Visiting London

April 30, 2009 · Posted in Travelling · 1 Comment

Taking a short break from my university studies , I decided to visit London. That was my forth time in UK but my first stay in London. The other three times I was mainly visiting Liverpool . Once in London, I rose to the chance and enjoyed a wonderful musical (again!) : Lion King. Seriously guys, this is something you must experience at least once in your life. The atmosphere was extraondinary , the music was simply awesome and the actors were brilliant. Two years ago I did a quick stop in London ,before going to Liverpool, in order to enjoy another musical: Phantom of the Opera. It, too, was amazing!

Since I am a crazy Chelsea fun, I obviously took the first tube to Chelsea’s Stadium, Stamford Bridge .Luckily that day ,there was a Champions League match between Chelsea and Liverpool. OMG; what a game! :)

Easter day was awsome. We end up having feast with friends at Gerrards’ Cross . It is a quite nice village, only 20′ out of central London.

We , as in Greek people , consider food as a top priority :). Las inguanas was a great place to taste spicy food and have exotic drinks :). I strongly suggest to give it a shot if visiting London.

IMAX 3D cinemas was another amazing experience. Unfortunately, It’s very unfortunate we don’t have these in Greece. We watched “Monsters VS Alliens” which was quite entertaining.

On the last day we visited Hyde Park. It was a unique experience. I could never image such a park could exist in a city of that size. I wonder why Athens doesnt have such places …

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the way London’s residents respect their city and the envroment.

Overall, I really enjoyed that trip and I will definitely be revisiting London:)

Photos:

Tags: London, musical, Travelling, UK

Domain moved

April 29, 2009 · Posted in Various · 2 Comments

Just a quick post to inform you that this blog has been moved to a new domain + hosting service.

The new url is -> http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org . The old domain will point ( via ’301 redirect’ ) to the new one for a while , so if you have this blog bookmarked or something please update your links :)

Sorry for the confusion and the troubles. I really really hope this is the last time I am moving this blog …

Tags: blog, domain, hosting

plasma-emergelog plasmoid

April 20, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo, Programming · 36 Comments

Usually I use yakuake whenever I need to do terminal job. But having to press the shortcut key again and again in order to hide and unhide yakuake is not that handy , especially when somebody wants to monitor the emerge progress :). So , two days ago, I decided to write a simple kde4 plasmoid to monitor emerge progress for me :) . The plasmoid monitors /var/log/emerge.log file, so make sure that you have at least ‘read’ access before you use it.

There is no tarball for this yet, but you can install it using two different ways

1) Cloning git repo

git clone git://github.com/hwoarang/plasma-emergelog.git

cd plasma-emergelog

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr

make

make install ( as root )

2) Using the ebuild from kde-testing overlay

I did push an ebuild for this plasmoid on kde-testing overlay. Feel free to try it :)

Credits: Filewatcher plasmoid helped me a lot to create this plasmoid :)

You can browse the git repository here

Update 02-05-2009

Version 0.0.1 released on kde-look.org

Link

plasma-emergelog

Tags: emerge, Gentoo, kde4, plasmoids

Interview: Dimitris Glezos

April 14, 2009 · Posted in Interviews · Comment

One of the reasons I like open source so much , is the relationships that are developed between users and developers. Through irc, blogs, forums, etc, users can contact us directly and discuss with us about almost anything :) . This is why I try to be quite active on these areas. As a user, I also really enjoy reading interviews from various open source developers. Learning more about their character and personality leads effectively to more creative discussions with them.

In order to turn the above thoughts into actions, I am planning to get involved with the Gentoo userrel project :)

Bringing users and developers closer is a nice way to keep them motivated and recruit highly active users as future developers.

Today, I have the honor and the pleasure to interview Dimitris Glezos, a Fedoras’ board member and the founder of Indifex. He is also the lead developer of Transifex.

* Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m Dimitris Glezos, 28 years old, living in sunny Greece. I’m the founder of
Indifex, a new software company which researches and develops scalable
solutions for content translation and distribution. I’ve been quite active in
the Fedora Project as a member of the Board and a member of the Fedora
Localization and Documentation Steering Committees.

I graduated as a Computer Engineer from Greece and specialized on Advanced
Information Systems, before deciding to try out research and study Semantic
Web and Fuzzy Logic for a year and half. After finally admitting to myself
that my true love is open source, I switched to work full-time on it.

In the non-technology world, I enjoy design, photography and rock climbing
quite a lot. Lately I’ve been trying to learn Contract Bridge too — hard
game. But that’s true for most of the great games, right?

* Tell us about your opensource contribution.

The first contribution I remember came at least a year after I started being
attracted to the free software culture from projects like Mozilla. I took the
lead in localizing the PHP programming language manual, and proceeded to
translating Fedora and GNOME in Greek. Around that time, together with Nikos
Charonitakis and others, the Greek Fedora Team was founded.

In terms of code contributions, I’ve sent a few patches to the i18n toolchain
of the Fedora Docs Project and some improvements to Fedora’s Websites and
default Firefox homepage. Seeing how much Fedora’s Localization infrastructure
could be improved, I decided to expose myself in more trouble by leading the
effort to move the Fedora development code, which was hosted on an internal
CVS server, to servers managed by the community. Boy, that was fun!

At that point Transifex started being built, with support from the Google
Summer of Code, and soon became the Localization Platform for Fedora. Today,
the Tx development website has more than 70 people registered and the project
has grown to 15K lines of code and a strong core team of committers.

Oh, and one of the most fun stuff I did about open source and ‘digital
freedom’ in general was my involvement with the FFII opposition to the
legislation of software patents in the EU. Lots of trips to the European
Parliament, which, to all’s satisfaction and excitement, led to the rejection
of the directive.

* Recently you became a member of Fedoras’ Board. What is your area of
responsibility now?

The Fedora Project Board is the highest level of decision-making within
Fedora, and together, as a group, its members are empowered to decide on the
Project’s policies, to steer it to a good direction, to set priorities, and to
allow the rest of the Fedora sub-projects do their work with efficiency and
accountability.

While I’m a firm believer that the most successful organizations are those
which do not need a centralized decision center (a good read on the topic is
“The Starfish and the Spider” by Brafman and Beckstrom), the Board *is*
eventually accountable for everything that might go wrong in Fedora.

One of the roles I’m taking in the Board is helping the team and the Fedora
Project Leader have the best view of the needs, feelings and requests of the
community. Also, I’m working in continuing to increase the Project’s openness
in every decision taken, and in expanding our community reach by proposing
(sometimes drastic) changes in the way we’re doing things.

Being a guy who lives in Europe and doesn’t work with Red Hat allows me to
give different input to the Board, eventually chipping in the balance of the
team in a way which represents and benefits our community the most.

* What’s the status of Fedora at this moment? How do you see its future in
the next 2-3 years?

The Feature process we have in Fedora is completely open, and anyone can apply
for having a feature. You can take a look at the upcoming Fedora 11 feature
list at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList.

We released our Beta a few days ago, which looks quite promising. Some of the
features I’m excited about are automatic font and application installation,
kernel-based mode setting, faster startup (20 seconds?!), and the built-in
support for Delta RPMs, which allows users to update their packages by
downloading only what has changed in the update instead of a whole new version
of the package.

I’m also excited to see Python 2.6 being shipped with Fedora 11, a feature led
by Indifex’s own Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams.

Fedora’s development pace seems to be increasing, with more features landing
with each release. We see a lot of innovation happening in Fedora, and that’s
great, because that’s what our users like to see and need. In a few years I
see Fedora being even more influential in the state of the Linux Desktop,
having a stronger developer community and with improvements on the things we
need to continue improving.

* Transifex is being used more and more for translating purposes. How do you
feel about that?

Well, it feels great of course. :) The promises Transifex makes are quite
simple: I’ll be the robot to which translators can request everything they
need to translate, and the servant to take those files and silently put them
into the developer’s knitting pattern. Gradually we see more projects being
interested to use Transifex, and this will allow us to do some pretty cool
stuff in the future.

I’m also very excited to see that there is interest to use Transifex as a
platform and extend it to build other tools which extend and compliment its
functionality. This is also one of the reasons I’d like us to release a public
API soon too: to allow even more projects to interoperate with Tx and offer
users more features than today.

* How do you see the future of Transifex?

Bigger, better, faster. We’re working hard in listening to feedback from
translators and developers, in order to make Tx the best tool for large
communities of users like Fedora, Maemo, GNOME, OpenSUSE etc.

I also see the spur of side-projects which use Transifex to do cool stuff that
couldn’t be done before in the Open Source L10n landscape.

* What is the purpose of your company, Indifex? Do you have any projecs
running already?

At Indifex, we’re working on solutions that eventually will enable millions of
people to easily publish material to the web in the user’s native language.

Indifex also hires some very talented code hackers, among others, who develop
Transifex to the needs of various large organizations. We provide support for
the translation workflow of enterprises and big projects like Fedora, making
sure the translators and developers have the infrastructure they need to work
efficiently.

One of our biggest projects at this moment is the development of
transifex.net, a one-stop place and open platform for crowdsourcing
translations.

For us, Indifex is the place where we can have fun hacking great solutions
together using cutting-edge tools like Python, Linux, distributed version
control systems, and scalable internationalization techniques. It’s been a
great time so far, and I’m super excited about the upcoming months and years.

Looking for the “ideal” C/C++ IDE

April 4, 2009 · Posted in Programming, Various · 11 Comments

Choosing the best IDE for your development projects is somehow a difficult task.

Recently I had to develop ( and I am still developing it) a University project. Basically I need to write some code on C ,some other on C++, use some (?) Qt4 for the user interface and use some rtai/rtnet headers and functions as well. The thing is that I haven’t written C/C++ for a long time. Last time I needed to , I used Anjuta . It was a very simple IDE that did the basics ( as far as I remember ). The years have pasted , now I am older and more mature (no comments) so I need to use a more mature IDE.

Kdevelop3 was the first IDE that poped on Google search. But.. it is a kde3 application. Hell NOOO :) . I dont feel like using old kde3 apps for my development. I just dont know why!!! I am that weird. Since I use kde4, I prefered to find a more “recent” and up2date IDE. Isn’t that normal? Kdevelop4 is pretty much broken right now so I had to search for another IDE.

Codeblocks was the second IDE that came into my mind. Very very handy ( not interface wise ) . I could have loved it ,if it wasn’t a GTK application :) . But still ,that IDE seems somehow pretty good for my project. Despite the fact that the interface was badly designed, it had some nice features. Unfortunately you can’t do much work if the interface is that ugly. And since I was supposed to do heavy development , I had to look for another ( more pretty ) IDE.

I do maintain qt-creator for Gentoo Linux. So I thought it was about time to give it a shoot. Great interface, pretty convenient but…. it was mostly for Qt4 development. So I decided to use this program to design my gui . Believe me , you should TRY IT if you write Qt4 applications. it is AWSOME. Great designer, handy features (fakevim, auto-completion , cmake support ). I liked the project tab that let me configure my .pro files just like I wanted them. gdb embedded debugger was really helpfull as well :)

Ok we are done with the user interface. What about the backend???? I was out of ideas…

But Kenneth’s blog post , reminded me of Eclipse :).

I didnt know ( and I still dont ) what version of eclipse exists on portage so I just downloaded the C/C++ version from here . I unpacked it on my $HOME folder and started using it . I think I found the ideal IDE for my projects ( at least so far ).There are not many words to say about eclipse. I am sure everybody (who has developed java/c++ ) knows about it.

What about you fellows? What is your prefered C/C++ IDE?

Tags: c, development, ide