Aigarius Blog

As soon as my laptop came back from repairs, I started to feel better - being back with 1920×1200 resolution is great! NVidia is much more stable than ATi and Intel wireless is just great!

And then last weekend I was in Berlin for the FFII board meeting and used the opportunity to see the city with my girlfriend. I must say that there is a lot of interesting things to see in Berlin.The things I would recommend everyone are: go to the Zoo (5-7 hours of superb fun), then take bus 100 to Alexander Platz (driving by all the main landmarks), go up on the TV tower, then come down and sometime late in the night go to ‘Weekend’ dance club.

(Continued)

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Last night we celebrated Christmas with some friends by doing a lot of cooking - baking mostly. In the end we had some regular sweetbread dough and some gingerbread dough left over. On a whim I suggested to put them together - we rolled out both doughs very thin (3-4 mm), put them on top of each other (with some vanilla powder in between) then rolled that into a big roll and cut it into 1 cm pieces. After glazing that with beaten egg and cooking for 15 minutes in 200 degrees C oven we got what can be seen in the photo above. The taste is phenomenal - it has the hard and crispy layers of gingerbread and soft layers of the regular sweetbread and sweet all through. In some cookies the innermost core was made of a chunk of soft gingerbread - that tasted the best.

I also got myself an oven and have started to bake home-made bread, but that’s for another post :). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

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Tokkee and I are doing the mugshots this year and we need your cooperation. Mugshots are a great way for people to link the name to a face and remember that link even after several years. Liw did this as his project last year and it was great success - many people have now a better way to link a persons IRC nickname to their face which in turn reduces the tension in communication as you can very easily know who is the person you are speaking to.
There are people who avoid the mugshots and i wanted to ask them to reconsider. Mugshots is not a beauty pageant - in Debian people are judged by their merits. Mugshots are useful tools in future on-line communications, tools that could reduce the aggressiveness and flammability in the Debian IRC and mailing lists.
It is not the holy grail, but it helps. So I ask every participant of Debconf - help us make this mugshot gallery complete by contributing your own picture. And thank you very much to the many people that already did.
If you want to have your mugshot taken then listen out to when mugshot sessions are taking place - we take all mugshots in front of the cafeteria door, usually during the food times, so you have easy time finding me and tokkee there.

UPDATE: First 120 mugshots are uploaded here. Next mugshot shooting session will be tomorrow - on the 18th of June, during scheduled lunch and dinner.

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The I18N meeting in Extremadura is almost over - tomorrow everyone is leaving to the airport at different times. So, enjoy the group photo of the meeting. And if you click the photo, that will bring you to a Frickr photoset that contains all the other good photos that I took at this meeting. Enjoy!

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This Friday I am invited to give a presentation to the annual conference of Latvian project leader association (LNPVA) about what can these project leaders learn from the free software development process. The core of the presentation will involve asking them to try participating in existing free software projects in order to gather understanding about how we do it and then see for themselves, how that could apply to their projects. Maybe some of them will listen to me and we will get some more people contributing to free software here in Latvia.

I will try to make my presentation in Lessig style, wish me luck on that.

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This Saturday we had an installfest in LAKA with a topic of free games. It came to me to make my own top 10 of free Linux time wasting games that are packaged for Debian. Here we have the list for future reference:

Honorable mention - Battle for Wesnoth: a turn based strategy game with a lot of scenarios for single player and also with multiplayer support.

1. Enigma - A fine puzzle of precision ball moving around large and complex landscapes with a lot of different of tools and quirks

1. Bygfoot - A football team manager with a lot of nice extra tools like transfers, injuries, salaries, sponsorship deals and a nice comentary for the games themselves. I only would love to see some kind of an online mode either in runtime mode or in turn-per-day mode.

1. Blob wars - Funny and bloody as hell. Think Rambo as a bruised blob shooting other blobs and rescuing another blobs. Got a lot of laughs during the presentation.

1. Pingus - Lemmings clone just with penguins. Nice graphics and control. Looks like there is a lot of levels too. Wonderful intro.

1. LiquidWar - A very addictive and abstract game of liquid domination. Nothing much to explain - just play it with your friends or against a bunch of AI players.

1. Tecnoballz - Arcanoid on steroids … x4 … with a shop … and bosses … and ballz … lots of ballz. Must see.

1. Scorched3D - The best 3D graphics I have ever seen for a free software project. Same old addictive blowing stuff up with nukes that we all love since Scorched Earth and Worms. Gameplay is better then the latest Worms. Great multiplayer fun. I only with the camera would be more intelligent.

1. Frozen Bubble - instant classic of free software gaming. Wit and precision required. Fun supplied.

1. Neverball - Great graphics. Wacky gameplay. Tilt the world with your mouse. Do not fall off. Try the harder levels for even more fun.

1. Powermanga - Just plain fly and shoot. With powerups. Lots of powerups. Especially note the last powerup that upgrades your ship to a new model which has new weapons to upgrade. Waves and waves of enemies with an occasional big boss. Sadly no multiplayer.

Note: sometime later this week I will also add screenshots to the list.

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