Thursday, November 29, 2007

Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 plans

As of today (29th November 2007), Ubuntu's next big release, Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, which will be a Long Term Support release, just like Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I've noticed a milestone announcement about it. It contains 9 blueprints and about 32 targetted bugs for now.
Ubuntu developers have expressed their desire to focus more on fixing the bugs of the applications that are already contained in Ubuntu, rather than reviewing new applications and their updated versions - thumbs up for that decision!

The tracker search tool will be reviewed, OpenOffice.org suite will also get its bugs fixed by April 2008 (the expected month of release), same stands for several other important applications. Let's hope there will be more in that list :-)

torrentpowered.com is fake

Cant Play/View Movie Properly?
Try This: Rename the .avi extension to .rar, the movie file should be inside the .rar
We did this due to repeated Copyright Violation Allegations (copyright infractions) by Numerous Studios.
Step number 2:
Is The Movie (.avi file) Asking for a Password?
Please go to: www.torrentpowered.com/pass.htm for your pass it should only take a min. :)
www.torrentpowered.com/pass.htm
We apologize for the inconvenience, Thank You
If you downloaded a torrent, like this topic and came out to be something else way unexpected (with the file "How to Play The Movie Properly.txt"), well, welcome to the fake world! Yes, it is fake, and yes, I know it bites. Looks like some copyright trolls have got their tenticles around the bittorrent network, or it's just a "bright" young fellow that wants to get rich with pennies!

Either way, the password is (yes, big capital A, all the rest small letters): Alerts
...and as they say at that lame website "Enjoy your Movie =)", whatever you may have downloaded. I'll have to warn you though, it might be an adult movie, so do a preview first before you present it to your children.

Update: www.omegatorrents.com is the same website as torrentpowered.com, same pass.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Mozilla Firefox: 7-year-old bug fixed!


I just read a blog of a friend and thought to join about the "victorious" bugfix.
I adore my hotkeys / shortcut keys. I was tired of switching back and forth languages while writing. Due to this bug, which developers have ignored for the sake of the 2% of users (and partly because they didn't care). So, after a *lot* of comments (around 200) and expressed deep frustration, someone decided to patch it, and another one, aaand one more, until the patch finally got reviewed and added to the trunk!

Looks like GNU/Linux and GTK are alive after all :)

Monday, November 26, 2007

Re: Y!News

Always trying to stay informed, I just read at Yahoo! News that Kosovo's leaders are ready for opposition "in case -beep-". It seems as though more and more people are promoting the Albanian flag when arguing about Kosovo. Take a look at the pictures they took, talking about the people protesting for the independency of Kosmet (Kosovo and Metohija) - all showing up the Albanian flag and calling them "people" as if all of the residents of Kosovo want the independence. I have nothing against Albania or its residents, but do you think it's wise to pour oil over fire?

If you're looking for the real reasons of how all this mess started, you've come to the wrong blog - I'm stating my thoughts here. The reason I'm ranting about the whole thing is because they're passively promoting their side of the story, and the reporters aren't much of a help here. Where are the photographs of the protests we're making? Sure, they're covering a fact in Austria, but what happened to the "both sides of the story" part?
The United States [...] that the Ahtisaari plan was the best option if the two sides could not reach agreement.
Remarkable, as was the Annan plan for Cyprus back in 2002; No wonder Cyprus is still opposed to EU-supervised independence of Kosovo!

You could say I'm promoting ethnicism, in fact, you could say pretty much whatever you like. Would India let go of Taj Mahal? Would Muslims ever give up on Mecca or Medina? You know the answer to those questions, hence in turn, would Serbia just dismiss its Christian Orthodox heart at Kosovo?
It's true that the people in Serbia are alarmed of the utterly heated up situation. I'm not Nostradamus, but I can foretell that everything points out to the inevitable... we just have to wait and see. My personal opinion is that we don't need any more countries in the Eastern Europe and a note to America would be: How about stop picking someone else's nose and face your own internal problems?

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Medicine: The power of memories

Yesterday I tried to make a tuna fish salad again, but with minimal ingredients this time; I didn't have cucumbers nor peppers! Anyway, one of the most amazing things just happened while I was squeezing a lemon over the freshly cut onion - my nose caught the scent which reminded me of souvlakia-sheftalia (σουβλάκια-σιεφταλιά, ражњићи), which I haven't tasted for almost two years!
Souvlakia-sheftalia is a Greek/Cypriot traditional specialty usually served with salad or half an onion and half a lemon, all packed in a nice pocket-shaped bread (pitta - yes double 't'). Memories can be quite amazing sometimes.

Now on to the real part: Memories! Your memories aren't but chemicals, nicely organised in neuron, waiting to be released. When the human nose catches a familiar smell within a respected range, the smell could be connected to some old memories, in my case, FOOD! I believe the term for this occasion is "Olfaction memory". But how is this connected?

I won't go into many details, but here's a brief road-map: The human nervous system has been divided into two big parts, the central (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (here is a short summary of the NS stucture I made). CNS consists of the brain and the spinal cord.
Somewhere in your brain, there's a Hippocampus is one of the main parts of the Limbic System, controlling emotion expression and memory. The amygdala play a big role for the expression of emotions such as sadness, need to reward/congratulate or fear, anger, etc. Don't forget that emotions can often be triggered by a smell - like the sweet, sweet smell of souvlakia! Argh, now I'm hungry again.

Anyway, the memory part is controlled mainly by hippocampus (thank God there's Wikipedia to show where it is, so I'll be able to keep this short). Its name is given from its shape - in greek (or latin for that matter), ιππόκαμπος means sea-horse. If you damage this baby you'll end up either losing your ability to memorise new things (anterograde amnesia) and probably access to memory before the damage (retrograde amnesia). At patients that suffer from Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus is probably one of the primary parts of the brain that is damaged.
Before you start nagging that this is a huge and boring post, there is one more thing I'd like you to see, the rhinencephalon and the olfactory tract. Some thousands (correct me if I'm wrong) of olfactory neurons, that hang on the top border of your nose (ethmoid bone), send signals through the olfactory tract all the way to the olfactory or piriform cortex. As you can see, it is tightly connected to the Limbic system, hence the connection between the senses and emotion expression or memory recall. Each sniff you take is "encoded" to several bits of local depolarisations, if they're enough they're added up and create an action potential and finally sent towards your brain, an impulse to the limbic system in our case. Although the neurons between the limbic system parts go into an loop, the system has several cut-points, points where the axons are connected with other neurons, therefore points where new signals take place in the loop. From there, the amygdala send direct orders to the brain to bring me a sense of euphoria or satisfaction and the hippocampus retrieves the information from the long-term memory "database" about the specific smell.

Imagine this post as a backstage pass; not to a Madonna concert, but to one of your many body functions :-)
You disagree on anything of the above? State your opinion by writing a comment.

Friday, November 16, 2007

New Ubuntu flavour on the horizon



I've seen the announcements about Ubuntu going mobile, the Ubuntu security testing platform (nUbuntu), the Ubuntu that consists of free software (Gobuntu), the Ubuntu with enlightenment (Elbuntu), but we haven't seen any virtualisation plans - until now that is.

Ubuntu has announced a new derivative of Ubuntu, Ubuntu JeOS 7.10. It is pronounced "juice" for a reason that I do not know, probably for readability and direct connection to the "core" idea: all the ubuntu juice for virtual appliances!

I'm detecting a cooperation with VMware somewhere here, I run a google search about JeOS and got a very nice review of the new operating system... in JUNE! The new OS (I'm talking about the 7.10 version) was announced just yesterday. As they say at the console blog, JeOS is a thinner version of an operating system that matches exactly the needs of the virtualisation applications and its hardware. Smaller, more secure, easier to manage. I think these reasons are enough and that my cooperation theory might stand on reality.

Get juiced! Why? Srinivas Krishnamurti explains:
An OS finely tuned to the application it supports is smaller, more secure, easier to manage, and higher performing than a general purpose OS. A smaller footprint means IT organizations can run more instances per server. Tailoring the OS specifically to the app enables the removal of vulnerable components such as the browser from Windows and therefore significantly reduces the number of vulnerabilities and patches required to address those vulnerabilities.
The 7.10 version is ready for download, click here. You might find a screenshot tutorial about it at ςςς.ελληνικούρες.ψομ.

Meanwhile, a couple of my friends and I have established the Cyprus Ubuntui LoCo team, you can visit the wiki page by clicking here. The page is still under construction and we haven't managed to get the ubuntu-cy.org domain yet, but it is just a matter of time. The logo on the right was my initial recommendation, but it seems that the founder prefers the logo you see at the wiki page (I've colourised both logos, you can view the "series" here).

Sunday, November 11, 2007

News: Google sued over patent infridgement

Credit should be given where it is due... maybe Google forgot that or maybe they did come up with the lovely idea of indexing websites and presenting results through a single website, but it looks like someone other than Lawrence Page patented a similar invention some 3 years before the Google creators filed their own patent. This was released in Boston Globe, Computerworld, and probably some thousand blogs by now
You can view the patent by Kenneth P. Baclawski here
I'm not 100% sure if this the corresponding Google patent, but try here or here.

Patents are actually a way of telling someone "You can't step on my grass without paying!", if you browse through at Google Patents search, you'll find out quite a load of inventions brought down and described on paper, i.e. "patented". I bet it's impossible to patent a new invention nowadays and not to cite older ones. Either way, I believe patents are evil - They actually restrict you because someone else had a bright moment and was quick enough to write it down on a piece of paper, and that someone now requests to receive from Google a "noble" (try "adequately enormous") royalty.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Homo bardus

bardus = stupid, slow, dull.

After the following videos, which probably represent the level of stupidity of the human race at its greatest peak in the 21st century, I believe you'll think twice before a McDonald's chow-down and just where you will take your child.





P.S. New blog design, new approach in life ;)