• 
• .com/
• weblog

04 jul 09

• GCC/09: init

• Here I am, at Crete, participating in the first ever Greek Coding Camp.

  We’re at Paleochora, a small town in South Crete. At the moment we’re 10 people, and today a few more are coming along. We’re sitting at the camping’s cafe/restaurant, under mulberry trees and the loud sound of with birds and insects hacking on open source.

  We arrived here in the morning after a good trip with the boat from Piraeus. Good thing we caught the bus which came directly from Patras, entered the boat and dropped us in the city center of Chania. We went to the village home of alup, eaten a rich breakfast from his parents which included the local specialty of Bougatsa. Yummy!

  Four guys together with camping equipment managed entered the tiny car of local guru hoo2 and traveled to Paleochora. The day started with the usual laughter overdose with the local group.

  The teams formed into projects which can last a few days. For today, we have the following projects:

  • Translation of 45+ standard Open Office Templates
  • Creation of Greek-specific OOo Templates (eg. υπεύθυνη δήλωση)
  • Openoffice Testing Greek Build
  • Transifex workflow support for translations. Development taking place on our bitbucket ‘reviews’ branch.
  • Bugfix in Xorg for letter ‘ς’

  Lunch included a local specialty, τσιγαριαστό αρνί (special lamb in casserole with olive oil and herbs) and, of course, a healthy dose of Tsikoudia. Afternoon session was on quite soon.

  Follow our work on Twitter at the #gcc09 hashtag!

  
  (cc) by Charlie Phillips

• afternoon, Σάββατο 4 Ιουλίου 2009
  FOSS, linux | GCC/09: init (Comment!)

---

• Greek Coding Camp ‘09 is ON!

• 

  Right on!

• noon, Σάββατο 4 Ιουλίου 2009
  Random | Greek Coding Camp ‘09 is ON! (Comment!)

---

• LinuxTag ‘09

• Here I am, at Berlin, at LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin ‘09.

  Quite a few things exactly like last year: Berlin is beautiful, East Berlin is fantastic. Weather is great, food is good and I’m having a blast. LinuxTag still tries to balance between a hacker conference and a trade show, admittedly not very well.

  A few things different this year. Michael Jackson died. We’ve got FUDCon this year organized in a way to overlap with LinuxTag. Talk about strong Fedora presence! Everywhere I go I see people with blue polo shirts, it’s simply rocking wild. This gave the chance to more folks from the US to fly here and join our partae which is great.

  Once again, I created a ‘Faces’ album with portraits from the event by invading people’s privacy.

  http://dimitris.glezos.com/photos/events/linuxtag-09/

  
  Jesse Keating
• in the night, Σάββατο 27 Ιουνίου 2009
  FOSS, linux | LinuxTag ‘09 (1 comment)

---

• Busy, happy June

• Log of past couple of weeks or so:

  • Had the opportunity to present our work with Transifex at a press conference of the Greek Open Source Company (also known as EELLAK), being broadcasted live and showcasing some big FOSS projects led by Greek teams and companies. Besides talking about our recent progress and requests from our customers, I had the chance to meet some hacker friends who build enterprise and government-level solutions, also utilizing Amazon Web Services for complex tasks. I love discussions between folks using completely different technologies who try to find patterns between them to improve their own work. Fantastic.

    After the press conference I stayed a bit longer and discussed with the EELLAK board their community architecture, communicating how popular and successful communities abroad operate. Our focus with EELLAK is to be a catalyst and accelerator for the Greek Community, supporting its operations and motivating for more work and results. The presence of such an entity behind communities, even so loosely-coupled as a country-wide one has proved to be a great accelerator factor in a lot of cases.

  • The annual Venture Capital Forum took place in Athens last week, and we took the opportunity to identify possible partners that could share the vision we have at Indifex and bring value to our team. I had the chance to meet some very interesting people, including representatives from a few VCs who were interested in exploring the possibility to invest in Indifex.

    The general feeling at the conference from most entrepreneurs (and established startups) was that the VC land in Greece is quite risk-averse (read: techophobics?). There are quite a few technology companies with leading, disrupting technologies in Greece, however very, very few big Greek investors are willing at this point to take this adventurous and exciting path. Which makes sense if one doesn’t like the excitement and adrenaline of changing the world and competing with software giants.

    But really, I’m positive there are people out there who want to put their money in revolutionary companies with global audiences.

  • The annual Greek Open Source Developers’ Conference took place in Athens last week. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend and present Lotte (greek) but John was there and presented how Indifex is adopting Open Source to help its customers solve their localization and content management needs. Really, I can’t imagine how we could have achieved half of our goals if we weren’t walking the open source road.

  Finally, I was able to wrap-up things for a week and travel to Berlin for LinuxTag and FUDCon. I’m feeling very excited to meet again with good friends and new people.

  
  (cc) by alexdecarvalho

• in the night, Τρίτη 23 Ιουνίου 2009
  FOSS, linux, Tech/web | Busy, happy June (Comment!)

---

• It’s all in the tools.

• 
• early in the afternoon, Κυριακή 21 Ιουνίου 2009
  Climbing | It’s all in the tools. (2 comments)

---

• I now have an Amazon Wishlist!

• 

  I recently bought a birthday present to a good friend as a ‘thank you’ to all the great stuff he’s done. Seeing how useful a wishlist could be, I decided to create an Amazon wishlist of my own. People who like me (or my work) now have the chance of buying me something that I need and like!

  I’ve put a little bit of everything in there — stuff that could improve my work, my photography, my life. So — do you remember (you know who) when you mentioned that you’d love to see some of my rock climbing photographs with a wide-angle lens? Heh.

  Oh, and what do you know.. while writing this, I just realize that my birthday is coming up in a month and half (4th of August).

  

• noon, Κυριακή 21 Ιουνίου 2009
  Personal | I now have an Amazon Wishlist! (Comment!)

---

• Caruso

• But, yes, it is life that ends
  and he did not think so much about it
  On the contrary, he already felt happy
  and continued his song…

  
• in the night, Σάββατο 13 Ιουνίου 2009
  Books/Music/Films, Quotes | Caruso (Comment!)

---

• Friday nights

• What I love about Friday nights (post-clubbing post-3am):

  • The feeling
  • The Italian and Spanish songs on the radio on the way back home
  • The empty narrow streets
  • The delicious open bakery at the top part of Agiou Nicolaou street in Patras

  
  (cc) by junkmonkey

• in the night, Παρασκευή 12 Ιουνίου 2009
  Personal | Friday nights (Comment!)

---

• Crux

• Entering the crux section of an 6b+ route. Long moves on tiny sharp holds which fade away further up the 4m blank wall. Challenging, nice route along the rest of them at Alepochori.

  

  I think need some more endurance practice and better eating habits to lead and do this root freely.

• early in the afternoon, Κυριακή 7 Ιουνίου 2009
  Climbing | Crux (Comment!)

---

• Big-picture release translation status

• A lot of things are happening lately in Transifex-land. We’ve been working hard in bringing transifex.net live, developing Lotte, the Lightweight Online Translation Editor, recruiting two more developers for Indifex, opening up a new office and stuff.

  Been experimenting with new things too. One of them was various mockups to improve the way we present information to release engineers who need an overview of how a release looks like from a localization perspective. Take the XFCE default branch πpage, for example. It gives a good overview of the release, and I was wondering if we could make it even more rich by breaking up the statistics in the ones comprising the total percentage.

  I’ve been playing around with a mockup for this. This came up in Inkscape:

  

  What do you think? Does it make sense? Is it useful?

  Update: I neglected to mention that the numbers and colors are random, but the idea is that they are completion percentages and red = low ones, green = high ones.

• noon, Σάββατο 6 Ιουνίου 2009
  FOSS, linux, Transifex | Big-picture release translation status (Comment!)

---

Post archive →

• CHOICES

  • Weblog homepage
  • About the author
  • About this blog
  • Archive
  • Contact

• SEARCH

• FEEDS

  • All articles (atom)
  • Main articles (atom)
  • Mini-posts (atom)
  • Comments (atom)

• COMMUNITIES

  Belonging

  • planet ελλακ,
  • planet Fedora,
  • Fedora greece,
  • gnome.gr,
  • django.gr,
  • transifex,
  • digitalrights.gr,
  • patras lug

  Hanging around

  • gallery,
  • twitter,
  • identi.ca,
  • del.icio.us,
  • #ellak on Freenode

  Using

  • webfaction,
  • dreamhost,
  • radio paradise

  Participating

  • fudcon,
  • athens digital week,
  • foss.in,
  • GUADEC,
  • patras freecycle

π