Inception real life

Some time ago saw a real inception concept in technology. This had to do with activation process of pre-paid cards for a distributor of such cards within cards provider. Whenever a distributor needed to activate a batch of pre-paid cards (prior for those cards to be sold out), he needed to perform the following steps:

  1. Open a web page and login to distributors area on the site
  2. Click a button to launch a java applet which would open an RDP client and connect to a window server
  3. In the given RDP session click on shortcut, which would open IE with a web page of some intranet, accessible only from that RDP session
  4. In the given intranet, enter a part of LIKE SQL statement with parts of the serial number of cards to be activated and click the query button
  5. Select all/some checkboxes next to result rows of a query and press activation button

That looks pretty much like a scenario of a recent movie :)

I won’t give out any names of companies or whatsoever, just wanted to show how a simple task can be over-complicated…

Gnome3 Fallback Mode

After working for a while on Xfce, I found out about Gnome 3 fallback mode. That is almost exactly what I needed – old style Gnome. Obviously not completely like Gnome 2.x, but very very close to it.

Will work in Gnome 3 under this mode for a while to see. At least I have all my menus, applets, proper system tray and whatever else I am so used to in their correct places :)

Saturday

Just a short post on a nice Saturday. Started by going to BBQ for birthday party of my friends mother. Meat, beers, guitar, nice people, like always, pics here. After BBQ went went to Agios Georgios where some unknown event was to take place. We didn’t know much about what’s going on there, just decided to check and found out that there should be some DJ concert with tons of people and 20 euro entrance fee, so we skipped it and went to take few photos on a nearby beach. Managed to take few nice pics as well (somehow sea is always nice on photos).

As per now, it is Sunday morning, coffee and few nice plans for a day… Good thing is that tomorrow is a holiday, so this weekend is pretty long!

Latchi

Since parents of my classmate from hometown came for vacations in Cyprus, I decided to visit them in Latchi (close to Paphos) last afternoon. Had some nice time in a taverna by the marine, lots of talking and memories (haven’t seen them for 10 years or so), as well as few pics. On a way back, while I was driving, Yana was playing with camera and night lights, the experimental art photos here.

 

Few nice things about Latchi that I noticed yesterday: the Sunset is just amazing there and it is very very quiet. Even the music in the restaurants is not playing and due to the small size of a town/village and not that many people around – it is very relaxing, compared to Limassol, Paphos or any other town on the island. I am thinking on visiting that place from time to time during evenings for relaxed atmosphere.

PySol

Though many people claim Linux is not for games or whatever, I really love the huge collection of those small games one can spend days on like logic, puzzle, simple strategies and others.

Recently I came across PySol FC Edition – a collection of more than 1000 solitaire card games. Short description from their website states:

There are games that use the 52 card International Pattern deck, games for the 78 card Tarock deck, eight and ten suit Ganjifa games, Hanafuda games, Matrix games, Mahjongg games, and games for an original hexadecimal-based deck.

Has everything from simple and known card games like FreeCell, Spider and Klondike to all kinds of weird things that take some time figure out on how to play them. For the ones who like Klondike, for instance – try Varaha game from the collection. It is more complex and more fun.

Warning you before you downloaded and launched it – may take a lot of your time away from you and you won’t even notice that!