2013

Holy God. This is going to change my life in a zillion different ways. I must be nuts. — Sofia, Vanilla Sky

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke

Luck is statistics taken personally. — Penn Jillette

The longest journey is the journey inward, for he who has chosen his destiny has started upon his quest for the source of his being. — Dag Hammarskjöld

All I want more than anything is to work with people who give a fuck as much as I do. — Marcus 'djWHEAT' Graham

Home made thai red curry. Taste wise, a worthy first effort.

The pines were roaring on the height.. The winds were moaning in the night.. The trees like torches blazed with light.. — The Hobbit

The most important piece of advice I can give you on the path to happiness, is not just be yourself, but be your weird self. It takes too much energy to be other than your weird self. We spend so much of our lives living up to the expectations of ...

I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know ...

There's only so much spiciness baba ghanoush and fresh tomato can cover. —

The thing about quotes on the Internet is that you cannot confirm their validity. — Abraham Lincoln

Game of Thrones at the Game Developers Conference #gdc

There is no opponent. Because the word "I" does not exist. A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract. When ...

Copied from the blog of the amazing Sam Ruby. The reason you have arived here is probably due to the fact that the owner of this web site has deemed some portion of a comment as flamebait. While I am not sure of many things, here are a few things ...

The little things... there's nothing bigger, is there? — Vanilla Sky

Steak au poivre with smoked sweet potato chipotle puree, roasted tomato and portobello mushroom. Execution Lots of good recipes for "steak au poivre". Many small details make all the difference. My sauce has shallots, beef stock, cognique, heavy cream and a little butter. There's a sprinkle of crispy bacon ...

Business Partners, the influential magazine of the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce, has published an article discussing Greece, Startups and Transifex. I was invited to write a column. Business Partners presents the voices of six young entrepreneurs who are rising above the status quo to take control of their professional careers ...

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. — Greek Proverb

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. — Cyril Parkinson

via Major flashback. Best Donald Duck cartoon ever: The Plastics Inventor. Best part starts at 4 minutes.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with assholes. — William Gibson

2011

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it ...

The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn. — Norman Douglas

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. — Henry David Thoreau

You know how the time flies Only yesterday was the time of our lives We were born and raised in a summer haze Bound by the surprise of our glory days — Adele

With Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, owner of EasyJet Airlines, at the "Award for Young Entrepreneur in Greece 2011" event.

Sailing at the San Francisco Bay. Golden gate and bay bridge at the back.

To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... Greetings. — Winston in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify ...

Received the following messages from GMail today, a few seconds from each other: "Permanently delete 80944 conversations from Trash?"   "Oops… the system encountered a problem (#767) - Retrying now"   Temporary Error (503): We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable.

Sailing towards the storm Catched this photo right before the storm hit us and the other boat. Fifteen seconds later we lowered sails and sailed for one hour through the storm.

My newest coffee mug: A 24-105mm camera lens with stabilizer!

If it was important, your phone would have rung. Now get back to work. — @mperedim

Returning from trip to the Greek islands. Sailing in close reach (greek "ανοιχτή όρτσα") at 8.6 knots and a heel (inclination) of ~15°.

At Paxoi island, deciding which tortoise-water beaches to sail to today. Fantastic.

via "The music washed away all the hate, and society started advancing Every demographic was represented, It was a rainbow coalition of dancing"

A lot of friends abroad ask me the same question: "What has led up to the current financially hard situation in Greece?". I found this excellent article from NY Times called "Can Greeks Become Germans?", which summarizes the problem in a very detailed way. I'll quote some large sections ...

If @transifex ever entered the Linux desktop, the first thing I'd translate would be "λσ -λα bash: λσ: command not found..." — https://twitter.com/#!/glezos/status/93335171264286721

Brainstorming design mockups at summer seaside café

At the QuickNDirty OpenCoffee Patras event, talking startups and technology

Greece was the ultimate bubble, and most of society was content with that — the promise of stress-free living was impossible to pass up. Over the years, I witnessed the powers-that-be strip away all mechanisms of entrepreneurship, risk and innovation in favor of the alternatives: a bloated public sector and a ...

A woman's shoulders are the front lines of her mystique, and her neck, if she's alive, has all the mystery of a border town. A no-man's land in that battle between the mind and the body. — John Milton, The Devil's Advocate

So I guess this is where I tell you what I learned - my conclusion, right? Well, my conclusion is: Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time. It's just not worth it. — Danny Vinyard, American History X

With @yantonellis hacking together with live country music in the background.

Arrived in San Francisco. My startup's value just doubled.

I had the privilege to be invited to the opening keynote talk at the recent MeeGo Conference in San Francisco. Jim Zemlin, the Director of Linux Foundation, called me on stage to talk about MeeGo Localization and the acceleration of MeeGo's availability in dozens of markets around the world ...

Playing werewolf at the hacker lounge of MeeGo conference. Epic.

Home-made pepper steak (au poivre) with fresh chicory salad

tags ceidtrip Slug: 2011-04-13-with-firefoxs-asa-dotzler-talking-about-the Status: published With Firefox's Asa Dotzler, talking about the history of the Web.

Here's something neat. Today I decided not to develop using the Django development server, but instead do that from inside my tests. This way I will work directly on my test database which runs with my test fixtures and when I'm ready, I'll just write the necessary ...

via An explorer adventures into an unknown world, yet it seems that he has been there before. A short animated film directed by Malcolm Sutherland in 2010. (Notice the guy tripping at 1:43. Ingenious.)

|image0| Κουλούρι, το φαϊ του entrepreneur. .. |image0| image:: http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhc44iGaMh1qaawg5o1_1280.jpg

There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision ...

For passionate and patient people it's never too little, and it's never too late. — Quim Gil

via Athens I The Little Great City Directed, shot, cut and finished by Emmanouil Papadopoulos

There are a number of levels you can test your Django project. You can test any Python method, your models, your views and even your templates. In the latter case, you're actually testing the rendered response of a view with a specific context. Most of the times, this result ...

via "Entrepreneurship: A different way of life" by Mara Kapota The video won the European Entrepreneurship Video Award in 2010.

The beginning is a very delicate time — (Dune film, via @hakmem)

Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally. — Linus Torvalds

Hand-crafted owl. Reminds me of my days as a boy scout!

Goal at the hockey game with the Portland Winterhawks!

Parrot 3.0.0 is available from an Internet near you. — http://parrot.org/news/2011/parrot-3.0.0

Today's Sunday morning: An excuisite cup of cappuccino with Entrepreneur magazine.

Having an excellent authentic Indian dali dinner with lamb pasanda and mango lassi in the heart of Beaverton, Oregon. http://www.abhiruchirestaurant.com/

[Social media companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn] are being valued as if they will be our permanent means for identifying ourselves. Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. — Douglas Rushkoff on CNN

2010

Today I created my best strapatsada ever. It tasted fantastic. So I'll try to document it for more people to use. Strapatsada, or kagiana, is a simple dish for breakfast or dinner. Basically, it's a dish of scrambled eggs with added tomatoes and feta cheese. This way it ...

Κατανοούμε ότι οι απόψεις μας είναι αιρετικές και ασύμβατες με την απόπειρα που κάνουν οι αναχρονιστές να μας υποχρεώσουν να ορκιστούμε στο "μελαγχολώ άρα υπάρχω". Μοναδικό μας αντικαταθλιπτικό ο αγώνας για αξίωση της εργασίας μας. Ευελπιστούμε για πρώτη φορά και τολμάμε να προβλέψουμε ότι το τέλος της κρίσης θα μας ...

Out-of-office Indifex team meeting with Kostas with good beer and meat.

The probaility you'll hit the cappuchino is propotional to its size and proximity to the keyboard.

A poem about that girl I met yesterday. ...she had an unusual calmness around her. One, that everyone strives for. The calmness of a floating kite. That character of a river. Calmness which, monks attain through divine realisation, and turtles gain, perhaps, through years of watching genera- tions pass by ...

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was 9. It was a hot summer day in Cyprus at my grandmother's back yard. My bicycle hit top speed, but chose a rather unfortunate and irreparable route towards the hen-house, resulting to my landing on a pile of mud and ...

London calling to the imitation zone. Forget it, brother, an' go it alone — London Calling, The Clash

I spent around 30 minutes setting up our office printer/scanner/fax machine on Linux. While there's been a lot of work in the CUPS world for setting up things automatically, scanning didn't particularly work out-of-the-box. Here's what I remember needing to do to get scanning work ...

Building a new technology company is really, really hard. In order to do it successfully, you have to sweat the details, worry about all the things that might go wrong, and suffer more than a few sleepless nights (either from working through the night or just worrying through the night ...

"Hi Dimitris. I was wondering whether you work on proton exchange membrane fuel cells, as I'd like to ask a few questions." This introduction/message came on my Facebook account. At first I thought it was a joke, but such things do exist.

Tip of the day: For deep cuts, add a stronger disinfectant (hydrogen peroxide-like) on top of Betadine; better against anaerobic microbes (via @vickykorvesi).

For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it ...

What are your favorite fonts for code editing? Mine are DejaVu Sans Mono (Vera-based) and Droid Sans Mono (Google). Inconsolata is very good (and free) but I can't seem to get sub-pixel anti-aliasing with it (only normal one, which at <10px gets blurry). And Envy Code R is just ...

Reading this piece of code is like seeing Guernica for the first time. — moi

"The difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her." via

via Στη FOSSComm είχα την ευκαιρία να δώσω μια παρουσίαση γύρω από ακραία σενάρια Web Development, εστιάζοντας γύρω από το Large/Popular Open Source Project & Release management. Χθες, στην τοπική ομάδα Python στην Πάτρα, δόθηκε ένα καθαρό τεχνικό incarnation της παρουσίασης για το πώς χτίζεται και γίνεται deployed ένα scalable ...

At bouzoukia, celebrating a friend's graduation with lots of Opa!

You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. — Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga

Delicious pepper steak at Jackson's Hall at Kolonaki sq, Athens

I suppose it's old partner, but the beat goes on Da da dum da dum da da... — Eminem

This weekend @andy_lupo and me will head north to Thessaloniki to present at the FOSS-Communities Conference some of the kewl technologies we're using at Indifex. Andreas' talk is titled "Multi-GB databases with NoSQL" and mine "Extreme Web Programming". Additionally, I was humbled to be invited from the local entrepreneur ...

An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams come true. — Vinod Khosla

Mozilla power -- another glimpse from today's visit at the Mozilla HQ

LWN.net interviewed Leslie Hawthorn, the main person behind Google Summer of Code. I liked how a small team in a big company Google can feel like a startup sometimes. I think the most important lesson I learned was to just get out there and make things happen, no matter ...

Awesome teaching books might as well come with everything underlined by default.

Did you know that ~80% of the traffic on Google, Facebook and Twitter come from outside of the US? Fred Wilson (avc.com) has written an insightful blog post titled "Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?". Fred believes that localization is key to monetize outside of the ...

Wimps tend to talk a lot about problems, and brave people tend to talk about challenges. The belief that there's a solution to something converts it from a problem into a challenge. — moi

Epiphany! The past days I learned great things today about Mercurial. I found out Joel Spolsky's hginit.com. It teaches you the key concepts behind hg in a way which doesn't mess with complex internals, but focuses on what's important: the user experience. I found out that ...

ack rocks. It's like grep, but you can also ignore .svn-like dirs and backup files (foo~, foo#), specify file types to search, color highlighting. Sweet! http://betterthangrep.com/

via Loving once again, after many, many years, "Hamlet of the Moon" by Christos Thiveos.

– I coded until 5am. – I only coded until 10pm. You win. – I'd say I'm the loser here...

Θέλω τη μέρα που θα φύγεις απ' το πρωί να μου γελάς κι όταν την πόρτα θα ανοίγεις να είναι σα να μ' αγαπάς. — Χρήστος Θηβαίος

Today I wanted to debug some of our unit tests, so I wanted to drop to a shell from inside a test case. Here's how that can be done: import IPython IPython.embed() In previous versions this used to be: from IPython.Shell import IPShellEmbed ipython = IPShellEmbed() ipython() The ...

His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes ...

category text tags hg, hack, rebase Slug: 2010-01-27-single-merge-rebase Status: published `hg rebase` works well with merged branches. You can rebase a merged node perfectly. Additionally, with `--collapse`, you can hide the draft commits you might have done while developing. These help you do locally branched development.\ However, there's a ...

category quote tags shakespear, english Slug: 2010-01-25-all-made-of Status: published It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience and impatience, All purity, all trial, all observance. — Shakespeare, "As you like it"

Ξέρεις, καμιά φορά, θαυμάζοντας, ξεχνάς οτι θαυμάζεις, σου φτάνει ο θαυμασμός σου, θε μου, τι μάτια πάναστρα, κι ανυψωνόμουν σε μιαν αποθέωση αρνημένων άστρων γιατί, έτσι πολιορκημένη απ' έξω κι από μέσα, άλλος δρόμος δε μου 'μενε παρά μονάχα προς τα πάνω ή προς τα κάτω. - Όχι, δε φτάνει. Άφησέ ...

Rule #1 of photo equipment: If you can't find your lens cap anywhere, check your camera bag.