Caught in a Web

Just a 3 months after dollar went to lowest rate since 2001 (on 07/15 USD vs. EUR rate was only 0.62), dollar is growing rapidly and it is already on rate from October 2005!

Somehow global financial problems is doing good for USD grow, so whole thing looks kind of weird to me since crisis actually started in USA. I wish there is some logical explanation from economist but I doubt.

Whatever, if you ask me I don’t care for cause, just please keep USD growing :)

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This is my first post in English after very long time. If I don’t count the one related to curl http client class update, I haven’t written anything on my English Blog since august 2007!

Unfortunately I had very good reason for doing that. My daughter got sick, very sick. She have Leukemia (ALL), so since October 2007 my life was twisted upside down. We had to move to Belgrade where she started with chemotherapy treatments which was really hard with plenty of complications and life treating conditions. With so much time spent in hospital and other related obligations, I really didn’t have spare time to deal with my Blog, neither to be honest i felt like writing anything about programming etc. I wrote few post on Serbian since than, but most of them were not related to programming or anything Web Dev alike.

Anyway few weeks ago she is done with intensive phase of chemotherapy, we’ve back home to our home town and it seams like things are moving back to normal. She is not done with therapy thought since Leukemia treatments last several years, but she have good chances to fully recover so we are trying to be positive and act like everything is completely normal.

Speaking of that after really hard year for us I decided to do something for myself and finally get one Apple :). I spent some considerably big amount of money to get one MacBook Pro. I even made unboxing gallery on Flickr, I guess after you drop like $2k USD for something you really want to save that moment for later. Now when I have it for a month almost I think it is worth the money. As a matter of fact I think it’s price in Europe (which is at least 33% bigger than in USA) is appropriate for what you get, while in USA I would consider it cheap ;)

Anyway, in next months other than usual LAMP stuff you can expect even text about Mac OS X applications, Darwin etc. For example my company use some socks5 proxy/public key setup to access to servers, which was pain in the ass to setup on Mac. I plan to write about things like that. And last but not least, I’ve already booked conference pass on FOWA conference, so I really feel my English should be improved to higher level. Maintaining English Blog should help I guess :)

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Few days ago I watched on history channel an documentary about Berlin Blockade in 1948. On Jun 24, 1948 Soviets started total blockade of Western part of Berlin, with goal to spread their control over whole city. All communitations were blocked, and citizens of West Berlin were faced with lack of food, medicine and fuel for upcoming winter.

American response was quick, and starting from Jun 25 they launched a massive airlift using both civil and military aircrafts that flew supplies into the Western Berlin. Aircrafts were fly by volunteers, mostly by experienced WWII pilots who flew day and night, sometimes without sleep. Landing on improvised Berlin airport was very hard (especially during bad weather) – many brave pilots died during this mission.

One of the pilots involved in this mission was Gail Halvorsen. One day during pause between two flights he gave a few sticks of chewing gum to some children watching the planes from outside the base. Wanting to give them more, he promised to drop more candy from his plane the next day. And really, during next flight, soon before landing Halvorsen dropped candy attached to parachutes to children below.

His actions were soon noticed by the press and gained widespread attention. A wave of public support led to donations which enabled Halvorsen and his crew to drop 850 pounds of candy. By the end of the airlift, around 25 plane crews had dropped 23 tons of chocolate, chewing gum, and other candies over various places in Berlin. The action may have had a substantial impact on the postwar perception of Americans in Germany, and it is still pointed to as a symbol of German-American relations.

Yesterday was 09/11, 5 years after terrorist attack on United States. I see many people are looking for cause, why that happend to USA, why USA was picked as a target and why USA is no longer an icon of freedom in modern world.

Not sure about all causes, but I am sure that one of the reasons is that US advocated their freedom in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Serbia etc. with bombs and not with candies.

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Few days ago I’ve decided to open english section on my blog. Thanks to Gengo wp plugin, I was able to separate english from serbian posts, then I translated some of old post from Serbian edition (mostly programming stuff).

Why am I doing this ? Well, since I started blogging I put great effort to write several programming tutorials, but found that these don’t have such a big audience here in Serbia. Since I got really good feedback from few people that were read them, and really wanted to offer those stuff to greater range of people, I’ve decided to put some little more effort, and translate them to english. Hopefully they will be usefull for someone, feel free to send in comments :)

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