Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Downtime. I hope no more!

There was a long long long downtime because of the problems with ISP. I\’ve been fighting with them a lot and finally I have switched to other one. Now I have a new line (of business lite kind) with a bunch of public IPs. This time I went with LogosNet who are although smaller, provide me with more quality service. From the past experience (I have some lines from LogosNet at other places) there were only 2 failures (for less than 10 min) during the whole year while I have a whole bunch of long failures with CytaNet (the provider I switched from now).

I hope that from now on everything will be just fine.

Got cold

I was suffering from a strange version of cold for 4 days. The strange thing was that this cold causes some physical side effects like pain in the body as well as a tooth pain. I had a huge problem with one tooth (I even went to the dentist and was in the mood of removing the tooth) but then I realized the problem was in cold.

I took some medicines and did a couple of procedures through the 4 days. I also took some rest at home and today I feel much better. My face start to look similar to face, but before today I had half face like a pumpkin.

Anyway, everything seems to go the right way now :)

Happy Birthday to myself

Today I got one number binded to me increased by 1 – this is my age. I am not a person who pays a lot of attention to age since I believe that age does not mean a lot. I\’ve seen much smarted people who are younger than me and completely unsmart people who are much older me. I think that age can show the potential time that one could have spent to gaining something while it is not showing that someone has really got something :)

Anyway, I have a nice mood today. I have already received a number of calls (and writings) with congratulations and wishes and I really like all of them. Thank you all.

Wiki Expirience

I\’ve never used wikis before a lot. I actually didn\’t like them due to the reason of poor navigation (as I thought it was), but few days ago I faces the situation where only wiki could help me in a way and (thanks to my bother) I set up DokuWiki.

After a couple of hours around I realized that it was not Wiki navigation that I didn\’t like, but instead it was the way the authors of the pages that I\’ve seen were doing it.

Anyway – it seems that I felt in love with Wikis now :)

Gnome Desktop

Some of you might already noticed that I am writing a lot about KDE and related software. This is mostly because I like to use KDE over other desktops for its flexibility and usability (at least from my point of view to avoid any wars in here).

This time I decided to look into Gnome. The reason for this was that I was trying to find some simple and nice desktop which would fit the basic needs in most of the offices. I have many friends who would like to try linux, but they want the desktop to be simple and ready to work out of the box.

I have installed the \”Personal Desktop\” package selection of Fedora Core 4 to see what it offers. Seems to be very good. Gnome is quite strait forward. It does not look so fancy and is not so flexible as KDE, but it is right what the most people who do the usual office job would like to see in front of them.
From the set application to check were Gaim and Evolution. Since I use OpenOffice.org for a long time already I didn\’t bother myself checking it, I just knew it is fine.

I remember that I had problems with Gaim and russian encoding while using ICQ – now it is gone. I noticed a field in the account setup wizard to specify custom encoding and after all it worked fine.

Evolution really impressed me a lot since its abilities to integrate with MS Exchange just amazing. Just specify the MS Server OWA URL and hostname of MS AD and it gives you almost everything you need including email, contacts (both Exchange personal, Exchange common and AD Global Address list), todos and whatever else.

The are only few problems which I found with Evolution:

1. The are no multiple identities as is. In order to have an option to have them, I need to create new account with \”None\” in type field. So basically instead of just plainly creating an identity I have to create an account.

2. Sub-folders of exchange public folders are not displayed – this really sucks. For instance if I have a trea of public folders (what is quite normal) than I will see only the root of the tree and all messages under it, but not the sub-folders (not their content).

3.Message threading by subject is not very intelligent since I have many mail with the same subject unthreaded. This irritates me a lot.

4. Almost no UI customization.

Anyway, overall I liked the expirience, although I still prefer KDE and its software, but for those who needs a simple business desktop – try Gnome, since I beleive KDE needs some tweaking inside of KControl until one can feel fully comfortable.