leopard, който се очаква да излезе Януари и много се изкефих, като показаха как Micro$oft са копирали голяма част от още не излезналата Vista от OS X.

На домашното компче, реших да обновя няколко пакета и ХАЛ взе та се счупи, та се наложи да го заместя с autofs, което направо си е благинка -> в момента, в който погледнеш директорията, където трябва да е монтирано устройството, системата проверява дали устройството го има и го монтира. След като нищо не гледа директорията,след 3 секунди го демонтира. Няма команди, няма магии. Всичко си бачка. Как не съм го видял това не знам…

Сега ще се захващам с пейпъра за Independent Study-то ми та да ми се махне от главата.