Single-Use Camera Reader for Windows - version 0.04 released

Here's th story. RitzCamera selld single use digital 1MP camera called "Dakota". I believe that this brand has an array of optical products, such as telescopes and binocular.

This camera costs 11$. You should return it to RitzCamera when it's memory's full. You pay 10$ more and get your pictures printed. Bye-bye camera, of course.

Well, some smart people discovered how to download images from this camera into a computer. So, you get 1MP camera just for 11$. Good deal for an emergency camera in the car glove department or for kids.

PowerEdge 1600SC is NOISY!!!

I want to do something with noise level of my Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server. It's unbearable.

I'll try to identify what's the source of noise, then I'll see. I may try with decoupling fans from the case. Here are links to silent products:
AcoustiProducts
Quite PC products
Papst Fans

Real Dialogue: The Tech interviews Jack Valenti

I found a link to this piece at Slashdot. It's a beautiful interview with MPAA guy, Jack Valenti, taken by The Tech, MIT's newspaper.

It's about DMCA, DVD and Linux. It's illegal to watch DVDs on Linux, even if you boght them in the store. Taste the FREEDOM :)

Digital Moviemaking

Scott Billups wrote a book on Digital Moviemaking . I have this stupid Sony DV camcorder, which I'm trying to make produce me good vidoes. So far not much success :) It's Ok for home video, but not broadcats quality. Maybe I've to spend a little more time studying this field.

Buffalo Tech's LPV2-USB-TX1 Print Server

It seems that I'm becoming a loyal customer of Buffalo Technology, Inc.

I bought this nice little print server today after a few months of preparations. I always wanted to connect my old HP DeskJet 842c to a print server. It's very convenient to print from any computer in the network without having one computer always on. Finally, I found out that my old friends in Buffalo Tech started to sell their own print server. I couldn't find any independent reviews on the prodcut, but have seen a few complaints for other cheap print servers. Anyways, it's in my network now. Surprisingly, installation was a breeze.

I had a couple of days of trouble with their WBR-G54 router in last Fall. I bought two of them to make a bridge between to networks, and they refused to work. It was over a weekend, I couldn't get through their support line. I was very angry and ready to return a product, but on Monday I was able to speak with a support person. After brief conversations with their tech support personnel, everything went fine. I was very impressed with their engineers. Product documentation sucked, but support people (based in USA!) were extremely helpful. These routers are nice products, verry stable so far. They beat with features every other competing router, having things like WDS and bridge functions. Firmware is based on Linux and available for download from the web site.

This time, with a print server, I was able to install everything myself without a bump. Now it's connected to my Windows 2000 PCs and RedHat Linux server. For the latter, I used hpijs driver. It prints fine but seemingly slower than from Windows. This little device supports several protocols such as IPP, NetBEUI, AppleTalk etc. I think there's Linux inside.

Google's GMail is On!

Well, finally, much hyped Gmail is On. I've got an invitation as a Blogger :)

Linux, open source insurance firm announces offerings

OSRM announced their open-source development insurance offering. There was a lot of controversy about open-sourse and free software recently. It's mainly related to Linux OS and covered very well on Groklaw web site.

Groklaw is worth a dedicated article. It's a phenomenon on its own, but I've no time to write about it now.

If you live in USA, you get used to all sorts of insurances: home owner, car, health, long-term disability, life... but this one is special. Here's what I found on OSRM's web site:

"Linux Kernel Developers

Individual contributors to the Linux kernel gain access to the full resources of the Open Source Legal Defense Fund including guidance on how to best protect and defend their own intellectual property rights. They also receive $25,000 in legal protection from OSRM if they are named in future lawsuits involving their contributions to the Linux kernel. Membership for individuals is $250 annually."

I think it's a fee for a privelege to be The Linux Kernel Developer. Man, it's like buying a condo. You'll have to pay a fee. Actually, it's worse, even if you stop contributing, you have to keep paying :) Why? Because it doesn't mean that you won't get involved in future lawsuites. In USA if you get dreagged into litigations, you better hire a lawyer. I'm afraid that if this trend persists, all open-source developers will be obliged to pay the fee, not only Linux developers. It sucks.

Sunday Branch at Perry's with Joseph

Today our friend Joseph invited us to a Sunday branch at Perry's in Washington, DC. The restaurant is near by Adams Morgan area. It doesn't have large banners with its name, just "1811" and a small plate on the wall at the entrance. Joseph told us that it's a new trend not to put banners.

He told us that there will be drag queens, but we didn't think that there's gonna be a performance. We thought that it's a place where they hang out.

When we got in, it was very crowded and loud music was playing. We saw a woman (or a man?) dancing between tables. Apparently, they have drag queens' performances every Sunday. It was fun to watch :)

The food was good. We liked mushrooms and salads. Buffet bar had everything from desserts and salads to meat and sushimi. The people were of all ages. Waiters were young in 20x, I guess. Overall, it's a nice place. We paid 70$ for two including drinks and tips. It's not cheap. You can find a review here.

When we got out, I noticed an interesting building with round pointy-top towers. It has "Habana Village" banner. I've read about this place that it plays salsa. It's in my short list of "to be visited" in the DC metro area now.

Saturday Paintball

Yesterday we went to play paintball with our friend Alex and his buddies from ex-USSR. It's a place in Hogback Mountains near by Leesburg, VA. We paid 59$ per person per day for a group of 9. The price includes 500 paintballs with a rental semi-auto gun and a mask. We started at about 10am and finished after 2pm. Everyone was tired and hungry at the end.
We split into two teams of 4-5 people and played elimination mostly, which means that you have to eliminate all members of the opposing team in order to win. There's another type of a game when you fight for flags, but we didn't like it much. The game is supposed to last 10-15 minutes. We were finishing in 3-4 minutes.
It can be painful when a ball hits uncovered parts of a body or your head. Therefore my advice is to cover everything, at least wear a hat and long sleve shirts. It was very hot, and the game in open fields can be quite an excersize. I recommend to buy a couple of bottles of water, not soda. If you wear glasses, then you better bring your own mask, since the rental masks are inconvenient to put over spectales. Don't wear your designer clothes. The paint itself is not a problem, it washed away by detergent in my washing machine.
We had a lot of fun, and I'd like to play paintball from time to time.

Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich.

Today afternoon we've seen a demonstration in Washington, DC on Connecticut Ave. Approximately 100 people were going down the avenue towards the Mall. We probably saw this near by the intersection with H street, you can see the Riggs bank's branch. Actually, I'm not sure if it was still Connecticut or became 17th. They were all in black, carrying banners, and a black flag with Arabic letters.



I don't know what was the cause. It looked like they mourning someone. I guess that it's about a murder of Mr. Rantissi. Police blocked all right lanes, we took the left lanes and couldn't stop and ask what was going on.

I wouldn't write about this encounter, there are many demonstration in the capital city, but when i came home and looked at the pohotos, one banner caught my attention. It's the banner on the right side of the next picture, it says "Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich."



Update: I was told that this demonstration was about Imam Hussein, see here. I was right with my assesoment of its size.

External Applications & Java's Runtime.exec()

I have to read this blog entry later. It's about calling external programs with Runtime.exec(). I used it to integrate Lucene and Antiword. My problem was that sometimes Antiword hangs up. I needed a way to detect this situation and deal with it. It's a work to do for me.

JavaServer Faces notes from NEJUG meeting

It's from Aaron Johnson's blog. He mentions Websphere Boston User Group's next meeting on Apr 29, 2004. Maybe I could go there.

Also, I found out about The New England Java Users Group. It seems to be worth attending one of their meetings.

Kazakh Genealogy

Man, this is what I was looking for so long! :)

I've to spend some time and find my ancestors there. I see the grand-grand... parent, his name was (surprise!) Argyn :)

SEDA: An Architecture for Highly Concurrent Server Applications

It's an event-based design approach for server-side applications by Matt Welsh. It's based on his PhD. I wanted to use it in my projects, but never had a chance until very recently.

Another interesting project is Chord, "a scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications". It's about finding data in a distributed environment, distributed hashtable.

Welcome To SIPfoundry

I found out this project in eWeek article by Paula Musich on open-source project related to VOIP.

Some more reading on SIP, i.e. Service Initiation Protocol used in VoIP apps.

Apache Avalon Project

Avalon is a component framework. My first encounter with it happened in 2000, we used it in our own J2EE framework. Also, Cocoon Project uses it. There are powerfull concepts implemented in Avalon, such as SoC and IoC.

Recently, I got involved in a project, which is supposed to use Merlin container. The matter is that Avalon is a framework, and there are several implementations of it, such as Merlin and Fortress. So, I wanted to find out what's going with these containers. It seems that the state of Avalon is troubling according to Sylvain, and I share his worries. Several committers are not happy, and some of them left a project. It was decided to take Merlin as a single reference implementation, but I'm not sure that all deveopers will support it. The mailing-lists were hot, and concerns don't seem to be resolved. Honestly, I can't predict what's going to happen with Avalon now.

Sun-MS Settlement

There was a lot of buzz recently going on. People are discussing Sun-MS Settlement. Here, some links:
Sun and Microsoft Make Nice - Slashdot

Java Evangelist Leaves Sun After MS Settlement
Gosling defends Sun's new partnership with Microsoft
Where Is Java In This Settlement?
Free but shackled: The Java trap

Related story on Open-sourcing Java - McNealy Answers: No Open Source Java

1. I wasn't sure that it's a good idea to open-source Java before this settlement.
2. When Sun sued MS I understood their rationale.
3. I wasn't very happy that Sun spends too much efforts for this litigation.
4. Suddenly, after the settlement I'm left with a sour feeling. Something's wrong.
5. Yeah, it's good to spend time on development, not in courts, but... Now it doesn't feel like Java in trustworthy hands anymore.
6. Java should go free now. Maybe it was good to be proprietary for so long. Maybe. Not anymore, my friends.

- Whose chop is this?
- Zed's.
- Who's Zed?
-Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.
(c) Pulp Fiction

MuVo's 4GB MicroDrive

Ok, here's the deal. Go and buy Creative Nomad MuVo2 MP3 Player with 4GB memory, then take out 4GB microdrive and replace it with other cheap CompactFlash card. The trick is that this 4GB microdrive has CompactFlash interface and costs much more when sold separately.

Here's the original link and comments. I didn't try this myself, but soon hopefully will.

Lowtax.net - Offshore Tax, E-commerce and Information Resource

Lowtax.net - Offshore Tax, E-commerce and Information Resource - interesting source of info on offshore business. I haven't ever dealt with this before, there's much to learn.

Sun kills UltraSparc V, Gemini chips

The article in ZDNet says that "Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun has stopped work on the UltraSparc V, a server chip that was supposed to come out late next year, and Gemini, a dual-core chip for Web servers, a company spokeswoman confirmed."

I've read about UltraSparc V processor before. It seems to me that someone (IBM?) is going to buy Sun. They are in big trouble. Recent lay-offs don't brighten the picture.

CIT-2004: Computational and Informational Technologies for Research, Engineering and Education

"Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Scientific Research institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Engineering Academy of Science of Republic of Kazakhstan, Institute of Computational Technologies of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Technopark "Novosibirsk", Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk State Technical University will carry on an International Conference

"Computational and Informational Technologies for Research, Engineering and Education"

on October 6 - 10, 2004."

I'm thinking about a paper for this conference.

Arthur Murray Dance Studios

We are looking for a Salsa dance classes to take in April. A few days ago we got a mail ad from Arthur Murray Dance Studios. So, we visited them. It seems that they'd been around for a long time. They have the same curriculum across all their studios. They sell instruction in packages, like 6 private + 6 group + 6 practice sessions, and charge a decent amount of money. It's definitely more expensive than group classes elsewhere, but cheaper than private lessons. We liked instructors, they are all young and dance well. However, the setup wasn't very convinient on our complementary trial class: we were in the room with many people, and the music was anything but salsa :) It's hard to practice this dance if the beat is different. I was left with mixed feelings. Probably, we'll pass this for now.

Maxim restaurant in DC is closed?

I've heard a rumor that Maxim restaurant is closed or closing soon. It's a pity if true.

UPDATE: it's not a rumor anymore, Maxim's Web site announced that the restaurant is closed. I've hear that there was a problem with liqueur license, which sounds ridiculous to me.

Multi-booting Solaris and other operating systems by Mariusz Zynel

This is an excellent guide on multi-booting x86 computers. The title mentions Solaris, but I used it to configure my server with RedHat and Win2k.

Web radio

I'm looking at media streaming servers and surrounded technologies. The idea is to study feasibility of low cost Web broadcasting in Kazakh language for Kazakhs abroad.

Links to free software

• http://streamcast.sourceforge.net/


• http://stream-db.sourceforge.net/


• http://www.icecast.org/


• FFmpeg

La Tasca Restaurant

La Tasca
722 Seventh St. N.W.
Washington, DC 20001
202-347-9190

We found out about this place from the flyer stuck on our car window after we got out Clarnedon Grill in Arlington. The flyer said that there's Salsa dancing severy Saturday in the restaurant. I couldn't find much about the place in Internet, but we decided to try.

We went there past Saturday. We came at about 11pm, there wasn't a lot of people. It's a nice looking restaurant, interior is very neat. Bar's on the right side, cover charge was 10$. The dance floor is along the bar, not really wide. Dance music started at about 11:30pm. We figured that there were many folks attending the same dance classes. At about 12am they had a little show, mediocre quality Samba and Salsa by 4 girls. Overal, it was a good experience but we weren't in our best shape after whole day of painting walls in our house :)

We'll come back to try their Spanish food, it's not expensive. They serve Tapas and Paellas, I've no idea what is it.