Sadly, not everything was perfect. In October my grandmother and one of my uncles passed away. Around the same time my Dad’s shop was robbed, twice. That was a tough period for my parents and the entire family, still not over it completely, but not giving up either! We love and support each other and will get out stronger than ever.

Now that the bad part is out, let’s jump to the awesome part ;)

Life changing decisions

In 2011 I actually had three life changing decisions.

First one in March, when I decided to finally quit smoking. And I did it! After 11 years I finally threw that shit away. Gave me a nice self-confidence boost, gained much needed weight – around 10kgs (now just to prevent that turning into fat and into muscles instead) – and I feel much, much better overall.

For the second one I owe a lot to my parents and to Srdjan Vranac, for their continuos support and making it possible to happen. In May I handed over my resignation at my previous job and in June I started my own company, Hex, and joined up with Vranac. Just this one thing changed my life to better in so many ways that I can’t thank Vranac enough for all he did, and is still doing! Thank you :)

The third decision happened in August when I cut my hair. And nope, I didn’t regret it :)

Friends and conferences

This year I spoke at two conferences, DORS/CLUC in May in Zagreb, and Webkonf in October in Budapest. My talks didn’t turn out that good (heck, the second one was pure horror), but I did make new friends which trumps bad talks any day!

In Zagreb I had the honor to meet fellow hacker Nikola Plejić, who kindly offered me a place to stay during the conference and showed me around the city. Now waiting for him to come to Novi Sad so I can return the favor. :)

In Budapest I met fellow hackers Ferenc Kovács and Dubravszky József. Great people with whom I’d like to grab a beer or two this year :)

Open source and hacking

Contributed to web2project and Zend Framework throughout the year, but somewhere in September got really close to a burn out so I decided to back up a little and have a break. I’m trying to ease my way back in to contributing and general hacking now. Need to be careful though, don’t want to get this close to a burn out again, next time might not see the line.

Started to learn C just for fun. Don’t know what to do with it yet, can’t hurt learning/knowing it.

All in all, awesome year which set the bar high for 2012, but with all this positive energy it will be a piece of cake to fly over it!

Happy hackin’ and a happy new year!

So, I got a haircut after 8 years.

This is the result. If you want, have a look at the whole album here: There, I fix’d it

I think it turned out pretty damn good.

The plan is simple and that’s to continue to work on things I love: work with PHP and contribute to open source. The rest will be figured out along the way.

I’ve teamed up with my good friend Vranac and his company Code4Hire to do what we’re both good at – writing software. If you need some good programmers, don’t hesitate to contact Vranac or me.

Happy hackin’!

Honestly, I don’t earn much. Enough for the rent, bills, food, but giving the fact that I don’t have a family, it’s enough for me, for now. So, I don’t make a s**t loads of money, but am still willing to work for free? Ummm. No.

Thing is, I really don’t consider this to be work. This is fun. This is hacking. This is creating stuff. This is solving problems. This is my passion. So no, I don’t work for free. I don’t work. I code, I hack.

But why open source?

Giving back

Giving back is nice. Not necessarily giving back to the same project, but just giving back to the open source community in general. It just makes you a better and nicer person :)

Knowledge

Both in high school and in college the fastest way for me to gain knowledge was to learn, collaborate with other students. Open source gives me the chance to share knowledge with hackers from all over the world; from Portugal, via Nova Scotia to Texas. It gives me the chance to be taught and to teach.

Experience

Open source gives the opportunity to work with people from every part of the globe. Getting ideas across by the means of email, chat, irc can be hard. Open source gives me the chance to improve my communication skills. Heck, I sometimes even have troubles explaining my ideas to my co-workers who sits right next to me.

Reading other peoples code, fixing bugs, writing documentation, adding new features, testing. Hack skills ++

Also, each and every accepted patch and merged pull request gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Contacts

Open source introduces you to new people. Who knows what can come out of these random introductions? Can’t be bad, that’s for sure.

This is why I contribute to open source: it is fun, it is hacking, it is creating stuff, it is solving problems.

It is my passion.

I graduated on June 26th, the topic was a Python desktop application that communicates with a web service; both sending and receiving data is possible. Started working on July 1st at Online Solutions as a PHP dev and started to “officially” give back to the Open Source community by joining the ZF Bug Hunt Days – so far few minor patches submitted and applied. Wrote a review on a ZF book and another one on jQuery and PHP is in the drafts.

I ain’t making plans for this year, cause I have failed miserably to realize my most important plan for 2009; I’ll just improvise throughout the year.

Dear 2009 – up yours. 2010 – bring it on.

Happy new year!

You can find my posterous account at http://robertbasic.posterous.com/.

That is all.

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 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!

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!