Жаловаться хочу

Решил тут заранее купить билеты на поезд Питер-Москва.

РЖД

Первым делом полез на сайт РЖД. Что удивительно, сайт работает, сайт ищет и сайт находит поезда. Из минусов, делает он это не очень хорошо.

Первая проблема, с которой я столкнулся, заключалась в том, что я искал ночной поезд. Ночные поезда отправляются где-то с 11^и вечера до 2^х ночи. К сожалению, сайт не поддерживает поиск с диапазоном отправления с началом и концом в разных сутках. Поэтому если я хочу заказать билет скажем на вечер 21^го мне приходится искать два раза, c начала на 21^ое (билеты с 11^и до 12^и часов) затем не 22^ое (с 12^и до 2^х). Я согласен, фича довольна специфичная, но что-то мне подсказывает, что не один я покупаю билеты Питер – Москва (ну или Москва – Питер).

Проблема номер два. Нет возможности сразу купить билет туда и обратно, сначала ишещь и покупаешь билет в одну сторону, а потом в другую. Будет весело если человек в одну сторону найдет и купит, а обратного не будет…

Проблема третья. Не возможно фильтровать билеты по стоимости. Пока на конкретный поезд не кликнешь сколько стоят билеты не узнаешь.

Ну и последняя капля, когда я все-таки выбрал один из поездов и заполнил всю информацию о себе, с меня почему-то затребовали 2750 рублей, хотя две минуты назад я выбрал билет за 2400. Самое обидное что никакого объяснения за что они берут больше нет.

Яндекс и все-все-все

Отчаявшись я полез в Яндекс искать где еще можно купить билеты и оказалось, что Яндекс и сам рад их мне продать. Тут и поиск был немного поудобней, да и дизайн сайта по-приятней. Только жаль сам Яндекс только помогает найти билеты, а продает их нечто под названием UFS. Тут все как у взрослых. Чтоб заплатить карточкой надо пройти через хитрую процедуру добавления и подтверждения.  Однако этот UFS почему-то не любит американские карточки. Обычные интернет магазины (российские в том числе) любят, а эта сволочь нет :(

Конец

В общем, придется покупать билеты по-старинке.

P.S.

Никто не подскажет хороший и недорогой поезд?

Wireless Printing & Scanning w/ Linux

I recently bought a HP Photosmart C4385 all-in-one printer/scanner. Nice thing about it is that printing/scanning can be done over wi-fi.

But to tell the truth I didn’t even hope that scanning would work over wi-fi with my Linux. And guess what? I was wrong! And not only did it work, it also took me just several minutes, probably even less then on windows (for which drivers where provided on a CD) to set it up.

Big thanks to HP for their support of Linux customers!

P.S.
Sorry I’m to lazy to write a howto, so just couple links:

• http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ – the drivers that do the magic, especialy nice ‘hp-toolbox’ tool
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HPLIP – Gentoo wiki page with lots of information, unfortunately not available anymore . Luckily there is a copy in web archive and there is equal amount of usefull information on the gentoo forum.

P.S.S.
Obviously printing worked just fine too :)

UPDATE: I decided to try to migrate to KDE4 and Arch64 so I had to reinstall my printer/scanner and I’m not lazy this time, so here are the steps required:

1. Install hplip, cups, sane and some sane frontend (xsane, kooka, skanlite, etc.)
2. Start cups daemon
3. Run hp-toolbox
4. It will guide you through printer setup
5. Uncomment hpaio in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

Now both printing and scanning should work. You might need to add yourself to group “scanner”.

CommunityOne Conference

It is seems to be conference season in Silicon Valley now. The big JavaOne is almost here and to get everyone ready Sun set up the CommunityOne conference. This was mainly a one day event there was something yesterday (on Sunday) but very little.
The CommunityOne is free and is dedicated to open source. It left me no excuse for missing it. Well, I didn’t:

I should say it was more interesting than Web 2.0 Expo. Less buzz more technical stuff. Overall I’m very satisfied. Plus I’ve got a nice t-shirt with opensource mascot patterns:

Мой Кофе

Я тут недавно побывал на Web 2.0 Expo. И представьте мою радость, когда я невыспавшийся забежал в фуд-корт выпить чего-нить бодрящего и увидел вот это:

Записка из силиконовой долины намбер 2

На прошлых выходных мы наконец-то сделали это. Хоть погода была не самая удачная, временами капал дождь, но мы взяли фотоаппарат сели в машину и поехали!

A Little Trip to LA or I Can’t Believe I Did It

I was very lucky to get a one week vacation after working a little at my new job. So I decided to drive to Los Angeles for couple days. Since my car isn’t in the best condition I decided to rent something cheap but hopefully more reliable than my car for this adventure.

I was planning to move out on the morning of the 25th when everybody’s at home celebrating Christmas so the freeways would be truly free :)

But the downside was that no rental would work on the 25th so I woke up early on the 24th and drove to several rentals close to my home.

First I visited Hertz (probably because that’s the best known name), then Avis (I also had heard of it before), then United Alamo (never heard of it before, but it appeared to be located just in the middle of the first two) and finally Budget (which I noticed on my way home).

Most of them didn’t have any cars :(

So I guess it’s a good idea to make a reservation beforehand.

The prices where pretty much the same, just Budget was a little cheaper.

The bad news where that since I’m not 25 years old yet I would have to pay extra $25 for each day. But that still wasn’t too bad.

The worst part was that Budget was the only one that a had a car for decent money and they wouldn’t give a car to someone who is under 25 and doesn’t have a credit card. In the other places they would accept debit cards but as I said they didn’t have cars.

So I ended up saving some money and taking the risks. But hey my car took me to LA in just 6 hours and got me back home in a little more than that due to some traffic.

Using a remote printer shared on windows xp from KDE

KDE has a very nice tool for configuring printers in ControlCenter.
Provided you have samba packages installed you can use it to add a printer shared on a windows xp computer. As designed it should work as a 5 click solution.
But for some weired reason (donna if it’s a windows or kde bug), SCAN function didn’t work well for me. It would display windows networks, it would even display computers in that networks, but when trying to look at available priters I would get:

Error returning browse list: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

Here is a solution I’ve found on Mepis forums:
- When you launch the Add printer wizard, choose SMB shared printer.
- In the next screen(user identification), choose Anonymous(no login/no password)
- Proceed to the next screen, and SCAN your network.(This is where you will get the NT_ACCESS_DENIED message if you try to access your Windows network)
- Now Don’t touch anything, and go BACK one step to the previous screen (User identification).
- In the user identification screen, choose guest(login = “guest”).
- Proceed to the next screen. DO NOT repeat a scan. Just try to access your Windows network in the displayed tree. You should magically see your Windows printer appear without any whining about access.

All you smart people out there give me some advice

I use KDE.

I love:
Katapult
digiKam
K3b
Kopete
amaroK
yakuake

I like:
Ktorrent
Codeine

I hate:
konqueror (both as file manager and as browser)

I wish:
there was a way to completely replace konqueror with something simpler, like dolphin for example
firefox was ported to QT
eclipse was ported to QT
openoffice was better and ported to QT
Kget was better, had download speed throttling and schedule (like ktorrent)

Applications I use:
very often:
Katapult
firefox
Kopete
Eclipse
OO Writer
konqueror

often:
amaroK
kmail

from time to time:
digiKam
codeine
mplayer

rarely:
K3b

The “I wish” part upsets me, so here is my question:
How can I become happy?

Update: I’m happy now!