Sergei Mutovkin's Rumbling Mumbling

This post is really funny, start laughing now.
Facebook recommendations are a great way to show how stupid people are. I’m “fan” of the ban of the high fructose corn syrup group. Once in a while Facebook shows related “recommended pages” telling me that members of that group also like “N.P.R.”. Did not catch the drift yet? People are clueless and don’t pay attention that Monsanto is a major “supporter” of N.P.R. So people who bring you high fructose corn syrop (well, actually the corn seeds manufacturer, the same company that supplied Napalm to US army during vietnam war) is now supporting your public radio. Funny, ha? And then those who are against HFCS return to listening to Monsanto propaganda. (Some would claim that those are N.P.R. affiliates that run the commercials, but it does not matter as clean, positive content that is never mentioning HFCS and GM food in a bad light, attracts lucrative commercial support).

Recorded this video just this Sunday (June 13th, 2010). Unfortunately, I had only my iPhone with me and not HD camera. Don’t forget to switch player into 480p mode for better video and audio quality.

(Sorry for embedding Flash, but it seems that’s the only way to embed YouTube videos right now)

In my previous Twitter postings I’ve voiced my support for Steve Job and his open letter about Adobe (before Macromedia) Flash. I was mildly happy to see Microsoft joining the camp (though they have a hidden agenda of getting rid of Flash and pushing Silverlight). But today I have to start questioning another Adobe product – Acrobat Reader. Just a few days ago I’ve installed my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate on my PC and installed the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat reader (it was on Friday, I think). Today, on Monday, I see a balloon saying that an update is available. I happily click, agreeing to get up to speed with Adobe fixing holes in their cheesy software. It takes a few minutes to decompress (this is on Core 2 Quad 3.86Ghz) and it installs. What do I see next?

A prompt to reboot my computer!

WHAT? Just a small file viewer now requires me to reboot my computer? Starting that point on I’m beginning to question quality of Adobe software engineers and if they are capable of writing any remotely good piece of code. Just amazing how this company is still able to produce Photoshop and Illustrator. Time to find alternative to Acrobat Reader on Windows real soon: on my Linux I’m already happily using the great Okular and on my Mac I’m using Preview.

It has been more than a year since I wrote my last post on this blog. My son is almost one year old and it should explain why I mostly ignored it. Pretty much no time. My comments system got spammed quite heavily and I have around 1100 comments most (if not all) of which are spam. I will have to figure out how to add CAPTCHA to my comments system. For now, I figure it out, I will disable all commenting on this site. In general changes in WordPress are pretty overwhelming from the time I started using it.

I was pretty active on Twitter recently, mostly due to the fact that it is easy to write 140 characters. I will see if I can bring my Twitter feed to this site, anyway I plan to spend some time tweaking my blog to my liking.

Finally we bought a beautiful new 2009 Nissan Altima 2.5S. I’m not a big car reviewer, but if anyone even considers buying Camry – they MUST test drive Altima on the same day right after they test drive Camry.
You will understand that Camry is a couch for elderly with a steering wheel. Anyway, today I’m here not to write a review – I have a question. With only one car garage it means one of my beloved cars will stand outside in the awful weather offered by Southern Ontario. For the four years I had X-Trail I did not want to protect it with something like Krown spray or similar – what a mess. I find this solution way too antique. For the longest time I was looking, but delaying installation of an Electronic module that would protect my car all around.
Google search being my right hand tool uncovered a few choices that I can find in Canada, though I’m still looking for the actual place that will install them.

One is Final Coat with a Canadian office located in the neck of the woods – in Concord.

Another device is sold at Canadian Tire – CounterAct.

The third is a device I would have to order online, but which has some limited “trust level” is RustStop. Low trust level is mostly due to this informative article.

Unfortunately, I can’t find real independent source of information, like Consumer Reports that independently tested these “gadgets”… so I’m asking you – my dear visitor to contribute your thoughts. I really want to know which one is better? Did I miss one that is worth checking out?

The happiest news of this year so far is the announcement by Nokia today that the upcoming version of Qt 4.5, my favourite C++ cross-platform toolkit will be release under LGPL!

What does it mean? It means that all of a sudden you can create commercial application using this toolkit without the need to pay for each developer’s tools licence. The price was quite high and in current economics conditions hard to justify by many managers (most of them don’t really care about increased productivity when Qt is used). Now a software developer’s recommendation to use Qt as a foundation for new application might go further along. This is a fantastic news that will result in many beautiful cross-platform applications further down the road.

Remember, as long as you use dynamic linking to Qt – it is free for you! (Which is not a huge limitation).
Qt 4.5 will be available for:
- Linux/X11
- Linux/Framebuffer
- Apple OS X
- Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft Windows CE
- Symbian S60 OS
(probably others like VXworks which were never widely publicized).

But the best part is that you don’t need to develop in C++ if you are not able or unwilling to do so. Qt has bindings for many languages:
- Java (official Nokia bindings called Jambi)
- Python (PyQt)
- Ruby
- PHP
(probably others like Perl, but who cares about Perl ? )

The other thought is that it might finally force GTK+ toolkit to compete a bit and introduce new features more frequently than once every 10 years….

Update: There is also the FAQ on licensing.

Our first excursion during Costa Rica vacation was to go abroad. We went to Nicaragua. Nicaragua is a poor country that has to buy its energy from Costa Rica, a big friend of Venezuela and has two old colonial towns: Granada and León. León unfortunately is way far north, so we did not go there, but we did go to Granada. However, before exploring human history we went to see natural one – Masaya Volcano.

Masaya Volcano is active, where by active I mean it still breathes. Sulfur dioxide fumes are coming out non-stop right from the depth of the crater. To see it in all its beauty you have to climb 107 steps that will lead you to the cross.

There at the top fumes are quite noticeable and some people feel they need to urgently run down, but I felt quite fine..

The second stop was a small town of Masaya. Otherwise boring place is famous by having a big souvenirs market, where people in blue attack you by offering their service to lead you to lowest price shop… we have escaped them and bought all the stuff we wanted at bargain prices.

Granada city was the last stop of the trip. A home style lunch at one of the hotels was followed by a forty minute carriage ride with frequent stops to see most interesting sights.

Right from the start of our trip we have asked to stay in Granada City longer than required by the schedule (thanks for the tip Irina and Dan) and after the carriage ride we walked quiet streets surrounding the main square.

Soon thereafter we were back on the bus heading into unknown – drive back to Costa Rica with lazy Costa Rican customs officers on our way. But just before we left we had a chance to see real WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction).

You can see the rest of the pictures from the trip on my Nicaragua Flickr Set. More photos from our Costa Rica vacations are coming shortly. It took a me whole week to process these photos and a bit of hacking of Gpisync that I use to geotag my photos to allow saving Unicode names.

Yes, we are having a baby – Baby Boy!

Until today we were waiting for the confirmation of the successful initialization of a new thread in our family line. Now that we know, we want to share the news with everyone.

It took a bit of precise planning and we now believe that he will be born at the beginning of May 2009. Our beautiful boy will be our best third anniversary gift to each other. My wife and me are eagerly waiting for him to take a breath of fresh spring air into his tiny lungs and start enjoying his life from day one.

What an amazing time away from the hectic life of the city.

Blue sky, parrots on the trees, monkeys on the branches, coati and different lizards on the ground – all this in Costa Rica right in front of our room. Did I mention all that fish in the Pacific Pond? We are finally back from this amazing trip, though not without a small hick-up of Skyservice plane first being delayed and then flight being canceled all together due to a bird getting into the engine.

All in all just one day later we are at home. I will need to sort through tons of e-mails I’ve got during the last months (even though vacation was only 15 days a week or so before preparations for the trip took over my normal computer oriented life) and will start answering them, so please have patience and your e-mail will get my attention.

I will slowly start processing my RAW CR2 files and posting them on Flickr (I will post an update once some are there). Unfortunately Bibble 5 is not yet release, what a long wait of almost two years.

Tired of having jerky YouTube video playback on your AMD64 version of Ubuntu Linux 8.04? Want Flash release that promises to be hardware accelerated? Wait no more, you can get latest beta from the Adobe Labs website, currently version is dated from August 11, 2008.

How are we going to do it? Let’s tee-off from Adobe Labs Flash download page. And download latest version for Linux in TAR.GZ format. (I assume that you had previously installed Ubuntu’s flash-nonfree package which contained version 9 of the flash player).


wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
tar zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so


This should work in the perfect world, however we are not there yet, so you will be greeted with this helpful message:

*** NSPlugin Viewer *** ERROR: libcurl.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so


Yeah, that essential library is missing… but why? Because this is a new dependency on the Flash side which is a 32bit library and needs corresponding lib32 versions of already present AMD64 versions. Unfortunately, libcurl and other Flash 10 required 32 bit libraries are not bundled by Ubuntu AMD64 team. But that’s easy to solve.

Download latest i386 versions of the following libraries (download them to a clean folder which you can delete later):

• libcurl
• libnss
• libnspr
• libssl

Now you have to extract the files by performing the following operations:

ar x ./libcurl3_7.18.0-1ubuntu2_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libssl0.9.8_0.9.8g-4ubuntu3.3_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libnss3-1d_3.12.0~beta3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libnspr4-0d_4.7.1~beta2-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz


We will have to copy all these libraries to your lib32 storage location and create required symlinks.

sudo cp -a usr/lib/ /usr/lib32/
cd /usr/lib32
sudo ln -sf libnss3.so.1d libnss3.so
sudo ln -sf libnspr4.so.0d libnspr3.so
sudo ln -sf libnspr4.so.0d libnspr4.so
sudo ln -sf libssl3.so.1d libssl3.so
sudo ldconfig


Yahoo… we are almost done. Just a final command to make Linux browsers find our plugin.
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so

Now restart your browser and enjoy crappy YouTube video quality ; real man download .MP4 H264 versions of YouTube videos (but that’s another story).