The blog is back. Hail science! My dear old server box has finally died. I’m not sure what exactly is wrong with it - I had no time to play with it, so I just replaced it with another box. Which is good, since the new box is quite a bit more powerful.
In other news, there is no other news, since I’m too lazy to blog. But I do twit for quite some time now :).
Yesterday I’ve recompiled wine one last time. Well I may have to do it once more, but that’s not really the point :). The Point is, that I’ve finally gotten C&C 3: Tiberium Wars to work. The game is quite enjoyable and I fear it will have an impact on my sleep. So far it deprived me of two hours of sleep.
And yet I wonder… Are games really as bad as some people would have you think? Sure, you sleep less and if you’re not accustomed to recreating you’ll gain weight. But on the other hand, what would you be doing instead of playing? Go out and grab a beer? Six beers?! As a matter of health hazard that’s just as bad, if not worse and socialization is overrated anyway :p.
Back to the point. While it wasn’t exactly straight-forward, because at first the cursor was invisible and at times there is no audio (and I have to restart the game). Also annoying is the keyboard failure (some 30 minutes or so into the game). To get it working I had to downgrade wine, imagine that. But I’ll sleep better, knowing I don’t have those rotten windows anywhere arround 
Today, totally unexpected, me and Anja had a totally unordinary day. Before we even fully woke up, the phone rang and Andrej told us to pack up our shit and meet him downstairs. We were going paragliding. After dringing a nice cup of coffee at the bottom cable car station and the discussion how people puke during these flights, we headed to the top. Ah, the modern day hiking. A cable car takes you 700m higher in 4 minutes, then a ski lisft continues, where the cable car left you. No sweat, 10 minutes later we were at the take off site. Another five minutes and we’re off.
What a day it was. No clouds, perfect weather, perfect wind and magnificent site. Amazingly the sea can be seen from 500m above Vogel (2000m above the sea level).
Both our pilots were young and crazy. Which was good, made a little more adrenaline pump throu our veins :). And I soon found out what 5g in a spin do to you. Not hard to imagine how people puke, but fortunatley that didn’t happen to me :).
The week is almost over and a successful week it was indeed :). Although I forced myself to take an exam on Monday I knew I would fail - and I did, we held the Firefox 3 Release Event which was in my opinion very successful.
It truly was a hot day and that was of no help to us at all. We went to grab a dinner Monday evening and I came home at 2 am. Not the brightest idea, since I had to be in Kiberpipa the next morning as soon as possible. I’ve made it there at 9:30 and was immediately made happy when I saw K4 technicians (and some of our crew) were working hard during the night. The stage was set up and there was a bunch of high tech sci-fi audio equipment ready to go :). Metropol was also ready for the party.
We’ve started the press conference on schedule and it all went smoothly. The press seemed happy, and were given enough time for individual interviews. The only problem was, we had no shirts yet to give to them. We promise to make up for that :).
After the press conference our guests with some of our own crew went on dinner to Figovec, while the others made everything ready for the talks and ate pizza \o/. You should have seen our goodie bag production line. It was really something of a group effort :). I’m very proud of our team! And the biggest surprise to our guests that day was that we’ve packed all goodie bags with wine :).
Te talks started with 15 minutes delay, but that’s why we’ve left plenty of time between each talk to compensate… There were no major technical errors during the talks, except when Zbigniew was on - he needed to play some sound on his computer, which was wired to a different power supply that as a side effect caused some brum in the speakers - but it wasn’t extremely annoying :). One thing we should learn from this is that perhaps we’ve started too early. At 15.00 people still tend to be at work.
Short after the talks started, the t-shirts arrived and we’ve started a somewhat chaotic distribution.
After the talks fry, who held the last talk started an improvised open stage - something we’ve wanted to plan anyways, but we’re totally too late to do it properly :(. He, with the help of Andraž Tori “forced” me to speak on behalf of Kiberpipa. Basically I had to tell everybody what Kiberpipa is and why they should come back next season. Primož told everybody what slo-tech and nest is and Polž had a funny speech about how computing has changed (he is also in the impro league).
With that over it was time for the party. We’ve granted ourselves one hour preparation time and we made room for the food and such. We’ve also prepared free Firefox cocktails and free wine. All in all I think the party was very successful, everybody seemed happy despite it was extremely hot. We’ve also recieved some positive feedback so far. Tristan loved it and so did she (Sorry, but you should really write your name somwhere on the page ;). Jure also posted on the fly notes from some of the talks - that will feed your appetite while you wait for the videos : Zbigniew, Gorazd, Markos.
We’ve had a couple of lovely ladies at the door to convince people they have to sign in and receive their goodie bags and t-shirts :).
It took a lot of energy and sweat to pull through the day, but we did it. And it was totally worth it! :).
It’s a good thing Astrodisco was in K4 so we had a great afterparty aswell :).
All that is left now is to publish the videos of the lectures in time. We’ll certanly try to do it next week :).
at Kiberpipa on June 24th, 2008. There’s gonna be a DJ, snacks and drinks, …
Stay tuned for more :).
In case you haven’t heard yet, it’s a new CC animated short movie, sponsored by the Blender foundation.
Download it, enjoy it, buy the DVD to support Blender!
The movie is funny and the coolest character is certainly the bird. It’s like Zoidberg in Futurama if you ask me. A side role that does by far the funniest things.
This movie shows how powerful Blender has become. I like the quality, the fur is great, except the grass is a bit 1999 :). I am no 3d expert, but I’d say progress is remarkable… If only most people would see the value in such project instead of stealing Cinema and other commercial programs (and by people here I mean art schools, academies and their students). Imagine what an art school and a computer science faculty could do for the project. We’re talking about diploma thesis that benefit the world here :).
It happened this Friday. There were some difficulties to overcome at first, but me and Blaž successfully arrived to Izola, late but still on time. By the time we got there the boats were already leaving port, so we were kind of in a hurry…
Our team was: Uroš, Blaž, Nika, Jaka and I.
The weather was perfect. Sunny at the beginning with enough wind to carry us to victory. There were four runs altogether. The first, we started awful and came in sixth. Second ti
me round, we were second. Now that’s an improvement. The third run was also our best, as we came in first. In the las, fourth run we made some foolish mistakes that deprived us of eternal glory. We came in third.
Overall, that made us second. With KŠOP (Janez’s) team winning by one point. But, we’ve left all others far behind :).
I’ve stumbled upon this joke and I liked it :).
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the
ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”“You must be a programmer,” said the balloonist.
“I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”
“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”
The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”
It goes nice with this picture:
Dejan and I are both forward-looking people and so we didn’t settle on one of those old Windblows platforms. Instead we happily run Linux, but from time to time we need to try if things run on old platforms. For that reason we have a couple of virtual machines running Windblows and we kind of share them.
Funny enough, if I use one Windblows he cant and vice versa. As if that’s not enough, if I use them and he connects, I get kicked out. And vice versa. While it keeps you entertained for a minute or so, playing the dominance battle, it’s really useless. It made me realise just how obsolete windblows really are :).
I just came across this funky warning in Firefox 3.0 beta 5, while trying to access the "about:config"
