Dell D620 pc-speaker

If you use this laptop, you probably wonder how to stop the freaking thing - look a bit further for more info:

Windows - Turn Off the PC-Speaker (Annoyances.org) Here you can read how it was a bug in the motherboard :) ... I'd recommend the power-toy solution.

Gentoo Linux - Turn Off the PC-Speaker (Gentoo-wiki) or just "modprobe -r pcspkr" :)

Sabayon

Finally desktop linux is a reality :) Looks better than Vista (esp. with accelerated desktop) , the miniEdition installs in half an hour, default kde install has almost everything out of the box (maybe katapult should be added). KNetworkManager makes wired/wireless setup a breeze and most importantly - it's a Gentoo :)

some notes though:
if you need Open Office, check '/etc/make.conf' (you should anyway), unless you want support for all those languages :)

InfoQ: In-process Interoperability

InfoQ: In-process Interoperability
I very nice way to avoid the stupid web services and talk to Java via JMS directly.

Science Toys

Science Toys
Great stuff! If you have a kid... or you are a kid - enjoy!
My parents would have been very happy, if they had all this stuff to keep me away from my own experiments. But I can proudly say that my rockets were much better than the simple matchstick rocket. I found that a certain plastic used for drawing tools made superb rocket fuel. And it also made a huge amount of smoke :)

Just realised...

... that there are 7 nations at the office - the Bulgarians, (Where's my software dude? - Don't know, ask the Bulgarians) , Islander, Australian, Indian, Polish, South African, and of course the Irish. Cool :)

Welcome to the dark side...

I finally succumbed to the dark side of Ruby and Rails. I was sure I wouldn't like something generating that much hype, but after all you are most likely going to love the freakish thing. Feels like the first time I used IDEA, it does so much for you and instead of you, that you have so much more time to just jump around and clap hands and yell like a monkey :)
All is not perfect at the dark side though - i18n, 2pc, proper orm ... there is the routing bug fiasco - patched twice ??!! But that stupid bug was the last straw to fuel my interest and finally learn about RoR.
Some call it a toy language, but it surely is worthy of replacing all the php out there... and quite a lot of the java too!

Don't trust service men

Finally my laptop warranty expired and, after spending some time with google to find the service guide, I opened the damn thing. It's been overheating (again), so I thought it's time to do the fan cleaning... Turned out the fan and radiator are quite clean, the problem was that some dumb moron from the "authorised" service didn't put thermal paste between the cpu and the heatsink!!! This must've happened the last time I got it cleaned in the service (and they charge a lot for it). When they returned it to me, the fan wasn't working at all - they just forgot to reconnect it.

High Fidelity

Having watched the film (one of my top 5 films of all time :)), I instantly bought the book, the moment I saw it. Just finished reading it and it's the best thing I've read in a long time. Sometimes I had the feeling that I wrote those words. Certainly I don't have that talant to express myself, but it was as if I was reading my own thoughts. Now I'm afraid to read the other books by Nick Hornby - they just can't be that good. Damn, I thought that noone wrote like this and hoped to become such a writer one day, but that's the end of my dream :)

P.S. If you haven't watched the film - do it, and then read the book. A suitable age is required to appreciate them though. If you've been through a lot in your life - 25+ should be enough.