On a happy note

We won the soccer game for the third time in a row with a pretty good score!

Pessimism or Realism?

I have come to realize that I hate many things. Like some people in this world, I see many things in a negative light, and always criticize/analyze everything. I don’t know why, but more and more I am hurting with my whole existence over what is happening with this planet and humanity. The planet is slowly turning into a big garbage bin. I just cannot find a reason to be optimistic about this system, about this consumerist society, in which human values of love and respect come after self-benefit. It is truly sad that corporate social responsibility is only a camouflage for the exploitation of peoples and people. It is truly sad that many think this is a healthy society with competition driving progress. It is also truly sad to realize that many know that everything is a big political game, but it is still played. One may ask why? Because there is no way out. The world is slowly driven to increase the tensions between each of us. I really liked the idea of constructivist communication though. I wish everyone just talked and listened to each other. There are a lot of us, those who think this is not going to end well if we do not do anything. But we do not listen. We take accounting instead of human rights. We take business administration instead of environmental studies. We run corporation instead of picking up garbage. We make money by taking it from those who need it the most. The problem is everyone needs it the most. Total equality is obviously unattainable, but we can work to make each other more successful. The amount of stress we’re going through every day reduces everyone’s chances of becoming something they’ve dreamed of. Others dream about becoming corporate leaders. They teach their kids to think the same way. We run transportation networks, whose only positive aspect is the reduced time it take you to get to places. Other than that it is a waste of air, raw materials and lives, because hundreds of people die every day, due to accidents. When we buy things, we are ready to cut each other’s throats just to get that discount. Relationships go to hell because there are very few things you can do in this society with your loved ones without spending money that you do not have. Hence come credit cards. Hence comes debt and bankruptcy, starvation and homelessness, misery and suffering. Soon your loved ones become people you want to forget. And all this is filled with tiny little things, the things we try to enjoy as possible, because we know that tomorrow will be another day when we have to do something we hate. Nevertheless, there are tons of people who do not care about the bigger picture. They are happy and I am happy that some of us are able to enjoy this world, whether it is out of ignorance or simply the realization that alone we are helpless against it. I don’t know how to change the world, but I’m really thinking on it. I really am. I hope one day I come up with something that does not require more human sacrifices. I wish I could come up with a model that would satisfy everyone. I’ve lost my chance to be in this capitalist society of the West. I’ve lost the love of my life. I only have myself. I will be fine, as long as there is the Sun, the earth, water and air. I will be fine even through all the shit I have to deal with every day, customers, strangers gives me so much headache. My pain over the future of this planet will live, but I will be fine. I will try to be better than all those that I so dislike. I will try to give as much as I can to our common future!

Vultri.org and PileofShots.com

So these are two startups. Vultri.org is my new design studio. From now on I am officially creating websites of different complexity and content. Hope it does bring some return :) “Pile of Shots” is another website, which will be free image hosting and possibly something like Flickr (not as cool of course, nothing can be cooler). Depending on the amount of time and visitors I have, I will try to provide the top quality service for anything I start. I also have a couple of more ideas about potential projects.


First decisions :) Webhostingpad.com

Seems like the optimal option for me. There is only one BUT. No domain names from them :) I need to actually OWN mine ;)

Ubuntu 8.10

Time to play with this baby :) Awwwwwwwhhh yeeaaahhh!!!

CMS, portal system, etc.

The plan is to create a very light, performance oriented expandable system. Top priority! :)

PDF to Text + PHP

I have had a little project at work. The task is to convert a .pdf file into plain text, and then cut some parts out of the text to use them in my database. Well, the hardest part of it all was that I had to use PHP to do it. I had been looking for a conversion tool, but never really found anything. FPDI did not do what I needed, so I came across xpdf. I had to use “exec()” function of PHP to perform the conversion, but the output turned out to be very messy. So after some manipulations with the text I managed to convert almost all breaks. How much time I am going to spend on trying to “preg_match” the whole text for the stuff I need, I don’t know. I am sure it is not going to be easy, since it is not even HTML with all its tags and stuff. The thing is the conversion output format strictly depends on how the document was formatted in pdf. Well, according to my .pdf file, the creator was way far from publishing. Oh yeah, the tool is called pdftotext and is a Windows executable. However the package is distributed under many operating systems, so everybody can find a suitable package.

No WWW

This 3w thing has always made me mad. I can understand when DNS servers have “www” as an alias of every domain, but when you go for http://domain.com, but cannot access it unless you put it with “www” before, that just gets me. Whether they do it on purpose, or server administrators are just lame, I don’t know. So I decided to put a no-www.org button on my page when I get to have my own domain and hosting. Be smart people, learn how to adjust your BIND settings!

cURL behind proxy and all the heavy stuff…

Had to find a way to get webpages through proxy, and cURL for PHP was very helpful. Soon I am going to post a script with a possibility to use a proxy or not. Such a learning tip from me for people that might look for the same thing. I also decided to use Smarty and MDB2 with its MySQL driver for my new website automated monitoring system primarily because the script itself was too small to show to anybody :D Even though everything works well, I did not even realize that I would need a normal design for it, which I have no idea where to get. Anyways, cURL proxy usage example soon.

Windows Vista = nice + inconvenient?

I have had Vista on my precious laptop for almost a year now, but I am seriously thinking about installing something else instead. The only reason I have not installed another OS is because I don’t want to lose my license, which I do not even have a DVD for. This is probably the most annoying thing about this version of Windows. It creates a recovery partition on your hard drive taking around 7-10 GB of your space, and puts there everything exactly in the form, in which you got it when you bought it. So all you can do with that recovery partition is “recover” your Vista back to the original state. That means that you cannot do a fresh install, and therefore, you cannot control the process or choose any type of software or settings to set up. This is some crazy stuff, because I always thought that if you buy a copy of the OS, then you are entitled to an OEM DVD, so you can at least have those 10 GB for your own needs. It comes with all that stuff that I do not need, such as HP software, different CD burning and movie-making stuff. Almost 1 GB of games that you have to buy and a lot of other useless stuff. Also there is the new dumb defragmentation tool, which completely sucks compared to the one in XP. There is UAC, which pops up every now and then. The hardware requirements are just messed up, do not even want to talk about it. Aero is a little slow on older machines. BUT, I have to say in terms of security, it is a lot better than XP. I have been on the web the entire year and have not even picked up a single virus. So I guess Windows Defender must be working well. The Aero looks really nice, especially on widescreen big displays. I do not know what to say. When you just start using it, you think how dumb it is, then when you get used to it, you start thinking it is not that bad after all :D LOL I also had to find that EasyBCD tool to work with my Ubuntu without installing GRUB into MBR. By the way, I had to remove the partition where Ubuntu was, so now I do not have anything *nixy on my laptop. I have been so busy that I cannot even write something here.

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