Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov – Page 82

GSM and satellite for vessels

Doing a nice project for vessels communication. I was looking into different problems, solutions, equipment sets and so on and finally I have finished with one installation with Thrane & Thrane Fleet 33 for satellite and Ericsson GSM modem along side.

The idea is that the vessel spends most of the time near the shore in the coverage of GSM and from time to time crosses the Mediterranean see. So when vessel is nearby, it uses usual dialup (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.04) and when it is out, it is using Fleet (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.60).
Everyone seems to be happy now. I really enjoyed doing this project since I learned a lot of stuff about communication on vessels as well as about vessels as a whole.

College finished

Finally the college classes have finished and I have finished with all exams I had. Now waiting for the results (was promised to receive them Friday afternoon). I hope that I have passed all of them (or at least two major one that I need to pass).

Week holidays with friend from Russia

This week I had a friend of mine from Russia visiting me. We used to live next to each other when I was in Russia and since I have left it, I haven\’t seen him.

He was trying to come here for a long time and this time he managed to. We\’ve been to some nice places in Cyprus including Paphos Mosaic. We spend a lot of time here and we have did a lot of photos (he has a digital camera). Hopefully I will upload them to the web some day.

Anyhow, he has just left back to Russia. We had a very good time and now I feel very good and refreshed. Hopefully he will come to Cyprus again in some time.

Watching old movies

Somehow I decided to watch a couple of old movies these days. I have already watched The Blues Brothers, Stop! Or my mom will shoot and Hackers, now got Demolition Man and The Net.

I\’ve seen these movies many times and I really like them, that\’s why I thought it would be nice to see them again :)

LVM and rescue

I was avoiding using LVM for the past time without even understanding why. I was thinking that without LVM things are more simple, just plain partitions. Few days ago I understood why – systems which use LVM for the root partition are kinda harder to recover with different rescue cds. Instead of just plainly mounting the /dev/hd?? to somewhere on /mnt/??? one have to do lots of tricky operations.

I think I will continue sticking to non-LVM installations for the time being since now I even now at least one exact reason why – easier recovery if needed :)