As a php/sql freelancer, I felt the urge to have a private BTS to keep in contact with clients and keep track of the (hopefully) few bugs they reported. I needed a system  simple and easy to install and manage. I needed to restrict users to a certain project (a client shouldnt be posting a bug to a project she doesnt own ;P ). I planned to try out 3 projects:

1. phpbt
2. whups
3. mantis

I finally opted for the first one. I didnt even install Whups when I realized I needed to install the Horde framework first. Mantis is a nice and nifty one, it has a really cool layout, but it hasnt any group2project restriction management (you get only some fixed groups and privileges to manage). Phpbt has what I was looking for, I already thought about a couple of features it would be cool to add, I will start working on it as soon as possible.

I am back from a 5 days break on the mountains. I enjoyed this time for many reasons, first of all my friends, then the weather and the place. Now I am back to study Maths and Python.

Today I did and will do various tasks:

• wake up and have breakfast with my spanish brother
• try to teach him some cubing
• do some cubing as well
• reading books
• reading blogs
• having lunch
• making tortellini for tomorrow’ lunch
• greeting blextar leaving for Estonia
• installing awstats

I never mentioned it before, but a couple of months ago I got addicted to Rubik’s cube. A friend from Austria taught me a solving method, but now I am learning the champion Lars Petrus method. Surprised there is a Cube Championship? I was too when I found out this little game from the old 80’s is still so popular. My average time is around 3 minutes and a half, a little too far from the current World Record.

To get awstats working I had to fight a bit with a .htaccess file, because I needed to override some settings from Drupal’s htaccess. I found in a forum the solution was:

&lt;Files ~ (\.pl)&gt;<br />Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks<br />&lt;/Files&gt;

When people get angry aroud me, I always try to be as more calm as I can. In fact, times in which I  raise my voice over normal levels because I am angry. I dont know whether this is good or not. From my experience, I like this approach. I mean, you save precious resources for other tasks. Getting angry should be something that happens rarely so that people around you understands that problem is really important for you (a way to somehow get the attention focused on your problem). If anger lasts too long, it ruins people's life. There was an apointment-overflow in my afternoon today. People of both groups underlined the importance for me to stay with the respective group. I finally managed to meet both groups wishes. Except that both groups leaders wasted a lot of words, time, decibels, friendship points to clear things up. (For you my friend, that know what happened, please understand this is a simplification of the fact. Take my post as a consideration about anger in general.) Yesterday peassa started blogging. This evening there will be the choir concert I have been preparing for such a long time. Tomorrow my brother is coming. Now I am going to prepare my dress for this evening and maybe I will go and buy some ingredients for a welcome tiramisù for my brother.

There's nothing to add to this post.

I spent the last hour GIMP-ing around with a photo I took a couple of weeks ago, featuring my best friend blextar and me with the most stupid and arrogant face we could ever think of. My auntie has bought a new camera, so she gifted my family with her old one. It was a long time I had been thinking of buying one, and I got one without even asking! What a luck ;) The photo is one of the first I took with this new toy. I wasn't satisfied enough with the original one, so I thought to edit it. I messed around with all possible mix of plugins that came to my mind. I am attaching a couple of results. The one I like most is blueish one. To achieve that result I followed these steps:

1. <image>->filters->colors->decompose->CMYK
2. <image>->filters->blur->gaussian blur(RLE) (12px)
3. with tool "select by color" with thereshold around 80, I clicked on light part, floated the selection and anchored to a new layer
4. with the new layer selected: <image>->layer->colors->posterize with 15 value
5. <image>->image->mode->RGB
6. mess around with <image>->layer->colors->color balance to get a nice blueish photo

To view the attachments, click on the post title, they will appear listed below the post. DuePirliElfi is the blueish one amd DuePirliSeppa is the Sepia version. (UPDATE: thanks to Checco for notifying me anonymous users couldnt see attachments. For the few of you that dont know who is Checco, I link his band site. If you like challenges, you may look and try to find which instrument he plays.)

I just finished a one-hour session with a friend of mine. It has stired up a lot of thoughts and it has given me material about my actual situation to think about for at least a couple of weeks. 

I want to code something for my own site. A blog roll block manager and a bugzilla-like manager for my eventual clients.

Blextar has handed me a small work in PHP. I am planning to spend less than 10 hours on it. I think it’s worth the money I will get. The problem is that I need to write my scripts to manage the worst-designed database I ever encountered in my short programmer life. Unusued fields, one-to-many and many-to-many relations mixed in a single table. I spent most of the 3 hours I dedicated to the project today to figure out how the database was built and which improvements I could apply. Note for future works: reading your own code is a whole lot easier than customizing one’s scripts, unless they are well-coded and commented (which is not the case). 

Today I had a lot of fun playing this challenge, so I have one for you too below. If you mail me the correct location, you can win a gmail account. This is another interesting link: http://www.spaceimaging.com/

The depressing part is about my programming exam. I expected it not to be difficult for my abilities, but instead it panicked me because some parts of it were not explained well enough and I couldnt help to code the way I wanted. I dont think I have passed it, but in the case, I am planning to restart it from scratch (one multiple choice test again), because I think (hope) I can do better than this. I will get the results by Friday.

It’s too late to post a big enough post. Anyway I inform you I passed the first of three parts of the Java Programming exam with a 45/50 score. The first part was a written test with multiple choices. Tomorrow I will have the actual programming part. Next week there will be the oral part.

I am still thinking about how to refactor my life. Sharing experiences with people of my age showed that I am not alone, and this is of some kind of comfort to me.

At the end of this week my brother from Spain is coming. And also a friend from Edinburgh.

Short post since its Sunday. I am havvily listening to Hober and heavvily BlogExploding. Hober is the kind of web radio I would listen uninterruptedly for days I am planning to start adding some more blocks on the left here. A block about my delicious bookmarks and a block with some icons/links to other sites. Have a nice Sunday.