Aigarius Blog (Posts about UK)

Censorship is unacceptable

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:12:26 GMT

UK ISPs erect "Great Firewall of Britain" to censor Wikipedia

I used to use Eclipse in UK and recommended it to others, but they are now involved in this censorship scandal. Unacceptable.

Almost a master

Aigars Mahinovs — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 10:07:47 GMT

On Wednesday I had a viva for my Master by Research thesis on "Text classification by quality". After a 15 minute presentation and almost two hours of questions from two of my examiners, I was told that I will receive my Masters degree (after minor corrections to the thesis). It is a great relief and a great reason to celebrate!

In order of celebration I will embrace consumerism and get me two things: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade expansion and a cat. Next week I will be going around animal shelters and cat owners in Riga in a search for a 1-2 months old black, male kitten. It has been my dream to have a cat again since my last cat died of old age 3 years ago. Unfortunately I lived in dormitories where they did not allow pets or in UK. But now, I can finally get one. I am very exited about that :)

Debconf7 photos

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:06:20 GMT

My blog server has been down ever since I left off to Edinburgh for the 7th Debian conference. Since then I have been busy taking photos of everything and everyone here AND I am not alone in that. Enjoy!

Debconf - fun and motivation (and pictures)

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:05:11 GMT

Debconf is coming. And I fully agree with Amaya regarding the much needed battery recharge that brings to people (and me in particular.
And to the contrary to the information two posts ago, thanks to getting an unexpected side income from the nice folks of FFII, I did manage to buy myself a Canon 400D instead of my old camera that was stolen from me recently. Unfortunately, I do not earn well enough to also buy a good lens, so I will have to document this Debconf with the kit lens :P. If you want something better, then I beg you to lend me some better Canon (EF or EF-S) lens for the time of the Debconf. Canon EF 17-40 f/4 L (like the one that I took the last years group photos) would really be great! :D
This year I am thinking of doing both the group photo and the mugshots. Any other ideas for the paparazzi? :)

I'm blue!

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:11:11 GMT

In the last day of Lastguru's visit, I convinced him to go to The Blue Man group performance in the New London Theatre. The performance was just great - a combination of rhythmic music, dramatic light and a hilarious comedy show. Just wonderful!
There was a lot of classic Blue Man moments - weird looks, colour-splashing drums, rock concert movements, textual and emotional sketches with the audience and the great "You Are LATE!" intermission. It really was 100 minutes of pure fun.
And best of all, on the exit I was given a special ticket with which I can get back in again for free if I bring a friend - yay!

Game On!

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 01:11:20 GMT

For the last couple weeks I have been concentrating on things related to my studies and on some events related to it. I posted pictures from these events on my Flickr photostream: a colleague from the institute finished his PhD and we had a goodbye dinner, my supervisor invited me to his son's first birthday party. Also my friends Bunja and lastguru came to UK. With one I took photos of a night playground and squirrels and with other one some photos of the Eye and Babbage's brain.

However the main theme of this post is the Game On! exhibition in the London's Science Museum. They have the best games playable there starting with the classic Pong, Lara Croft, Bomberman, Mortal Combat and up to Halo 2 on XBox 360. Even my non-gamer friend lastguru found a thing to drool upon - his childhood obsession: Elite.

Update: Almost forgot to mention - the exhibition is great: it shows the evolution of gaming and allows to experience the most important games again and it also brings a huge amount of joy to anyone who has ever played these games before - the return to childhood is imminent. I never expected that something as simple as the original Pong can be so exciting in a good company. Very recommended!

Finally back

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:10:37 GMT

All the time since the Debian I18N conference in Extremadura I was moving around, staying in temporary places having temporary accesses to restricted Internet connections. Finally yesterday I got everything back - a permanent place to stay and a good permanent and unrestricted Internet connection there. Now I just need to compensate for the productivity loss that it is causing me :)

P.S. There have been two bugfix releases of SBackup since my last blog post about it - bugs such as "having no regexes skips all files" and "always do incremental upgrades because we can not count" are fixed. Priority of SBackup process is reduced and configuration files are managed explicitly.

I called it!

Aigars Mahinovs — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 23:08:05 GMT

Ryanair finally sued the UK government for 3 million pounds for the air traffic disruptions, just like I called it!
Now they only need to team up with British Airways (who demand their money from goverment's BAA) and all the other affected airlines, so that the court doesn't just dismiss it right away. Also it would be nice if Ryanair rallied the people to halp them - demonstration in front of the courthouse and bumper stickers saying "Keep Britain Flying!" and "Keep US Flying!" (along with t-shirts, umbrellas and sports style water bottles) would also help to rally public support.

Dell Next Day service - 10.5 days turnaround

Aigars Mahinovs — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:08:05 GMT

I previously mentioned that my brand new Dell Inspiron XPS m1710 notebook broke down just a few weeks after I got it.

It took from Wednesday to Friday to arrange for pick-up n the notebook.

The DHL guy came to my house on Monday morning and picked my laptop up. He said that the official line on these is that I will get it back in a week, but usually they get them back in a couple of days.

On Tuesday I received an SMS saying that my laptop has arrived to repair centre and then another saying that it has proceeded to repair. Nothing happened on Wednesday but on Thursday I received another SMS, again saying that it proceeded to repair. On Friday I finally called back on the XPS support line and got an answer that my laptop is fixed and currently is being tested and that I will most probably get it back on Monday as Dell does not use the delivery option to deliver on Saturdays.

And finally today at 11.00 in the morning a DHL courier knocked on my door with my notebook in hand. There was a note in the package saying that the CPU has been replaced.

All in all - 10.5 days from first report until the laptop is fixed. I assume that is the worst case scenario. The techs on the phone were competent, but did not have the information about what I went trough in their online diagnostics wizard and did not have the information about emails that I sent them. One tech answered me on the phone, but another answered my email. There could be more integration there. Also I could not find any way to see more details about the progress of the repairs on Dell website - that should be easy to provide.

In an ideal world, in cases when it is clear that the problem is in hardware, but not in the hard drive, it would be great if Dell could provide a temporary replacement laptop for the time of repair and put the hard drive of my existing laptop into the temporary replacement notebook, so that I an contiue working like nothing happened. It might not be the same spec, but it must be easy to swap the hard drive in, so I suppose that means that the same model is required.

Note: just as I was starting to write this post, a Dell Customer Advocate commented on my previous blog post. They sure deserve some plus points for that :)

Security costs? You pay!

Aigars Mahinovs — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:08:08 GMT

Apparently the government agencies in UK that are managing the current security craze have little to no idea how much their super-paranoid security policies acctualy cost. It appears that direct losses from one day of air traffic chaos costs airlines 175 million pounds.

Everyone who has their flight delayed for more then an hour for whatever reason need simply to sue the airlines and further the UK government according the EU regulations. Each person delayed for just 4 hours can claim as much as 600 euros of compensations. I wonder what compensation must a person delayed 24+ hours get, considering missed meeting, needed hotel bookings and other expenses.

Now if all passengers and all airlines united and sued the government for the compensations (those can be in billions, considering that no sane business person would fly without their mobile and notebook and no mother would want to fly without toys to keep their children happy, so that will cause huge decreese in flying), then the government will think twice before disturbing lives of tens of thousands of people even when all suspects have been arrested.

And we do not even know if there was any terror plot. Last time there was a terror craze in the UK, a road was closed and isolated, a house was raided and then disassembled and a man was shot, but in the end nothing was found.

Who will foot the bill this time? The news say that people will not receive any compensation even if they were insured, because "it was an extreme event". WTF?! That is what regulations and insurance are for!!! And the minister is saying that they think that most restrictions will stay forever. No carry-on baggage? That is ridiculose.

SUE THE UK GOVERNMENT!