Quite a bunch of time passed since I posted the last article. So tonight
I decided to scratch my head and finally to describe what's been new
over here. Just like a small rest after a lot of hard work.
Open Source
All the courious ones must had been noticed the recent release of
centericq, version 4.9.7. Where the numbers come from? I've got no idea.
Initially there were amount of fixed bugs and newly added features,
which were the second and the third number respectively. Now I just
increase the last one, and in case some major changes take place, -- the
second or the first number. Good news, the problems with the Yahoo!
protocol are gone. Among major features there is the minimal support for
posting to LiveJournal. Back in 1998, when I only wrote the main()
function, and made up the project name, I had an ambition to create a
whole communication center, so that it would be possible not to leave it
during whole the day. But who said LJ is not a communication? It's a
real and great community of users. Thus, if someone asks "should an
instant messenger support something like that?" our answer will be loud
and proud, sounding "YEEESSSS!!!"
Also, a serious step towards getting the maximum comfort for Windows
users of the program was made. Thanks to Niels Andersen's efforts, the
version build for this OS which is available on the centericq page, will now work on your box even if you
don't have any Cygwin components installed. The problem Windows users
used to face with before was that the exe file said "no termain "cygwin"
on every start attepmt.
Apart from all of this, it was a real pleasure for me to see the
activity of centericq users who wanted to say thanks for my hard work.
Lately, the following fellows had a possibility to make me a little bit
happy with the help of PayPal and WebMoney systems: Tigran R. Zakoyan,
Christian Frank, Francis Rodrigue, Jostein Berntsen, Ed MacDonald and
Rodger Castle. So I want to say thanks to everyone who sent me some
funds till this very moment, and also to the rest who is going to send
some in the future :) Be sure, I will keep developing my GNU projects,
no matter how many donations I get. Nevertheless, my name is not Bill
Gates, so I always have what to spend extra $20-30 for. Beleive me,
tequila gets over quickly here :)
Photography
Those of you who like porno photography, first of all can
consider taking a look at several new albums. In the terms of the
process of taking pics this one was the most interesting for me. There are
the interior and the goods from the new "Carrefour" superstore. The name
must only be pronounced with the specific French accent like "Karfur",
otherwise Romanians most likely won't understand you :) So, the store
you can see in the pictures really belongs to the network of the same
name, and it's the second one they opened in Romania. The first one is
situated outside the city, on the Bucharest-Ploiesti road. Actually
"Carrefour" looks very similar to the famous "Metro" stores (a bit less
to "Billa"), with the only exception that apart from the supermarket
itself one can find various restaurants, clothes, perfume and
electronics shops inside the building.
Now, about the pictures. When I came there for the first time, having
the camera with me, I thought it would be cool to take shots with the
great seafood seciton, with all of those cat-fishes, omars and salmons.
But like a white man and a cultured person, I decided to ask first if I
had a right to make photos in there. There was no sign with a
striked-out camera on the entrance, but who knows.. So, first I came to
a girl who was giving out various ads, and asked her. She told I
might ask people in red, who actually formed the store's staff. The girl
herself was only giving ads, and she couldn't have such information.
Finally, I found a woman who was putting various stuff on the shelves. She
looked just like the girl described, all in red. So I asked her if I
could make any photos inside the store. "Well, I've already saw someone
taking shots, thus I suppose you may do it, mister" -- she answered.
That's actually what I wanted to hear. Then I got directly to shooting.
I took photos of everything, starting from the great seafood section (I
almost looked into "faces" of fishes and mollusces with the camera), and
ending with fruits and vodka. But exactly in the moment I started
shooting a manechin sitting on a gym, a guy came to me. He said it was
forbidden to take pictures in the store. What a surprise. Just in case,
I described the situation to him, and said I already had had a talk with
someone from their staff. He kept on insisting, but I already didn't
care, since there were as much as 40 used positions in my flash card
till then.
Here I conclude that "Carrefour" gets "poor" for its protecting the
interior design from potential plagiarism. Now having seen my gallery,
everyone would be able to build a superstore just like the great French
one. As to the gallery itself, I recently implemented my old idea --
full-screen view mode. As soon as you access the respective section, you'll see a link to the right.
Actually, my own reason for implementing it was that I found it very
uncomfortable to have a need to scroll down a page to see the whole
photo. Or in case if I wanted to see an image using all the available
screen resolution, I had to choose "Show picture" each time. In the
recently implemented full-screen mode it's possible not only to see a
single picture, but also to navigate through whole the current album.
The navigation keys help can be seen as soon as the window opens. In
Internet Explorer there is a hint popping-up near the mouse cursor, and
in Mozilla everything is written in the window title. Actually, it's
very simple: "space" brings you to the next image, "backspace" goes
backward and "d" shows picture's description in an alert box.
I see a great photo gallery solution has been shaping up here. Probably
one day I should separate it from the rest of the site and make it a
ready-to-use distributable package. Maybe its license should be GNU,
maybe there should also be a commercial version with support and adding
new features by demand. I wonder, if anyone would be interested.
Funny
Finally, a nice piece of programmers' humour which someone sent me
recently.
See you.
::
