R.I.P. Zorane

Zoran Radevic, my dear beloved father, has passed away at a middle age on the 6th of December, one day after my nameday (St. Savvas, Greek Christian Orthodox). As a medical doctor, specialised in Internal Medicine and Cardiology, he was great at his work, his patients can all confirm that. One of the main reasons he couldn't stay in life longer was because of his condition, Wilson's disease. He was diagnosed at an early age, about 9 years old, but the problems had already began to gather up due to the already piled Cuprum (copper). The problems became vivid day by day, until he decided to take his chances and do the inevitable transplantation about 2 years ago. After a whole of 3-4 months of waiting, a donor was found to be compatible with my father's body tissues and size (among other things). With a 60-70% of chance to survive, enormous inner strength and pride have made him a fighter, a fighter that wants to survive the worst moments in his life and yes, he did pull it through, the surgery was successful.
But compatibility problems have appeared 6 months after the surgery. The immunosuppressive drugs weren't doing their job anymore, so my parents decided to do a retransplantation to try once more, maybe he was lucky enough to find a donor in time. But, as all patients of immunosuppressive therapy, he faced the big problem: bacteria. A type of Klebsiella species has invaded his body and it made sure he couldn't do the tranplantation in time. Klebsiella spp. usually comes from the hospital staff, and it's probably the reason why my father had to confront with this nosocomial infection. 4 months have passed since that event, and the microbiological tests were still positive for bacteria. As long as those tests were positive, he couldn't do anything that involved surgery, since that would be characterized as a high-risk action and of course no one would do anything but to try and clear out the infection.
My dad was one of the main reasons I'm studying medicine, and again the reason why I've chosen to study at the Medical school of Belgrade university, since that's the place where my parents met during studies.
What surprised me the most was that at the day of his funeral and the first Sunday afterwards (Greek Cypriots call it μνημόσυνο, in memoriam of the deceased) it rained in Cyprus, 3 or 4 times - and Cyprus is an island known for its long drought seasons. It kind of makes you think about possibilities and coincidences as well as afterlife.
After his death and his funeral, I am proud to be his son, I cannot thank him enough for being there when he was needed the most, for trying so hard to raise his two children and give them a bright future and a good life. I love you dad, I'll always love you and I know that you will always be with me, every step of the way, to guide me through all my difficult moments.

Rest in peace and may the ground holding your body be blessed with the thousands of thankful souls you have saved.

Xubuntu peerwatch or university rootkit?

After I've read Ubuntu's weekly newsletter and the blog post from washingtonpost, your not-so-friendly neighbour, a notorious group of people who are deluged in money, the same group who have successfully tried to ashame themselves in the past, have done it again, by infridging the GPL license!
They kept Xubuntu trademarks and artwork and made / published their own tools that break privacy policies of almost every university.

I'll keep this post short: Democracy or hypocracy? Hypocrites or advanced rootkit bullies? The legend stays to be told...
The so-called Xubuntu "derivative" website can be found here: http://www.universitytoolkit.com/

As a footnote, if you agree to their *ahem* novel of terms and conditions about how it can break your computer, you can check out their work (or temper with their bandwidth) by downloading the newest iso here:
http://universitytoolkit.com/peerwatch-0.9.2.1.iso
(0.9.2a is not available or someone is hiding the good stuff!)

P.S. Unfortunately, the picture is not associated with the text, but it pretty much explains my thoughts :-)

Update: 19:50 CET - the 0.9.2.1.iso is down

Ubuntu Hug Day: 5th December 2007

Give a solution to a bug, you get a hug! At first, when it was announced I thought "hug" was a typo for bug, but I was wrong. It could be a typo that was interpreted to an idea, since the keys "B" and "H" are next to each other.
The rules are:
- There are no rules!
- Anyone can join!

Who can join the Hug Day? Everyone. You don't need to be a developer. You don't need to know how to code. Everyone is welcome. If you don't know how to help, then just stop on by and we'll explain everything to you.

- Anyone can list the bugs they want to be fixed.

Join #ubuntu-bugs at Freenode IRC Network for a great hugging experience: irc://irc.ubuntu.com/#ubuntu-bugs
More at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay