Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Going virtualized

One of the problems I have always had was e-mail. Work e-mail, home e-mail, junk accounts... I always wanted to have everything in a single place. But often it was not possible.
I lived with this issue until today when I thought how to end the multiple accounts nightmare.
What I did was somehow weird for me.
I have created a Dovecot IMAP server inside a virtual machine and I have moved all my emails to this server. Simple enough - QEmu did it's job very well.
But this success made me consider an even stranger solution.
I am using Windows only for a few operations (MS Project, Nokia PC suite, ...) so I am booting it quite seldom. It means that could create a virtual machine with windows, using only a fraction of the real partition size I am using now, install on the virtual machine the software I cannot use in Linux and share the rest of the gained space between the host and the virtualized windows via Samba.

It worked well this time also.
I have gained in this way a nice Windows appliance securized behind my Linux firewall. I can use it to experiment a lot off things as it runs smoothly with 512 Mbytes of RAM allocated.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Problems. Not just mine...

I realized those days that we are civilization in decline. In every aspect. Especially morally.
I was astonished that in Scotland there is a project for a law that will forbid the usage of words "mother" and "father" in order not to discriminate the homosexuals.

This is a perfect illustration of the Romanian saying "The country is in fire and the lady is brushing". Our planet is dying. The resources are becoming scarce. The populations is rapidly growing. The economy of the world is just an illusion (see the recent American funds disaster). The regional conflicts tend to overtake the world. Nations start not to understand each other. Diplomacy is dead being exchanged just for machine gun talks and bomb lines... Consumerism and our hunger gadgets that are filling our inside emptiness is cutting down trees, making deep holes in the ground, polluting the ocean. The worst is that people die for this - Irak for example.
Still we want everything to be "Bigger, Better, Faster, More" without really thinking if this is feasible or not and what is the final cost for this. I am always listening to people dying to buy a bigger jeep or to cut some trees in a recently gained piece of forest instead of thinking to plant a single tree.

Stop Nilu. You are not better either.
True. I didn't do something too much of substance for this. I am also a slave for gadgets, for buying unnecessary things but not looking for real problems.
I thought for some minor things that I might do:
1. Plant more trees on the small piece of land I have.
2. Propose to the company to organize a team building of cleaning some parks or planting trees.
3. Use the train rather than my car. (as I am a lousy driver this is almost done)
4. Considering how I will live my life in the next years trying to do the least harm to the others and to nature.

I guess that I might be utopic but... I have no more ideas...

Hyenas

Patriarch Teoctist. God rest him in peace.
He was a controversial character, but without a shadow of a doubt, an important personality for the contemporary Romania. I am sure that he had a hard mission into keeping the Romanian Orthodox Church in one piece despite both the internal and external pressure - in his days the church was the most credible institution in Romania. maybe his past was not spotless but he worked hard to do good deeds. He was quite bold in his actions - especially inviting the pope John Paul II to Romania - one gesture that was a milestone in the relations between Orthodoxy and Catholicisms.
After his death lots of hyenas appeared in the stage just to grab a piece of his image. Sad. They started to throw mud both in the man Teoctist as well as in the church. "De mortuis nihil nisi bene" Latin saying seems to be forgotten by the bozos (of uncertain Roman descent) that invaded the press with their inept judgements and venomous sayings. The sad part is that that they are attacking a dead person that is in impossibility to defend himself. The only thing they are after is to get a bit of the aura the patriarch has and mask their hideous figures.
It would be polite to let the time judge the man - after all he was just a man - by its deeds not by the fantasies of some delators.
I recommend a good book Vladimir Volkoff's - Le Trêtre - a book about an NKVD agent infiltrated into the remains of the Russian Orthodox Church after the communists destroyed it that has a careers inside the church as he did his mission extraordinarily. The end of the book has an open end. Maybe the communist found the divine revelation... or maybe not.
Comming back to Teoctist - churches were demolished during his time, but cathedrals, monasteries and skeets were born. An history will look to those either.