Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

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).

Again, just after finishing watching another Blu-ray disk - “Road Warrior” I was greeted with a message that a new update is available, this time it was 2.42. No details available, though I really hope that it will resolve choppy MP4/AVI file playback issue that plagued my Playstation ever since I’ve installed long awaited 2.41.

Other than that I still have to inform the great Internet why I was out of blogging for so long…

I remember the days when I was waiting for new iRiver firmware for my SlimX and Rio Volt hacked to be iRiver iMP-100 before that, it was fun - new features were coming every month. Now SONY is providing me with as much fun bun but now for my Playstation 3 and all of a sudden after finishing watching a DVD I get a notification that Firmware 2.35 is available. Though there is not a word about it on SONY Playstation Network website that I’ve just checked… SURPRISE is in the box - Installing NOW

Update: After installation it did not let me know what new features I can try, thus I assume it was a bug-fix release, still Bravo SONY… PS3 is the best piece of hardware I own

It is just a small statement to support Earth Hour. It is my statement to let governments and people governed by them know that we need to start “thinking Green”. We need to stop waisting our natural resources and use best available technologies to generate our energy. But on a personal level we can also help by recycling, using power efficient products, encourage producers of currently more expensive “green” products by buying only “green”.

Blogs like mine don’t help to solve the problem, they actually make it more acute. Unfortunately, it is a pleasure to have some services available at all times and it is difficult to part from them. But at least we can switch off devices that are not used. For example, even if power supply is just plugged to a power outlet, most probably in this idle mode it sucks a watt or two while the device is completely shut. Even a power supply of your computer can be made more efficient, you just have to ask your supplier of choice be it Dell or Apple. You can use efficient CPUs, like the 45W AMD Athlon 64 X2 or upcoming Intel Atom. You can recycle your old CRT screen and get a small power efficient LCD, or even better buy a lightweight portable laptop and use it as your only computer.

Show them we want to be “Green”.

It has been almost three weeks as AMD has announced the new chipset - 780G and a new power efficient CPU - X2 4850e. Motherboards are available for a couple of weeks already and are quite cheap. I’ve put my eye on this combo as my new server rig (with ASUS M3A78-EMH motherboard that features 6 SATA2 ports - feature that should be standard these days, but it is not). 4850e should be approximately as fast as 4800+ but only at 45W. Great? Isn’t it? But the CPU is nowhere to be found. Is this a paper launch again? Too frustrating…

All I want is a power efficient rig to run Ubuntu 8.04 Server LTS.

April 6, 2008 Update: What a disaster. I want to get AMD CPU first time in a VERY VERY long time and I can’t do it ANYWHERE on the internet one month after it has been announced. I totally miss the point of announcing it at all… It seems Dell is using it already in its business line, but nowhere else. If only there was any Intel based 6 SATA port motherboard I would have dumped AMD idea altogether. Then AMD complains that it can’t occupy its fabs enough… Now I know: it is because CPUs are not available at all, nobody can buy them to require any manufacturing at all. If only there was a cheap G33 based 6 SATA port motherboard except the expensive Supermicro board…..

Today my Sony Playstation 3 told me that an updated is available. The funny part, not a single RSS feed I’m tracking is reporting anything and Firmware itself did not inform me of any new features. A bit of Googling and it appeared that it is just a bug-fix release.

Where is my updated for Blu-Ray Profile 2.0? Where is my improved DivX support? What about other MP4 formats? Just joking - so far PS3 was one of the most impressive purchases I’ve ever made. And delivered more features then I could have ever wished. Slideshow in 1080p alone justifies the cost of the system (in Portrait mode with Face Detection and majestic panning). Thank you Sony, but keep updating it - I love fresh stuff

Wow, what a snowstorm and it is still not over.

Time after time I was cleaning my driveway, just to get it all freshly covered just a couple of hours later. I like the snow, but what would happen when all of it will decide to melt later next week? I’ve seen earlier this year in nearby Kleinburg.

After that I’m horrified of what to expect after THAT MUCH snow. It was so bad that GTA on Saturday had almost 800 car accidents and that’s considering that most people stayed at home! It is still a blizzard outside, with all the snow slowing down by 3am tomorrow. For now prepare for another Bushism - early March time switching ahead that will steal one hour from my sleep for the next little while and will waste a little bit more of my electricity since I’m waking up quite early and will have to light up my house instead of enjoying spring sunshine.

For now a few of the pictures I’ve taken earlier in the day (with more to come tomorrow ).

Snow outside

Backyard door and my BBQ all covered

Backyard through the mosquito net

The full set of pictures will be uploaded to my Flickr account.