Pavel's diary

Few days, weeks, years ago, I started short series of my anti-Itanium blog entries.

I have to admin I was not very good future-visionary then, because after five years and two days, there are still companies who still only plan to drop Itanium support (RedHat) and there even are companies who do not even plan to do so 8) OMG who and why pays those people?

More than three years ago, we were in Lyon, testing the taste of various different flavours of beer^H^H^H^Hpepsi, cola etc.

Today's newspaper contains an article (you can get the full copy of the article at their web) about Coca-Cola Blák's "success" I predicted three years ago. Interesting thing is, that people collect (even empty) bottles. Maybe CoCo's normal bottles are too boring.

And I did not drink coffee that time... Now I'm big lover of good coffee (with milk though). Morning cappuccino (I love Dulsao!) while reading daily magazines...

Other interesting thing is that for me, the various flavours of Pepsi are more tasty (is it really worth the Wikipedia page? ;-). I still remember Pepsi Gold.

Back to work and late newspaper reading ;-)

TV Nova (one of the commercial TV stations in our country) did a big thing today. The first message in the daily evening news (Televizní noviny) was about the security despite the fact that there was a fight between taxi drivers and police officers, even floods were commented later. The message criticized (at least they think so) or evangelized (they actually DID so) strong passwords!!!

If you understand Czech, you can hear it yourself.

This is as usual: computer specialists tell you that STRONG passwords are not strong enough (everyone has full mouth of PKI) and normal people tell you, that it is too difficult even now. Someone has to find more secure, portable and very easy solution. Brain-authentication, Brain-MAC ;-) But then, people from TV Nova will find someone who can't enjoy the game then 8)

Yay! 2 years ago, the first Czech POINT was officially opened (link)! Too long ago to rememeber. Thanks goes to AK for reminding me.

2 years of my life. It started as a wild idea to help Czech people, to bring authorities closer to them. Now there are 3528 places with Czech POINTs, 1400000+ produced listings. You can see the logo of the project on many postal offices, many municipal offices. You can even see some billboards with the light blue logo!

JFYI: Just before the release of OpenOffice.org 3.1, issue number #i100000# was filed into OOo's IssueZilla.

Everyone tends to assign everything to crisis these days. You are watching the TV news and almost everything is about crisis. My son mentioned yesterday, that TV news are the same as they were day before.

What I call crisis is that people call everything crisis.

But to be in line with everyone else, I think that Czech computer services are in crisis. This night is a very good example of this crisis. The official web of Ministry of Justice doesn't work, the official web of I.CA (one of authorized certification authorities in our country) doesn't work etc.

Or is this normal? That would be REAL crisis!

Apple business in CZ is doomed. I just want to receive my Mini DisplayPort Adapter I ordered together with a new machine for my wife on December, 4th 2008, ie. 40 days ago! Is it THAT difficult?

You can't do business this way...

Update: January 31, still no news. Almost 2 months now ;-) I can't believe it.

Update: February, 3 - I have an adapter at home, my wife's Mac is now connected to the display. Ordered two days ago from a different Czech company - thanks goes to Quentin and Filip... Two days compared to 2 months. That's approx. 30 times better service...

Update: February, 24 - ~80 days after my order, I have my money back.

Summary: do not trust local Apple Authorized Distributor.

The next year is going to its end. Do you know something new? I do.

I have an enormous amount of new experiences after this year:

• sometimes, it doesn't matter how much energy you invest into your goals
• sometimes, your goals happen even if you forget about them
• sometimes, even with you doing exactly the opposite, your goals happen anyway
• sometimes, even your enemies can work with you on your goals and even be better than you!

To sum up: everything is relative. The only thing you can do is to limit the relativness ;-) The only important thing is your family and people around you. And I'm proud that I can work with the people around me.

And I'm very proud of my family which is even bigger this year - my daughter Lucie brought a lot of light into my life. Thanks for her, thanks for my son and my wife and others.

Building OpenOffice.org on so many platforms brings several strange issues ;-) One of the most interesting ones now is the issue connected with Vietnamese dictionary extension - dict-vi.oxt. When you build also with Vietnamese language, this extension is built and automatically registered into the install set. OK, this is normal. But thy it is waiting for Enter only on one platform I build on (on Mac OS X - #i93286#)?

I investigated the issue a bit more and found that Vietnamese extension contains 'accept-by' in its description and thus while registering the extension, it is waiting for confirmation of its license, it is waiting for Enter. It is the only extension, that contains it.

This brings several questions: who did QAed this extension? Did anyone tried to build it at all? Do they really press Enter while building it? How does Hamburg RE builds it? Why it happens only on Mac OS X?

I updated my build system in several aspects today. Better support for SVN, updated translate-toolkit to the latest version (1.2.0), disabled several inactive languages or laguages whose GSI files were located at inaccessible sites (disabled languages: bn, ne, gd, id, gl, ka, eo, uz, af, dz, tg, th, check your language ;-). Now I'm ready to add GSI files for active teams again.

The next milestone with all this stuff will be DEV300_m35.