The afternoon schedule of the three day conference was packed with on average 23 lectures in three different rooms which lasted 30-45 minutes each – not too long to bore the audience, and not too short to prevent presenters from delivering their message. After the tightly packed talks it was party time with Share hosting on average 30 bands each night, on nine different venues in downtown Belgrade.

The lectures were incredibly inspiring. Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia rightfully scored one of the biggest applauses for talking about the Tunisian revolution; Peter Sunde charmed the audience with his stories about the inside workings of the Pirate Bay website; and Jacob Appelbaum spent his time on stage showing how the Tor project helps people thwart internet censorship. Aside from these three, it would be borderline criminal not to mention Barack Obama’s chief campaign blogger Sam Graham-Felsen, Chairman of the Dutch Pirate Party Samir Allioui, Senior Staff Attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Matt Zimmerman and Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico who, in their project Face to facebook, stole one million facebook profiles thus making many people think twice about online privacy.

With this list of presenters the conference was bound to be successful, but with many organizational flops it was far from perfect. Some of the lectures were in Serbian and without a translator, and you really didn’t know that’s the case before the beginning. If you don’t speak Serbian you were sure to feel unwelcome at some point, and the only thing you could do was leave the room and go to another one, in hope of English. At an international conference it’s not too much to ask for lectures to be in English, or at the very least for schedules that indicate otherwise.

Not only did the lecture schedules lack language and topic details, but the little information they did provide was often misleading. A day before the conference started the official web site hosted at least two different versions of the schedule, and instead of getting their stories strait the organizers printed out the outdated version and handed it out to the audience. To make matters worse, neither the people handing schedules nor the people issuing admission bracelets knew it was outdated. And the handed schedules were far from what actually happened: some lectures were postponed, others canceled and some new ones introduced at seemingly the last minute.

To further spice things up, on the last day of the conference the organizers announced that the program in one of the rooms will start 40 minutes late due to technical issues. After returning 40 minutes later, I found out there was a lecture I missed. What happened there seems like a job for the CSI. The only way to avoid a detrimental headache was to go with the flow and not think about the schedule at all. That plan however required running around a lot and not having a clue when to take your lunch break, as you really don’t know when the interesting stuff will actually take place.

Speaking of lunch breaks, even tough it’s logical for a program that lasts eight hours to have a lunch break, they didn’t schedule one. They did however anticipate people being hungry, thirsty and not wanting to leave the venue, and so sandwich stands were available that also sold coffee and drinks, but all of it was three times the regular price. Now, any sensible public relations officer would have gone berserk at the idea of making money this way, and I would have started beating the idiot who came up with it with an actual sandwich for effect. How do you want people to remember Share is what I’d ask him: by your hospitality or by your intent to mug them for a cup of coffee?

Just to prove how totally incompetent the person in charge of Share public relations was, I’ll mention that journalists were accredited only if they covered the conference before it actually started. I find this incentive to encourage journalists to write announcement stories and thus generate publicity and free advertising totally despicable. When organizing a conference like this you want as many journalists as you can get and the last thing on your mind should be limiting media access.

When I first heard about the Share conference a couple of months ago I was impressed by the list of lecturers. It was obvious the conference is more than promising, especially having in mind it’s not going to be done by a bunch of first time event organizers, but by the same people behind the famous Exit festival. Granted, the organizers must have gone to great lengths to bring all those people to Belgrade at the same time, but that success does not justify all the childish mistakes that followed.

The installation of 7 on my Dell Inspiron 1520 ran smoothly. Nowadays, and despite common misconceptions, operating system installations are quite simple (even Linux ones) and anybody can do them, so the smoothness of 7′s doesn’t really stand out. Being exited (as only a geek such as myself can be when installing a new operating system), I didn’t measure the installation time but it certainly was fast.

After the installation was completed I was immediately surprised by how fast it booted up. After three weeks, I am still not used to these blazingly fast start-ups. Shutdowns are also fast too, and unlike all other Windows operating systems I used (98, Me, XP and Vista), so far I am still to experience frozen programs delaying shutdown indefinitely. I did experience programs freezing a couple of times during shutdown (which is normal as after the shutdown process is initiated, non-system program’s permissions are harshly restricted), but in each case Windows was able to force those programs to quit, and shutdown the computer.

The first thing I did after the installation was completed was open the Task Manager, where I found out that my laptop’s physical memory usage was around 32% of my 2GB of RAM, which is not even close to Vista’s 48% at start-up. In fact as I’m writing this, iTunes is running in the background together with around a dozen Chrome processes and the physical memory usage is 42%, still bellow Vista’s at start-up.

As for hardware support, the release candidate’s driver library did not include drivers for my memory card reader, nor for my Nokia E51 phone; but having in mind the number of devices on the market, that cannot really be taken as a flaw. What impressed me though is the way Windows handled this issue. I was presented with a window informing me about the lack of drivers, and a download link to a specific driver in each case. I was done in just a couple of clicks. And as if that didn’t make my life easy enough, after the installation of my Nokia drivers I was presented with another window that informed me that I am missing Nokia’s PC Suite. It also had a download link, so Windows did all the work for me. No CDs, and no searching on Nokia’s web site.

Truth to be told, I did experience a couple of annoying problems with the hardware support, but having in mind I am running just a release candidate I am sure those will be fixed before October 22, when Windows 7 is due to come out. The first one is a real pain in the neck as it involves drivers for the USB interface of my iPod which freezes when I try to sync it with the Disk Mode disabled (but simply enabling that mode solves the problem). The other problem I have is with buttons on my touchpad. Under Vista that was shipped with my Dell, a middle click is achieved by pressing both touchpad buttons at the same time and that doesn’t work anymore in my case.

As for system stability, it did not crash once in the past three weeks.

As for usability, Microsoft obviously put a lot of work into user interface which really stands out from Vista. The traditional taskbar withstood heavy modifications. It does take some getting used to, but when you do, you will wonder how could you ever use the traditional one without a headache.

One of the main things new Vista users complained about were the so-called “cancel or allow” messages which proved to be a great idea for this Get a Mac Apple ad Windows 7 offers several levels of security, and that setting sets the frequency of these messages. You rarely get them by default.

A lot of tools were drastically changed as well. For example, the Resource Monitor is now more detailed, and much better organized than its Vista counterpart. The integrated backup program was also changed and works great too.

Microsoft took a great blow with Vista’s failure because of bad PR. I have been a Vista user for two years and I do not think it is half as bad as people made it to be. Although a good product, it wasn’t released polished which allowed unsubstantiated rumors to spread. With the Mojave Experiment Microsoft did try to combat these rumors, but its PR department obviously failed. Unlike Vista, the release candidate of Windows 7 appears to be almost perfectly polished. As history repeats itself, I am sure that Vista will be remembered as Me of its time, and as for 7, come October 2010 Microsoft will probably declare it to be its lucky number.

Photo courtesy of www.itsmywindows.com.

You can also check out the movie trailers here.

On April 7, theater professor Nedyalko Delchev, together with van Lynden and about a dozen students, opened this semester’s theater season with Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! follows a plot of the Supreme Grand Master Lupine Wonse (van Lynden) to overthrow Lord Havelock Vetinari (Delchev) and install a puppet king. Wonse plans to achieve his goal by summoning a dragon to instigate mass panic, using the only copy of a book that explains the process.

The local librarian (Shpatar Morina) later reports that the book has been stolen to a new volunteer of the city guard – Carrot (Ilya Petrov), who tries to investigate the matter.

The play mocks today’s world by illustrating it in a rather hilarious way. Wonse, like an average politician, would do anything to overthrow the current head of state. After the dragon, which was meant to replace Lord Vetinari, proves not to be as obedient as he hoped, Wonse becomes the servant of the dragon King. He seems careless about all the people that have died just because of his hunger for power.

The “Thieves’ Guild,” an allusion to today’s mafia, is closely integrated into Lord Vetinari’s government. The thieves’ actions seem to be unrestricted. When Carrot, who seems to know the book of law by heart, and is still uncorrupted, puts the leader of the Guild under arrest, a huge scandal ensues.

Unlike other AUBG plays, Guards! Guards! is spiced up with some special effects and professional looking lighting. The acting performance was good enough to cause the whole hall to laugh at least a couple of times. Actors definitely did a great job having in mind most of them are not professionals.

Guards! Guards! allowed AUBGers some cultural time off before the ugly finals’ weeks of the semester. Even though some might label it as too long, and thus boring, the play is a “must see” because of its comedy, special effects and of course the cast.

Make sure you take full winter gear to survive through the over-an-hour-long play, as Blagoevgrad’s Opera Hall is an unbelievably cold place.

Originally posted on www.defactobg.com.