spinning world

Finally! After a year and a half in the US, I managed to go to Chicago and visit most of the places I wanted to go. Thanksgiving break was a perfect excuse and we took advantage of it perfectly.Arrival: 8:30am At union station. A second “wave” would be arriving 2 hours later so we grabbed the oportunity and we visited the Sears tower right next to it. The view was spectacular:

As soon as everybody was in Chicago, we started walking (and walking and walking…): Starting from the Grant Park, Buckingham fountain (unfortunately – and naturally for this season – not working), then to Millenium Park and Navi Pier. From there we took a boat for a 30-min. cruise. The view was really great and a must for anyone visiting Chicago I think.

At that point some people started getting hungry and tired (pfff!) so we decided to head back to the Union station since some would go back, but also because we had promised ourselves to eat at Chicago’s Greektown. Following Mina’s recommendation who has been there before, we went to Venus restaurant. There we found everything we could hope for: really good Greek and Cypriot food which I accompanied with a retsina (Malamatina!). A galaktompoureko for dessert ended a perfect meal.

After leaving the others at the station we headed for John Hancock Observatory… I have to say that I enjoyed it way more than the Sears tower. First of all because Chicago is much more spectacular in the night, but also because of the location of the building and the fact that it has an open-air room where you can feel how it feels being 300m high!

Next morning we got up and had a classic Greek breakfast with Tyropita and Greek Frappe (made with imported Nescafe!) at Artopolis. We spent the rest of the day at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Definitely recommended. We spent only 3 hours and a half there but we saw only 3/4 of the museum and some of them really quick. If you plan to go there give yourself plenty of time.
When we were leaving I promised myself that I’ll visit Chicago again… there are lots of places I didn’t get the chance to go; but even if that was not the case, Chicago is a city I really liked and I hope I’ll have more chances to come back in the future!

So, ever had the curiosity of finding out which file extension you are? I just took this life-altering quiz and found out that…

Which File Extension are You?

And since I have a LOT of free time tonight in my hands (LIE!) I thought I should find out which OS I was as well…. luckily not the one I feared

Which OS are You?

I was having trouble making my wireless work with the new Fedora. After several (failed) tries of using the repositories to install the ipw2200 firmware, I gave up. I just refused to work. Whenever I tried to initialize the wireless adaptor I’d get an error back that my “ipw2200 device eth1 does not seem to be present”. But today I was at the library and the only network available was wireless. So I thought to give it one more try. I booted my Fedora and looked at /var/log/messages. I found an interesting section which read:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.1.2kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:03:03.0 failed with error -5

Interesting… there’s something wrong with the firmware. Maybe I should try doing it by hand then! I downloaded the lastest version of the ipw2200 firmware and extracted the contents in /lib/firmware. Then I unloaded and reloaded the driver:

/sbin/rmmod ipw2200
/sbin/modprobe ipw2200

I opened my wireless manager and voila! Everything worked! I wish I knew what those install rpms were trying to do, but since all is ok now I don’t intend to try and find out!

This will be the last post in this series. I guess everybody has already shaped an opinion and I’ve expressed mine. Today I read a (different) story about a blogger whose identity was revealed by another blogger (and also a publisher) who was offended by some of his comments. The result was that the first one was fired from the paper he was working. I haven’t followed that one too much to express an opinion, but all these prove (to me at least) that the Hellenic blog scene is way past its innocence period. The fact that us Greeks have a natural ethnic tendency to start and keep conflicts makes me wonder why this didn’t start earlier. Some may prefer this situation; may find it more interesting. I just hope things will get better.

Actually I started this to tell you about an interesting article in Kathimerini with the title Electronic Sensorship (babelfish translated). There you’ll find the name of the offending blog but also the name of the suer. I don’t have anything else to add but that I agree with Mr. Mandravelis. I’d also like to point you to an interview Mr. Tsipropoulos gave to Naftemporiki (I tried but for some reason babelfish translation wouldn’t work; sorry).

Looks like my good provider had some issuse the last two days. My website was down and when it went back online MySQL was back to a September backup! I was lucky enough to have taken a backup 5 days ago (I hadn’t taken one in months!). Talk about lucky eh? I’ll try to add it to my monthly schedule to take regular backups from now and on.

Just in case

Just mentioning it here because I heard several people asking about it. I don’t take credit for this possible solution; I found it in the Fedora forum:

So, if you’re using Fedora Core 6 and you get an error that your system doesn’t support the XShape extension you can probably fix it (and fix transparency issues at the same time) by adding to your /etx/X11/xorg.conf the necessary stuff to enable desktop effects (Compiz & AIGLX). You don’t have to enable the desktop effects themselves, just the settings for them. So, what you have to do is:

continue reading…