If you visit the Russian version of my site you could have noticed a column that appeared next to the news items recently. If you didn't, don't be upset, I'll tell you about it anyway :) It contains news from evolog, a headers exchange system for various author's resources. Unfortunatelly, it's only connects resources in Russian now, but hopefully one day sections for sites in other languages will appear. Several guys are involved into the project nowdays, someone Head who may be known for his own web site (in Russian, too) writes the main engine. So far the system is only evolving towards the first open source release, but after that the authors promise to make it really distributed and evolving itself, i.e. without any central server with the "many-to-many" kind of communications. Would be really great, I reckon. Myself I imagine the following situation. Let's say, there are three sites with the evolog engine installed on each of them. The owner of another one, the fourth wants to participate and installs the engine on his own site. One of the three actual members configures then the synchronization and all of the four sites display their visitors news of each others. A real distribution, the heaven on Earth, the victory of the Great technological revolution, and sexual freedom. A nice feature of the system is its liberalism. Its members initially are not forced to place news of others on their sites. Though it doesn't feel bad to place the news, for it's possible to choose separate member projects you want to display news from. BTW, the evolog's logotype is worth paying attention. It's a three-eyed smiling face from the "Evolution" movie which I liked a lot after I saw it at a cinema.

There is an impossible heat now in Romania. This is the first time I think that I was lucky to live in the North-Eastern part of the country. During the summer and autumn there is the 10 degrees difference between Iasi and Bucharest. The latter is located a bit further to the South, so sometimes I used to envy the citizens of the capital. But now when it's about +35C outside every day I can only imagine what is going on in the hugde city built up of beton and glass. Recently a colleague of mine found out on the map that the city of Iasi was situated on the same latitude as the South-Ukrainian city of Nikolaev. Thus now it's clear why I don't bear with the local heat too well. That's why myself being a person with kinda conservative views regarding wear, because of the inability to live in black jeans and a black t-shirt, decided to put on long shorts and a funny orange t-shirt. I feel a little better now, but got a feeling that I look like a real asshole. Though several Romanian ladies said the new look was cool. Anyway, gotta take a photo and put it on the site so that my dear readers could judge.

These days the Yahoo! instant messaging protocol surprised me with an original trick from its creators. One day about a week ago the support for it in centericq just stopped working. Logging in and reading of a contact list was immediately followed by disconnect. The same thing was happening with their official Linux client application. After a small investigation it appeared that my program is almost the only software which had support for the old version of the protocol. Though got to thank the Yahoo! developers for the fact that they didn't change the protocol in a weird way like Mirabilis did. If you remember this New Year the ICQ v5 protocol was "extended" with several problems which used to appear at random so that users of the old versions of ICQ for Windows without banners would replace their software with the newer one. It was covered by my article at freshmeat. Obviously the Linux users of the ICQ network were not of interest for them, though the problems were gone as soon as the libicq2000 was ready. So I did exactly the same thing this time, having replaced the Yahoo! engine with a fresher GNU-licensed library which used the new protocol to talk to the server.