Finally I could allow myself to get home right after work. Recently the amount of various parties increased dramatically. So I started worrying that I wouldn't be in time (before the end of January) with an article about daemons in UNIX environment for the argc & argv magazine, which I promised to finish in time. Usually I get my promises seriously. Also there was a need to tell my site visitors about recent activities of mine.

Now I'll tell you some about parties I recently visited. One of the most intresting ones took place last Sunday when in the same room a whole OON gathered. Gustavo called this kind of party exactly this way, for there only Africaans speaking people were not represented. There were Spanish, Franch, Russian (me), Latin American, Canadian and several Romanian guys. Funny thing was that the latter formed a kind of a national minority there :) The rumble was organized in the appartment of one of the Spanish guys (he was Basque in fact), which travelling Europe stopped for some time here in Iasi. For guests he prepared quite an intresting drink named "cocamucho" which was a mix of "coca-cola" and wine. We renamed it into "cacamacho" immediatelly :) Now several observations of mine go. First, speaking with one French guy we discovered the Real Language of International Communication. The point is that both of us being foreigners in Romania spoke with each other not in English, Russian or French. We spoke Romanian, and this fact amused me a lot. Also, a compatriot of his demonstrated really cool linguistic knowlegde. Appears if you throw a showball to a cute and nice French girl she starts crying out Russian curse words. And I didn't tought her ever before. Wow :)

Till this moment I'm under impression of a book of George Orwell, "1984" which I have read recently. Probably this old literature (it was written in the year 1949) won't sound a disovery for the majority of site visitors. And it's strange I haven't read it before. Nevertheless, if some of you haven't done this yet it's strongly suggested to read.

Finally, about my programming. As soon as a release version of libicq2000 sees the world, I'm gonna release the new version of centericq. Indeed, it's a major breakthrough in terms of functionality in comparison with 4.5.0. Recently implemented in libicq2000 whitepages search and self information update functionality found its place in the brand text interface. Also some bugs were fixed as well as several new features were implemented. After the release adding long awaited support for AOL Instant Messenger protocol is planned.

By the way, now the program has its own fan club. Probably I should feel like a real rock star now :) Besides, it's not the first site of such a kind, for several years ago, when I was developing another quite famous application on my own - Tornado, several fan club sites existed. This one is called centericq.de and Wolfram Schlich takes care of it. He with some other guys gathers releases, useful advisories and answers in the mailing list, makes screenshots, and so on, creating content for the site this way.

And also, I repaired my sms address. Now you can send an e-mail message to phone@konst.org.ua or pager@konst.org.ua adress, and it will beep on my mobile phone immediately. I implemented it in quite a complicated way. The point is the my current Connex mobile operator doesn't have its own e-mail -> sms gateway. So I had to setup the e-mail's going through the smssend program which was using the mtnsms.com site to get messages delivered. mtnsms.com was the only site which supports Connex, for no others including ICQ are able to work with it.