Yay ! The day for a trip in Banja Luka :D The weather was great too ! It was the first sunny day since we came here. It was a short trip to a place called Krupa na Vrbasu. The tour leader gave us a brief information about Banja Luka. Banja Luka is the 2nd largest city in BiH, and is the capital of the republic of Srpska. Approx. 250,000 people live in Banja Luka. There are more women than men. Actually, the men-to-women ratio here is 1-to-7 !! This is mainly because there were many wars in this country.

Arrived at Krupa na Vrbasu, we went to the 13th-century orthodox monastery here, then walked through a forrest to a small waterfall. Then, had a barbecue lunch at a restaurant. The place we had lunch is also popular place for rafting. Some may go for rafting here too. I don’t like water sports that much. So, I skipped. Instead, we had good chats with people from Japan, and Taiwan. It was fun exchanging experiences.

I have learned from a japanese guy that bash has special /dev for creating TCP/UDP sockets , e.g, /dev/tcp/<host>/<port>. So, we could do something like

cat < /dev/tcp/time.nist.gov/13

to access daytime service on port 13/TCP at time.nist.gov, just like any other simple TCP client socket, but without coding! Cool!

Finally, we went back to the hotel. I cleaned up my code and my messy git (dang!), then had dinner. We joined the table with Christian, who ran back from the restaurant to the hotel. That was half marathon at least, or full ? .. I don’t know. But it was some distance by running. Gosh !

About organizing DebConf somewhere in Asia. Japan and Taiwan also planned to organize DebConf too (may be in 2014 ?) At least, Japan will organize mini-DebConf soon. Chances are that they will do DebConf things before Thailand. They have strong local teams, local DDs, and local users. DebConf in Thailand is possible, but it’s very hard. We basically have nothing to support the proposal/bidding. But, at least, for the first step, we have attended the DebConf 11.

Mini-DebConf is more likely. We should start with mini-DebConf, before DebConf anyway. When would it be ? Well, it depends. If we really really want to do this, and there is a local team that commits on this job, I guess November or December this year would be the time. Bangkok would take priority for the venue.

Let’s see.