Have you ever died on an electric chair? Have you been shot in a dark basement? Or awakened at 6am by a sound of gas saw? Exactly this happened with me yesterday. I woke up because some asshole was sawing planks. At 6 o'clock. They were in a hurry, you see? There is no way to saw planks at 10am, but 6am is the right time. Yeah, c'mon, let's rock'n'roll and saw'n'noise! Specific thing about almost all the buildings here is that they have a very good sound-conductivity. Bad soundproof, to be exact. Like shit. Knowing this, it's easy to imagine what kind of melody I had in my sleeping room. But what I was the most surprised by, is that noone came to the guys and told them something wierd, or report the administrative law breaking case to the police. Later I was explained it was a specific national thing. They're very patient. So it's ok if someone in the night goes near a building to beat a carpet, saw planks, or pull a cat's tail. Everyone else will be making no complains. Sigh.

Ok. I started with something unneeded. I'm sure if you're reading this news item (or a message in a mailing list) something about Linux console or IM programming is expected.

Several days ago a new piece of software saw the world. I wrote about the groan project Groan not so long ago. The first version had been ready for quite a while, I only had to update the site and announce it at freshmeat. This was finally done, so I wait for feedback, patches, and new dictionaries. So far only Russian- and Romanian- English, and vise versa are available for download.

On this week a new version of motor has been announced. Among it's new features I personally still enjoy regular expressions explorer. Full list of changes can be found here.

centericq finally got a new feature, support for yahoo messenger protocol. Still, there is no complete opensource library for icq2000 protocol to which I can migrate the program. I wouldn't like to do reverse engineering of the protocol myself, because it's quite a hard work, and I don't have enough enthusiasm for it. Of course, all of us appreciate work of Mattew Smith and Barnaby Gray. The former made the first Linux client for ICQ, and the latter is now working on icq2000 implementation. But I decided rather to include protocols with existing implementations into the program. So, Yahoo support works pretty stable now, but I'd like to arrange some kind of testing before the release. Use the cicqsync script which is included into the program distribution to get the recent source from CVS.

Enough programming news for today. Let's get back to the real life. What I was really missing here, is a place to buy new metal music albums. There was a very good shop in Kharkov, and in NIX Solutions I had a colleague who had friends there and every time there was something new he took disks to listen at work. So I just was sitting at work, reading announces, asking Roma for disks to listen, and picked intresting music myself. More, the shop wasn't expensive, a licensed CD cost about $2. Here CDs are about $5, and no pirate production. So I was suffering a lot, but my colleagues introduced me to a "CD man" guy they buy music from. He had a lot of genres, singers, etc. It was even possible to order something specific. Prices are ok. As far as I understood he brings disks from the former USSR :)