Category archive: Random
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On criticism
Great project leaders not only accept criticism, they encourage it. They understand that their project’s worst enemy is stagnation, which comes from apathy, oppression, and not enough feedback.
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at night, Monday 1 June 2009
Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Quotes, Tech/web
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On criticism (Comment!)
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Δάχτυλα που δείχνουν
“Κι όταν υποκριτικά αναζητάμε τις αιτίες των κακώς κειμένων, υπάρχουν άφθονα δάχτυλα που δείχνουν: πάντα τον άλλο. Κι αφήνουμε να μας διαφεύγει ότι συνολικά όλα τα δάχτυλα μας δείχνουν όλους, κι αυτή είναι η απλή αλήθεια…” (metablogging.gr)
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at night, Thursday 28 May 2009
Mini-Post, Quotes
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Δάχτυλα που δείχνουν (Comment!)
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Rough Photo Colors
Dear Lazyweb, do you know how rough/metal colors like in this photo are produced?
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at night, Monday 25 May 2009
Climbing, Mini-Post, Random
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Rough Photo Colors (Comment!)
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Fedora Weekly Webcomic EOL’ed
Oh dear. The awesome Fedora Webcomic is being EOL’ed. I’ll miss the Greek Ubuntu team complaining to me: “Aren’t there any other distros to make fun of?” =)
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at night, Saturday 23 May 2009
Fedora, Mini-Post
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Fedora Weekly Webcomic EOL’ed (Comment!)
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Pumped
So I admit it. I love adventures. Guilty as charged.
I’m not sure what chemical substances or which exact butterfly wing flaps caused this. It’ was always there, from a kid I guess, a mutation extraordinaire. Things go wrong and I like it. Problems come up and I feel excited. Solution seem obvious but the prove not to be. The 30m-route’s last rock climbing hold looks good but it’s a sloper.
What a rush!
Maybe it’s the need for problem-solving painted with colours of the engineering palette. Maybe it’s the need for reminding myself that life, still, happens and not everything can be predicted. Something like a warning, in case something really bad happens. Heck, maybe I’m just an adrenaline junkie.
Today I travelled to Athens with 1 euro in my pocket. Sure, things might have went bad. The bus might have broken down and leave is in the middle of nowhere. My pickup might not make it and I might have to take a cab. I might have desperately needed more water than what I had.
The thing is, all the above sound really exciting to me. I find adventures being great. They make us think out of the box for solutions in problems we haven’t faced so far. They get our body out of its comfort zone and into the vast unknown, into the void that spreads beyond the circle of the easily predictable.
They also remind us that we’re still, in fact, human.
(cc) by PresleyJesus-
at night, Friday 15 May 2009
Personal
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Pumped (Comment!)
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FOSDEM ‘09 photos
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at night, Wednesday 13 May 2009
Foss, Linux, Mini-Post
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FOSDEM ‘09 photos (Comment!)
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FOSSComm recap
So, FOSSComm is now over and everyone has returned to their base after a really fun weekend. Kudos to the Linux Team of TEI Larisas for the excellent organization, and a big thanks to the TEI itself for sponsoring some great swag and coffee/food!
Day 1 ended with the side-effects from tsipouro and other poisonous liquides quite visible on a couple of hackers. A person had to sleep in our room, since even a few blocks’ walk was pretty much out of the question. Definitely out of the question.
- Drunk
- Wow.. the world is spinning…
- X
- I swear I just saw a Ferrari pass (in reality was a Mini Cooper)
- Drunk
- Whoa! Awesome…
I always find it fun talking with drunken people, especially if you pretend you’re wasted too.
Day 2 stared slowly, and by 11am the amphitheater was populated for Pierros’ talk about Fedora and its Greek community. His presentation was insightful on the areas where Fedora shines as a distribution and project with a particular emphasis on how friendships and fun are evident in most of our events. I really liked his graphical theme too: he emulated Fedora’s installer, anaconda, as the presentation theme. Neat. Costas’ presentation on FEL and Fedora Spins was quite interesting too, and the room was pretty crowded.
My presentation on Transifex went well too. I realized this was the first time I presented our work to the Greek hacker community, so I was a bit nervous too. I pitched why localization is important to both software and publication in general, and the current problems in this area. Then I run a live demo of Transifex and was able to finish in time for quite a few questions which filled all the gaps I left out of the presentation like translation memories, Launchpad’s shortcomings and translation team workflows.
The F11-el hackfest did OK, but not without surprises. Day 1 included some power surges and network unavailability, and day 2 some urgent calls from $dayjob. We did manage to get some translations done, testing of F11-preview media, and some prototyping for some team features in Transifex.
Later on in the day I had the honor of being invited to the OpenCoffee Larissa III to talk about hacking and entrepreneurship. Delved into some open source licensing and investment discussions too. Had one of those not-fresh yet delicious ‘cranberry & white chocolate’ cheesecakes of Starbucks.
The evening was.. well, my English vocabulary isn’t rich enough to describe it. It included some very good food, some insightful discussions on the powers that drive Linux forward (is it new users or contributors?) and what space each major Linux project fills in the open source landscape.
The highlight was post-dinner, when a disturbingly dangerous mixture of Fedora, Chania LUG and Larissa LUG folks got together with beers at the hotel and busted some guts laughing. Tears were runnig when the reception called at 3am to tell us to shut up, and Christos replying “We’ll think about it and get back to you”.
(Click on photo for names of people — help collect names/tweets)Had a very relaxing and insightful trip back with great discussions with security hacker Fotis aka ithilgore.
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at night, Tuesday 12 May 2009
Foss, Linux, Transifex
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FOSSComm recap (Comment!)
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FOSSComm day 1
Returned from a full day of fun with hackers from all around the Greek open source community. Had some great discussions. And flames.
Slept at 6:30am, finishing off some details for Indifex’s business plan to present to some good investors. After an hour’s of sleep and a cold shower, we were ready to go. Picked up John and drove the lovely route from Patras to Larissa, passing the Rion-Antirrion Bridge, following the south coastline of the Greek mainland, passing through Bralos and on to Lamia, Volos and Larissa. The trip was great, and the weather was perfect.
The day was full of catch-ups with Greek open source hackers, evangelists and enthusiasts. Talked a lot about Fedora, what we value in the community and why what we do matters. Had the chance to update a few folks about Transifex’s progress, and discuss how it could be used in other distributions and projects too.
Oh, I met some trolls too. Rare species to meet in real life, not always a pleasant acquaintance, but always one to remember. ;-)
As usual with any Greek happening, this too ended up at a tavern. Our event organizers booked us a tsipouro place, where you order alochol and the meze dishes continue to come until you ask them not to. Dangerous stuff.
Off to polish my presentation for tomorrow now and get some sleep.
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at night, Sunday 10 May 2009
Foss, Linux
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FOSSComm day 1 (Comment!)
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Dawn
Successfully finishing a big task of yours with sunrise… Priceless feeling.
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at night, Saturday 9 May 2009
Mini-Post, Personal
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Dawn (Comment!)
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Transifex appliance on cloud computing
Testing a Transifex appliance running on Amazon’s EC2 for customers. rPath rocks.
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at night, Friday 8 May 2009
Mini-Post, Tech/web, Transifex
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Transifex appliance on cloud computing (Comment!)
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Λαμπρινίδης on Telecom Package
“Στην ηλεκτρονική εποχή, η πρόσβαση των πολιτών στο διαδίκτυο είναι θεμελιώδες δικαίωμα, η προστασία του οποίου απαιτείται και για τη θωράκιση πολλών άλλων θεμελιωδών δικαιωμάτων, όπως είναι η πρόσβαση στην παιδεία και τη γνώση, η ελευθερία έκφρασης και συνάθροισης και η ελευθερία πολιτικής δράσης.
Το Ευρωπαϊκό Κοινοβούλιο σήμερα έστειλε ένα καθαρό μήνυμα προς το Συμβούλιο των Υπουργών της ΕΕ: Παραθυράκια στους ευρωπαϊκούς νόμους, που να επιτρέπουν σε ιδιωτικές εταιρείες να παραβιάζουν αυθαίρετα αυτό το θεμελιώδες δικαίωμα, δεν είναι αποδεκτά”.
Σταύρος Λαμπρινίδης, Έλληνας Ευρωβουλευτής
Respect.
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at night, Thursday 7 May 2009
Digital Rights, Quotes
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Λαμπρινίδης on Telecom Package (Comment!)
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Tx interview on greek radio
Tx was featured on a popular Greek radio station past week. I really enjoyed the discussion, where we had the opportunity to talk about the importance of universal access of information, open source and digital rights, beautiful code and entrepreneurship.
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at night, Sunday 3 May 2009
Tech/web, Transifex
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Tx interview on greek radio (Comment!)
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The Bitter and the Sweet
“You will never know the exquisite pain of the guy who goes home alone. Because, without the bitter baby, the sweet ain’t a sweet.” (Vanilla Sky, script by Alejandro Amenábar)
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at night, Thursday 16 April 2009
Mini-Post, Quotes
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The Bitter and the Sweet (Comment!)
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Mozilla praise: Ctrl-select
I just love Firefox’s ability to control-select certain cells from a table in a page.
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at night, Wednesday 15 April 2009
Mini-Post, Tech/web
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Mozilla praise: Ctrl-select (Comment!)
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startup2.eu and Tx
Transifex on the startup2.eu European web 2.0 competition! Votes are openly accepted at http://www.startup2.eu/upcoming.php.
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at night, Tuesday 14 April 2009
Mini-Post, Transifex
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startup2.eu and Tx (Comment!)
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Abstraction layers: One, two, many
(cc) by piet_musterdIt’s becoming pretty clear to me that when in doubt whether to write an abstraction, the rule is clear: “one, two, many”.
Write something 3 times and you’re breaking the DRY principle. The cost of changing a bit in one place and needing to update the other places too is high.
Abstract something you only use once (in case you want to re-use in the future), and you forgot the “two” in the above rule. The cost for later refactoring is probably not worth the extra load you’ll carry until that day comes. If it comes.
“One, two, many” is usually better than “one, two, three” and “one, many”.
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at night, Monday 13 April 2009
Django
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Abstraction layers: One, two, many (Comment!)
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Ignore Everybody
By Hugh Macleod, the titles of his new book.
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at night, Saturday 11 April 2009
Books/music/films, Startups
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Ignore Everybody (Comment!)
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More power, more power!
It seems that Indiplex was trying to pull more power from the network than what it could provide us. Luckily the electricity guys came right after we dropped them a call and quickly put things back in place.
I asked the guy whether we burned out the cables from too much hacking. Without even smirking, he said it was probably the wind.
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at night, Friday 10 April 2009
Humor, Indifex
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More power, more power! (Comment!)
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A happy hacking summer
(Printable, linkable, shareable. All the good stuff.)
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at night, Thursday 9 April 2009
Foss, Linux, Indifex
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A happy hacking summer (Comment!)
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Spork rebasing
As seen on IRC: “Right now I want to rebase a spork into someone’s skull.”
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at night, Wednesday 1 April 2009
Mini-Post, Random
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Spork rebasing (Comment!)