book

Book Review: Speed of Dark

I've finished another book: Speed of Dark. Very interesting and only just futuristic. Unlike my most SciFi lectures, this is realistic and seems very well researched. It's about autistic people and their perception of the world surrounding them. The view that all sensory inputs are like

dbus

Ever Closer

I'm playing with D-Bus, QT4 and looking at KDE4...... KDE4 is a mess right now. I'm waiting for it's next build because I have to launch stuff by hand now. aka it ain't working. D-Bus in Qt4 however is usable and I&

news

Some news...

Laura went back today to Italy.. /me is not a happy bunny! Got the new svn for dbus so I can go send images from one side to the other. And finally start the style processing bit in c++. -- This is a really old post published originally on my

news

New man

All, I have entered the world of married couple ... and it's wonderful! I shall be more focused from now on! :) -- This is a really old post published originally on my blogspot blog

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World cup

Just seen the Sweden-Paraguay game (after seeing the second half of the england game). Both games were crap and the commentators on BBC and RTE acknowledged that and bashed both "top" teams. However, both winners (Sweden and England) will most likely play further and advance. I can see

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Steaua, the babies

My fav team crashed out of the UEFA cup in style: leading with 2-0 (3-0 on aggregate), they managed to concede 4 goals in 60 minutes. It's disappointing, but not as bad as when they sold the game to PSG and lost 5-0 with a penalty in the

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Back from Edinburgh

Well, we went to Edinburgh for the Easter Holidays and it was mostly nice. We went to the big castle, roamed around, Laura went shopping (me too, but to no avail), we ordered food in Romanian :) and we drank lots of ales. interesting... Also, it looks like I've

laptop

New laptop - episode 3

My xorg.conf Section "Module" Load "dbe" Load "type1" Load "freetype" Load "extmod" Load "glx" Load "v4l" EndSection ... Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse[3]" Driver "synaptics" Option "AccelFactor" "

laptop

New laptop - episode 2

.. or in other words, "why, oh, why I did this to myself"... First, the generics. I'm parametrising the distros I've tried so far and then I'll explain what's my setup now. Several parameters of outside interest are monitored: * Sound: If

laptop

New laptop - episode 1

Well, finally I've got myself a new laptop: a Sony SZ1XP. Great machine overall, but with several bad points. One should ponder if these points are really bad... First, the good points: * Great screen. And I mean this. I've looked upon a large number of screens

laptop

Laptop

Well, I've got finally fixated on a laptop. To make my life miserable, I've picked up a top of the range sony vaio (the SZ1XP/C to be precise). It's supposed to have a life of 5-7 hours which is good for me when

concert

Concert

On Sunday I've been to a concert of Anouar Brahem Trio. Himself on oud (aka some sor of a tunisian/arab guitar), piano and accordion. Brilliant. The soloes were impressive and the guys showed their skills. Personally I was blown away by the accordion guy who played a

laptop

Testing laptops

Friday I went to Milan and I got into Fnac there. I got the chance to feel some of the laptops and here are my impressions about things: 1. Sony, the 15.4in wide screen Core duos: lovely screen but low resolution; I've been told they last only

laptop

Hail to the age of the Laptop

Interesting reading these days the press on computers... C|Net says laptops are the thing now, core duo is the thing now blah-di-blah. In fairness, this is the age of the laptop. Also, several factors come into place with this one. Here's my take: 1. portability. I'

laptop

A laptop survey

Several weeks since the anouncement of dual cores, and more and more vendors pop up with interesting machines... The latest with reviews would be Sony. The FE series would be (from sonystyle): * Intel Core Duo Processor T2500 (2GHz,2MB L2 Cache) * DVD+R Double Layer/DVD+-RW Drive * 1GB RAM

laptop

New laptop

Im hunting for a new laptop these days. Laura's screen went dead just a couple of weeks after the warranty expired and Dell guys were quite unhelpful, asking for a 700Eur to replace the screen on a 900Eur laptop. HA! So there's my perfect excuse: I

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A new year...

...and a new status. I proposed to Laura on Christmas Eve. It's very difficult to create the "perfect moment" in such a night, but I got it towards midnight :) We're very happy and it's going to be very interesting from now on

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And Pisicu'

.. and Pisicel must be mentioned today.. otherwise i'm going to hear things for the rest of my life :).. it's a bit annoying being in different parts the way we are now... but we agree that's a temp thing. -- This is a really old

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Dell 720 on SuSE 9.3

Using all kind of info off the net, I've figured it out: you can actually use it: 1. Download the z600 tarball from Lexmark 2. Extract all it's components (few TCL scripts and RPMs) 3. install the RPMs (the cups one needs --nodeps to install, as

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Post-Sicily

Well, it has been a long time... I've been to Sicily for 3 weeks almost and it was great. Lots of things seen, lots of photos, lots of great fish and nice dishes (FOOD). and lots of memories. more updates on the wireless bit: most parts are done,

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C optimisation

I was trying to optimize a bit of code and found out that 2 if() statements are quicker than a case with true/false. and an if/else case is WAY quicker!!! All with various optimisation levels (from nothing to O3 to O3 + architecture optimisations). Odd. one might believe that

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On wireless and other things

Well, my automatic wireless thing is progressing nicely. Now I've got the Qt4 event loop and threads in place and it does the polling (and returns values alright). All I have to do now is process them. And that's cool. I've already got the

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On world, wireless and other things

It's been a while... I'm watching in the last couple of days stuff about the Pope (Janus Paulus II) and it's impossible not to shed a tear when seeing what this man has achieved and done... Impressive. If only the other leaders could learn

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Wireless news

The daemon will be Qt 4. That's because Qt4 offers a simple event loop pretty much the way glib does. This is great, because I can have all the Qt goodies (threads, mutex-es, signals) and D-BUS too. -- This is a really old post published originally on my

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Sick and back again

Well, I had tonsils with white spots on them. Actually, they were covered in white :(. It hurt like hell, so, in about 30 years, I went to the hospital for a few days (... I.V. stuff). Laura was great during this time and stayed with me all the time. Worked