Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

… again.

It is very difficult for me to say but… the most appreciated by me application in the Windows world was defeated. It was tough. I tried to save it but it failed… for the 2nd time in (my) history.

Last night has been a busy night trying to send 2 e-mails of ~3MB each with Microsoft Outlook 2003. I know, they’re pretty big, but in my father’s business people often exchange big files (documentation) using e-mail. Unfortunately, some servers block big e-mails or some busy people have e-mail boxes with few free space. That’s when.. (no) surprise.. the e-mails bounce back, filling YOUR e-mail box with the same e-mails you’ve sent (lots of MB included).

As I’ve said here, my ISP behaves a bit weird. I have uploaded very fast the e-mails, but they weren’t gone from Outbox. Downloading bounced e-mails took really long time. Unfortunately, Outlook sent over and over those e-mails and they bounced back, filling my father’s Inbox with ~14MB. Guess what… everything was blocked. My father couldn’t read future e-mails because those e-mails were waiting in the queue to be downloaded. Moreover, if Outlook did manage to download an e-mail, it would not delete it from the server unless all the transfer has been completed. A broken connection would have meant re-downloading everything (which did happen a few times). Great “joy”…

My father has a pretty small e-mail box, considering the tons of e-mails he gets - only 50MB maximum mailbox size. The hosting provider in Romania (actually a resaller from US) is not very competitive - I’ll make sure this changes in the future. I have to use POP3 for his e-mail in order to free his mailbox. The problem of the 14MB of bounced e-mails could only be solved by IMAP.

Enter the Outlook IMAP experience. My previous expericences with IMAP in Outlook were also not very bright. I’ve had problems before. I’ve selected the e-mails, pressed delete, but Outlook tried downloading them and everything got stuck… again. I’ve closed the laptop and got to sleep. I had enough for one night.

Today, a bright day in history, I tried again IMAP in Outlook, with no success. Last time I had the “big e-mail, everything is stuck”-problem (was one >10MB e-mail, I know: people have huge bandwidth outside Romania) I’ve used KMail to get the e-mail, remove it from the mailbox and make Outlook work again. The same thing happened now: I’ve started KMail, created an IMAP account, opened my father’s mailbox, deleted the bounced e-mails and… everything was back to normal - Outlook successfully downloaded the rest of the e-mails.

Now, I’m very sad that the only application I really liked on Windows - Outlook - behaved so bad. Outlook has probably the worst Queue Manager (& IMAP support) I’ve seen in the world of e-mail clients (I live in a very limited world of e-mail clients: Outlook, KMail, Thunderbird). Unless Microsoft does something about the Queue Manager and the IMAP Support, I’ll have to retreat the title of e-mail client from Outlook, leaving it with Best Application on Windows excluding e-mail clients .

Hope for the best in the future, or I might change my father to use Kontact when KDE is ported to Windows (with the help of Qt4 which is said to be GPLed for Windows also).

My ISP increased the bandwidth limit this month.
For my $15/month I get now 512kbps instead of 256kbps. The rest of the subscription remained the same.

BUT, the upgrade was done under the following unwritten conditions:
External:
- before: upload/download 256kbps
- after: upload: 512kbps, download 128kbps before ~17:20 local time, 256kbps in the evening and during the night

Internal (Romania):
- before: upload/download: 256kbps
- after: upload/download: 512kbps

People might say “Well, great, 512kbps!!!“, but what really annoys me is the 128kbps download speed during the day for the external sites. I use primarily sites outside the country. My server is outside the country. My ArchLinux mirrors are outside the country. Everything is so slow. It’s a bit weird, considering that this is an upgrade. IMO, an upgrade should provide the previous conditions but improved.

Now, one more thing to notice: I have 512kbps upload speed everywhere/everytime, for only $15/month. How many people outside Romania can say they have this uploading bandwidth for for only $15/month. I have a semi-fixed IP (they assign it by DHCP, but it’s kept the same - they said it’s for the situations when they increase the network, change the topology etc.). I could make one almost-great webserver here, with this bandwidth.

I hope they rethink their upgrading scheme. I don’t really like it right now.

I’m also studying some alternative ISPs. I might be making a small peering point in my home, if it works that bad. Some networking experiments wouldn’t hurt.

Friday, the 13th… May 2005.
… and I’m not superstitious.

It all started when the alarm set off. I remember setting it at 9:30 AM.
Woke up, turned on the computer (I was waiting for an e-mail with an essay for a presentation - had to burn it on a CD). Looked at the time: 7:35 AM. What tha?!?.. then.. it hit me! There was a recurrent alarm set at 7:30AM. Ok, that means 2 more hours for waking up and getting ready for this full day. (I will consider this a neutral event)

I should have been at the University at about 11:15 AM. The 2nd round of presentations for the English Scientific Session started at that time. Sometime later, at about 12:30, me and 3 more colleagues were scheduled for the Psychological Education Scientific Session.

I was all ready at about 10:30. I just needed to burn 2 CDs (one for English, one for Psychological Education) and print my English essay.
Magic happened then: the printer was out of ink (1st bad thing: -1). It was working perfectly less than 12 hours before, when my father printed some faxes.

Called my friend Liviu to ask him if he managed to print his essay in full colour, at a shop nearby. He answered the phone and I found out that “no, he couldn’t print it, but I could send my essay to him and print it black and white”. Ok, that will do - thanks Liviu once again. (1st good thing +1)

I got dressed up very nice in my navy blue suit, put a tie on - incredible speed (about 1-2 minutes) and rushed out. I was in a hurry, so Liviu suggested me I grab a cab, go over to him and get to the University together. Found an undecided cab driver (he didn’t know if he was occupied or not - a lady was waiting for somebody else which, surprisingly, appeared exactly when I was heading for the door of the cab). Took the next cab and.. surprise. That was the most expensive cab I’ve ever been to in my entire life. It costed me ROL 170,000 (that’s about EUR 4.5) to get to the University, when, normal way, it would have been 3 times cheaper. For that price I could have gotten a Mercedes to drive me to the University. (2nd bad thing -1)

We were there at 11:20 AM, only 5 minutes late. Everything was moving so slowly, that the beginning of the presentations was delayed for about 25 minutes. I will consider this the 2nd good thing (+1).

The English presentation I had was the worst presentation of my entire life.
Thinking back about that, I can only say that the main reason for failing to deliver a close to perfect presentation lack of preparation (derived from “lack of time”). What I am most upset about is that I destroyed the most well designed presentation I’ve ever had in my entire life. The name of the presentation is Always sell yourself. How to think like a CEO. A nice not very computer science related subject which literally required serious preparation on behalf of a computer-oriented person like me (it was a mix of ideas, maybe too many ideas, not very logical binding, requiring lots of support in order to glue the entire presentation). It was a bit full of text, but the concept was great. I might put it up online sometime. This would be the 3rd bad thing (-1).

The Psychological Education Scientific Session Presentation went good, I might even say very good. Everybody was pleased. This counts for the good things (3rd good thing +1).

The rest of the day was pretty good, except for the weird things still comming up.
Me and Liviu went to a seminar on Leadership at the Student Union (Casa de Cultura a Studentilor) Bucharest. It was pretty interesting.

We spent the rest of the day walking through Bucharest. Even if I was dressed formally, I felt very comfortable.

We got somewhere in the Revolution Square, where we saw the mayor of Bucharest - Adrian Videanu. He was waiting for somebody. We saw him, he saw us, we crossed the street and stopped in front of the National Art Museum, where a party was being held up. We saw many BMWs stopping by, high influence people in Romania, one ambassador - we later found out it was a charity party. While staying there, Mr. Videanu also crossed the street with his wife. He left his wife go ahead and when he got in front of us he turned towards us, greeted us, we greeted him, then he turned back and entered through the Museum’s gate, where everyone else was waying. I stopped for a moment. Then realised. The mayor has greeted me, when many other people was around us. We weren’t even close to the gate and I had no way/reason to enter, but I admit: I was dressed formaly. This goes with the good things: +1.

There were some other minor good bits which I skipped. Overall, after doing the calculations, this turned out to be a good day. Unfortunately, the English Presentation was a loss, especially for the design itself which I’ve managed to “downvalue” a lot.

Well, at least the mayor greeted me… and we might take a prize for the Psychological Education Presentation… weird day… I have to admit.

Do you remember your first two years? I bet you don’t!
Well, I do! And I’m very proud of them.

I remember my first step, my first words… and now, after two years… I still feel like a baby. Lots of things to share, lots of things to learn.

Happy Birthday to me! It’s been 2 years today since I’ve joined the Psi Community.
It brings me great joy remembering all the stuff that happened these 2 years. Psi really grew under my eyes:

• I personally gave birth to the Psi Windows Installer, a pack of NSIS scripts meant to create an easy to use installer for Windows - these scripts turned out to be wonderful starting points for other projects as well
• Two applications started living to help Psi and not only Psi. One of them is FlySpray (currently in use in many projects all over the world) and Unclassified Newsboard - Psi’s future forum backend.
• I got to be Forum Moderator for the wonderful Psi Community
• Michal was also named moderator to support the upcomming flow of users
• Named moderator at the begining, Remko (spike) was “promoted” to Psi developer as recognition of his continuous effors to improve and develop Psi, bringing fresh ideas to the Project
• We got to have a new Lead Developer - Kevin , once Justin (infiniti) stepped out to pursue other goals, focusing more on the development of the XMPP library used by Psi, named Iris.
• Psi shaped really well to adapt to MacOS users’ needs once our devs started using Macs - mainly with the help of Remko
• File transfer got implemented - this is seen by many as one of the greatest achievements of Psi
• Got really really cool User Interface features, all available in the next Psi version (0.10), thanks to our Qt GUI code master - misha.

I can’t be forgetting Hal here, as he bravely stood and organized us, setting us on the right tracks whenever this was needed - a big THANK YOU for him.
Let me not forget all the translators who help spreading Psi around the globe, thus making Jabber a better place for everybody - they also diserve our thanks.

There are definitely many more things to mention, but I don’t have 2 years to do that.
What’s worth mentioning is that we are constantly working on providing a better, improved Psi, both on the application side and on the community side. The next Psi version (0.10), code name “Faces of conversation” (directed by our new Lead Developer Kevin - this sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?), focuses on usability and improving the interaction with the user. It’s release will sync with a website overhaul, bringing a new face to collaboration within the Psi Community.
Psi 0.10 will make this happen. Don’t forget! Be there when this happens! It’s a one time opportunity!

In the end, I’d like to thank you all for being such a wonderful (Internet) Community.
I am really proud of being a two-year-old around you.

Happy birthday to you too!

Bought a new HDD today, after having school. It’s a Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA150 with NCQ (more on NCQ).

Unfortunately, my motherboard doesn’t know NCQ, so I will not benefit from this interesting and most likely powerful improvement. Maybe on the next upgrade ;).

The HDD guarantee is interesting.
Seagate offers a 5 years guarantee as follows:

• depending on the size of the HDD: 1 year (< =80GB)/2 years (>80GB) on supplier’s site
• the rest up to 5 years in special Seagate collection centers (at present, the closest for me is in Polland) - I’ve been informed (not sure how valid this is) that Seagate will have such a collection centre in Romania too, in about half a year

I will have 240GB storage space after I get the (less than 6 months) old HDD back to service.
What will I use all that space for?… I’m still thinking about that…