the-shrike.net

…my furry ball will be greatly missed.
From now, and forever :°

Farewell my beloved and dear minnie…

I love manga, as everyone already knows.
I am a geek, as everyone already knows.
I love to name things I own, as probably almost everyone already knows.

That’s why Killy is born!

Killy (name derived from the amazing character of the more than just fantastic BLAME! manga series by Tsutomu Nihei) is nothing less than my new cell-phone, a shiny new HSDPA clamshell phone by Samsung: the SGH-Z560.
By now, after playing around with it since about 6-7 days I’m quite satisfied by it, with two only remarks: one about the (well-known) not-so-long battery life (could have definitely been longer…) and the second one with the low styling options it has for themes and character display (way too bigger for my tastes). Both issues are anyway quite bearable without any huge problem, and while using 3G and HSDPA network service is really fast.
And I mean FAST. That’s what is made for… after all.

Well, my first toughts were about trying the 2.0MP camera, one of the main feature I bought it for, to see how pictures would have looked on it. For what I’ve seen so far, it deals perfectly with outside scenery (see above, another here) while it suffers bad from low light scenery (like interiors) compensating with quite a lot of blurring noise.

In all those three cases, the 1600×1200 version (higher resolution possible, even if it seems that Flickr is resizing them to 1024×768, probably because I have a free account) shows huge disturbing sings of low quality, while when seeing the pictures at lower resolution everything seems more than just “lookable” and the results are pretty what I was expecting.
Perfect from my needs for my point-and-shot behaviour.

Soon (time permitting) will follow a brief HOW-TO about how to connect a SGH-Z560 with a Gentoo driven computer (belial in my case, my Thinkpad x60s) via Bluetooth. It’s easy, but even for future personal reference, I’d like to sum things up! :)

A quick consideration before leaving to take a flight (off-duty) to Mombasa to be repositioned in order to operate the inbound flight from there to Milan on Wednesday. Actually: my first time on a long-haul intercontinental route as a passenger. And the first time on a B767 too! I’m excited.

Back to the consideration. Indeed, there are actually two of them.
Last 10 days I’ve been in Maldives for work, on a long shift, and like it’s my common habit there, I literally devoured 3 books (from start to finish).
Two of them are definitely worth a quick note each.

[Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya]
I loved it. Well, not in the common sense of the term. It’s a sad book, especially for someone like me that is so fond and so fascinated by the fate of Russia.
Very revealing and reading it while following on SKYNews TV the poisoning spy-game that was going on in the UK (and in Italy too) has been a little strange adding more and more thoughts on the “whole” status of the Russian life/system now.
I am usually not very “fond” of the all against books or movies, always a little suspicion about they telling the actual truth, but even taking in mind a little “dramatization” due to hate towards the person (President Putin in this case, take President Bush for Moore and it’s the same…), the stories narrated there are more than just scary, are definitely tremedously scaring!
Looking forward to read also A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya as soon as possible, I suggest Putin’s Russia as a must read to anyone who would like to take a look in the present of Russia.
It’s probably not the whole story, but a lot of it for sure, and well written too.

[The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond]
Shame on me! Shame on me!
Still, up until 10 days ago, I haven’t read what could be considered one of the many pages of a possible bible of the Open Source community. In my defence I can say I had in the past already read the on-line version of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, so what I was really missing was the other essayes published with it by O’Reilly.
I know have filled that missing in my Open Source history culture, and I’m feeling better :p
Right now quite outdated in its examples (due to publishing date) but a must read for everyone interested in the subject!

…what I could have never thought was that this blog would have seen so much almost-book-reviews like it’s doing. Oh well, maybe it’s just because I love reading.
Now I go back to pack things, to play with my new Samsung SGH-Z560 and to get ready to leave.