Huntsville and Firefox: A Love Story

Since mid August I am living in Huntsville, Alabama as a part of Kosovo Youth Exchange Program.  I will be here till the school year ends. I am taking classes at Huntsville High School.

I was very lucky to come this year, Huntsville City  Schools which is in charge for all schools in Huntsville decided to switch to laptops for all it’s 23,000+ students. The laptops are HP and all of them run in Windows, knowing that Internet Explorer doesn’t work as good as other browsers, and the student were having problems with the textbooks etc in  the test phase. They decided to switch to Firefox, as a better and more stable alternative to Internet Explorer. Is a big thing for the Mozilla Community, to get 23k+ users at the same time in a single day, they update Firefox regularly and students didn’t have any problem so far.

I finally found you Xfce and I am not going to let you go!

  When I first installed Fedora 15 to try GNOME3 was fascinated by it’s look and differences from the older versions, I still like it but after a couple weeks using it started to work very slow and crashed many times, now finally decided to move to Xfce but not removing GNOME 3 because maybe one day I will come back but not until I upgrade my computer. Applications start very fast, don’t crash, it’s simpler and reminds me the ClearLooks of Gnome 2.6 from F13 and F14.

Resizing images with Mogrify

You shot some photos but they have a big resolution and take time to upload online, here is a fast way to scale them from the terminal using Mogrify. Mogrify comes by default on Fedora.

As root type:
# mogrify -path /home/user/example -resize 1000x1000 /home/user/example

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. It’s a free and open source software release under GPL.

I love it, I mostly use it to convert videos.

Here’s a simple how-to convert a .wmv to .avi on Fedora:

[gent@fedora ~]$ su -c "yum install -y ffmpeg"
[gent@fedora ~]$ cd Videos/
[gent@fedora Videos]$ ffmpeg -i gent_on_bike.wmv gent_on_bike.avi

Lost data!

After long time not blogging, I am posting this blogpost for those who will have problems with lost data, a couple of hours ago I was trying to run a Windows game on GNU/Linux through Wine which I copied inside my External Western Digital HDD (It only works as NTFS file-system). Then trying to remove the dir after the copying the files did a typo with “rm -rf *” on Parent Directory removing everything including Documents and Movies.

After starting to panic and search across the web, a friend of mine reminded me TestDisk, a great free data recovery software under GPL which could do the work if I didn’t re-mount the device and then remove the “wanted-to-remove-before” directory where in that case basically overwrote it. I also tried with dd but still everything was gone

So if you accidentally deleted everything on a NTFS-partitioned HARD-DRIVE theres still a great hope with TestDisk if you didn’t touch anything after, simply install TestDisk and follow the steps: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk:_undelete_file_for_NTFS

If you do so you are probably able to recover them. and I hope you’ll have a better luck than mine ^^.

 

Cloud Servers for FLOSSK from Rackspace!

Rackspace was nice to give us 2 cloud servers with Debian 5.0 GNU/Linux distribution which we’re very thankful. Plan is to to move our FLOSSK web-site to Drupal fully in near future from the current proprietary CMS. We will also use the space to host other platforms for ours needs like Open Atrium, for project managing etc.  We also thank Dave Hall, which made the contact with Rackspace guys to make it possible.

Visa for FOSDEM!

I am planning to go in Brussels, Belgium on the 4th till 7th of February, 2011 for being a part of Fedora Project team as an Ambassador, expect that I am also interested to explore more because I’m also involved in other great projects like Mozilla, Drupal etc! at FOSDEM (conference), for that I need a Schengen Visa. I had my appointment today to apply but couldn’t go in time to apply because I didn’t have “the original” invitation paper which arrived 1 hour later. I have all documents ready including original invitation paper, plane ticket reservation, booked hotel, parental and school permit etc. I am applying at Belgian Embassy in Prishtina, Kosovo in my next appointment at 10:45 (GMT +01:00) this Thursday (27th). Chances are minimal to get it because I am late but If somebody can help me, it’ll be more than appreciated!

Please spread the word!

Sincerely,
Gent

Drupal swag from Development Seed

Development Seed is nice company that helps teams communicate, with great products like Open Atrium, MapBox,Managing News etc. They were nice to send us some Drupal swag which we really appreciated.

Some people speak over 10 languages!

I found this really cool and funny phrase from soever chat from the internets, probably facebook!

‎> o hi girl, I speak over 10 languages! And I’m sure you won’t understand more than half of them.
< wow, you must be like super duper awesome!
> of course I am. but you could call me a geek too
< oh k, bye

Mozilla Balkans Meetup ’10, Ljubljana, Slovenia

(Copyrights to Alexandru)

Last weekend I was glad to be a part of Mozilla Balkans Communities Meet-up that was organized by the Slovenian community in Ljubljana at Kiberpipa hackerspace during the 4th and the 5th of December.

I was there together with my friend Heroid Shehu as representative of the Kosovo community, traveled by plane on 3th for our first time which was a really interesting experience. After our arrival with shuttles from Airport to Hostel Celica in Ljubljana, we checked in and met the community representatives from most of the Balkans countries at the bar. That night we had a community dinner at Stara Mačka (Old Cat) near Ljubljanica river in downtown, dinner finished and we decided that we should get back to the hostel (no party) because we had a lot of work to do tomorrow.

(Photo by Axel Hecht)

(Copyrights to Alexandru)

We woke up tomorrow for breakfast with others at 7:30am because we needed to be present at Kiberpipa around 9am for starting the sessions. Everything started with a Welcome message from William Quiviger and a general review since the Skopje meetup through Skype because he unfortunetly couldn’t make it. Then ~5 minutes talks for each community. After our talks, Brian King gave us a Firefox update, Kadir Topal from SUMO community gave us a SUMO update, Axel Hecht from Localization project gave us a l10n update, Pierros Pappadeas from Greek community in stead of Alina Mierlus because she also couldn’t make it gave us a Drumbeat update, Gorjan Jovanovski from Macedonin community gave us a Community Marketing update and 30 minutes before Lunch, Milos Dinics talked about Mozilla Communities Sites project. While we were heaving lunch Pierros Pappadeas talked about Open Web.

After the launch the session started with with a SUMO sprint by Kadir Topal,followed after by Axel Hecht with a l10n sprint,Brian King showed us how to build our first Firefox add-ons with Jetpack which was a lot of fun and in the end Milos Dinic gave us a QA sprint. In the end we fastly got ready and got back to the hostel to prepare for dinner and meeting the special guest/s.

We had dinner on Saturday at Figovec, a traditional Slovenian restaurant. There we had a really amazing suprise, Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla and others were waiting for us. There we had a great time discussing to each other.

(Photo by: Tristan Nitot)

(Copyrights to Alexandru Szasz)

In the end I would like to thanks Mozilla for giving me the chance to be a part of the community and the meetup, indeed.

If you want to see more photos from the meetup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mozbalkans10/ I will also post my photos nowdays!