Posts Tagged ‘perspective’

Into great depression – What is like to live in the Balkans?

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

I'm so depressed these days that I'm trying to write something decent here but everytime I try I do stop and delete all I have written and start from scratch again.
It's terrible, I believe everyone have this days and they're so dark that even the smallest ray of light is gone somewhere…

The causes for depression are multiple, I know we're entering into the season period and that could be a factor, but truly for a long time I haven't felt that bad and I really cannot find the true cause. It's like hunting the unexplained.
Being a citizen of a countries on the balkans brings a lot of questions which cannot get answered. Why we the Balkan and more specificly most of the Orthodox Christian countries are suffering so badly and economically in constant crisis and recession?
From a material perspective Bulgaria is one of the worst countries one can live in, we the people on the balkans are chronically depressed and it really seems like a downward spiral
We've been gone through so far, when I was a child we were teached in the spirit of communism and a believe in a hard material realities.

Communism has taught us we're all fleshly brothers and we should live in groups and stick to the group, now as the democracy come it's on the contraty, we're being constantly re-taught that we should leave behind the group kind of thinking and all built from communism destroy it all and build the new society… We're told by individualist nations like USA and Western europe that the only thing for the good of a person is to (get an absolute individualistic life and only exist for the greater goodness of each ones self as individuals..

As with everything the Balkans are notable for being a very unordered place. Living here is like living in chaos…
The social security policies here are not working, the jurisdiction is working on behalf of the rich, the police force is seriously disfunctional and easily bribable. Put next to all this shit a high levels of unemployment and a lot of unhappy depressed people crawling around the streets and you get the picture …
As a normal consequence most of the young people have entered a dark ways of alcoholism and hard-core nihillism.
There are high level of people who are oriented into the new dark realities of Metal or underground music.
Each philosophy that is being put in from the west is being adopted here and being multiplied million times and mostly the bad things are being adopted and less rarely the good ones…
It's so mixed up that nobody can explain why it is happening as it is here.
I really am trying hard to convince myself for a years now that it is worthy to live here but the more I live here in Bulgaria the more I see all is getting worser than getting for good.

I wonder for how long it will go this pointless way, we the balkan people are living in ruins literally.

The only light we still have is the Church, but very sadly most people has left behind the faith and prefer to follow the fake American dream than to obey to our old ways and traditions.

Globalisation has entered in the Balkans in a full-force and is destroying our ancient culture and traditions and building the fakeness of the coca-cola culture that most of the people prefer to adore nowdays …

Bulgaria's population is mostly based of old people and we're a dying nation, if a miracle doesn't happen then we definitely will be gone.

What happened during the last week

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

I’ve decided to use my blog in the end. The Last week we were with Habib for some time. He is a nice company we speaked about his Grand Father who did some miracles through the power of 2 Gins.

A lot of people with various diseases were cured with the help of 2 Jins he has power over. P.S. In the Quran Jins are spirits created from fire after God created the Angels due to the quran Jins are spirits which are with free will just like us humans and they could go for good or bad,

From Christian perspective so far as I’m Christian the Christians think Jins for Demons but are they Demons or not only God knows, because his Grand Father did a lot of nice things for the people was praying and fasting a lot and was trying to love everybody, well he was a muslim but I guess God can save everybody through Christ Jesus in his own way.

Then We talked about what the bible the life. Habib explained something very interesting of what the muslim myth says about why people do cough. Myth says that when God created in the beginning everything he put (soul/spirit) when breading to the body of soil, before that the soul was happily living with God in Heaven and the soul is not being conforted by living in a dying body because you know it can hurt, you feel cold stuff like that, so often when a born to human being is being given an Angel from God comes and puts the soul in the body through the nose then locks the entrance to be sure the soul won’t try to go out, and because the soul tries to get out we cough :]].

In Friday night or the Saturdays I can’t exactly we went to mino with Mitko we saw Gosho/Geni there he was drunk this time he did not repeat “on my head” like a parrot, this time the saying was “baba yaga”;]. I’m thinking again about stopping the cigars but we’ll see.

Yesterday I was in Mitko and we was able to run WarCraft 3 under GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6. His brother was extraordinary happy he will be able to play WC3 :]. During the day there was tons of work for me. There were problems with one of our mail servers mail.design.bg.

One of the ValueWeb’s Caching DNSes was down the other was resolving hosts awfully slow. So I read some about djbdns as a caching DNS and installed it on two of the servers on (backup-serv1.design.bg and backup-server2.design.bg). then switched all the NSes our servers in USA use to my new djb caching dnses, I was amazed djbdns is really a nice bit of soft it’s really a fast caching NS. I use it for first time and I really like it from the beginning. I experienced some problems before starting daemontools properly on two of the machines because of the errorno-patch that redhats and fedoras should apply to compile successfully daemontools. I thought our problems with the mail server was mainly because of the slow DNS resolves, but after setting up the new djbdns and configured all the servers to use them still the response of the mail server when there are connects to port 25 was very slow. I was able to isolate the problem in the evening I spoke with a guy (greycat) in irc.freenode.net in #qmail. About my problem and he pointed me to the RBLs I use at my qmail-smtpd run. So using the method of exclusion. Removing all the RBLs and started putting them one by one I discovered one of the RBL Hosts I used was lagging dnsbl.antispam.or.id (maybe due to slow DNS resolves). If you’re using it my advice is not to. When Removed it from my run file all started working perfectly. The last days I’m doing a lot of stuff around the qmail. I loaded some custom spam rules from SARE (SA Rules Emposium) to reduce spam and wrote some my own custom rules due to the spam I receive in my Mailbox.

More and more I realize how hard is to be a good mail server administrator. Oh yes I almost forgot I ran my own qmailmrtg two days ago it graphs nicely lot of very precious info about the mail server’s load, queue, pop3 concurrency etc. etc. and I also ran qsstats nice qmail-scanner statistics grapher program. Because of all the work I missed shool yesterday. I need to read now about this business plan and know more about it I can’t even imagine how I’ll graduate ever :].

Star Trek (2009) – The Future Begins short movie feedback

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Star Trek - The Future Begins 2009 Front Cover and movie review

Yesterday I watched Star Trek (2009) , the movie was recommended to me by a friend as a worthy one to be seen even for people who are not fans of Sci-Fi
I’m a fan of sci-fi but lately I’m not that keen as in the short past. So I thought let’s see if this movie is worthy from the perspective of an ex-sci-fi maniac 😉
I should also say that I was a bit skeptical in the beginning as I’ve never been a big fan ot Star Trek , neither too much impressed by Star Wars

To sum it up the movie is a nice enjoyable one to take up 2 hours on watching good visual effects and human stories. There is an evil guy like with most sci-fi movies. Which prankly is a funny one 😉
The general movie plot is not much, neither its easy to grasp some of the moments of the movie, but this should be part of the cyberpunk part of it I guess.
Generally I enjoyed the movie and I would recommend it to my dear readers to have a look if they’re bored and they want to have 2 hrs of enjoyment 😉

How to build website sitemap (sitemap.xml) in Joomla

Monday, December 20th, 2010

A joomla installation I’m managing needed to have created a sitemap.xml

From a SEO perspective sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz are absolutely necessary for a website to bewell indexed in google.

After some investigation I’ve found out a perfect program that makes generation of sitemap.xml in joomla a piece of cake.

All necessary to be done for the sitemap.xml to be created comes to download and install of JCrawler

What makes JCrawler even better is that it’s open source program.

To install Jcrawler go in the joomla administrator panel:

Extensiosn -> Install/Uninstall

You will see the Install from URL on the bottom, there place the link to the com_jcrawler.zip installation archive, for instance you can place the link of the downloaded copy of com_jcrawler.zip I’ve mirrored on www.pc-freak.net ,by placing it on https://www.pc-freak.net/files/com_jcrawler.zip

The installation will be done in a few seconds and you will hopefully be greated with a Installation Success message.

Last thing to do in order to have the sitemap.xml in your joomla based website generated is to navigate to:

Components -> JCrawler

There a screen will appear where you can customize certain things related to the sitemap.xml generation, I myself used the default options and continued straight to the Start button.

Further on a screen will appear asking you to Submit the newly generated sitemap to; Google, MSN, Ask.com, Moreover and Yahoo , so press the Submit button.
That’s all now your joomla website will be equipped with sitemap.xml, enjoy!

Two wordpress plugins to accelerate wordpress opening times and decrease server load time

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

A Comparison of wordpress webpage responce with and without wp dbcache

A combination of two wordpress caching plugins (Hyper Cache and Db Cachesignificantly improves the access times of a wordpress based blogs and websites.

Installing the two websites has drastically improved my blog opening times, so in my view having the two plugins on every wordpress install out there is a must! 🙂
The plugins installation is straight forward, here is how I installed them.

1. Installing Hyper Cache on WordPress

To install Hyper Cache all I had to do is download and enable the plugin, the plugin doesn’t require any configuration. I always love it when I don’t have to bother with reading configuration options and pondering for some 20 minutes on the plugin features, so in that perspective Hyper Cache in my view is a good alternative to WordPress Super Cache

Besides that WordPress Super Cache was having issues when enabled on few wordpress based websites I manage these days. For comparison Hyper Cache worked just great on all wordpress install I tried the plugin so far.

To install all I had to do is download the plugin unzip and enable it:

a. Download and unzip it

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

b. Enable Hyper Cache plugin

To enable the plugin follow to standard plugin location;

Plugins -> Inactive -> Hyper Cache (Enable)

To enable the plugin follow to standard plugin location;

Plugins -> Inactive -> Hyper Cache (Enable)

 

A  mirror of current version of hyper-cache.zip plugin is here 

2. Installing Wodpress Db Cache

What Db Cache, does it does caching of last queries made to MySQL for specified time, so if the query has to be refetched again from wordpress’s php frontend the queries results are fetched straight for the memory. This decreases the load towards the MySQL server and increases the webpages loading time.

As the plugin page suggests it’s way faster than other html caching-plugins like WP-Cache  or WP Super Cache

However, I think its still slower than using a combination of WP Super Cache’s alternative Hyper Cache  and  Db Cache . Combining this two could rise the webpage opening times according to some statisticonline at best cases up to 830% !! 😉 Let me proceed with how I did the install of  Db Cache .

a. Download and Install Db Cache

 

debian:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/db-cache.0.6.zip

...

debian:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip db-cache.0.6.zip

 

b. Enable the plugin 

 

Plugins -> Inactive -> Db Cache (Enable)

 

c. Make sure the permissions for Db Cache are correct

On Debian to enable Db Cache, the permissions should be changed for Apache to have a read/write permissions to plugin directory, on Debian to fix the permissions I used the commands:

debian:/var/www/blog# chown www-data:www-data wp-content

debian:/var/www/blog# chown -R www-data:www-data wp-content/plugins/db-cache

On other GNU/Linux distributions the above commands (user and group) www-data:www-data, should be set to whatever user/group Apache is running with, on Slackware this would be nobody:nobody, on CentOS and RHEL it would be apache:apache.

Finally to enable Db Cache go to

Settings -> Db Cache -> (Tick Enable) -> Save

I’ve also made a mirror of Db Cache plugin here

Enjoy the speed boost 😉

Little Registry Cleaner (Free Software / Open Source Windows XP Registry Cleaner)

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

Little Registry Cleaner - Free and Open Source Software Windows XP Registry cleaner / Alternative to Registry Booster
Have you ever wondered, if there is a free (open source) software that could fix Windows XP registry irregularities e.g. (obsolete or unwanted items that build up in the registry over time.)?

I did not either until now, however when I had to fix, few Windows XP computers which was not maintained for a long time fixing the Windows registry was necessery to make the sluggerish computers improve their overall stability and performance.

The reasons of the slowness in computers who run for a long time by users who does not have a "computer culture" are obvious.
Windows programs which has incorrectly placed registry records withint the Windows registry database, Programs which on Uninstall / Removal left behind a lot of registry records just to hang around because of impotent (coders), or records created on purpose on program uninstall to intentionally further track the user behavior etc.
Other reasons why Windows registry gots bloated with time, are due to Malware or polymorphic Viruses which load them selves everytime on Windows load using some obscure registry records.

Though I'm not a big proprietary software lover still my job as a system administrator , enforces me to fix some broken Windowses.
I haven't fixed Windows machines for a long time, so my memories on programs that clean up registry are from my young years.

The software, I've used before to fix Windows 2000 / XP Registry was:

1. Registry Booster

From my current perspective of a free software hobbyist / evangelist it was important for me to clean up the Windows PCs with a program that is Free or Open Source Software.
When I'm asked to fix some Windows computer I always do my best to make most of the programs that roll on the PC to be FOSS.

Using FOSS instead of downloading from torrents, some cracked software has multiple benefits.

1. Usually Free Software is more stable and more robust2. FOSS software for Windows usually does not come with Malware / Spyware as many of the cracked proprietary software

3. Free and Open Source Programs are simplistic in interface and way of use

A bit of research if there is a Free (Open Source) Software immediately lead me to a program called Little Registry Cleaner
You can see a screenshot of the program in the beginning of the article, the program is very easy to install and use and uses some .NET framework classes so right before installing it installs .NET library (code).

The use results of Little Registry Cleaner were amazing. Even though it is a free software the program found and fixed more registry problems than its competitor Windows Registry Booster! 😉
 

How to check any filesystem for bad blocks using GNU / Linux or FreeBSD with dd

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Check any filesystem partition for BAD BLOCKS with DD on GNU Linux and FreeBSD

Have you looked for a universal physical check up tool to check up any filesystem type existing on your hard drive partitions?
I did! and was more than happy to just recently find out that the small UNIX program dd is capable to check any file system which is red by the Linux or *BSD kernel.

I’ll give an example, I have few partitions on my laptop computer with linux ext3 filesystem and NTFS partition.
My partitions looks like so:

noah:/home/hipo# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2d92834c
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 721 5786624 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 721 9839 73237024 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 9839 19457 77263200 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9839 12474 21167968+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 12474 16407 31593208+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 16407 16650 1950448+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 16650 19457 22551448+ 83 Linux

For all those unfamiliar with dddd – convert and copy a file this tiny program is capable of copying data from (if) input file to an output file as in UNIX , the basic philosophy is that everything is a file partitions themselves are also files.
The most common use of dd is to make image copies of a partition with any type of filesystem on it and move it to another system
Looking from a Windows user perspective dd is the command line Norton Ghost equivalent for Linux and BSD systems.
The classic way dd is used to copy let’s say my /dev/sda1 partition to another hard drive /dev/hdc1 is by cmds:

noah:/home/hipo# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/hdc1 bs=16065b

Even though the basic use of dd is to copy files, its flexibility allows a “trick” through which dd can be used to check any partition readable by the operating system kernel for bad blocks

In order to check any of the partitions listed, let’s say the one listed with filesystem HPFS/NTFS on /dev/sda2 using dd

noah:/home/hipo# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1M

As you can see the of (output file) for dd is set to /dev/null in order to prevent dd to write out any output red by /dev/sda2 partition. bs=1M instructs dd to read from /dev/sda2 by chunks of 1 Megabyte in order to accelerate the speed of checking the whole drive.
Decreasing the bs=1M to less will take more time but will make the bad block checking be more precise.
Anyhow in most cases bs of 1 Megabyte will be a good value.

After some minutes (depending on the partition size), dd if, of operations outputs a statistics informing on how dd operations went.
Hence ff some of the blocks on the partition failed to be red by dd this will be shown in the final stats on its operation completion.
The drive, I’m checking does not have any bad blocks and dd statistics for my checked partition does not show any hard drive bad block problems:

71520+1 records in
71520+1 records out
74994712576 bytes (75 GB) copied, 1964.75 s, 38.2 MB/s

The statistics is quite self explanatory my partition of s size 75 GB was scanned for 1964 seconds roughly 32 minutes 46 seconds. The number of records red and written are 71520+1 e.g. (records in / records out). This means that all the records were properly red and wrote to /dev/null and therefore no BAD blocks on my NTFS partition 😉

Burj Al Arab, Towers of the Arabs and my bathing in Arab Sea

Saturday, September 17th, 2011

Burj Al Arab and Dubai shoe pciture

Burj Al Arab is probably the symbol of Dubai and is the 4th tallest hotel in the world as well as 5 star hotel.
The hotel is a majestic peace of modern architecture and is built on artificially made island near Jumeirah beach where the aparment where I sojourn in Dubai is situated ;).

I saw Burj Al Arab hotel building from some distance and it looks really majestic too bad I would not have the time to go closer to it as I would be going on a Safari in the desert. That’s right, they organize a Safari in the desert here with a dinner, they let you ride a camel and even have a belly dancers.
I’m very excited on going to the Safari, as I love Camels and I’ve never been in the wild desert 😉 Thanks God for letting my eyes see this things.
I’ve also tested the Beach here for a second time and the experience is way inferior if compared to any of the Black Sea Resorts we have in Bulgaria and possibly in many locations in Europe.
The Sun here is too strong, so its not a good idea to stay exposed to the sun for more than an hour, also the sea is too salty so if your eyes are directly exposede to water its a bit painful for the eyes.
Besides that the sea water is really too warm so it feels a bit like entering in soup stew. Going for a swim in Arabian sea does give you a hot bath after the excessive sun and does not cool you.
I found it interesting the Arab woman bath up in Sea here in UAE with a special long swimming suit (burkas) as they’re called in Arabic.
Here is a picture I’ve found online two Arab woman bathing in sea in Burkas.
Arab woman swimming in Burkas in Arab Sea, United Arab Emirates

Arab Woman Swimming in Burkas in Arab Sea the UAE

By the way the Arab woman look very beautiful wearing these black traditional dress (burka). Also in my view from Christian perspective it’s very righteous kind of think as covering the body and hiding the face reduces the sexual associations one does when seeing a woman and hence should be good from a spiritual perspective.<br><br>However wearing this burkas in the background of all this internationaliazation looks a bit strange. Anyways its worthy for admiration that they were able to keep this pious tradition for so many years, so instead of mocking the Arabs for asking their wifes to wear the burkas I think its we better learn from them and suggest our european woman to be a bit less sexually opened and more pious ;)<br></p>

A few words on Pseudo Christian Spirituality. A false “Spiritual” Movies and Books which we as Christians should Fully Avoid

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Heresies and How to Avoid them

We live in the age of the boom of sects, false prophets and false “messiahs”. Today it’s common that the bookstores are filled in with all kind of occult literature and magic teaching literature, agnostic books, horoscopes and all kind of empty modern day philosophy books which teaches evil, the so called “Get rich for a day”, “The secrets of success”, “How to take advantage over the others”, “How to be succesful”, “NLP for your success”, “How to enter into business”, “How to become rich quickly” etc. are e very short list of all the non-sense literature one can meet on the books market.

Along with the books we are being offered all kind of movies and philosophies “teaching us” about the life meanings, trying to explain the meaning of life and the universe and the meaning of each self as a human being.

From Christian perspective, most of this movies and books which plead to contain “a deeper life meaning” are empty of any real pure spiritual contents but are simply a mixture of various religious beliefs belonging to different group of worldy faiths and mostly targets to make the authors of the story or screen play rich.

This movies are not being inspired by God – The All Holy Trinity and they reject Christ as a founding stone on which to stand over, it’s clear that they contain an anti-christian content and every truly devoted Christian should try to abstain from watching them.

To name just a few of asuch a movies which are ecumenical (preach for unification of world religions) and from Orthodox Christian perspective are anti-christian in essence:

  • What the Bleep Do we Know – Down The Rabbit Hole
  • The Great Secret of Water
  • The Secret
  • The Fountain

We as Christians should try not watch this movie or praise them as something which confirms our faith, as they don’t confirm our faith in Christ but they try to spread up a “sick spirituality” and insane ideas.
This is just a small list of movies I have encountered which has influenced my spiritual health in a really negative way, therefore I hope if you’re a Christian you will take my warning and CHOOSE NOT TO WATCH THESE MOVIES!.
The reason for choosing not to watch this movies would be purely to prevent yourself from experiencing a spiritual (soul) damages by exposing yourself to the heretical teachings and ideas of the aforementioned ones.

Also try to get astray from all the genres of boks which I have mentioned above which try to teach you how to become sucessful in life, I have personally read a book I’m not sure about the exact name but it was similar to:

  • “The subsconscious could do everything / (Psyche can achieve everything) / The power of Mind etc.”

The book teaches the false idea that with our subconscrious mind we built our own current realities and promotes “positive thinking” as a way to attract wealth, personal success and happiness to yourself.

You can see yourself that this is insane not only from a Christian perspective but even for any rational person.

The idea of this false teachings is to convince you that man is undeveloped god and that we are masters of our own reality.

Therefore it is in direct contrast with even basic Christian beliefs, we Christians do belief that our reality and existence is completely in God’s hands and nothing could happen without God to allow it to happen.
Therefore from a Christian perspective if you, “during the whole day think about how you will get rich and how you will have millions in a bank account” as many of the up-mentioned devilish movies and books teaches, nothing will happen if God does not allow it.

We’re clearly said and taught from the Holy Bible and the Livings of the saints that all our life and daily goods we attain through our life are given by mercy, the saints has taught us that our lives and all we’re and possess are from God for God and through God! To whom be glory now and forever and ever! Amen.

Watch out for this heretical false doctrines which might separate you from Christ and our mother the Orthodox Church. The appearance of all this kind heretical literature and movies is in accordance to the prophecies by our Lord Jesus Christ who said that in the last days there will be many wolves in sheeps clothes, who will deceive and be deceived.

Let we as an Orthodox Christians be careful about what kind of books we read and keep our selves away from these and the similar kind of poisonous teachings.

Let we be fully delivered by God’s grace from being exposed to this kind of faith tempting books by the Holy Prayers of The Theotokos and all the Saints. Amen