It all started with this. Just another bored tweet from yours truly after the Sunday lunch. Followed by tweets like this and this and this and this and this. I’ll just blame the fact that it’s Sunday afternoon for the low response and that we geeks do have a life! (well, most of us… some of us…)

What’s the point?

To meet. To really get to know those people behind the avatars and tweets and funny names like “Swizec”.

Who can come?

Despite the “Balkanic” part in the name, anyone can come, no matter from where you are. Be friendly and don’t hate the geeks (geeks run the world, so, beware). One rule only: you have to have a Twitter account. On the list below you’ll read later are my friends from Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. If you have a friend from these countries and I don’t know her or him, do not worry, she or he, can come too. As long as they have a Twitter account.

When?

In autumn. September, most likely, during a weekend, when no sane person should be working. Our dear Anca had a knee surgery recently and will have another one sometimes in July and we shall wait for her to fully heal and recover! (the hashtag is #wewaitforanca).

Update: I created a twtPoll on when to organize the #balkanictweetup Please give your vote!

Where?

Budapest, Hungary. Well, that’s one suggestion. But it can be somewhere else. As long as we are together :-* It would be great to last at least one night (2 days that is), but I’m fine with more, too. One day is not possible. I expect lots of you guys there and it would be impossible to drink beers with all of you in one day only (oh yeah baby, we’re gonna have lot’s of beers). So, it would be great to find a cheap hotel where there are those fancy conference halls.

What will we do?

Chat (IRL!!!) and eat and drink and goof around and laugh and cry and sleep (NOT!) and take pictures and go do stuff and most importantly, we’ll TWEET!!!1 There will be one special event that will be important for everyone to attend: we’ll sit around in a big freakin’ circle and introduce - stand up, say hi my name is Robert, aka @robertbasic and sit down (no need for the “and I’m a Twitter addict” part, we all know that).

We also can give talks on some silly topics. We can show off our works. We can sing odes to the Twitter Bird. We really can do what we want. The sky is the limit.

Other stuff of interest

The official hashtag is #balkanictweetup.

The Tweetup tagline is “Bring netbooks and beers.”

The official #balkanictweetup Twitter account is @BalkanicTweetup.

Send all your ideas, comments, appeals to zebalkanictweetup at gmail dot com

I spent all my money on beers and women so if a good Samaritan wants to support us with buying a domain and hosting for this event that would be, like, very nice of you. You would have your own page on the official #balkanictweetup page where we praise you and your good deeds. The domain is bought by Vlad Georgescu. Thanks Vlad!

I am too lazy to make the list of my friends I promised earlier, so there will be no list for now. Sorry.

He, who likes this silly idea, drop me a love letter to zebalkanictweetup at gmail dot com with your real name (yes, Jozef, I mean, Swizec, you too!) and your Twitter username. I’ll make a list based on that.

I gotta run now. Please, share your thoughts in the comments below.

Love,
Robert :-*

P.S.: Due to insane amounts of spam, I’m moderating the comments, so please wait while I approve yours. Thanks :)

Moblin got me curios and I wanted to test it out:

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.

Cause I don’t own (yet!) a netbook, I installed it under VirtualBox (VB from now on). The image is 666 MB big and it comes not in an .iso, but in a .img format. But, VB, a really awesome software, had no troubles booting from it. As with the majority of Linux distros nowadays, Moblin image is also a Live CD, which means you can run it, without installing it.

Installing Moblin

The preinstall process is made up from 6-7 steps: choosing the language, the keyboard layout, the timezone and, of course, the partitioning. Basically, it’s just another boring “Next-Next” process. The installation itself took around 6 minutes to finish. When it’s done, it asks for a username and a password.

The first boot went pretty quickly, considering that booting under VB takes longer than booting under regular installations. The thing about VB is that it needs, the so called “Guest Additions” installed on the guest machine, so that the guest machine can be used normally. In this case, I failed to install it: Moblin comes with one version of the Linux kernel and the additions are for another version of the kernel. This prevented me in my quest to test Moblin fully. Anyway, I’ve managed to take a few screenshots of it, all are uploaded to my Picasa profile.

The m_zone

There was one thing that was strange. It has a “Status panel”, from which you can update your profiles on social networks. A really useful stuff. I just opened it up and updated my Twitter profile. Almost. I wasn’t logged in to Twitter from it and Moblin didn’t say a word about it. It just happily said that my status is updated. Once I found the “Web services” panel I logged in and this time I was really updating my Twitter stream.

I really was hoping to test it normally and write a detailed review of it, but this guest additions thingy thought otherwise. Moblin is a great distro, even in this beta stage I believe it’s useful. What do you think? Did you test it already, saw it in action?

One thing’s for sure: when I’ll get myself a netbook, it’ll run on Moblin.

Cheers!

P.S.: Check out the Moblin intro, too!

It’s been a while since I last wrote something; didn’t have anything smart or interesting to say. Not that I do have this time. It’s 4AM and I can’t sleep. Can’t really find the inspiration for work and writing (if you can consider these scribblings as writing). Lots of ssss… stuff happened which had a great impact on my mood and my ability to do something useful. And I just didn’t felt like doing something about it. Until recently…

I was having a couple of beers with a friend of mine, with whom I go to college. After the 3rd beer or so, we came to an idea of submitting a paper to this year’s SISY conference. All I will say for now, that it will include Python, Assembly, microcontrollers, electric motors and lots of other geeky stuff. This project, even while the idea is still only in my head, got my mind running again and might be the way out of this state of indifference. Why? Well, to be able to start this project, I first need to finish my current project, my graduate work. To finish my grad work, I needed to start working on it again (which I did, honest!). I’ll even spend my whole Saturday this week in the college to write/test/debug my app there. If all goes well, the app will be finished this week and I can go onto writing the documentation for the grad work. Everything will go fine, right?

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop a few days ago. Loving it! Had only 2 minor issues with the hardware upon the installation. First, the graphic card was messing around, it didn’t want to enable all those funky visual effects. That got sorted out, thanks to @firusvg who suggested to install compiz and @ivan86 who pointed me to this article. Second, when plugged in the headphones, the sound was still coming out on the speakers. @Asgrim sent me this link which helped me to sort this out. Apart from this, everything else works out-of-box. Even the wifi!

OK, enough for now. Here’s to hoping that the bad times are over and the good times are coming. Cheers!

Edit: Once, there was a youtube video clip here; Uriah Heep - The Magicians Birthday. Now, it is gone. That is all.

Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms out there — if not the best. It’s very powerful, can be easily extended and modified. It’s documentation is very well written and, so far, had answer to all of my crazy questions :)

You know what’s the best part of Wordpress? With some knowledge of PHP and MySql, you can turn it into much more than just a blogging platform. After doing some HTML to WP work for Roger, I thought of one way how could Wordpress be transformed into a CMS. Note the “one way”. This is not the only way for doing this, and, most likely, not the best way.

I didn’t look much, but I think that there are some nice plugins out there that can do this. But, where’s the fun in the download, upload, activate process? Nowhere!

I will show you how to change your Wordpress into a CMS and it really doesn’t take much coding to achieve this! The example presented here is simple and will have a static page for it’s home page, another static page for the “Portfolio” page and the blog. The home and portfolio page will have some of own content and both will include some content from other static pages. You all most likely know the blog part ;)

Static pages

Things you should know: each static page has it’s title, it’s slug or name (the thing that shows up in your browsers address bar: http://example.com/portfolio/ - right there, the portfolio is the slug!), has the parent attribute and the template attribute. The parent attribute is used when it’s needed to make one page a child of another, i.e. to show Page2 as a subpage of Page1. The template attribute is used when we want to apply some different layout and styling to a static page. Read more about static pages and how to create your own page templates.

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