Music for free (almost)

Recently I have convinced myself to buy a MP3 player with 1GB and radio, just to keep me entertained on the plain when I cannot use my mobile phone and in any other occasion where it is going to be more handy.
But soon I have come to the point where all my MP3s generated out of my legal CDs were no longer cool and entertaining anymore. Buying a new CD is not an option this days, so I went Internet-shopping.
Luckily "legal mp3" query in Google led me to http://www.tunster.ru/ which turned out to be the coolest (and cheapest - please correct me if I am wrong) places.
An average mp3 costs around $0.10 which means that I can stuff my MP3-player for around $15. And the quality is really good - 192 bit rate.

Polish community in Galway

Today was the first polish mass I attended in Galway. Great thing that we can finally have one. But I was also said that not so many people were there - probably because that did not even know about it.
So to change this situation I decided to set up a blog [http://poloniawgalway.blogspot.com/] where polish community in Galway notify others about events like that.

How to advertise a school of motoring

How to advertise a school of motoring
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Ever wondered how to do that? Try to squeeze your car in a small alley, park it inch beside the fence ... and there you have it - it just screams: "no other school will teach you how to park that good"

DDict - Desktop Proxy for Online Dictionaries

For a long time I was using a nice desktop interface of the dict.org service for KDE. But it was of no use when trying to come up with a translation from Polish. While there is a lot of good online dictionaries - none of them had an similar proxy for the linux desktop.
I have decided to take appropriate action - one night of hacking and I have developed DDict - Desktop Proxy for Online Dictionaries [http://sf.net/projects/ddict/]. This small tool written in Java/JDIC resides in System Tray allowing user quick access to a number of predefined (and easily extendable) list of online dictionaries.

Check out the ready to use packages at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=157520 and screenshots at http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=157520

History of MarcOnt

I have just realized that although so much has been said about MarcOnt in many places, I have never said the full story of that initiative. It all stared when I came for the interview to Galway in April,2004. I meet a lot of interesting people from DERI - current colleagues. Among them I meet Anna. We have briefly discussed what we are working on. She told me that since the ontology has to be build based on the community agreement - she is building a portal where a community/e-society can collaborate on the ontology. At that time I had problems with librarians accepting the idea of the Semantic Web. The only remedy was to create an ontology based on their favorite MARC21. But how to do that? Then it struck me - we can get librarians to create the ontology for themselves. But we need a smart process, with negotiations, collaboration and versioning. And this is where MarcOnt Initiative and MarcOnt Portal were born. It was somewhere over Germany on my way home from Galway (through Frankfurt) ...

Rainbow

Rainbow
Originally uploaded by skruk.

No wonder Ireland is such a rich country: Rain -> Rainbows -> Irish Pixies + Pots of Gold -> Lots of Gold !

A hole

A hole
Originally uploaded by skruk.

I am just curious - is this the way to cover the hole or to warn pedestrians about the danger?

Do not fly to/from Bydgoszcz

When 3 weeks ago I was land in Gdansk instead of my destination - Bydgoszcz - it was kind of funny, since I got a coach that dropped me out in my hometown on the way from Gdansk to Bydgoszcz. The weather was horrible - first snow - and we appreciated the care Ryanair took to handle the problem of its passengers.
But what happend today was a completely weird story - the weather was good - not perfect - but you could see clearly for miles - so we were sure there were going to be no problems. How wrong were we ... the plane decided not to land in Bydgoszcz due to fog (what FOG?!) - and fly to Poznan instead - leaving all of us on the ground - helpless :(
What came next was like a horror - of course we were offered to get our money back but when you book your tickets early - the price then and for the nearest flight was like 1:10 - nice solution. Or to re-schedule our flights - problem was - 200 people waiting in an endless queue - hearing that the next available flight was no sooner that in a weeks time.
In addition if you were to have a flights connection to e.g. Shannon or Derry like some of us did - you were in even more trouble - no help at all - no money return for the second flight - unless your private insurance covers that (mine claims it does - I hope so).
To cut down the number of passengers waiting to be servered - we were given small pieces of paper with Ryanair web site (wonder how I book my tickets without it) and a phone number to Dublin where we were supposed to be served.
So I decided to check the flights myself immediately - there was Orange.HotSpot and since I am used to using airport WIFI services - I was trying to connect to that one. To my surprise Orange do not provide online service to buy the access time - the only way to do that is to buy one of those scratch cards- but ... surprise ... you will not find one on THAT airport :(
Finally I got home - and find two possible connections I could you next week - reasonable expensive - but as you could suspect - not provided by Ryanair. I decided to do the last thing I could - call the phone number we were given and arrange reimbursement - to my surprise the line was dead with information stating that I should call between 9-14 and 15-19 Mon-Fri - since it is already Friday, 9pm - there is nothing I can do about that, Damn!!
Take my advice - DO NOT FLY TO/FROM Bydgoszcz