All day I've been feeling this strange sense of overwhelming happiness, mostly about how great my girlfriend is, how she's always there for me and how downright sexy she is and how life will truly be beautiful one day, and about how great my computer is, how it's almost always there for me when I should be doing something else and how downright ugly it is, but that it has a fucking beautiful GUI … this all leads me to thinking death is upon me because nobody should be allowed to be this happy and live, just not natural.

But let me tell you a bit about my computer because you might remember I've been having some problems with it. Well I finally got fed up of waiting for the "day or two" to pass on Wednesday and decided to call them up and implore about what was going on. They say that tomorrow (Thursday) it'd surely be done. No call. So on Friday I call again and they go that yeah yeah, it'll be done in a few hours and I should just come pick it up. No call.

So I called again and the mister told me that nope, computer is still all in parts on the operating table. This really put me down … but a few moments later the guy calls back and says that hey, he checked wrongly and the compuer was ready for pick up after all. Woot. (later on that day I got a similar surprise when the girlfriend said she was coming a lot sooner than I was expecting, a whole night sooner actually)

Very well, got the computer and instantly had some issues with getting it to work, but nothing major, just seems that connecting my old batter DVD drive to power is a bit tricky. After some more issues I finally had ubuntu up and running and decided to give KDE 4.1 a go, and I did.

You know what, I really can't understand what everyone is complaining about because 4.1 is totally ready for day-to-day use. Sure it might still be bit buggy now and anon and some things aren't quite fully completed yet (I'm looking at you Amarok!), but it's shangrilah compared to what Linux was when I first made the switch in roughly 2k2, back then we still had to mount cdroms and shit manually!

But because just the orgasmic prettiness of kde isn't enough I also took the liberty of setting up compiz and making everything even prettier. Ok so it's not that prettier and in some regards even uglier (this time I'm looking at you old skool window decorations!), but it sure is faster and more responsive, to the point I believe I'll be running it full time.

Now it's time to go learn how to code those widgets because I'm sick and tired of my tea timer being an actual application running in dock when it should be an awesome widget!

There have been many surprises regarding these blog over the past few days and one very huge one over the past few months. My readership has experienced a very odd fucking spike in that it's suddenly almost four-bloody-hundred a month whereas before I was lucky to push near 300. Another great surprise was talking to a lass in Norway the other day and when the topic of my computer came up she said something to the extent of Oh yeah I know, read the blog about that. Must say I was quite taken aback by that, what the fuck, people actually read that bunch of jibber jabber!?

A few months ago a different kind of awesome happened, which I may already have talked about, but whatever, it was that in a debate on a forum someone wanted to prove me wrong and they … quoted my blog that they found on the internets and had no idea it was from me … very odd feeling indeed.

But it hasn't always been like this and I fear all of this is merely some kind of freak occurence. When I think about it I started my first blog back when they were still called journals. Not sure what domain it was on and am pretty certain it's been lost to the great beyond, but I do know what I started it for. We were doing poets and writers in school and I realised the importance of their journals, that they were very useful to the posterity, of great help in deciphering their texts. So I started my own.

Of course it was a total flop, think I managed writing it for not even three weeks. But it was an experience. Later, when I started my first webcomic, or maybe the webcomic came before … anyway, it had a news section where I diligently wrote about stuff, not realising it – I was writing a blog. Later when I started Cthulhu and other crazies, which was of course a total flop, and bought this domain I also had a news section.

Diligently, with every update of the comic I wrote and wrote. But since the comic was so overdesigned and the art way way too complex for anything but a monthly release schedule the news section became the most updated part of the website. And so slowly but surely it turned into a real proper blog.

As you may have noticed the comic slowly slipped out of my update schedule and only the blog remained around here, even though it's still called "news", which is silly since it's a blog. But what's most surprising to me is that none of my webcomics, none of my previous blogs, ever managed to reel in even a quarter of the users this lonely jabbering blog does. Strange how things go, what was supposed to be a simple sideshow turned into the main attraction.

This is why I will soon be reworking this site into a pure blog, all about me and my yapping. Hopefully all you readers will be amused and will even start leaving me a comment or two once I make it practically possible instead of merely a theoretical possibility.

Thinking about how I had a blog when blogs weren't blogs yet makes me feel old, damn it.

You know I've always lived in this fantasy land where setting up a server only took five minutes at most. It was a simple as browsing to a certain directory on your computer, clicking a few times and voila it was all there. A brand new website ready for the people.

But you know what? It's apparently not quite that easy with real servers as I've somehow managed to find out a few times already. First we had the incident of a german VPS where nothing quite worked, ever. At first it was, admitedly, my own fault as I did many a thing quite wrong. But then later on it started being purely the server's fault, the OS was old, nothing worked as it should and I was forced to coerce the boss into getting a new server. His words were: "Find one and go ahead".

So I did. I did find two actually. This time I decided to throw frugality to the wind and find a local provider in Slovenia that would offer VPS hosting (because no sane shared hosting provider would ever suffice our needs) … turns out that's harder than it seems. I've heard rumours of Domenca offering VPS, but apparently they haven't quite got there yet so in the end there were only two: sloHosting and Hostko. Wicked.

Asked some questions and finally went with sloHosting because they provided Hardy Heron, which is what I use on the development server so I could be certain everything would work. Yesterday I was notified that hey, the server is up and ready, hope you love us. I did think I loved them until I found out the bitter truth – nothing, absolutely nothing, worked. After some nagging I found out today that they had forgotten to update the kernel (seriously guys, you're actual sysadmins and it takes a developer to notify you of something like this?).

Right, everything did work this time. And so it began, the setting up of users, installing all the fancy weirdo things we need and so on. Since I'm no sysadmin, or at best a hobbyist one, I was browsing google for almost anything I wanted to do, but I had learned some lessons from the german server and managed to do everything pretty cleanly, no major issues at all. In the end five bloody hours later everything ended up working and the web app is lovably installed and working well.

Now we're left to hoping it'll be able to handle the load of alpha testing, because hell, everything worked, even with the dirty hacks, on the german host until semi-serious load came into play.

Some of you might remember how Lestat died a while ago, six months' worth of a while ago apparently, and I've been reluctant to fix him because everything was so dated there was simply no point in patching it up. So I waited until Sunday when I could order all new bits, a fancy new motherboard, CPU, graphics card, RAM and even a speedy hard drive.

On wednesday all the parts arrived and in the evening I completely and totally neglected my girlfriend putting it all together. First I stripped out the old parts and yadayada, most of all I decided to do it nice and slow and to take great pleasure in it. Because hell, what greater pleasure is there for a geek than setting up a whole new computer from scratch, I'd've been up all night but for one thing. … It didn't work.

When I turned it on, suspense built up and then nothing happened. The fans were blasting, the front panel lights all burned and … nothing else happened. The cause? Either a brand new CPU failure or a brand new motherboard failure. My bet was on CPU so yesterday I went to the store and asked for a new one, but the clerk, seemingly somewhat knowledgable, looked at it and said at least three pins didn't settle so I should bring the motherboard in as well because perhaps the problem was there. So I did.

Thinking that we'd just do a quick check and they'll give me my parts was a mistake, a stupid one I admit. The computer had to be left there to be looked over by their maintenance staff and it'd take at least a day, perhaps more, seeing as how it's the weekend I'll probably only get it next month. Fucking shit.

But after all of these shenanigans I am simply not enthusiastic about the computer anymore. It'll be put together by a third party, somebody will've messed inside my computer that hasn't been touched by anybody other than me in seven years. I feel somewhat violated, raped even. That's my computer and now somebody else is going to poke around in it! That's just wrong.

If it comes back with windows installed, or the data on my old hdd is touched, I'm suing them …

There has been blabber about opensource around here before and some against but what there hasn't been is an ode and an ode is exactly what opensource needs right now. Because it's fucking awesome! And why exactly would that be, just why is this opensource thing so very awesome, you might ask. Well stop fussing around and let me tell you a tale, a tale of labour cut to a minimum, a tale of espionage and treasure, and most of all bare-breasted cuties.

A few months ago I was told about a project wherein a social network thingy much like facebook would have to be made for students of Europe and their teachers, alright I thought, gave a rough time estimate and forgot about it. Then last week the project, after hassling around with the clients and whatnot the project came back. This time I made another time estimate – roughly two hundred hours.

Whoa everyone thought, the programmer has his work cut out, we can reel the designer in a bit later and we all have very much time left on our hands. Then I did some searching because verily some opensource alternative to me doing all the work was about and I'd merely have to touch it up a bit. What I found was elgg … a totally and absolutely complete social networking thingy that has everything absolutely everything we needed either built in or as a freely available plugin.

Now you may not fully understand the situation here so let me boil it down for you. The time estimate for my work plumeted from ~200 hours to ~50 hours!! FIFTY! … I did in two hours what I thought would take me three weeks! (the left-over 50 hours are for aplying the fancy design). But don't you dare think I stole anything, I intend to give full credit to the developers of elgg and if we decide a funky plugin is needed for some special feature we come up with I have all intention (and permission from the boss) to give it back to the elgg community.

Ok so there were no bare-breasted cuties in this story, but what there was was so much more awesome you can't blame me for skipping the boobies.

This saturday the first ever php conference in slovenia happened … and it was fun. I've never been to such an event before so there isn't really much I can compare it to, but I can compare to Blogres . And you know what, blogres may have been a tad bigger and it may have had a fancier location and more famous speakers, but by god was it much more boring and seemingly poorer organised.

Now it may just be that I found these talks more interesting because they were about the things I do for a living and practically devote my life to, or it may just be that when the room is packed to the brim with people it all seems more fun than when it's half empty. What I really liked about the php conference was that there was food, real food, for free.

What I loved even more was just how much food there was. For example there were croissants at every coffee break and for lunch PIZZA, and developers love pizza … Well anyway, let's hope there's more such events in the near future.

A few days ago I instituted a new organisational paradigm for a project at work – bugzilla. This move was done because I was getting slowly fed up with everyone coming straight to me to report what's not working well, often something I was either already working on or something that was far away from what I was currenlty doing.

Naturally a lot of the stuff got forgotten along the road before I could get around to them, I also had no idea how important something was and how much it broke things. This is where bugzilla comes in. It keeps all bug reports in a nice format, organised by priority and I get notified of any new bugs or changes to them via e-mail.

What I love most is the sequental nature of bug displaying. I can just go to the first bug, resolve it and it shows me the next bug I should work on based on priority and some other things I can't quite fathom. It's awesome because it gives me a clear "This is what you should do next, do it!" so I don't have to bother with organising myself and just focuse on the code.

What I don't like about bugzilla, however, is that it's so very obviously made by engineers, for engineers. Worse still, made by bugzilla users for bugzilla users. As a new kid in town it took me quite a while to even figure out how to set things up and teaching my boss to bugreport? HA! I'm lucky he even agreed to using it … and we're trying to put the application in a public alpha testing next week where anyone should report bugs they find.

Luckily though I'm getting more and more used to bugzilla and was so able to put a link on the front page that lists all bugs – I think – and set up a default user with all the login fields already filled in for anyone not wishing to make a special account.

No matter the difficulties, bugzilla will be used with all large-ish projects I work on henceforth.

Recently I've read a book on decadence that was comprised primarily of examples on being decadent, how it's done, why it's done and so on … it was called The Decadent Handbook I believe and anyone with any sort of decadent aspirations should give it a read, even though it is a bit difficult to wade through at certain points. The book itself has an interesting notion in the foreword and epilogue in that it claims everyone mentioned in it, indeed anyone writing about decadence, cannot be decadent themselves by definition.

The idea behind this notion seemed to be that the people writing in the book were not writing about their own experiences for the most part and that they were merely bookworms behind closed doors dreaming up lives of fun and adventure. Nothing wrong with this, but personally I prefer thinking that at least some of them were real and they weren't all quite as shammy as the cynic bastard surrounding it would have you think.

But it got me to wondering, just what is decadence then? Everyone in the book seemed to agree on one single point, surprisingly it wasn't the drugs, the debauchery or glutonous eating. No, the one and only common denominator between all descriptions was having fun with total disregard for common sense.

Right, so that immediatelly pops an image of a rockstar or something similar up in your head and there's nothing wrong with that, there really isn't. But I propose to you an image of a different decadent, one that doesn't flip his finger at society quite so obviously. What if true decadence is that guy who goes to work every morning and loves it? What if it's the workoholic who actually likes what they do and feels invigorated by their job? Granted that doesn't seem very fun to the rest of the world, but he wouldn't even care, just like he shouldn't. If he manages to sneak in a few drugs here and there, some heavy drinking when he's got the time and perhaps an odd kink or two that's an added plus.

So, in the end, what is decadence? Decadence is fun.

The firefox 3 release event happened this Tuesday and I would've blogged about it yesterday were it not for some people's stupid keyboards that I swear were not meant to be typed on.

It went on at kiberpipa and was rather well organised for such an event, was pleasantly surprised. Everything started off with a talk from Tristan Nitot about how Firefox came about and why it's managed to strive so much. He spoke of interesting things I haven't even thought of before, but it was all a bit dragged out if you ask me and it showed that he wasn't very well prepared (in fact he admited to having finished the presentation six minutes after he was scheduled to give it).

Unluckily, though, it was a bit too hot for my liking and I didn't want to sweat my life away there so the other presentations escaped me since I went home to have a shower. But I'm certain they were very interesting and informative.

Later on I came to the party where I got the rest of my free stuff (all together a t-shirt from the event, firefox wine and a notebook, awesome) and mingled a bit with the people. Didn't know very many of them, but at least the food was bloody awesome. Nice of them to have thought of feeding us … unlike blogres you know …

When I noticed Tristan was a bit removed from everyone else I went to implore about why Opera wasn't shown on any of the graphs in his presentation and he mentioned that the time has come when FF finally beats Opera in certain performance aspects – interesting stuff, will have to try. Also, interestingly, he also reads xkcd and recognised my t-shirt as being from there.

Sadly I left the party after an hour because I was melting my life away.

Blogres came and went and now it's over. I've arleady written a blog about it on poper's site, and don't really like writing another right now. But I will say this: my photo is on the bloody frontpage of blogres! I swear there was this photographer who kept taking close-up photos of me and even though I don't really know what happened to the lot of them, one made it to the front page.