Hazard's stuff

History of metric units

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-27 13:03
Did you know that kilogram was invented because of French revolution? Read here.

Trip to Troodos video

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-16 06:24
Today I have publicly released a videoclip regarding trip to Troodos I did about a week ago. The scenery was beautiful and together with Lev we have filmed some nice moments. Of course the clip is nowhere perfect, especially as regards to camera shaking.

This is a milestone as it is the first videoclip which I completely edited under Linux. I'm quite impressed with Cinerella and its capabilities. Video was grabbed using dvgrab, and deinterlacing and MPEG-4 conversion was done using transcode.

Support Unicef

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-12 23:15
Right now on MTV they are running a show to support UNICEF Tsunami relief effort. People from various countries can send a premium SMS and be charged 2-5 euros, which will supposedly be allocated to help tsunami victoms. Well, some further research shows that only about 50-60% of the collected money will actually go to the relief support fund... the rest is going to the pockets of GSM operators and other middlemen. :-\

If you want to donate more directly, visit UNICEF website, where you can donate through credit card.

Still, what MTV does is a good thing. It has made spend a few minutes and donate, even though I realize that most of the money will end up in the wrong hands.


Fedora Core 3 upgrade bugs

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-12 16:42
I have upgraded to Fedora Core 3. The following issues appeared during upgrade:

1) If RPM needs to create a directory, but file with the same name exists, it fails.
2) In my /etc numerous files are protected using chattr. RPM fails to upgrade a package if it encounters such files.

Both of these issues are unlikely to happen on an average workstation. The main problem is that the Fedora Core 3 installer does not provide any clue as to why it had failed - it just writes that a fatal error occured and the only choice is to reboot. I had to manually try to upgrade the packages, see what the problem was, fix it and then restart the upgrade.


Best Satellite Earth Images from 2004

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-09 20:46
Space Imaging has published their top 10 Earth images taken by Ikonos satellite. Nice stuff.

Chains rule!

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-05 02:48
It has been reported that finally there is snow in Troodos. We're thinking to go there this weekend. Since the road might be slipery I have decided that the best car must be my 4WD Ferroza. So I googled to find whatever tricks there are for driving 4WD in snow. Here comes the big surprise: 4WD does not have much difference than 2WD when driving. 4WD does provide benefits when starting on a slippery surface, or can go through up in snow in a place where 2WD would spin wheels. However, 4WD does not provide any benefits when steering or breaking. Actually, it is reported that 4WD statisticly have more accidents in snow because drivers are not careful enough.

Only one thing substantially improves driving in a snow - chains. For more information, good set of tips can be found here and here.

Friday

— Posted by hazard @ 2005-02-04 23:44
Hooray, it's Friday! :-)