Luci Sandor’s blog

In Eastern Europe, the end of WWII is celebrated in 9th of May. The date is different than in Western Europe, because Easterners have different reasons to celebrate. In fact, the recent protests from the Baltics officials tend to change the meaning of this day.

For the eastern Europe, the Yalta agreement established that half of the Europe will be witnessing another plague, spreading soon after the Nazi plague retreated. The Reality Communism has killed over 60 millions in the countries that USA and UK left to Stalin.

Poland moved to the West, Romania was reshaped, Yugoslavia remained a Frankesteinian creation. In Balkans, where countries are drawn an re-drawn after each empire retreats, a new empire added the social terror to the nations’ mayhem, each nation loosing its elite.

I should add that Romanians, Hungarians, the Croatian Ustasha, Finish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian didn’t fought their war and couldn’t won it, no matter on which side they would be at that time. For these people there will never be a right democratic winner and a wrong Nazi looser.

We, Easterners, had our first centuries cursed, under Ottoman Turks/ Holy Roman/ Russian rules. It’s perhaps the time to let the world know that the last 60 years were another curse under USSR/ USA/ UK rule.

His father was an illegal immigrant, coming from the despicable Romania, home of all so-called Posh kidnappers. Yet he strived for a limitation on legal immigrants, pretending that this would limit the overall numbers of those who admit to work in week-ends on a low wage. One of those perpetrators was his maid and he didn’t find any contradiction in exploiting the woman.

The Brits didn’t respect his stance.

Blair was almost disgraced. He lost 5 percent of the votes. But the votes did not made it to the Tories candidates. That makes Howard the wrong leader. Almost surely he will quit in the following days. Good bye for the weakest Tory!

This is also a vote for Europe. Blair pushes for the Euro, for the European Constitution and his re-election means more chances for a European British Kingdom.

The vote means also that Brits don’t miss Saddam Hussein and that the overall effect of the Iraq war is perceived as a positive one.

Blair is also the most friendly British leader for which Romanian could hope. We are waiting for a permanent lift of travel visas and a better support for Romania’s integration in the European Union.

I was very glad to see Abramovich and his dog, Murinho, tasting the dust from the boots of the mighty Liverpoolians. It was of course the day when I saw the funniest corner kick (short kick, the ball hits a mate one meter away and leaves the field) and the day when the entire world learned: it is not enough to waste one and a half million Euros daily, in soccer you need love and passion. And the tens of thousands of supporters pushed Gudjohnsen’s foot making the ball he kicked go parallel with the goal line.

I got a bit sad tonight when AC Milan scored in the 91st minute. I secretly hoped Berlusconi will get a similar lesson, although AC is a loved team and the Italian premier usually makes money investing in football.

Right now I am listening continuously to Despina Vandi’s latest single, Come along now (Windows Media link). I didn’t heard it during the 2004 Olympics when it supposedly was the Coke anthem. It does the beautiful job of not sounding Greek.

For those never heard of him, Voiculescu is a kind of Berlusconi of Romania, except that he is suspected that his money came from the operations of communist political police, his TV station has long way to go to the supremacy of the Berlusconi’s channels and, although member of the ruling coalition, his party was never voted by a significant group, because it is way below the threshold for entering the Parliament and it never participated in national elections without an alliance with the ruling ex-communists.

You may also know that the Romanian hostages are still in Iraq and that Friday the kidnappers have sent the demand that the Romanian troops leave Iraq until Tuesday.

Politicians are split, some say we should call our boys back, some that we shouldn’t.

Voiculescu made a weird statement. Maybe he was trying to avoid the real issue, but still, it proves an unbelievable stupidity. He said that he is ready to go to Iraq to take the place of the hostages, if the terrorists are kind enough to accept the swapping.

I fail to see why the terrorists will exchange 3 prisoners for one, even if he is a party leader. (And anyway, Voiculescu’s party does not really exist).

I fail to see how the swap will solve the problem. Let’s say the swap takes place Monday. Still the troops will have to retreat. Or, if the swap takes place on the next Friday, why would someone alive would be exchanged for three dead bodies?

I fail to see why he looks for an answer from president Basescu. His hatred for Voiculescu is well known and I don’t think the president will waste even 5 seconds for this jerk.

My wish is that Basescu will swap him with the three kidnapped journalists. Then, we keep our troops in Iraq as long as needed, hoping that the terrorists will have mercy on us and will kill the man of Securitate.

Voiculescu, if you google for yourself (I saw Mischie and Van Goethem doing that), learn that I fail to see how any Romanian will vote for such an crook, because he says things that should put him committed in a mental institution. Lately I failed to see any sign of your intelligence.

I tried to install Linux on my PC. Nothing unusual, the failure was to be expected.

I tried SuSE if that really matters. In fact I hoped it matters, given the money that were pumped into SuSE by IBM and Novell.

Before anything I tried to run Skype. There were a lot of things to be fixed, the most awkward being the fact that the mic was defaulted to mute. Other fixes included: adding the user to the "audio" group, giving full writing right to the audio device to the user (chmod-ing it) etc.

Then the printer issue came to be fixed. Almost everything ran smooth with the open-source driver "hp-oj", except the fact that CUPS server started before the initialization of the device (a script called "ptal-init"). After a reboot, CUPS needed to be restarted in order to see the printer. A definitive fix was possible, but I decided I’ll do it later.

The TV tuner, AverMedia’s AverTV GO 007 Plus, was not running. I googled for solutions and I learned that the Taiwanese jerks don’t reply to inquiries regarding their hardware in conjunction with Linux, even when driver developers write them. There was a patch to apply to the source code. A recompilation of the kernel was scheduled, so I postponed it too. (later edit: here’s a hint)

I’ve noticed that the video card was not correctly identified. Even when I manually set its model, the SuSE driver denied that it has dual head capabilities. I downloaded the ATi driver which was a pain in the posterior. Right after installing it, I couldn’t log on as root with KDE’s logon manager, because KDE crashed and I was returned to the logon window. Now, avoiding logging on a root is a good security practice, but I don’t need a video card driver to enforce that policy. After googling, I’ve learned that NVidia is even better at drivers and software on Linux than ATi. OMG, if you want Linux, you should really buy a NVidia-based video card! The situation run for years by now and the ATi hasn’t fixed it. Probably they will never fix it and I should change the video card before running Linux.

It was just a small step before removing Linux for now. I inserted a file DVD written with Nero, with ISO9660 and Joliet. It just crashes, worse than a Windows 98, but without an obvious BSOD. An orthodoxy bug probably prevented it from reading my DVD, because probably the DVD fault, because it should adapt to the software and the standards . In no way should the software adapt to the situation on the field. I pushed the reset button and I watched it constantly crashing after login. It just hated my DVD.

Hey, the DVD is my friend, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy. FDISK.

I love to see how peace is spreading through the world. It is called consolidation and it sometimes comes after wars, lawsuits and almost-swearing-the-other-CEO.

After suing them over the dockable menus and hurting them big time (Macromedia had reissued Studio MX series due to that patent infringement), Adobe seems to find a better attitude. After quasi-monopoly position over Portable Document File format, Adobe will get the total monopoly over one more used format, SWF Flash. Both giants are lazy when talking abut their Linux software, Both provide editors for Mac and Windows and only a player for Linux.

It is a sad peace because Macromedia was one of the Microsoft slaves (and Microsoft ditributed their software in a way no one else got) and because Macromedia used real Programmers. With each version, their software was faster, occupied less hard drive space and was really including new features, while Adobe, au contraire,…

On his blog you can find a download link for the latest gadget in making the web a free place. This Firefox extension adds to the capability of JavaScript popup block. Now the popups from plugins such as Java or Flash are blockable too.

It happens again. Mozilla Foundation still can’t pack that megabyte of new files into an intelligent patch. If, by mistake, Joe The Average User hit the update button in Mozilla 1.0 (and that’s very unlikely to happen), he will be directed to a full installer of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1.

Worse thing, a flaw in the Java plugin remains unpatched and Mozilla Foundation walks the path that Microsoft already rammed. There should be no secure browser!

I heard Microsoft is hiring Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes. I was too young at that time and for me Lotus Notes sounds like an alternative to Thunderbird, Outlook and Evolution. Well, a bad alternative since no one I know uses it.

But Ray O. also sold his business, Groove Virtual Office, to Microsoft. I watched for a while the funny Flash video and I didn’t understood where does it fit compared to Microsoft’s Project.

I had participated in lots of collaborative media, such as Wikipedia, Slashdot, Rent-a-Coder, Mozilla’s Bugzilla, Sourceforge’s CVS and ASF SVN repositories, but when I see these kind of labels, such as colaborator, slave, commander-in-chief, as in Groove or Microsoft software, I get a bit nervous. It is my opinion that a organization is more efficient when there are a small number of layers of authority.

…And when I large corp (say, GM) decides it needs more levels, it will never use such software.

I have another supposition about what lured Microsoft into this deal. There is this fancy button in Windows Explorer provided by Groove. You click on it and it synchronizes with other people’s copies of the folder. As far as I could see there was no versioning, but, my God, that was hard to implement and Microsoft needed to buy this company because they didn’t have the know-how required. And I see from their presentation that "PC or Web-based file sharing" is "charging you by the month or by the megabyte". Maybe Groove found the secret recipe to an internet connection without monthly fee, or maybe they are hiding the fact that if you would only synch docs you won’t have such a big traffic and you might host a small web server with DAV.

The monthly fee won’t be going anywhere, but Ray O. will. He is going to Microsoft.

PS. I would like to add that the basic options are available in a Personal Edition without a fee, and that’s almost as good as you can get for free from LogMeIn.com. Give it a try until Microsoft changes the application server from ColdFusion to ASP and from free version to "checking your Windows XP license, please wait forever".

How was that called? Plug and Pray?