April Fools and assorted wisdom

Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense

Got me ROTFLOL for a long, long time. Now it is your turn!

One can wish...

...for more often updates, perhaps? Well, I guess not. Still, I have not abandoned the blog. Just that I am busy working on Wiki (and my doctoral studies seem to have finally picked a pace up...more on that later).

Central and Eastern Europe have been a site of much war and destruction over the last few hundred years. But in alternate history, this could have been different, for example, if one man dream would have became a reality:

In 1919 Józef Piłsudski envisioned a federation (the "Federation of Międzymorze"), a Polish-led confederation comprising Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and other Central and East European countries now emerging out of the crumbling empires after the First World War. The new union would have had borders similar to those of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 15th–18th centuries; and it was to be a counterweight to, and restraint upon, any imperialist intentions of Russia or Germany. It might have made central Europe into a "Third Europe" invulnerable to Poland's historic antagonists, Germany and Russia.

It might have. It didn't, since it never happened. Soviets pulled all strings they could to prevent this. Western Allies feared that weakened Germany and Russia may not be able to pay First World War reparations, and that the balance of power in Europe would be offset too much by the newly independent countries. Lithuanians, Ukrainians and many other nations that were approached for entry into the Miedzymorze federation were afraid of any compromise limiting their own, dearly awaited independence, and in many cases had good reasons to be wary of Poland, as various border conflicts and even all-out wars divided their new, respective governments (especially the Polish-Lithuanian War, Polish-Ukrainian War and border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia). Finally, many Polish politicians like Roman Dmowski were opposed to the idea of multi-cultural federation, prefering the creation of nationalistic, pure-ethinic Polish country. Eventually, Piłsudki's dream was lost in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War, and the alliance between Central and Eastern European countries was never formed. Less then two decades after Piłsudski first articulated the proposal, and five years after his death, all of the countries that so persistently guarded their independence were again swallowed by their neigbours - Germany and the Soviet Union.

One can only wonder what would our world look today if Piłsudski's dream became a reality. I can't help but think that for the war ravaged European countries this alternative world would be a better one...

Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article

Press release:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th article in the English-language Wikipedia, its project to create a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia. The article was about "Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_settlements_in_the_Soviet_Union)." Wikipedia is a comprehensive online reference that has won acclaim and awards (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trophy_box) for its detailed coverage of current events and popular culture, its usability, and its community of contributors. It receives millions of visits each day.

Other recent additions to its English-language edition include hundreds of full-length songs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list), almost a gigabyte of new images (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), and subject-specific portals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Art).

Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, recently described Wikipedia as "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future." BBC News calls it "One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line," and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The Font of All Knowledge."

Wikipedia is the first and best-known project of the Wikimedia Foundation. It has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, and a news site. These projects are all run on the open source MediaWiki platform (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/).

Wikipedia is available free of charge and free of advertising from its website, en.wikipedia.org. Interested contributors can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction to learn how to add to the encyclopedia. DVD versions of the encyclopedia are scheduled to be released in English, German (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia-Distribution), and French, later this year.

Why ebooks are GOOD

It sounds bizarre, but giving something away for free is ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
insert link good way to make profit. A contradiction? No.

Read Building the , and don't forget to check the Ghostwheel!

Nice reading...and buying :D

The Daily .WAV

Found a new site. Nifty. The Daily .WAV. Title sais it all. Enjoy!

The Daily .WAV


"I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andre and Sofie Ivanoff. I am the Right Hand of Vengence. . .and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, damnit. I am Death Incarnate and the last living thing you are ever going to see. God sent me."

Anybody wants to guess where is this quote from? :)

Free Antivirus

It is worth following Sourceforge Projects of the Months. Each of them represents the best of open source community. And this month we got a real treat: a free antivirus, ClamWin:

ClamWin A Free Antivirus For Windows

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. It provides a graphical user interface to the Clam AntiVirus engine.

ClamWin Free Antivirus uses the GNU General Public License by the Free Software Foundation and is free (as in freedom) software. To find out more about GNU General Public License and what it entitles you to, please visit the following link: Philosophy of the GNU Project - Free Software Foundation.

ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code at no cost. It features:

• Scanning Scheduler;
• Automatic Virus Database Updates. ClamAV team updates Virus Databases on a regular basis and almost immediately after a new virus/variant is out;
• Standalone Virus Scanner;
• Context Menu Integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;
• Addin to Microsoft Outlook.

The latest version of Clamwin Free Antivirus is 0.83 (click on this link for more information.

Gotta love open source. Now, where can I find good oo firewall?