Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Moved to new apartments

I have finally moved to new apartments. The owner of the previous apartments I was living in did not extend the rental agreement (as I got him, he wanted to sell the apartments). Anyway, I was looking for some place to move and have found a very nice offer. A one bedroom apartments near the Four Seasons hotel. This flat is almost twice bigger than the old one and is almost twice cheaper. The approximate size of the flat is 35 square matters (including the huge balcony) and it costs CYP 150 which is almost unreal price (the previous flat was CYP 250).

All weekends I was moving the stuff from one place to another (thanks Chris and his Father-in-Law) who have helped me a lot by providing their cars and helping to carry the stuff around.

Now I will be unpacking, organizing the stuff as well as cleaning the apartments and doing some minor house work since the building is a bit old (built in 1981).

Motorbike service

I was planning to do the service for my motorbike for at least half a year already and didn\’t have chance to do it due to many reasons. Finally, I was forced to do so because my bike just stopped. Anyhow, with some money spend I replaced all old parts and now my bike is good for another long period.

Web development with Catalyst

I have some web development to do for the past month and I came across Catalyst framework for perl which simplifies the job a lot. It is an MVC framework which does all the routing one need, plus it has support for such good modules like Template Toolkit, Class::DBI and others. Another big advantage is that it has a small web developers web server which helps to troubleshoot many aspects during the development process and then the whole thing can be migrated to apache with a couple of moves only.

Brainbench certificates

I was planning to take a couple of tests and pass certifications from Brainbench for a while already but I never came back to actually do it. This Friday I occasionally got near by the Brainbench site and finally went to the test section. I found all the free/sponsored tests and I took almost all of the ones I thought I had some knowledge in. I ended up with 9 certificates:

  1. Linux Administration (General)
  2. MS Office 2003 Fundamentals
  3. Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98)
  4. HTML 3.2
  5. Computer Fundamentals (Win XP)
  6. PHP 5
  7. Cisco Routers Fundamentals
  8. Network Security
  9. MS Windows Server 2003 Administration

Only two of the above (no 7 and no 9) are not very well, but still ok due to the reason that I am not too much into Cisco (consider myself a beginner) and I am more a Linux administrator, so I do not spend much time on Windows Servers and that is why my Windows Servers test was not as good.

Anyhow, I think that it is quite good for the time being. I hope that I will get better results on the two not-so-good tests and that I will take more tests later on (especially if they will be free/sponsored).

My transcript number is 6210735 and my results (and other stuff related to Brainbench) can be seen here

Missed Slashdot new design while using RSS

I am so used to RSS that I have missed a new (or maybe it is not already new???) design of Slashdot. I don\’t remember when I was visiting the sites for news directly and thus I do not see the changes there. It is just today that I was seating not on my machine and didn\’t have access to my RSS reader (nor I wanted to go to bloglines) I decided to visit Slashdot and I was very impressed. I really liked their new design – cool :)

Now I feel a bit pity about this. Just imagine, web-designer do a lot of their job to make cool look & feel and people (although not all of them) do not visit the site directly more than once :(