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• On success in life

• “He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.” (Douglas Adams)

• at night, Monday 30 June 2008
  Humor, Mini-Post, Quotes | On success in life (Comment!)

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• Arrows

• 

  I sometimes lose myself for a few moments in this Unicode block.

  So… beautiful?

• at night, Saturday 28 June 2008
  Tech/web, Thoughts | Arrows (Comment!)

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• The greatest thing

• There was a boy
  A very strange enchanted boy
  They say he wandered very far, very far
  Over land and sea
  A little shy and sad of eye
  But very wise was he

  And then one day
  A magic day he passed my way
  And while we spoke of many things
  Fools and kings
  This he said to me
  “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn
  Is just to love and be loved in return”

  Nat King Cole, “Nature Boy” (1948)

  Not sure I totally agree, but the song is fantastic anyway.

• at night, Friday 27 June 2008
  | The greatest thing (Comment!)

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• Presenting Transifex at TechCrunch Athens

• The highly popular among startups TechCrunch meets OpenCoffee in Athens next week, in an event that is anticipated to be big. Enterpreuners, investors, and geeks excited about technology get together to discuss cool ideas, present novel technologies, talk partnerships and a whole lot of other cool stuff.

  

  The event will feature a few speakers, and I’m pretty excited to be one of them. I’ll be presenting Transifex of course, discussing its technology and its potential to become a solid localization platform for a lot of projects on the Web. In my pitch I’ll explain the value Transifex adds not only to software projects and existing translation communities, but also to publishing platforms, blogs, and companies doing localization. I’ll also discuss the potential to gradually scale the platform to serve more and bigger projects, and how this momentum could bring back revenue.

  Since I like it quite, I’ll quote here the pitch abstract I prepared for the talk.

  Transifex is a platform that simplifies the translation of content accessible through the Internet. It helps producers of software, documents or web services to reach out to established localization communities to receive high-quality translations which are then stored directly on the source repository of the product. Professional and volunteer translators are provided with a distributed web service that accepts translation data and forwards it to the right projects. Transifex focuses on ease of use and scalability, and minimizes the maintenance overhead for the translators, the content providers as well as the system administrators. Transifex is already in production use. Red Hat, Inc. and the Fedora Project rely on it for the internationalization infrastructure of its software with its millions of users. In six months, Transifex served more than 2500 translations to 80 projects from 400 translators speaking 70 languages.

  The next steps of Transifex are to embrace more projects and localization communities and to continue working in making it the translation platform for the Web.

  So, if you happen to be in Athens on July 1st, do consider dropping by. Should be fun!

• at night, Friday 27 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web, Transifex | Presenting Transifex at TechCrunch Athens (Comment!)

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• Κάθε τέλος και μια νέα αρχή

• Ακόμη μια ζόρικη κορυφή έχει κατακτηθεί. Το συναίσθημα είναι κλασικά, φανταστικό.

  Τώρα, χρειαζόμαστε 3 πράγματα:

  1. Καταρχήν μια κορνίζα κι ένα αρκετά μεγάλο τοίχο
  2. Ένα νέο τρόπο για ηρεμία μετά από μιας ημέρας γερή δουλειά για τα επόμενα 1-2 χρόνια
  3. Ένα νέο στόχο που θα αμφισβητεί τα όρια της λογικής

  /me happy.

  

• at night, Thursday 19 June 2008
  | Κάθε τέλος και μια νέα αρχή (Comment!)

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• Lost Fedora heads

• For the folks who lost their heads with the Planet Fedora transition, the old hackergotchis are still available at http://planet.fedoraproject.org/heads/.

• at night, Thursday 19 June 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post, Weblogs | Lost Fedora heads (Comment!)

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• Photos from LinuxTag

• I finally got around to uploading my photos from LinuxTag ’08.

  Highlight photo, the Fearless Leader and The Strawberry Vanilla:

  “Whoa!”

  The photos are also available as a zip package (12 MiB). There are some more taken in raw format (like the ones at the dinner) which will delay a bit until I figure out how to make NEF editing work properly again.

• at night, Monday 16 June 2008
  Foss, Linux | Photos from LinuxTag (Comment!)

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• Ωράρια εργασίας

• Το κακό με το σταθερό ωράριο είναι ότι δεν έχεις ελεύθερες τις καθημερινές σου.
  Το κακό όταν δουλεύεις από το σπίτι είναι ότι δεν έχεις καθόλου ελεύθερα τα σαββατοκύριακα σου.

  Εθεάθη στην tweet-ο κατάσταση μου

• at night, Sunday 15 June 2008
  Humor, Thoughts | Ωράρια εργασίας (Comment!)

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• Tip of the day: Virtual object properties

• Here’s a trick I learned today from Chris that’s worth sharing: creating “virtual” attributes for objects (in need for a better wording).

  Here’s a use-case: we have a person with a Name and a Surname — how could we access its full name in one string like person.full_name? You could do that with Python’s @property decorator:

  class Person(object):
   
      def __init__(self, name, surname):
          self.name = name
          self.surname = surname
   
      @property
      def full_name(self):
          return "%s %s" % (self.name, self.surname)
   
  p=Person('John', 'Doe')
  print (p.name, p.surname)
  ('John', 'Doe')
   
  print p.full_name
  John Doe
  

  Without the decorator we would need to access the string as person.full_name(), instead of the simpler and more intuitive person.full_name. Pretty neat.

• at night, Saturday 14 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Tip of the day: Virtual object properties (Comment!)

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• GUADEC roadtrip

• Σκέφτομαι να πάω με αμάξι στην Κωνσταντινούπολη για την GUADEC, στις 7 Ιουλίου. Ψήνεται κανείς για ~~roadtrip~~ αεροπορική (τελικά) επίσκεψη;

• at night, Thursday 12 June 2008
  Gnome, Mini-Post, Personal | GUADEC roadtrip (Comment!)

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• On masterpieces and inspiration

• “Comptine d’un autre été: L’apres midi” from the movie Amélie is one of those masterpieces of music, which just inspires people to be creative. Some examples:

  • A different self
  • Remembering
  • Love
  • Happiness
  • Earth

  Beautiful works are destined be used creatively, inspire, reach greatness, achieve immortality.

  Resistance is futile.

• at night, Monday 9 June 2008
  | On masterpieces and inspiration (Comment!)

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• Lowering barriers

• Seen today in fedora-trans-list:

  User 1

  I just joined in the group and will translate to Latvian. I got a problem with cvs login. I did all instructions to set up it. I suspect here is problem with keys.

  User 2

  I have the same problem…. but don’t worry. CVS access is not necessary to work at translations. Just download the pot you want translate from your team page… translate it using gtranslator/kbabel/others… and submit the translated PO file using the TRANSIFEX system.

  Also interesting: Stavros’ take on the same topic for the Xfce project. I’m so looking forward to it.

• at night, Saturday 7 June 2008
  | Lowering barriers (Comment!)

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• Weblog maintenance

• I need to do some maintenance on the blog (upgrade, theme adjustment, etc), so some glitches might be visible (like the generic theme for example). Will try to get them fixed by tomorrow. It’s times like this you feel that the future is all about hosted solutions…

• at night, Saturday 7 June 2008
  Website | Weblog maintenance (Comment!)

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• Meaningless framework statistics

• IRC Channel	Users
  #python	604
  #ruby	204
  #django	468
  #rubyonrails	349
  #turbogears	51

• at night, Thursday 5 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Meaningless framework statistics (Comment!)

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• GNOME-Glass date conflict #@$!

• GUADEC @ Istanbul: 7-12 July 2008. Philip Glass @ Athens: 8-12 July 2008. Darn. Update, 2 hours later: EuroPython 2008: 7-12 July 2008. GAH!

• at night, Tuesday 3 June 2008
  Gnome, Mini-Post, Personal | GNOME-Glass date conflict #@$! (Comment!)

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• LinuxTag Saturday update

• Reporting from beautiful Berlin.

  • Had the chance to discuss with a few code hackers like Harald Hoyer about features they need from Tx. Harald mentioned the need for more management interfaces for resource maintainers, like eg. administrating branches. I’m glad to say that Diego is already working on this as part of his GSoC project.
  • Folks from GNOME, openSUSE, Debian and Gentoo had also a bunch of good comments and constructive criticism. There is a clear need for an open localization platform right now in the whole established FOSS projects landscape. With some help, we could get a prototype out as soon as possible.
  • Thursday evening: LinuxNacht. Yup, that’s the night event where we go out and do two things: drink beer and drink beer. The reality was it also involved a lot of fun, good food and good music.
  • Being one of the last people to leave the place, it wasn’t easy to wake up at 8am in order to make it to the OLPC workshop.
  • Met with a couple of great folks from OLPC and discussed a couple of ideas of mine around content distribution, localization and the little laptop. I’m so happy they found them exciting enough to give me an XO to take home, hack on it and be a total showoff.
  • I managed to work a bit on code and attend a few presentations on Fedora land. Listening to Max‘s talk I realized how great it would be if every project’s leaders believed so deeply in transparency as the Fedora ones do.
  • One of the things I realized the past days is how much work has Novell done in the community space. There has been an amazing improvement on openness in every aspect of openSUSE lately. Respect.
  • I’m attending GUADEC next month at Istanbul. Until then I’ll work on bringing Tx to shape to be used by GNOME.

  I’m off to meet the CentOS folks to continue yesterday’s discussion to get them on board with Tx. It could be as simple as get their release notes reach out to more non-english users but also to consider localizing more stuff in their distro.

• at night, Saturday 31 May 2008
  Foss, Linux | LinuxTag Saturday update (Comment!)

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• LinuxTag baby!

• 

  It’s been 3 days now of constant running, and I’m soooo glad I managed to get a good rest last night. No feet dragging today, yay!

  With super-charged batteries I hit the coffee shop next to the place I crash, grab a couple of croissants and head towards the venue. The last days we’ve had a ton of interesting technical discussions with Lennart Poettering and other folks. Besides learning a bunch of new stuff (filesystem internals, GTK+ v3 challenges, X.org plans & tricks) a bunch of ideas come out to use Transifex in creative ways.

  For example, Lennart is working on sound theming, in order to have the ability to personalize the sounds your desktop does. This could prove very helpful for blind people, but others might also find it useful, interesting or just fun: listening to “You’ve got mail”, “You’re low on battery”, etc. Maniacs could even configure “click.. click.. click” and for multiple ones have a deep voice saying “You’re on clicking spree!!” and “Rampage!”. Kidding aside, this made me think we’ll need localization and we could have this done by Transifex. While it would work right away, it would be more fun to create a plugin that adds a set of small features like normalization check (all sound files are on the same sound level), multiple file upload, and on the ‘Preview Submission’ screen an embedded flash player that allows you to preview (pre-hear) the final file.

  Yesterday we had the chance to discuss with other fellow GNOME folks how we could imporve the integration between our tools (Transifex, Vertimus, Damned Lies). Having to maintain three different tools and configurations is a pain for everyone and interoperability always is sub-optimal (or, in other words, ‘you can feel the glue’). It’s encouraging to see solutions being adapted by more projects and > 1 {people, projects} having the same feelings on where we should be heading, since this indicates that we’re probably on the right track. I’m looking forward to the integration, which could more easily produce a bunch of exciting features (like, getting translation statistics on the command line, etc).

  One of the most interesting talks I attended was Dirk Hohndel’s one titled What do Major Corporations do for Open Source?. Dirk gave out many messages, but I particularly liked his suggestions on how open source developers can approach big companies to see if they’re interested in their project. He said something along the lines *”while you might think that sending an email to info@company.com would be a silly idea, it’s not. Go on and do it. Say how your project’s goals (roadmap, releases) could help the company achieve its goals or enhance their processes.” Brilliant approach.

  

  I’ll go off now to help out at the Fedora booth and continue networking. Once I find some more time I’ll write some more happenings.

• at night, Thursday 29 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | LinuxTag baby! (Comment!)

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• 3ο συνέδριο ΕΛΛΑΚ

• Τα λέμε εκεί σε 12 ώρες! Looking forward to it.

• at night, Monday 26 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post | 3ο συνέδριο ΕΛΛΑΚ (Comment!)

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• Fedora bokeh

• Photo by Spyros Theodoritsis (cc)

  More photos by Spyros over at the F9 Greece Release Party album.

  And to answer a Q that came up to a few IM messages and emails: Yes! After 8 years, I’ve had my ponytail cut. :-)

• at night, Monday 26 May 2008
  | Fedora bokeh (Comment!)

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• Getting (not) ready for LinuxTag

• Checklist:

  • Lose pair of glasses and my wallet with ID-card 3 days before a big trip: check
  • Schedule a business meeting the day before the trip and promise to attend a conference a few hours before the trip: check
  • Cause the n810 to need firmware flash and data reload a few hours before driving to Athens: check
  • Topped a hard rock climbing route after 3 months away of the rock and cause my body to shout “I want to sleep more, you tyrant, not travel!”: check

  On the positive side of things:

  • Had an important set of unit tests for Transifex finished this week
  • Working on a cool new project, which is progressing very well
  • Feeling excited to be meeting once again with the awesome bunch
• at night, Monday 26 May 2008
  | Getting (not) ready for LinuxTag (Comment!)

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