Archive for May, 2004

Weekend Fun

Monday, May 31st, 2004

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Finally a nice weather on the weekend. On Saturday we went to see some old schoolfriends. We meet quite often and it’s good fun most of the time. Went for a tiny little hike up to the Valdstejn castle and back. Quite a decent achievement to stop at two pubs on a 2km trip ;) .

Next day we went for a little ride in Jizerske mountains. I was tired before we even got to Malinik. But from then on it’s essentially flat. Nice panoramas.

When we got back, we figured we need to get all the energy back somehow ;) .

Video Tutorials

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

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Managed to get xvidcap running on my SuSE 9.1 box and made a few more video demos with GIMP. Have to figure out what to do for the Guadec talk.

People usually want to see some photo editing, so I guess a bit of that.

Beagle

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

I was playing a bit with trow’s beagle indexer and must admit falling in love with it. Such a simple interface to find stuff I actually wanted. The GUI query tool just shows the first few matches and then launches the document with the appropriate application.

I found myself finding email, webpages I browsed to a lot faster than using Evolution’s search or Epiphany’s history. This is totally going to rock on my panel. And will make me even more senile, not forcing me to remeber ANYTHING.

Oh and I love the way it puts the favicon emblem on the globe icon.

Passing By

Wednesday, May 26th, 2004

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Today I walked to town while enjoying the pump panel reconstruction mix of New Order’s Confusion quite loud. I was passing by a lady walking her dog from behind. In the moment she saw me she shook with fright. I keep telling myself it was the music that scared her. Or maybe I need a haircut.

Testing gnome-blog

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

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This is my first test of gnome-blog. It seems to be working ok.

notification area icons

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

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The current situation with notification area is a little chaotic. While I don’t want to discuss the behaviour I would like to see the icons placed in the area to have a specific visual style as illustrated on this mockup.

I suggest the icons look different to regular application launchers or applets since they behave differently and their primary purpose is to inform. Having simplistic, greyscale icons would work quite well I would say.

weekend of destruction

Sunday, May 23rd, 2004

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We felt like escaping the dull cold weather and drive south to Marianske Lazne over the weekend. It’s been a marvelous day. We went for a littlebit of hinking, visited a nice peaty moor site at Sadska and a Stinky trail (with a nice smelly CO2 exhallation pond) and then comming back to the town promenade.

After having a nice panini and a coffee we went back north with a plan to stop by at Cerny Most for Kill Bill 2. Unfortunately it became Kill Peugeot 206 almost 200m away from the cinema place. Something has been making funny noises occasionally for the past few months and while I had a theory about a fan in the cooler, it was ditched by two technicians at the local Peogeot service shop. Supposedly it was just some loose part after the recent crash that was resonating thanks to aerodynamics. Fair enough. Well after the noise started again this time I didn’t bother checking the temperature since it was doing this very regularly lately and became an attribute of the vehicle.

And suddenly, at 130km/h *poof* the engine stopped, making a high pitched sound, all the controls lit up a nasty STOP! sign shining into my face. Stopped the a pretty ridiculous spot, but before even laying down the emergency triangle a nice woman already offering help and towing us to the nearest gas station (about a km away).

So ok, the cooler wasn’t working, been there, done that. Bought some distilled water and waited for it to cool down. But I was a little worried about the engine stopping. After realising the cooler or the rubber pipes are broken (that’s some pressure, boy!), since the water leaked, an engine start failure (only the starter doing its job) a slight panic made me call up a friend to pick us up. It’s s great to have friends to pick you up 100km away at 11:30. Leos, you’re our hero! ;)

Luckily my sister’s boyfriend’s has a car repair shop in Prague which made it an obvious place to have it serviced. I’m still crssing my fingers they will be able to put it back together since they only do mazdas. I still have no idea about the damage I managed to do.

Finally arriving home at about 2AM I smashed my backback on the floor only realising later that I had my f717 camera in. Looks like the LCD at the back and in the viewfinder have colored ghosts making it really hard to work with. Although the damage on the car looks like way way more expensive than on the cam, I felt more sorry about the camera.

For some reason I don’t feel depressed now. Must be the good food I’m having all the time ;)