June 23, 2004
Server troubles
I had some server troubles today, so I'd like to apologize about the multiple postings. Everything should be OK now.
I did have some excellent pork for dinner tonight. Our guests from New York did some wonderful things with krkovička and vepřová panenka involving ginger, lime, garlic, chili pepper and salt on a barbecue grill.
Also, I filled up my car today. 38 liters (10.04 gallons) of gasoline cost me around CZK 1200 (USD $45.56). I can only imagine what it must cost to fill up a Hummer here.
What do we want? Pork! When do we want it? Now!
Anybody who's spent any quality time with Czech cuisine will know the special place pork holds.
I joke with visitors that they need to eat up, because the authorities at the airport will be checking their pork levels on their exit from the country.
So I read the news today about pork prices rising as a result of Czech EU entry with somewhat mixed emotions. Prices are rising because Czech farmers can now ship to EU countries, where they can get a better price; probably 15 to 20% more than domestically. A kilo of live pig (which apparently is the measurement they use) went for CZK 28 (USD $1.06)before Czech EU entry, and now sells for CZK 33 (USD $1.25). In Germany, the price is CZK 37.30 (USD $1.41), and that's where prices will probably go.
I wonder, though, if a backlash could be in the works. Pork is a God-given right, handed down to the sons and daughters of Libuše by Praotec Čech himself, no?
Somehow, though, I doubt that there'll be street demonstrations over the issue, but one can only hope. I'll be leading the chants:
"What do we want? Pork! When do we want it? Now!"
June 21, 2004
Do I Get Credited for the Assist?
My upstairs neighbor came down today and asked if I knew that I was in the paper on Friday. The surprised answer was, no, I did not.
To use an egregious football metaphor, the BBC's Ondřej Štindl took my center - my recent post on the variable meaning of standardní situace - and drove it home into the net in his commentary in Friday's Lidové noviny.
I read his piece thinking, 'man, why didn't I put it that way?'
No Sleep Till Žižkov
I love the Czech word náročné. It could mean demanding, or complicated, or time-consuming, depending on the situation.
This week for me will be náročné. We have several developers in town to meet about our LiveSupport software development project.
LiveSupport is an effort to create a free and open-source software package that radio stations can use to manage every aspect of their broadcast, from the playlist in the studio to workflow in the newsroom to archives of shows.
Theoretically, a radio station operator could use LiveSupport on a single laptop to run a professional-sounding radio station. It's designed to be flexible, so you should be able to use it whether you're one guy running a community radio station or a major broadcasting powerhouse.
We're about at the 1/3 mark with the project, and welcome other developers and radio professionals to take part. There's more info over at the Campware site about LiveSupport, including the developers' forum. It's empty now because our correspondence has been on a closed mailing list so far, but we will be opening up our process in the next couple of days.
The LiveSupport development team is truly international, with developers in Berlin, Budapest (but soon to move to Bangkok), Belgrade and New York. That's another thing that should be nice about LiveSupport: one of our consortium partners is the Digital Design Department of the Parsons School of Design of New York City; we have four masters' students and two professors working on the interface. Which should ensure that even though this is an open source project, it'll be user-friendly.
The náročnost continues during the week because I DJ tonight with Tony Ozuna at the Palac Akropolis' Divadelní bar and Friday night at the Tulip Lounge. Nárocné.
June 18, 2004
Firefox, Thunderbird and NVU
One thing a lot of people miss about open source software is that a lot of great programs have Windows versions too.
I just installed the excellent Mozilla Firefox 0.9 web browser today, and liked it enough to make it my default browser. I like Internet Explorer fine, but Firefox has some stuff I use quite a bit, especially tabbed browsing, which opens up multiple tabs - each holding a web page - inside a single browser window. This has the advantage of not clogging up your task bar.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a fantastic email program, one I've been using for about a month. It has a pretty good junk mail filter, one that gets smarter the longer you use it, but the feature I appreciate most is a really simple one that deserves explaining.
When you get an HTML message, the web browser inside your mail program calls back to the server to load up the pictures. This is one way spammers know that your mailbox is a real one.
Thunderbird gets around this by blocking images inside an HTML message, so that the spammers can't see that you've opened it. Which is always nice.
The last program to check out is called NVU (pronounced N-view), which aims to be an open-source alternative to Dreamweaver, and is built around Mozilla's Gecko web-page rendering engine. Pretty slick stuff.
You can get Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows, Mac and Linux at http://www.mozilla.org, and NVU for Linux and Windows at http://www.nvu.com.
