• Starting with real VoIP

    Phone calls are notoriously expensive in Czech Republic. Despite the former communication monopoly is officially gone, the company still owns the landlines and you pay them high fixed monthly fees and high call rates. Fortunately, VoIP started to expand here recently. I’ve already been using VoIP for some time, but only at the PC-to-PC level […]

  • Not without help

    There are simple facts which one should nevertheless repeat as often as needed. We are sometimes full of doubts about things we do. But if God gives us a task, there is a reason He did so and He doesn’t leave us without his help.

  • -22°C

    Yesterday morning was -22°C cold here. This was the lowest temperature I can remember I’ve ever experienced. Cool. I’m old enough now to observe some changes in clime here. About 20 years ago summers often used to be dry and there wasn’t much snow in winters. Last years there is more snow and winters seem […]

  • From Konqueror to Firefox

    Several latest versions of Konqueror use to crash, usually about once or twice a week. This is not something I’m able to fix easily and as I got sufficiently annoyed (including some missing features such as inability to block popups or to show page source in a sane way) I decided to move to another […]

  • Stepping down with GUI toolkits

    I write a small application which works with Festival speech synthesis system. As Festival modules I use are written in Scheme, I started to write the application in Common Lisp and McCLIM. But I had to step back from this decision soon. McCLIM is an excellent GUI toolkit, but it lacks support for Czech, which […]

  • Back to math

    I was curious whether one can return to same basic math (calculus and linear algebra in this case) after several years of inactivity in those areas. I was positively surprised that while I forgot many things I was still able to refresh my knowledge quickly. And not only that, I was able to understand some […]

  • Shiny nights

    These days we have clear sky, full moon and a lot of snow. We can’t enjoy such wonderful conditions at our geographical location often. And because winter moon is high, I took my old photography equipment (which suffers of no problems working at -10°C for long time) and entered the night to take some snapshots […]

  • Publicité on my computer

    The following fortune made me LOL yesterday: Eat shit – billions of flies can’t be wrong.

  • Introductory economics textbooks

    I needed to get some very basic knowledge of economics principles, so I looked for introductory economics textbooks (in Czech). The classic Samuelson’s and Nordhaus’s book Economics was the most expensive one and its Czech edition was dated 1991. I wasn’t willing to pay such a big amount of money for an about 15 years […]

  • Tramping in Emacs

    Why to use separate terminal applications for remote connections when one can use Emacs? Why to run remote Emacs of different version, in different configuration, with echo delays, without your customizations, etc.? Why to pollute your desktop with another window and why to switch between it and Emacs all the time? Why to run multiple […]