Archive for June, 2006

I'm getting worried. What do you think it is?

No, this isn't a huge ice berg from the Antarctica mirrored vertically. I can help you a bit by showing you a farther shot.

Yeah, it's our fridge in the subtlet. I should seriously consider thawing this weird formation. The only problem is that there's too much food in the fridge and everyone of us would need to remove his food for a while, so I have to wait for this to happen. In the meantime it could be useful for reducing the global warming. At least I hope so.

Since I'm searching for a job, I've just updated my CV. You can fetch both the Hungarian and English versions. I think they became pretty good, regarding both presentation and content.

Update (2007-02-14): I've finally paid the price, because they threatened me with legal actions. I asked some advices from a lawyer regarding this situation, so I'll be more clever next time in such cases. As a side note, it's impossible to unsubscribe from their mailing list, so they can be also considered spammers.

Ultraweb.hu is the former hosting provider of monda.hu. I had problems with them so I moved to another hosting provider about three months ago, to mediacenter.hu which I'm very pleased with.

Some days ago, I got a two checks from Ultraweb. The first was about the hosting price of the last year, which seemed a bit higher that is mentioned on their home page. The second was about the hosting price of the next year which is quite ridiculous, because I'm no longer their customer. I've emailed them about these pricing issues. They didn't answer 3 working days later, so I emailed them again. 2 days passed, no answers, so I tried to call them on the phone. It wasn't easy to find a contact number to begin with, but when I called them, I felt pretty pissed off.

I call them, I immediately hear a female voice: "Your call is important to us. You are the first client on the queue. Please hold on!". Stupid music for two minutes… After that again: "Your call is important to us. You are the first client on the queue. Please hold on!". Stupid music for some minutes again… At that point, I fucking put down the phone.

Well, I've finally made the decision that I won't pay a fucking cent to these bastards. To understand my situation here's what they should mention on their home page about the quality of their service:

• Many times our servers are so fucking overloaded, that your site becomes inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvience.
• Major administrative outages will frequently occur, which usually means that you cannot write your web space for several days. You won't get notified about any of these outages, of course.
• Our customer support has quality issues. To be honest we don't exactly have a customer support, just a pimpled teenager, jerking off all day to lesbian porn.
• It's all shit, we admit it, but what can you expect for this price, fucker?

I've also noticed that they don't have any slogans. I think they should really have one, because it's really important from a marketing point of view. Here are some of my ideas:

• It's cheap shit. Pay the price and get lost!
• Customer support? We don't have such a thing.
• Ultraweb.hu – for all the fuckers who wanna suffer.

I've also made an updated logo for them. I think it became pretty good:

I'm so glad because I've finally succeeded with my exams for this semester. The last one was a nasty fucker.

I wanna hack on UC, hardcore. I've updated the Project Roadmap in the near past so there's a pretty good vision where the project should be moving. I have to make a couple little changes on the MediaWiki home page skin. After that, I have to implement a custom TreeModel interface for the panel, so it could display files much more faster. It seems that it's the only way to speed it up, I've basically tried everything else. I also feel a strong urge to move to Stetic, in MonoDevelop, because messed up Glade signals are cumbersome to handle.

I wanna also find some nice telejob(s) to make some money, because currently, I'm a poor bastard.

Miguel has a great post on An Inconvenient Truth [Trailer]. We should care more. Not only because of ourselves, but especially because of the future generations. You'll also read about the sneaky activity of astroturfing in his post, which is an interesting concept.

Four days after I set up Planet GNOME Archives, Jeff Waugh, editor of Planet GNOME mailed me:

Hi László,

I found your blog entry about Planet GNOME Archives as a referer to the
Planet website.

Planet, as it was designed for Planet GNOME, specifically did not include an
archival feature, because we felt it was inappropriate for a third-party
site to archive blog entries. The original author may edit the entry, remove
it from his/her blog, or change the readership policy in the future and this
really is up to them, *not* a third-party archival site that they are unable
to control.

At some stage, Planet itself may include an archival feature, for aggregator
admins that wish to do this. But many admins will approach it the same way I
have for Planet GNOME: no archival whatsover, leave that in the hands of the
authors themselves.

So, this is a long-winded, history-filled way of suggesting that you should
not make your archive of Planet GNOME publically accessible.

Thanks,

- Jeff

For these very reasons, you should be careful about putting your archive out to
the public. You should negotiate this with the admins of the Planet you wish to
archive. I've made Planet GNOME Archives private and published its source as the project Planet Archiver. Jeff found it a cool hack that useful for many on-line resources and so do I.

Update (2006-06-07): Planet GNOME Archives is no longer available publicly. See my post: "Planet GNOME Archives Is Down, Planet Archiver is Available" for the explanation.

I'm addicted to Planet GNOME. It's the richest resource I read on a regular basis. Lots of talented people writing here about mostly GNOME related and generally Free Software related stuff and one can learn a lot by reading their posts.

I had only one problem with it, though: PlanetPlanet is not able to generate feed archives, so it is not possible to go back in history and read the earlier posts that the GNOME folks made. If I forget to visit or can't visit Planet GNOME for 3 days or more, I drop behind and there are phases in my life when I don't have so much time and it's a pain in my ass. I could use a web based feed reader with cron, but unfortunately none of the readers are good enough for my choosey taste, so I had to choose a different approach to solve this issue.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce Planet GNOME Archives [link removed]! (I like the name, came out with it myself.) It must be pretty damn intuitive to use, because of the extra JavaScript love I gave to this babe. Motto: "No readers get left behind!"

I haven't used JavaScript for a long time, but despite of this fact, it was really a pleasure. Enjoy!