Coffee

Recently we bought a Moka Express pot.

I must admit that it brews the best coffee I tasted at home. It's very easy to operate and hopefully to clean ;-). Brewing is also quite quick :-D

Our pot is actually a cheep imitation of the original "Alfonso Bialetti's Moka Express". Here's how it looks:

Just Married

On 14 of April 2007 I got married :-D.

My wife's name is Katarzyna (Cathrine) but everybody calls her Kasia.

We are a couple for five and a half years now.
We studied together Physics on Warsaw Technical University.

The wedding went marvelous. We arrived in stylish white "Warszawa"[pl] (which is actually licensed Pobeda) . We had beautiful weather - it was sunny and warm but not hot. Cathy looked stunning, and our guest say that my morning suit looked great ;-). Church[pl] in which wedding took place has unforgettable atmosphere, especially inside.

Our wedding party was also a great success :-D. The ball room[pl] was beautifully decorated, food was delicious and looked great ;-). But the best was the band[pl]. They simply rocked ]:->. Well they didn't forget about standards, so our aunts and uncles were also very happy ;-).

So to make long story short:
I'm a happy husband now :-D.

Please visit our website[pl]. When we'll get some pictures from the wedding we'll put them there.

Unlock the Gnome keyring upon login - Xubuntu

As many people already noticed NetworManager uses gnome-keyring to store password for different wireless networks. This is already true for Dapper Drake.

In Edgy and Feisty more and more programs start to use gnome-keyring for the same purpose. To name a few: Evolution, Gajim.

This is quite annoying because one has to unlock the keyring database every time one logs in. On my desktop with freshly installed Feisty I use only Gajim from those three. Which makes storing my google talk password virtually useless.

Fortunately there is a solution: pam-keyring.
Here you'll find how to install it for Feisty.

Shortly how its done:

sudo apt-get install libpam-keyring
sudo echo "@include common-pamkeyring" >> /etc/pam.d/gdm

Unfortunately it didn't work on my Xubutu at first.
Apparently one has to disable "Launch Gnome services on startup" to make it work.

What seems to happen is that xfce4-session lunches new instance of gnome-keyring-deamon without checking if there is already a running one. This new instance of course does not have the keyring database unlocked by pam-keyring, hence we get the password popup.

I've filled a bug report we'll see what happens...

Smooth upgrade from Dapper to Edgy on my desktop

Yesterday I've updated OS on my desktop computer.

It's quite old PIII celeron 800MHz with nvidia geforce MX2. OS installed was Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. Install was almost clean one, with minor tweeking (installed acrobat reader, SUN java, mplayer and few other packages).

I've followed several guides. For pre-upgrade instructions I went with this one: before-upgrading-to-edgy
For installation I went with instructions (command line ones) from here: upgrade-ubuntu-606-dapper-drake-to-ubuntu-10-edgy-eft but I used aptitude instead of apt-get.

Official instructions: EdgyUpgrades
Common problems with solutions: ubuntu-edgy-upgrade-common-problems-with-solutions

So basically it would go like this:

1. Check if ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-destktop packages are installed.
2. Check which packages were installed by hand and if they are probable to cause problems (use common sense ;))
3. Remove apps that were installed via "make install" and so on (once again use common sense ;))
   
4. Edit sources list, and replace dapper with edgy: sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
5. sudo aptitude update
6. sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
• Repeat this step until all problems are solved... I had to run it at least four times :)
  
7. sudo aptitude -f install
8. sudo dpkg –configure -a
9. Reboot the computer

Everything went fine. After the reboot I had running Edgy Eft :D.
So now it's time to install Beryl and show off to my friends that wait for Vista ;).
And then do the same with my laptop. This one will be harder as this install is heavily customized...

Google calendar

For some time now I've been playing with Google Calendar.
As other google products it has nice very intuitive interface, and of course is still in BETA ;).

At first I've found this calendar to be not very useful, apart from it's notification feature. Unfortunately for it to work your web browser must be running and you have to be logged onto google calendar. Moreover it's not very visible...

Recently my fiancée started to use google calendar. And then I realized that it became quite useful. I've subscribed to her calendar and Kasia subscribed to mine. Now I don't have to remember when she has her classes and so on. I always can look it up :D.

It has a lot more features that ease up making appointments with other people. But up to now I haven't had a chance to try them out :/

Today as you probably noticed I added my two calendars to my blog. So now everyone who's interested can check when I'm available... Of course I don't put all my appointments into this calendar ;)