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• 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

• at night, Wednesday 24 June 2009
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Busy, happy June (Comment!)

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• Hosting foo.

• I love Webfaction for Python sites. But for PHP it’s been a PITA the past months, despite the friendliness and fast response of the support stuff. Need to find solutions for d.g.com fast.

• at night, Sunday 21 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Website | Hosting foo. (Comment!)

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• 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).

  

• at night, Sunday 21 June 2009
  Personal | I now have an Amazon Wishlist! (Comment!)

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• It’s all in the tools.

• 

• at night, Sunday 21 June 2009
  Climbing | It’s all in the tools. (Comment!)

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• 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…

  

• at night, Sunday 14 June 2009
  Books/music/films, Quotes | Caruso (Comment!)

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• 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

• at night, Saturday 13 June 2009
  Personal | Friday nights (Comment!)

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• Platform nazi

• Πώς ξενερώνω όταν βλέπω κάτι τέτοιο σε ένα site: “Click here to reset your password: http://www…LostYourPassword.aspx/…”. Μπλιαχ.

• at night, Friday 12 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Random | Platform nazi (Comment!)

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• Similar images

• Playing around Google Similar Images. Very useful. I remember playing around this technology 5+ years ago with IBM DB2 Extenders. It’s amazing to see how much time a research-like cutting-edge technology needs to come to the masses.

• at night, Friday 12 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Similar images (Comment!)

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• ithilgore on Phrack Magazine

• Woa. Good friend Fotis now an author on the “handbook and a manifesto”, highly prestigious [Phrack Magazine](http://phrack.org/issues.html?issue=66&id=9#article). Respect.

• at night, Thursday 11 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Random | ithilgore on Phrack Magazine (Comment!)

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• Word of the day: Sopranist

• This is quite extraordinary.

• at night, Tuesday 9 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Random | Word of the day: Sopranist (Comment!)

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• Software #!$@!

• My software tortures me. WordPress just marked a bunch of past good comment as spam (sorry guys!), and Firefox auto-deleted its history and bookmarks.

• at night, Sunday 7 June 2009
  Mini-Post, Personal, Random | Software #!$@! (Comment!)

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• 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.

• at night, Saturday 6 June 2009
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Big-picture release translation status (Comment!)

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• jespern / django-piston / wiki / Home — bitbucket.org

• Giving a good look at django-piston. Looks hawt!

• at night, Wednesday 3 June 2009
  Django, Mini-Post, Transifex | jespern / django-piston / wiki / Home — bitbucket.org (Comment!)

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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.

• at night, Monday 1 June 2009
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Quotes, Tech/web | 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)

• at night, Thursday 28 May 2009
  Mini-Post, Quotes | 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?

• at night, Monday 25 May 2009
  Climbing, Mini-Post, Random | 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?” =)

• at night, Saturday 23 May 2009
  Fedora, Mini-Post | 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 | Pumped (Comment!)

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• FOSDEM ‘09 photos

• at night, Wednesday 13 May 2009
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post | 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.

• at night, Tuesday 12 May 2009
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | FOSSComm recap (Comment!)

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