odd_parity

HEP ima krasnu opciju - omogućuje korisnicima komunikaciju e-mailom. Koristio sam ju u par navrata i zadovoljan sam uslugom. Nije najsavršenija, ali je sasvim Ok, brza, efikasna, uljudna.

I, tako sam ja prije par dana poslao e-mail sa očitanjem brojila. Pritom sam, kako sam kasnije shvatio (kad je već bilo kasno), pogreškom unio dvije šestice umjesto jedne. Mea culpa. No, jučer ujutro, mojoj sestrični zvoni telefon...

sestrična: "Molim?"

glas: "Dobar dan, ovdje X.Y. iz HEP-a. Pa znate li vi koliko sam ja vremena potrošila da nađem vaš broj telefona? Vas je nemoguće naći, jedva sam uspjela u T-Comu dobiti ovaj vaš broj, pa kako vi to mislite komunicirati, bla bla bla..."

sestrična: "..."

glas: "... i ono što ste nam poslali nije dobar broj brojila, imate tu jednu brojku viška, a i ova očitovanja pa kako vi to pišete, što vam to znači..."

sestrična: "... ali..."

glas: "... vidite to trebate prijaviti točno onako kako piše, razumijete, ovako mi ne znamo što ste nam htjeli reći, mi ne možemo pogađati kakvo je stanje vašeg brojila..."

sestrična: " Kakvog brojila?"

glas: " ... Jeste li vi gospodin Dejanović?"

Inače, daje se na znanje: postoji web adresa na kojoj možete naći *formular* za upis očitanja brojila, nalazi se ovdje:

http://www.hep.hr/ods/kupci/dostavaOcitanja.aspx.

Problem je što je sakriven iza Flash animacije, pa ako koristite Flash blocker, nećete ga uočiti.

If you happen to have (and enjoy) a microscope that can view three-dimensional objects, you know how much fun it can be, and how different the world looks like when magnified some tens of times.

However, handling small 3D objects is not that easy, if you can't fix them. They slide, rotate and flee from the focus...

So, here's very easy and really cheap trick: let's make a slide that will fix your small objects in place, and won't obstruct your view.

Here's what you will need:

Microscope slide glass.

Sticky putty used to place posters on walls and make other mess.

You will want one square per one slide. If the object is much bigger than putty square or very long, you can add more putty; plan in advance, because adding another putty after the first one is done is not as easy and clean as if you start with more putty and prepare them sinchronously.Use a scalpel to carefully remove one square from the set. Manipulate meticulously, as you want it to keep flat square shape and white color. A brown ball looking like a chewing gum that has seen better days will not do the trick. Be careful with the knife.

Now, remove the transparent foil on the top of the square. Do it with a scalpel, avoid touching the putty.

Once this is done, take your microscope slide and push it on the square! You must do this on flat surface, and don't be shy applying pressure - the idea is to make it stick to the slide and not fall off as soon as you put something on it. Keep in mind that you need certain thickness of that putty, so don't push too hard.

Now, turn the slide and remove the opaque foil, while still avoiding touching the surface. Use scalpel and it will come off easily.

There we are, a slide with a white, flat, sticky surface that will provide both support and clear background for our object.

Using tweezers, put the object of your desire on the putty. Don't do this with your fingers, or you might ruin everything! The putty is quite sticky and will deform if you touch it. Push the object slightly into the putty, not too deep, but enough to ensure that it won't move if you don't want it to.

Done! Enjoy your fixed-position-miniature-magnified-thingie.

Due to the increasingly high volume of spam messages, I was faced with two choices:

1. disable anonymous comments (which I think is not good)

2. do some antispam protection

I've opted for second choice. So from now on, I have certain antispam solution installed (and it helped a lot to weed out 90% of spam messages), updated badwords list a little bit (still very permissive!), and turned MathGuard on.
That means, if you wish to leave a comment, you'll have to solve very simple mathematical equation. If you're puzzled with the random strings of letters and numbers, take a closer... um, farther look at it. It's kind of IQ test, and it took me some seconds to realize what is it all about.

(and, while you're at it - please do, leave some comments regarding this site)

Hrvatska verzija:

Obzirom da je site zbog posjećenosti počeo biti poprilično spamiran, suočen sa izborom da isključim anonimne poruke (što je loše) i aktiviram neku antispam zaštitu, odlučio sam se za ovo drugo; pa sad imam sustav koji blokira 90% spam poruka, neke "zle riječi" su proširene (ali ne bitno), a dodan je i MathGuard, sustav koji od vas traži rješavanje jednostavne matematičke operacije kako biste dokazali da ste živo biće, a ne spam-bot. Ako vam črčke od slova i brojeva izgledaju nejasno, odmaknite se malo od monitora i pogledajte ponovo. :)

(a dok gledate o čemu se radi, budite dobri pa ostavite svoj komentar na moj blog)

It seems that I have done quite a lot of Microsoft bashing these days, all in a favour of their great plan for force-feeding OOXML into everyone's throat.

Let's balance this a little. I have had two days of "great" experience with Novell SLED. Oh, it seems I didn't trot far away from Redmond...

Well, whatever. There's certain agency trying out Linux desktops. And they choose Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop.

It's got great name, you know.

I have had issues with Novell's way of doing business before, but I'm not going to talk about that now. The problem here was that the agency use USB based barcode reader, and from the myriad of barcode readers that work great with Linux, they happened to have particular one that, well, doesn't cooperate.

So we had to put virtual COM port driver on the machine. First I have tried it on Ubuntu, and it compiled without problem, giving life to barcode reader. That was quite easy.

Now, trying the same under SLED - did not compute. I had to work around compat_ioctl issue (btw, both are 32-bit machines), but eventually I've got it working. Playing with barcode reader was fun.

Ok, SLED is a little bit more "conservative" option than Ubuntu, which can live closer to the bleeding edge. However, I do feel little bit restrained when I'm using SLED or RHEL Workstation. I've got quite a number of issues to be resolved before one of my clients could run their (mostly 32-bit) software on 64-bit Linux workstations. Ubuntu seem to be easier to set-up. There's a lack of 32-bit libuuid.so on 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.10 (nobody thought that an 32-bit application would require 32-bit version of libuuid?) and libXm.so need some manual force, but once set up, it just seem to run applications better than RH (and my client's opinion is that the I/O is faster as well, as they are churning thousands of small to multi-giga files every day). It's cheaper (no license fees) and just as easy to maintain. But, where's big business, there has to be official Linux distribution.

I can't say that I'm impressed with Red Hat, but SLED just dissapoints me. Maybe this is the result of what Novell did to used-to-be-great SuSE distribution over time, and maybe I'm expecting too much. I feel SLED to be not so trivial for administration, mixing hand-made changes to config files and Yast changes doesn't end well, the default user interface I don't like.

Maybe I'm just too used to work with Linux distributions that are very open for anything you throw at them, so confining to a small subset of possibilities look bad. But it isn't - as long as you keep in mind that conservative Linux distribution offer less choice for you and the end-user. Sometimes, this is what you really want. (and even then, you could end up discussing the squareness of the font in menubar)

And, to conclude this semi-bitter article, I'll throw in for a good measure a joke that might isult some Christians. I am a Christian, and I believe it's Ok to pick on yourself, so here it is - a joke about Međugorje, a place in Bosnia and Herzegowina where there's really a lot of apparitions of Virgin Mary from 1981. 'till today. On a daily basis.

Some people are suspicious of great number of apparitions, some strongly and passionately belive in it. You should judge for yourself (see the Wikipedia article above), and here's the joke (I apologize to everyone who might feel insulted by it):

One (present) day, apostles decided to go on a weekend. But they couldn't decide what place to visit.

"Let's go to Vatican", said one apostle.

"Nah, we have been there thousands of times!", said another.

"How about Jerusalem?", asked another apostle.

"No, too dangerous.", said another.

"How about Međugorje?", asked one of them.

"That would be great", said Virgin Mary, "I've never been there before!"