Alexey Solofnenko blog

Technorati Profile

I have been playing with my new VOIP phone for some time now. I bought Linksys PAP2-NA and opened an account with a Canadian firm. Surprisingly I found out that Canadian dollar is now more expensive than American. Not much to warrant looking for another company. Of cause it did not work out of the box - I had to always use long distance numbers even for my zone and incoming calls were always busy. After contacting my provider I unchecked "Send DID Prefix" option in my DID and it worked! I still need to iron out problems with NAT before disconnecting my normal phone - incoming calls do not always connect. After that I will tell my TelCo bye-bye.

Today I visited my photos on Panoramio. Some photos became popular, some others (usually the photos that were not selected for Google Earth) stopped being popular. Surprisingly the photo I am not proud of is the most popular - a road in Long Beach. The only explanation I can think is that nobody else made a photo of this uninteresting street next to the Aquarium. As usual, location is the more important than the quality of the photo itself.

I have watched a film from "Digging for the Truth" serial about God's Gold. The film was about a possible path that the Second Temple treasures and the path ended in Saint Theodosius monastery. The film crew was denied visiting the monastery, so I decided to look at it in Google Maps. Well, it was not easy to find. The map in the film was not very detailed. Fortunately I was able to find monastery air photos and start looking for similar features on satellite's photos. Just by luck, I was able to find it: map . The images are not very detailed, but, at least, I found it and when eventually the maps are updated, we can see better what is behind the walls.

Yesterday I was driving home late. I entered a highway, sped up and lane by line went to the third lane from the left. I was driving slightly faster than traffic and on the left lane another car was driving with about the same speed. Few moments later I caught up with the traffic in front of me and slowed down, the car on the left passed me and was stopped by CHP. I do not know for how long he followed us. I guess it was a tough decision which car to stop, but, my experience tells me, that usually cars in the "fast" lane get stopped. I will be more careful controlling driving speed when there is not a lot of traffic.

Yesterday I was driving to work when it was raining. As usual the traffic was hard before 24 split and after that it was a fast drive. Surprisingly two cars passed me on a carpool lane with passengers sun shades open. Of cause there was no passenger in both vehicles. I still do not know what surprised me most - using sun shades during a rain or breaking a carpool law when normal traffic is going at a speed limit. I guess the second - my wife often uses a mirror on the sun shade to put her lipstick while I am driving - it is just efficient usage of a time.

I have given a friend a CD with OpenSuSE 10.3 GNOME and warned her to unselect option to use online repositories. She had to back few files from the computer up, so I left her to do the work. She backed everything up, booted from the CD, used default settings, installed default packages, ... and after reboot the system said - "No system on drive". I have never seen it after Linux installation. I do not understand, how it is possible. There is a single hard drive - no chance to screw the system up. Unless... Compaq liked putting a service partition on the hard drive and maybe Linux installer removed it and the computer cannot boot any more. Or maybe the CD was not good - this was the third attempt to burn it and there were problems with the first two. I will try reinstalling the system with the second CD - only one unessential RPM could not be validated on it. I hope it will fix the problem. So much for "easy Linux installation". People noticed that software is just afraid of me to misbehave - bugs disappear when I come to watch them happening.

Today I updated my resume with GrandCentral phone number. The number now calls my cell, my home, and my business number. I even installed GizmoProject client, but GC wants me use a real phone number with it. I do not understand the reason for it. There are free numbers, but I still needed a credit card and I did not want to give any. Maybe I will generate a temporary number just for GizmoProject.

Yesterday I tested new number and it worked great. First time my wife was surprised by the prompt she heard after peeking the phone - GC told that the caller is unknown and whether she wanted to answer the call, send to voice mail or to ignore. While she was thinking, VoiceMail activated. Next time she will be prepared.

Yesterday my friend showed me a site he has been working for a while. It is DivorceFormsPro. The idea is sound - the service allows saving a lot of money on preparing divorce documents for courts. There is a small flat fee and no time limit. At home over internet at any pace one can create documents acceptable by divorce courts. The site helps all the way from preparing to filing and everything in between. DivorceFormsPro even provides free paralegal review. Looking at the rates lawyers ask just for talking with them, this site is a clear choice in most situations. I hope nobody I know will need it, but for those that will, I recommend this site.

Long time ago I setup my blog trackback URLs with a prefix containing a backslash. On UNIX file systems backslash is a normal character and not all spammer scripts can handle it. (I remember confusion when I did the same in a virtual file system in one of our products - /home/DOMAIN\user - was just two directories down under root folder, but people expected three and wondered how it worked). Some of the spammer scripts double escape back slash, others just omit it, thinking that the following forward slash is escaped. Of cause these are just bugs in their scripts and they will fix them when it becomes important. I recently fixed a similar bug in my project, but I will tell about it later.