Bèrto ëd Sèra's blog

All of a sudden Russia seems to be keen to perform symbolic moves. By acknowledging the independence of Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia they did not change anything, in practice. They simply gave the western media something to talk about. In practice nothing changed, the Russians tanks are where they were, they did not get a square millimetre more than what they already had. So why did they do it?

I rarely read fiction. Well, Philip K. Dick is an exception, but I guess all rules need several exceptions to become proper rules, don't they? So it's not a wonder that a book I was given as a present remained on my shelf for a full year before I opened it. But when I did open it I literally fell into it. And in love with it. It looks like there ARE good writers in contemporary Europe, after all.

As days go by, the Georgian puzzle starts to make some sense. No one can obviously say whether the sides had this scenery in mind on starting the game or not, yet a scenery is coming into focus.

Hopefully as MySQL 5.1 moves to a final stable release things will get much simpler... in the meantime, that's what you are supposed to do. The versions used are explicitly stated, if you have any weird surprise by later version pls signal it here.Pls note that this instructions are for Debian only, maybe they work under other systems, but I haven't checked them and I do not plan to check them in the future.

 

The EU offered its role as a mediator in the Caucasian crisis. The French, in particular, are having an extremely active moment. Since their occupation of Odessa during the Soviet Revolution this is probably the most active Russian period of my good French cousins. One can be quite skeptkical of the possible results, yet at least someone DID something, instead of just taking sides and betting money on who will kick who, while the dead count keeps rising.

On July 25 the Financial Times announced that TNK-BP's CEO, Robert Dudley, was leaving Russia and would run the company ''from a secret location abroad''. It was the last move in a chain of confrontations about the strategic directions the company is expected to take. The Russian shareholders (led by Mr. Fridman , according to the media) are pressing for independence from BP, and accuse London of trying to run this joint-venture as a local office, avoiding those moves that are in conflict with direct BP interests. On its side, BP declares that the Russians are mostly willing to ''extract cash'' from the company, instead of reinvesting profits.

These days there is a huge number of requests for closure of wikipedias in African Languages. The issue is controversial as obviously one can look at them from a number of conflicting points of view. From one end you can pretty much say these requests are discriminatory in nature, as they tend to ignore the potential amount of public for information published in such languages and they deliberately ignore the objective problems (low alphabetization, lack of connectivity, to name but the first that come to mind) that slow down the production rate for such projects. On the other end, there is a number of practical problems associated with the management of an empty project, as spammers do not know linguistic boundaries and must be dealt with no matter if you have users for a project or not.

I previously wrote that I suspected Italy to be involved in the merge between Gazprom and the EU. The answer to my question marks just appeared on the New Yok Times. So that was a correct guess. There really appear to be two parties within NATO, one of which has interests that are totally diverging from the American interests. This game is getting interesting... let's see what happens :)

The first effects of the falling dollar already appeared: NATO suddenly started to speak european. The Ukraine and Georgia have been told the current expression for forget it in EUese, which sounds "Great! we will surely find the right time to discuss it!". Only it never says when such friendly search is supposed to start. Turkey is listening to this very song since ages, they must have heartily laughed on hearing it repeated in Bucharest, today. So here we are... no bucks, no power. Even the interests of Greece now appear to be stronger than Emperor's Bush's will. 

One of the things we initially used for this project was Alexa. When i-iter started, almost a year ago, we could not use proper stats as we did not control our own server, as we do now. So there wasn't much we could do to track traffic, apart from using Google and Alexa. So I was happy to install the Alexa bar on my Firefox and proudly show what appeared to be a massive traffic. In a few months we jumped up to the top 100k positions.