Posts Tagged ‘fun’

Here I’m :)

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

Haven’t blogged for some time so I’m going to write down few lines. Today I passed succesfully the Cisco CCNA2 Final Exam and the CCNA2 Voucher exam thanks to God :). The Voucher exam grants everybody who passed succesfully a discount of the price of the CCNA Certification exam, whi ch is pretty cool. To be honest I cheated at the 2 tests otherwise I won’t have passed but I’m really busy this days and I’m a bit of tired so this was the only option. I also made my CCNA2 (9,10,11) tests for which I used the cisco answers page :). CCNA2 The Final Exam and the Voucher wasn’t included in the blogspot cisco answers so I googled around but thanksfully I found the answers on a website in the net. This days I had a lot of fun and saw a lot of old friends (some of them studying others working in Sofia). It’s the summers holiday period in which tons of friends who are in other cities are back in Dobrich so I was able to spend nice time with a lot of them. This are ppl like: hellpain, nomen, mariana (one of my ex-girlfriend). At Wednesday I and Nomen went to the beach at Balchik, we had great fun there. We met together in front of the place we call “The Young House” at 7:30, at 8:30 we were already travelling to Balchik and in 9:35 we were on the beach. We stayed there until 12:30. Vlado and Mitko tried to learn me to be able to relax on my on back while in the water I almost did it but still I need some more tries until I’m able to make it the right way. At 13:00 we were back in Dobrich and we went to an open restaurant “Seasons”. I ate vegetarenian pizza and Vlado ate a meal called “English Breakfast”. “English Breakfast”. Right after that at 14:00 I went to the regional Red Cross building, because I had to get a course on “First Aid”, it’s required to have that course passed until you’re able to apply for a driving license after you complete both the theoretical exam and the practice exam. My driving practice exam would be at Wednesday at 9:00 to be honest I’m not still driving well and my driving course is almost over. My only hope for passing it in the Lord, only if he support me and guide me during the exam I’ll be able to pass. The same night I went out with Shanar and we later met hellpain and Alex. We had nice discussions in the city park until somewhere around 11:30. When we were going back home I met Mariana and I proposed her to have a walk together she accepted and we negotiated to meet around 30 minutes later. We spend 4 hours with her talking about stuff and drinking beer. I should say she is one of the only girls I’m able to speak for hours and still feel good and confortable. The center of our talks were mainly God the Bible and in particular my belief in Christ Jesus as Lord and Saviour. At Friday morning I had driving courses early at the morning from 8:00 o’clock, later I went to Varna with my father because I had to pick up one bag I forgot the last time when I was in Varna, Thanks God we didn’t crashed. On our way to Varna there was a very dangerous situation in which the chances to crash was pretty big but thanksfully to God’s protection and kindness we didn’t. Later when we came back in Dobrich I went to the police office to check if international passport is ready. Thanksfully it was and now I have the “red passport” home and ready :). I called to Mariana to great her because it was the great christian feast, we at the Orthodox Church believe that at that day the Eartly Mother of our Lord Jesus has resurrected in the 3rd day and ascended to heaven just like our Lord! We call that celebrity “The Maryam’s day”. Everybody who is named after Mary’s name is also celebrating this great feast. We decided to meet at night time at 11:30 and have walk. Like I said earlier I really enjoy Mariana’s company. Unfortunately an hour later we met Bino so we wasn’t able to talk much about stuff with Mariana. Bino is pretty cool guy but sometimes his company is pretty annoying :). Later I went home and after a minute of prayer I went to bed. On August 22 I’m traveling to the Netherlands to continue my studies at the HRQM stream, sometimes I feel a sort of preliminary homesickness but I believe this decision is right and it’s God’s souvereign plan for my life. Well as Bugs Bunny (my favour cartoon character) says that’s all folks!END—–

Troubled Day

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

It was a day full of waiting. The Admin/tech support personel in sofia is a real pain in the ass. I waited half a day for a simple debian base install. The guy installed debian over already installed freebsd on a server we sent destined for colocation in evolink. The machine is great dual 3ghz Xeon with 3 x 70 gb SCSI discs. In 4:00 o’clock I received a mail with username and password of the server, but the system was unaccessible for 1 more hour. I got really nervous I received tons of calls from the boss, our project Manager, Vladi the PHP programmer. I logged to the server in 5:00 and configured apache with mysql upto 10:00 o’clock then did a little walk with nomen in the central park and drinked one beer per capita. I had to meet Static and Amri in 6:00 o’clock but I was busy configuring the new rack so I missed a great oportunity to have fun with old friends. ORDER has to come back to Bulgaria, today or even he maybe is already in Varna. I’m quite impatient to see him! In the afternoon I went to some spiritual downfalls but now Thanks to God I’m alive and well. The pozvanete site already points to the new rack so I hope the machine would be able to serve it’s goal perfect. This will be made clear in the morning. Soon I’m going to bed. Glory be to God for fulfilling me with his love and sustaining my life and keeping me from evil! END—–

Management Games and Theathre Sports with Joop Vinke

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Yesterday and today we had Management Games and Theathre Games with Joop Vinke.At the management game we play a sort of Human Resources Management game. All the students are devided into groups and we play a simulator game. We had to manage a company. First we setup our 2 year goals and then we play the game on quarters (6 quarters). Every quarter we have to made some managerial decisions (invest money into different stuff, hire personnel, promote ppl etc.).

Basicly the company consists of 660 employees, there are 5 levels in the company starting from 1 where there is unqualified specialists and 5 which are the top management.

When we make our choices then all this data is inputed into a computer which gives us some feedback which helps us in taking the decisions for the next quarter. At the meantime Vinke organizes fun games to entertain us and make us feel comfortable with him and through this games he tries to show us basic concepts in business. The last two days I really enjoyed.

Today the game that impressed me the most was called

“The Werewolves from Wackedan”. Basicly it’s a strategic game with roles. In it you’ve got a bunch of ppl who play different roles, 3 of them are werewolves, others are citizens others are ppl who have special abilities to foresee who are the werewolves.

We had cards in front of us turned back to prevent others except us to see the cards. Some of the cards are citizens and ppl who belong to the citizens other 3 are werewolves.

Every night the werewolf kills a person (by selecting somebody from the crowd, when they sleep), because the werewolves are out at night when everybody sleeps. At the morning citizens awake and one of their friends is dead so they try to revenge by pointing someone to be killed (it may be a citizen again it may be a werewolf).

At the end only werewolves or citizens should servive 🙂 It was a big fun today to play this simple game. At the end of the day at 18:00 we had a session of the so called Theathre/Games. Theathre Games include different entertaining games which are designed to improve our communication skills and teach us to act like an actors plus they are pretty entertaining 🙂 That’s all thanks to God everything seems to run smoothly around my life. Except my health I’m still having some health issues although I can say I have an improvement I am not still healed and I still drink herbs.

At 20:00 I was out with Narf and we went to the fountain a little later Kimmo and Yavor joined us and we spend some time their. Well that’s most of the day at night I went to my grandma just to see how she is doing and now I write this post tomorrow the Management Game continues at 09:00. So probably after few minutes I’ll go for the night prayers and then I’ll go to sleep. END—–

How to add multi language support to wordpress with qTranslate

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

QTRanslate WordPress Language Translate Screenshot 1

Lately, I have to deal with some wordpress based installs in big part of my working time. One of the wordpress sites needed to have added a multi language support.

My first research in Google pointed me to WPML Multilingual CMS The WordPress Multilingual Plugin
WPML Multilingual CMS looks nice and easy to use but unfortunately its paid, the company couldn’t afford to pay for the plugin so I looked forward online for a free alternative and stumbled upon QTranslate

QTranslate is free and very easy to install. Its installed the wordpress classic way and the installation went smoothly, e.g.:

1. Download and unzip QTranslate

# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/qtranslate.2.5.24.zip
...
/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip qtranslate.2.5.24.zip
...

Just for fun and in case the plugin disappears in future, a mirror of Qtranslate 2.5.24 is found here

2. Enable QTranslate from wordpress admin

Plugins -> Inactive -> qTranslate (Activate)

After activating the plugin, there is a Settings button from which qTranslate‘s various plugin parameteres can be tuned.

qTranslate WordPress translate screenshot 2

In my case my site had to support both English and Arabic, so from the settings I added support for Arabic translation to the wordpress install.

Adding Arabic is done in the following way:

a. From the Language Management (qTranslate Configuration) from the Languages menu and the Languages (Add Languages) I had to choose a language code (in my case a language code of ar – for Arabic). Next I had to choose the Arabic flag from the follow up flag list.

In next text box Name , again I had to fill Arabic, for Locale en_US.UTF-8
The following Date Format and Time Format text boxes are optional so I left them blank.
To complete the process of adding the Arabic as a new language wordpress should support I pressed the Add Language button and the Arabic got added as a second language.

Afterwards the Arabic was added as second language, on the bottom of the left wordpress menu pane a button allowing a switch between English, Arabic appeared (see below screenshot):

MultiLingual WordPress with qTranslate

Finally to make Arabic appear as a second language of choice on the website I added it as a Widget in the Widgets menu from the AWidgets menu:

Appearance -> Widgets

In widgets I added qTranslate Language Chooser to the Sidebar without putting any kind of Title for qtranslate widget .
I found it most helpful to choose the Text and Image as an option on how to display the Language switching in the wp.

Geki2 and Geki3 a Xenon 2 Megablast like games for GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

Do you remember the old arcade spaceship shooter Xenon 2 Megablast? I do 😉 For all those who are too young to remember, here are two screenshots:

Xenon2 Main game Screen PC DOS ver

Xenon 2 megablast PC DOS level screenshot

Even though Xenon 2 Megablast original can now be played using dosbox DOS emulator. Its interesting to mention I've found two Linux games that more or less can be qualitified to resemble Xenon 2.
The games are Native Free Software games and existing in package repositories of most Linux distributions and *BSD port trees.

Geki 2 and Geki 3 are of a less quality to Xenon but still, the game experience is nice and is among the Arcade shooter games to bring you fun in the boring days if you're on GNU / Linux or FreeBSD Free OS platforms.

Installing Geki2 and Geki3 on Debian and Ubuntu Linux is standard with apt:

debian:~# apt-get install geki2 geki3
...

On Debian GNU / Linux , after installed the games would not create GNOME Applications -> Games -> game startup shortcuts, however the game startups will get added in GNOME Applications Menu under:

Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Geki 2
and
Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Geki 3

The games can be launched also manually with commands:

geki2

Geki 2 Linux Xenon 2 like game Main Menu

or

geki3
Geki3 gameplay screenshot Debian Linux

Geki 2 is a way closer to Xenon 2 as it has similar look and feel and the same vertical direction the spaceship is navigated.
In Geki 3 still the shoot 'em' up spaceship like arcade is present, however instead of penguin you have to fly a flying penguin, as well as the spaceship move direction is horizontal.

 Both the games have the same sound and music effects. The game music and effects are not of top quality but are not bad. In general  the games surely gives some of the arcade atmosphere.

Geki 2 GNU Linux Xenon 2 like vertical shooter arcade
Geki 2 Xenon 2 Megablast like on Debian Linux

In the tradition of the arcade games at the end of each level in both games you face the Level Boss Enemy, you should destroy.

Geki3 Level boss Debian Linux Screenshot
As you can see in below's screenshot the overall graphics of GEKI 3 is poorer while compared to GEKI 2

still GEKI 2 gampley is fun and addictive and I would say not less enjoyable than GEKI 2.
 At times I even think that Geki 3 is more fun because it is more dynamic.

 Maybe other reason, why I enjoyed more Geki 3 is also the fact that Geki 2 is a way harder to play. Dying only 3 times in the game you get  GAME OVER  and the next game you're started from the beginning of the same level you died in …

Geki2 Linux different shooting Screenshot

 Something really annoying that affects both the games; there is no option to play them in Fullscreen mode! ARGH!

Game controls for Geki2 and Geki3 are identical as follows:

Up - Arrow up key
Down - Down arrow key
Right - Right arrow key
left - Left arrow key
Shoot - z or Space
Pause - s

Geki2 and Geki3 are fun and can kill some time, but definitely aren't that (professional) as other spaceship shoot'em'up arcades for Linux and BSD. Games like Starfighter , Critical Mass or  powermanga .
 Lest that they are two worthy to install and play on your Free Software OS.

Abe’s Amazing Adventure, A Dangerous Dave 2 like GNU Linux / FreeBSD Arcade Game substitute

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Abe's Amazing Adventure Game menu screenshot, A Dangerous Dave like Linux arcade game
While looking over the installable packages in System -> Administration -> Software Center on my my Debian powered notebook, I’ve accidently rolled over a game called Abe’s Amazing Adventure , as a big oldschool arcade game fan, I’ve immediately clicked on Install being impatient to see the overall game atmosphere and gameplay as well as storyline.

Abe’s Amazing Adventure is available under the debian package name abe and can be installed by issuing:

debian:~# apt-get install abe I was pleasently surprised to find out the gameplay and the overall game feels like the golden classical arcade game Dangerous Dave

For youngsters who never played the amazing absolute killing arcade ! as well as for people who feel nostalgic about Dangerous Dave 2 here is a nice gameplay screenshot:

Dangerous Dave 2 screenshot

Here is also a screenshot of Abe’s Amazing Adventure gameplay:

Abes Amazing Adventure Dangerous Dave like Linux / BSD Arcade Game like screenshot

You can see the great resemblense between the two games even by the screenshot; In both games you have to collect keys to open doors and diamonds which gives you points. Of course there are some differences as you can see Abe’s Amazing Adventure ‘s graphics has some additional items like Baloons with which your main character can fly over distances (for a limited time). There is also more diversity in the enemy types you face on the road to unlock the different doors. The game has also a red stars which while taken saves the game so if you quit the game on next game load up starting the game automatically starts you from the last save point.

Abes Amazing Adventure Star gameplay Screenshot on Debian

The ( 6 ) baloons seen in the screenshot on the left upper corner can be used occasionally to fly some distance by pressing Enter .
There are health recovery kits one can take to recover, some health damaged by hitting obstacles on the way.
The game story is short but entertaining, just like the general game feel:

Abes amazing adventure game storyThe game music is relaxing and more or less in the spirit of arcade games, the keyboard interactivety is pretty good as well.One thing I see can be improved to make the game better are the graphics, they’re a bit childish and too cubical, where sometimes some more general characters and obstacles animation will give the game a better look. Anyways for the year 2003 and for a free software arcade the game is not bad. For children and growing kids the game is just perfect, even for big kids like me its good to spend an hour of jump and run fun 😉