I think everyone has already heard about Redhat 7.3 - a new version of the popular Linux distribution. Since ISO images are available for downloading at the vendor's ftp (it cannot be other way), the next day our sysadmin burned 3 CDs for me. And when finally I brought them home, I decided to give its installer's upgrade option another chance. Previous bad exprerience I had with it, was when I tried to upgrade RH 6.2 to 7.0. It resulted into programs' configuration getting screwed up, and libraries incompatibility errors. Finished this in a way non-Linux way: I removed 6.2 and installed 7.0 from scratch feeling myself like a "happy" Windows user. Nevertheless, upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3 left only good impressions. First I booted from the first CD, selected my favourite text mode, and Russian language interface. It was a surprise to see Russian descriptions for the majority of packages how they appeared in the installation/upgrad dialog. Till now had no time to try to get a clue with it. I wonder if the installer has a list of descriptions in various languages, or it's a feature of the new RPM format which allows to give packages localized names. After the upgrade finished, I only had to issue find /etc -name "*rpmsave" -print and to get the updated configuration in order. The point is that old configuration files are renamed to *.rpmsave so that not to replace them with new ones from packages of fresh versions of software.

I already told you about the site of my Romanian colleague Mihai Bazon. Visiting it several days ago I found a new article of his, about pseudo-RPC in JavaScript using iframe and div elements. Quite a useful trick, if you have a need to reload only parts of pages to show up-to-date information.

If you are cuorious to test new programs with nice and useful textmode user interface, here is Orpheus for your attention. It's a program which I wrote, as it usually happens, after a plenty of unsuccessful attempts to find a useful textmode audio player with the following features: support for mp3 and cd tracks, with a possibility to combine the both types within a play list in arbitrary order, support for cddb (internet music cd albums database) and reading mp3 tags decoding them from win1251 to koi8 when needed. Since there were no releases yet, tar.gz and rpm packages of the program are available here. Will be very glad to receive feedbacks and bug-reports. The latter helps to improve software stability a lot.

Finally, since today till Sunday yours sincerelly is in Carpathians, in the Peatra Neamt area, the place is called Bicaz. If something intresting happens, it will be written about here.