Yesterday was a special day here in Bohinjska Bistrica, and in many other cities across Slovenia. We were celebrating the 100th anniversary of opening of the Bohinj rail-road line and of the Bohinj tunnel. This was one of the last majestic projects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and connected the city of Trst (Trieste) with Central Europe. Altogether, 42 tunnels, 3 avalanche galleries and more than 60 bridges were built on 145km-long line linking Jesenice with Trst. Besides Bohinj tunnel, which is 6327 meters long, another engineering marvel is the viaduct in Solkan, which has the largest stone arch among the railway bridges in the world (its span measures 85 m). To learn more about Bohinj line visit the page of The Bohinj-Gorica line society.

The celebration took place at the railway station. We arrived there quite a bit too early. People were still coming and amateur actors and musicians were preparing for the event. While we were waiting for the steam train to arrive there was also a small accident, that could turn out much worse. There were some flags on the roof of the station and because of the wind they fell down. Luckily, no one was beneath that part of the roof. By the time the train arrived a lot of people gathered. Our mayor, Evgenija Kegl Korošec, gave a short speech about the importance of the rail-road for Bohinj and how we should use it more in tourism. I couldn’t agree more. This is one of the most beautiful railway lines and our country could put a lot more effort into modernisation and promotion of it. After the speech amateur actors, dressed in the old fashion and representing important people from the time when the railway was opened, performed some dialogues. You could hear what people like Žiga Zoiss, Valentin Vodnik, Giacomo Ceconi and others could have said at the moment like this. We could also see a funny sketch depicting how some citizens of Bohinjska Bistrica reacted, when they first saw a steam train. Soon the train continued on its tour and we returned home. My sister took some photos of the celebration. You can check them out at Flickr in 100 years of Bohinj railway line photo set.

For this occasion a lot has been done in Bohinjska Bistrica. They renewed the rail-road station and the bridge that is on the path to it. For the first time we also have cross-road signs marking the streets in our town.

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Tags: railway, rail-road, railroad, anniversary, slovenia, bohinj, engineering, anniversaries, celebrations

Soon after I woke up today I’ve heard a door knock. Who could that be. No one at home is expecting a visit. It turned out that it was a delivery man from FedEx. What is this all about? I haven’t ordered anything recently. It looks like that I got a package. And if it is free, why not. When I opened the package another box was inside. On the box it was written: SUSE Linux 10.1. Then I remembered that a couple of months ago SUSE was asking all the beta testers of the alpha and beta versions for their mailing addresses. And this free retail box of SUSE Linux 10.1 is a thank you present for all of us who helped make this Linux distribution as great as it is. Here is what is in the box that otherwise costs only around €50/$60: 6 CDs, one DVD (both for 32 and 64-bit AMD64 compatible computers) and a 246-page Start-up Guide.

I’ll probably give this box as a birthday or holiday present to someone I know (or don’t know yet). And if you would like to get the same present from SUSE, now is you chance. They have just released version 10.2 Alpha 2 for testing. Download it, find bugs, report them and when openSUSE 10.2 final gets released a delivery man may also be knocking on your door.

Tags: suse, opensuse, linux, operating systems, novell, open source, free software, distributions

The summer holidays are finally here and I can take about two months of break from university. It will be nice blogging again. I’m sure you’ve all missed me a lot You may be wondering what I’ve been doing since the last post (has it really been three months allready?!). Besides studying and translating I’ve applied for Google Summer of Code with KPhysics project for KDE. Unfortunately I wasn’t selected. Harish Kukreja will be working on it and I wish him a lot of luck and fun. Can’t wait to test his code and when the SoC is over I’ll try to help him as much as possible. In May I also had a chance to meet Andrej Vernekar and Gregor Rakar for the first time. They are the coordinators of Slovenian KDE translation team. Andrej had an interesting presentation about using KBabel for localising free software. Unfortunately not many people showed up. On the same day, that is May 9 2006, I also got an account for KDE SVN repository. Now I can submit translations and code directly. Well, these are the most important things that I remember right now.

And what are my plans for this summer? Since I will not be working on my SoC project I’ll have enough time to do other things. I’ll monitor the code that Harish will be working on and get familiar with it as much as possible. Continuing to learn Qt and KDE programming is also on the list. Oh, by the way, there is a nice book being written about programming with C++ and Qt4. You can read it here for free: An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4. This could be a nice basis if you would like to get into developing for KDE 4. At the end of September there will be aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Ireland. It is a annual KDE community conference and I hope I’ll have enough money to attend it. Speaking about earning money, maybe I’ll be making a web page for our local construction company here in Bohinj. The one that my father works for. I was also thinking about contacting our primary school and ask them if they need any educational software that I could write for them. If we come up with some nice project I could apply for some monetary help that Slovenian Ministry for education is offering for open source educational software.

Tags: personal, blog, summer

In addition to learning C++ and Qt I also started to learn assembly language. I spend much of my free time reading the book Professional Assembly Language. You learn quite a bit about how processors work and how to use them at a very low level. It is also great that the authors use open source Linux tools like assembler GAS and debugger GDB. I have everything installed and ready so it is just perfect. What I miss in the book is more info about additional features available in AMD64 architecture. For that I will have to check out the documentation provided by AMD.

And why did I decide to start learning assembly language in the first place? There is a popular collection of Slovenian dictionaries from Amebis, but no application for Linux exists. So I decided to try to find out how the Windows application ASP32 opens the files. If I manage to do that I could then try to write a Linux program to do the same thing. Even if I fail the knowledge of assembly language will remain and you never know when it will come in handy. May it be just for a better understanding of compilers or knowing how to better optimize some demanding function.

Again I’ve been given the task of building a new computer. And, again, not for me. It is for my dad’s co-worker this time. His budget is about 1000 € and this should include an LCD monitor. He also wishes to try out Linux so all components should have good enough support for Linux. This is what I currently have in mind:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte K8NF-9
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3200+, socket 939, Venice core
• Memory: 512 MiB GeiL PC3200 Value
• Graphics card: Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D GeForce 6600GT 128MiB DDR3 PCI-E x16
• Hard drive: 160GiB Hitachi GST T7K250 7200rpm 8MiB cache Serial ATA2/300
• DVD drive: NEC ND-4551A 16X with LabelFlash
• Case: GMC H60
• Power supply: LC 550W LC6550G
• LCD display: Samsung 730BF
• Mouse: Logitech B85 UltraX
• Keyboard: Logitech UltraX

What do you think? What concerns me the most is the motherboard. How well is nVidia nForce 4 chipset supported in Linux? I’ll have to check this out before settling down on the final configuration. If anyone has any experiences I’d be more than glad to hear about them.

During this night (from midnight to about 4 am in the morning here in Slovenia) I was watching Super Bowl XL together with my sister. We were cheering up for the Seattle Seahawks who were playing against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Detroit. Both teams were playing very well, but unfortunately the mistakes in crucial moments doomed the Seahwaks and in the end the Steelers won with 21 against 10. Congratulations to the coach Bill Cowher and his team. They were working hard together for the long 14 years to come here.

And I must say thank you to Prva TV television station for bringing us Super Bowl XL and, for the first time here in Slovenia, the preceding games. Commentators were great. They were all full of enthusiasm and it was fun to listen to them. Can’t wait until the next year. Oh and if you didn’t know, we also have our own and only American football team here in Slovenia: Ljubljana Silverhawks. I must visit them some day, while they are having a training.

Tags: super bowl, seahawks, steelers, slovenia, silverhawks

First I wish you all a merry Christmas. I hope you are all well and maybe got some nice presents with an even nicer thought behind them. It’s been snowing for almost the whole day here in Bohinj and this is just great for the Christmas spirit. During these holidays I’ll be playing an adventure game called Voyage (inspired by Jules Verne) together with my sister. We also watch a lot of movies during this time and this year will be no different. I hope to get Chronicles of Narnia, which we liked a lot when we were younger and watched the cartoon series. Oh, it brings back the memories. Before I forget, here is the photo of our Christmas Tree for year 2005.

Tags: personal, holidays, christmas, adventure games, movies

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything to my blog ever since August. This is over 3 months without any post! Some of regular readers of my blog have sent me an e-mail asking what is going on. A lot of people also wanted to know where is the next, third, part of my KDE 3.5 Previews. So I hope this entry will answer all your questions. I’ll also try to tell you about important things that happened in my life during the long absence.

KDE 3.5 Previews: After publishing the second part I was ill for a couple of weeks and I was unable to work on the third part. After getting well again I had to study for my final maths exams a lot and I also wasn’t in the mood for writing anything. In addition, KDE 3.5 release was approaching very fast and I had (and still have) a lot of translation work to do. Even more then for version of 3.4 as other Slovenian translators didn’t have time and I was basically left alone to do the work. So I have to apologise to everyone waiting for more KDE 3.5 previews. If there is enough interest I can still try my best to write the third part. But no promises.

Laptop: Thanks to the people at Linux Users Group of Slovenia (LUGOS) I now have a new (and my first) notebook. It’s a very nice HP Compaq nx6125 with AMD Turion 64 processor, 512 MiB of memory, 60 GiB hard drive and 15 inch 1024×768 LCD panel. It is already running Gentoo Linux and I have dedicated one partition for testing purposes. Currently this partition is occupied by a beta version of Pingo Linux 4.2 (a Slovenian Linux distribution). It’s great to have a laptop like this. Now I will be able to translate more and it also proves extremely useful for university work and learning C++/Qt/KDE programming. I plan to write an article about running Linux on this laptop. When I have more time off course.

Blog comments: Some time ago I had to disable comments on this blog because of blog spam. It looks like that people here at Blogger.com have finally come to their senses and added an image test verification before anyone can post a comment. So I have enabled this test and re-enabled the comments. Now you can start commenting again and let’s hope that spam doesn’t come back any more.

Apartment: If you remember I was looking for a new apartment in Ljubljana back in July. I was lucky to find a very cheap place that is only about 5 minutes away from my faculty (if you walk). So I can sleep longer in the morning and I can go back to the apartment when we have free hours during lectures. Another bonus is that I don’t have to buy monthly tickets for the city bus. The only thing I really miss here is the internet connection.

Health: During the time since my last post to the blog I also got one of my wisdom teeth pulled out. The operation itself was quite long but painless. But after anaesthetics stopped working it was very painful for a couple of days.

That’s about it. I hope I don’t die on you again like this and that I will be able to post to the blog at least once a week. In the meantime be sure to get Firefox 1.5 and KDE 3.5 that were released about a week ago. Take care and thanks to all of you for reading my blog.

Tags: personal, blog, blogging, notebook, laptop

I’ve been with my current cable internet service provider UPC Telemach for a long time and it has had its share of ups and downs. As of late the upload speed (256 kb/s) was getting too slow for me and I was seriously considering switching to ADSL which, in addition to faster packages, also had quite a bit lower prices.

But yesterday evening my friend Davorin told me a really great news. Starting with 1st September Telemach is going to lower their prices and speed up their new packages considerably. For example, we were paying about 37,56 € per month for 1024 kb/s download and 256 kb/s upload speed. The new, much faster, 5120/768 package costs only a bit more, about 41,96 €, and you also get 20 MiB of free web hosting space. This space doesn’t matter so much to me as I have my own Linux powered server here. But much higher transfer rates, especiallyly upload, will sure come in handy. I only hope they properly set up reverse DNS lookup. They don’t have it now and this prevents me to connect to some servers.

What can I say. We’re staying with Telemach and upgrading our package to the fastest one. I wonder how ADSL competition will answer as now they have lower speeds and higher prices. But in any case this can be only good for development of broadband internet in Slovenia and good for the people.

Tags: personal, internet, cable, adsl, broadband, connection, slovenia

I have finally convinced my sister to write on her blog. It has been almost a year now since her last post. And since my friend Boris started to publish his photos, I suggested the same to my sister. Under all the pressure she bulged and uploaded some of her photos of nature to Flickr. Check out her blog entry for links to the photos. I hope she continues to post on her blog and upload photos.

Tags: blogging, photos, photographs, photography, nature

A few hours ago a news entry linking to my KDE 3.5 Previews article was published on Slashdot.org. And immediately my blog started to receive A LOT of visitors form all over the world. If I had my blog hosted on my own server on a poor cable link the Slashdot effect would bring it down in no time. I’ve never imagined that one of my articles would cause this.

But with good there also come some bad and irritating things. Some stupid spammer started to fill comments here, and some of the text was even racist. If he has something intelligent to say (which I highly doubt) he should set up his own blog. I think this coward is very sick and should get himself some professional help. Thanks to this ill person I had to disable all the commenting on this blog. Sorry for this! And after this incident I finally see how poorly Blogger.com service is prepared to fight against spam. I hope they improve this very soon or else they will loose their users to competition.

Tags: blog, blogging, spam, slashdot

As of now all the articles on this blog are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. This license is similar to the GPL license for free software and lets you remix, tweak, and build upon my work even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit me and license your new creations under the identical terms. If you are also an author there are a lot of different Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Pick one and let other people clearly know (by marking your work by the famous CC mark) how they can use your work and share it on.

Tags: creative commons, licensing, copyright, copyleft