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Category archive: Random

• Μπουκιά και συγχώριο

• Όσο φανταστική κι αν είναι αυτή η πίτα λεμονιού (Ελευθερουδάκης, Πανεπιστημίου), είναι λίγο δύσκολο να χωνέψεις ότι η κάθε μπουκιά της κάνει μισό ευρώ. =)

• at night, Friday 20 February 2009
  Humor, Mini-Post | Μπουκιά και συγχώριο (Comment!)

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• Camelot Project

• Camelot Project looks really sexy (slide deck).

• at night, Friday 13 February 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Camelot Project (Comment!)

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• Greek Spring of Code ‘09

• Για όσους δεν το έχουν ακούσει, έχει προκηρυχθεί Διαγωνισμός Ανάπτυξης Λογισμικού ΕΛΛΑΚ στην Ελλάδα μας. Κάτι σαν το Google Summer of Code, αλλά Άνοιξη, με πιο έντονη τη μορφή του locality και του Φεστιβάλ. Το πρόγραμμα είναι ανοιχτό σε φοιτητές και μη.

  Το πρόγραμμα είναι η πρώτη φορά που οργανώνεται, και στόχος είναι να παροτρύνει την ανάπτυξη ΕΛΛΑΚ στη χώρα μας. Το σχέδιο είναι να επιβραβευτεί τόσο η ανάπτυξη επιτυχημένων Ελληνικών έργων ΕΛΛΑΚ (και αντίστοιχα, οι Έλληνες developers που έχουν προσφέρει στο χώρο), όσο και να παροτρυνθεί η ωρίμανση νέων χαρακτηριστικών (και νέων developers) οι λειτουργίες των οποίων δυνητικά θα χρησιμοποιηθούν από όσο το δυνατόν πιο μεγάλο κοινό.

  Προσωπικά πιστεύω ότι πρέπει να λάβουμε μέρος όσο το δυνατόν περισσότεροι σε αυτό το Φεστιβάλ του ελεύθερου λογισμικού, δείχνοντας ότι η Ελλάδα έχει μια δυνατή κοινότητα από open source developers, τους οποίους ξέρει να “σκουντάει” προς τα εμπρός όταν κάνουν κάτι καλό. :-)

• at night, Friday 13 February 2009
  Foss, Linux | Greek Spring of Code ‘09 (Comment!)

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• Indifex hiring

• Looking for some ace developers for Indifex. Know a good open-source code hacker? Point him towards our direction. http://www.indifex.com/jobs/

• at night, Thursday 12 February 2009
  Indifex, Mini-Post, Tech/web | Indifex hiring (Comment!)

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• Playing with data presentation

• Working on making data presentation in Transifex lighter and more useful. Hide unimportant bits, expose vital ones, keeping a generally usable and friendly environment.

  

  Feedback please! More shots to come in the next days.

• at night, Thursday 5 February 2009
  Transifex | Playing with data presentation (Comment!)

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• Today’s “beautiful”

• $ gup -a 99 stats3.png 
  Uploading pictures to "Glezography/Weblog images"...
  Uploading "stats3.png" (1/1)...
  $
  

  Thanks to Julio Biason for gup. Next project: Package this as a nautilus extension/action.

• at night, Thursday 5 February 2009
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Today’s “beautiful” (Comment!)

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• A long awaited update

• 

  Photo by kazze (cc)

  The past days I spent a few hours moving my personal services (page, blog, gallery) on glezos.com from my previous provider, Dreamhost, to my favourite shared hosting provider, Webfaction (disclaimer: shameless affiliate link).

  If things went well, you should be reading this in something that resembles English with letters being one next to the other. Kidding aside, the blog should be loading blazingly faster than before and the photos from the gallery should actually load up in the blog.

  How come?

  Dreamhost is an inexpensive web hosting company, suitable for folks wanting abundant space for PHP applications, panel simplicity and simple one-click-install environments. The price one pays for the massive bandwidth and storage is quite good; in fact it’s so cheap some people choose Dreamhost instead of Amazon’s S3. We’ve been hosting more than 30 sites there for friends, local LUGs and NPOs, and for the most part, everyone is satisfied.

  We chose Webfaction for hosting the development of Transifex and a few other Python-powered sites. Originally python-hosting.com, Webfaction is considered one of the best hosting providers out there. Even hostingthatsuck.com recommends webfaction since it was amazed that there were almost no negative reviews about their service.

  The Webfaction folks were kind enough to offer us free hosting and our experience was nothing but amazing. The domain/app/website notion in the panel is intuitive and flexible, allowing you to switch domains, applications and servers in a snap. Pretty useful for staging newer versions of software brought to production mode. And their servers are not overcrowded at all: loads on my 3 servers right now are 0.1, 0.3 and 0.35.

  So yesterday I also moved glezos.com on Webfaction. I’ve had all the usual knots to untie with Wordpress upgrades and moves, but eventually everything worked great. Well, not quite everything, since there has been a mixup with the MX records. Both the blog and gallery were upgraded and I did some work on optimizing performance. According to pingdom, the blog mainpage is returned in 1 second and loads up (but the large photos) in 3 seconds. Which makes both me and my server admins happy. =) The gallery is even more impressive: 0.8 seconds for showing up main page.

  At this point I’ll raise my glass to all sysadmins in the world for messing with these stuff every friggin’ day. Here’s to you guys.

  
  Photo by docbudie (cc)

• at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
  Random | A long awaited update (Comment!)

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• About Schmidt

• “The cowards never started. The weak died on the way. Only the strong survived. They were the pioneers.” (About Schmidt)

• at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
  Books/music/films, Mini-Post, Quotes | About Schmidt (Comment!)

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• Theming Tx’s hgweb

• Themed Transifex’s code/hg web interface to blend in with the rest of the site. It needs some more work, maybe another Sunday.

• at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
  Mini-Post, Transifex | Theming Tx’s hgweb (Comment!)

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• Tab Control

• Newest favourite Firefox addon: Tab Control. Open new tabs next to current tab instead of the end.

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Tab Control (Comment!)

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• Transifex 0.3.2 released

• I realized today how good it feels right before a release. It’s something like the moment you fasten your seatbelt on the aeroplane before a trip. You know, after everything has been pack(ag)ed and transferred, you made it to your deadline (or changed flights), passed the security/QA. Just waiting for the take off. Satisfaction, planning newer, greater things.

  The smallest suspicion of weight is maybe whether your forgot something behind, but OK — you have this for the whole period until your next minor update.

  Today we released Transifex 0.3.2.

  Codenamed “As good as it gets”, this release includes a large number of bugfixes and improvements from more than 20 people. The diffstat weighs in at 76 files changed, 36245 insertions(+), 16465 deletions(-). For a full list of features take a look at the Release Notes for 0.3.2.

  Tarballs and packages are available at the files section of transifex.org and on the Python Cheese Shop.

  Fedora’s Transifex instance will be upgraded once we test the new version a bit. Bugs should be reported on Trac.

  Thanks to everyone who made this possible.

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Tech/web, Transifex | Transifex 0.3.2 released (Comment!)

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• Twitter-mania

• Ωραία τα είπε ο Γιάννης. Μου θυμίζει με το greek blogosphere boom που το κάθε τι γινόταν θέμα. Τις μάχες των followers. Τσκ τσκ. :-)

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Humor, Mini-Post | Twitter-mania (Comment!)

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• “title” HTML tag to avoid #156

• <title>Patra 2008, Patrinorama.com, Patras City Portal, Patras Magazine,
  Info Patra, News Patra, Patra Theatre, Patra Cinema, Patra Music, Patras Live,
  Patras Gossip, Patras Video, Patra Video, patra live, patra music,
  patra cinema, patra theatre, patra 2008</title>
  

  Too much SEO or what?

  Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as “Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping” instead.

  W3 reference

  Also:

  A good TITLE should be short and specific to the document’s content so that it can be used as a title for a user’s bookmark, a title for the display window, and a link from a search engine. A suggested limit for the number of characters in a TITLE is 60.

  WDG reference

• at night, Wednesday 28 January 2009
  Tech/web | “title” HTML tag to avoid #156 (Comment!)

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• The Zen of Python

• Αρκετοί φίλοι (και πελάτες πια) με ρωτούν την Μεγάλη Ερώτηση Ανάπτυξης Λογισμικού: “Γιατί τη γλώσσα Χ;”. Στην περίπτωση μου είναι συνήθως “Γιατί Python;”.

  Είναι από εκείνες τις ερωτήσεις που οτιδήποτε απαντήσεις, εκτός τις απαντήσεις αποφυγής “Απλά μου αρέσει!” και “Εξαρτάται”, θα γεννηθούν στον ερωτώντα περισσότερες ερωτήσεις. Μια περίληψη των λόγων που σε αρκετούς Python developers δεν τους αρέσουν τα πολλά ακρωνύμια ή τα ρουμπίνια είναι το Zen of Python (aka PEP 20), το οποίο έχει επηρεάσει το σχεδιασμό της γλώσσας και του λογισμικού που γράφεται σε αυτή και υπάρχει και σαν top-level easter-egg στο ίδιο το Python prompt.

  >>> import this
  The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
   
  Beautiful is better than ugly.
  Explicit is better than implicit.
  Simple is better than complex.
  Complex is better than complicated.
  Flat is better than nested.
  Sparse is better than dense.
  Readability counts.
  Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
  Although practicality beats purity.
  Errors should never pass silently.
  Unless explicitly silenced.
  In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
  Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
  Now is better than never.
  Although never is often better than *right* now.
  If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
  If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
  Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
  

• at night, Tuesday 27 January 2009
  Random | The Zen of Python (Comment!)

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• Sunday Turkish Coffee

• 

  Enjoying a cup of good Turkish coffee.

• at night, Sunday 25 January 2009
  Personal | Sunday Turkish Coffee (Comment!)

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• Transifex accepting donations

• I’ve been asked a few times in the past the question ‘How can I support the development of Transifex?’. Like most open source projects, the best way to give support is by contributing your time with actual bits of the software like code, documentation, translations, or spread the word about its cool features (an excellent example of the latter is spreadfirefox.com).

  Quite often though, the best contribution one can make is monetary. And since some people have asked for it, Transifex is now accepting donations via the marvels of PayPal with me as the “accountant”. I hope we can collect an amount to cover the hosting costs of transifex.org, and if possible, organize a developer sprint soon where we can buy the pizzas or a beer to the transifex-devel hackers who’d like to participate.

  Thanks in advance for your support! :-)

• at night, Saturday 24 January 2009
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Transifex accepting donations (Comment!)

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• Fedora Board decisions in the open

• I’m so glad folks on the Fedora Board are insisting on taking discussions that could be discussed in the open to our public advisory board list.

• at night, Thursday 22 January 2009
  Fedora, Mini-Post, Thoughts | Fedora Board decisions in the open (Comment!)

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• Bouncing balls

• I love Sony Bravia’s ad with the bouncing balls in HD. Choice of Jose Gonzalez in the background was excellent.

• at night, Wednesday 21 January 2009
  Books/music/films, Mini-Post | Bouncing balls (Comment!)

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• Alex Panagopoulos

• Ι just love Alex’s drawings. Emotional and engaging, dreamy and bittersweet.

  

  “The exchange of flowers”
  Alex Panagopoulos

  Alex and I did quite a few crazy things together during University and later. I remember endless nights talking about God and chess before hitting breakfast to do some more talking. I remember freaking out on our first day in rock climbing and breaking Alex’s leg on a fall. Hitting on girls with the size of our camera lenses. Driving California State Route 1 and trying to dodge bears in Yosemite Park in the night.

  Such an amazing guy.

• at night, Monday 19 January 2009
  Personal | Alex Panagopoulos (Comment!)

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• Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras I

• Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras. 20 people present, including CEO of Patras Science Park (Incubation center) Petros Groumpos. Talked about entrepreneurship, fundings, and also a bit about Indifex and its vision. Overall an experience to be repeated.

• at night, Sunday 18 January 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras I (Comment!)

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