Another copy-paste from my sister:
Today at 3am, another nephew came along.
Welcome aboard Chris!
So, at the very end of February (thankfully, 2009 is not a leap year), my cousin gave birth to her second daughter! An easy birth (second children are easier, or so I’m told), niece v2 came in this world at about 19:00 on Saturday. Welcome aboard, baby girl!
Lately I’ve become a bit disinterested in video games. I guess I was feeling a bit guilty about the fact that I didn’t play enough World of Warcraft. I haven’t even maxed my main character with Burning Crusade standards (70), and I have got Wrath of the Lich King as well. This may be a general problem of mine, that, even if I have played a myriad of games, I have completed just a few of them.
So, in order to make myself interested again, I installed steam. That was a big “mistake”… I have now bought a whole lot of games, and I still don’t have the time to play them…
I’ve made my first (popular) open source project since September, and it has been a very enlightening experience. It’s called Fallen Sword Helper, and it’s hosted by Google Code.
The project started when I started playing an online browser-based RPG game. I registered last April, but I didn’t really play before last summer (2008), as I found the instructions to be a little difficult. Anyhow, the game is (as you can see from the title) Fallen Sword from Hunted Cow Studios. After playing for a bit, there were some things in the game that somewhat annoyed me, which made the game less than enjoyable. After being accepted to a top 250-guild, which had a rule to not attack people of some guilds, I decided that I should enhance the game experience, as it would be very difficult for me to remember who were our “friendly” guilds – the ones I shouldn’t attack. So, I started working on a new Greasemonkey script to make those fixes.
Using a Greasemonkey script for Firefox was really a method I had used in another browser-based game. In fact, I had made a Firefox Extension first, because it would otherwise be impossible to send XMLHTTP requests. Of course Firefox extensions are a lot more difficult to develop, because each change you make means you have to restart your browser. So, since I discovered that Greasemonkey had an internal API that could send XMLHTTP requests (and also a way to persist variables), I decided that Greasemonkey scripts were the way to go.
After a while, I decided to post the Helper script on to userscripts.org, so that other people would benefit from it. I also put in an autoupdate feature, which I felt was a major requirement for me to keep my sanity.
As time progressed, there were many submissions to the userscripts forum, so I felt it was time to upgrade this project to a real collaborative environment – a true source control system, and, if possible a bug tracking tool. Google Code really is very good for all that. It provides a true subversion server, a trac-like (custom Google though) issue tracker, a wiki, and all of these on Google’s infrastructure. The only thing missing (for now) is a way to import/export the whole subversion repository, but I can live with that.
Doing that in a real scale was a new experience for me. From the project itself, I have become a lot more proficient with javascript and Firefox’s DOM, as opposed to mostly IE’s DOM which I used to work with. I also learned a lot about subversion in the process, to the point that I even managed to migrated a very old and very corrupt SourceSafe from work to a subversion repository (even though this was mostly done out of plain fear that the corruption would soon become terminal).
The best part of creating an open source project (even with just 3 active developers right now – but it would seem a lot more users) was finding out about that spirit of cooperation with people from all around the world (literally!). It feels really nice having other people reading and understanding your code, and being able to expand it without the “seams” being visible. By that I mean that they understand the code (I hope it doesn’t go to my head, but it would seem I make somewhat understandable code. Or they are supergeniuses), and what they add has the same “code smell”, you can’t see where my code ends and my collaborators’ code begins.
Another cool thing that has come out of that, is that I finally got to use a proper issue tracking software, and also to manage a project at a higher level than just writing code. Don’t get me wrong, writing code is still my favorite activity, but it’s nice to know that I could also manage a project from higher up. I’ve also started writing technical documentation for all that. All in all, I think I’m doing a more professional and complete job for this project that I’m not getting paid for, than the projects I’m really getting paid for at work 
Of course the fact that for my project I’m the chief developer, project manager and main customer helps.
This is how it all began: Snow.
A lot of snow. Me, living near the sea for most of my life (Piraeus) hadn’t seen much snow in my life. In fact I think that I’ve only seen snow maybe four or five times before this. So, now I’ve moved to the highlands of Gerakas, it seems that the weather gods saw fit to reward me with the largest amount of snow I’ve ever seen – and it also seems it was a lot of snow even for less snow-deprived people. How many times did I use snow in the last paragraph?
After that, it got worse:
And worse:
That’s a cheap thermometer on the ledge there. It went down to -4°C at least, maybe less.
And snow kept falling:
Until the next day:
I’m sure there’s my car under there:
This is how high the snow was in front of my door. I would say it’s about 80 cm off the ground.
You can’t believe there’s ground under there, can you?
The water supply pipes had frozen over, so I didn’t have drinking or any water at all.
I almost felt like a primitive man, picking up snow or even ice blocks by the handful and melting in the water heater to make water (not drinkable), carefully counting how much water I have left in the fridge and rationing it to last for the longest possible.
I didn’t make a snowman. I don’t think anyone should make snowmen alone. Even Calvin had Hobbes. I had enough adventures trying to restart the central heating (the lock had frozen over, so I had to melt the ice that had formed using a lighter to open the door).
Finally, this morning (Tuesday) the snow started to really melt. My cousin came over to fix the broken water supply.
Of course I had the whole distance from my house to the street to cover (or actually to uncover). I was very fortunate that a man in a private bulldozer came and cleared up in 2-3 minutes what would have taken me all afternoon.
Update: I had this post saved somewhere, and after some polishing, I’m posting it for real.
I think I will be readjusting my goals. It was a somewhat hard winter, so I didn’t have the chance to be riding every week as was my original plan. Furthermore, the past month the road seems full of bad drivers. Cutting offs are very usual, noone seems to know what the indicator lights do, and I even got honked at because I wouldn’t pass to the other side of the road and be crashed by incoming vehicles. There are also some new traffic lights on the way, and I think the only way to pass them all without hitting a red light is to travel at warp 9, or at least 120 km/h – which is absurd on such a narrow street! Some roads are being “redesigned” for some weird reason, so that you have to go around and travel about 1 km to get 50 meters north!
I’m not changing my goal to be going to the office by bicycle, I’m just not confident enough to be going to the traffic just yet (actually I’m not even confident I can make 10 km twice in a day yet!). At least it was a bit warmer today, so I rode for a bit
Bill Gates came to Greece on Monday, and I was one of the fortunate enough to go and see the presentation. Nothing really new there, only that there was a real demo of Microsoft Surface. Of course I’ve seen almost everything on the internet, but there’s obviously much better resolution IRL I really went so that I can say that I’ve really seen Bill Gates in person (even from some distance) The next presenter was more unknown, but he showed us something I hadn’t seen before. It’s codenamed "Oslo", and it’s part of new wave of developer products (Visual Studio 10, BizTalk 6, .NET Framework 4). It seemed ok, but what really seemed cool was a component that was temporarily named "Universal Editor". It seems like something that is between Workflow Foundation, SQL Server management, System Center and Visual Studio. If it does what I think it does, it should really be revolutionary for development.
This Thursday, I finally (after 14 years!) graduated from my university. I am now officially an Agricultural Biotechnologist!The ceremony wasn’t really much, which is a good thing, as the hall we had gathered in didn’t really have all that much room. Also, I think I was the last of my year to get a degree, so there was no-one I knew in the hall.
Still, this really was a pivotal time for me. A chapter has now really closed in my life, even though I was reading ahead about 3 chapters forward
The last three days were a bit hectic, but I was taking part of something very cool: The 31st World Othello Championship! It was a bit unexpected of course, but I was one of the two members of the Greek team. The event took place in Greece, in the center of Athens (which was almost obviously the reason a Greek team, which was just put together, could take part).
All in all, a wonderful experience! I came 66th of 68, but it really was my first time playing for real (as in on a board), with players that obviously have been playing a very long time and were very experienced. My goal was really not coming last, which I very much achieved .
I just hope there will be a next chapter in all of this, and I can do better next year
My server PC’s motherboard was fried last week, so I decided to not replace it, but to upgrade my Workstation PC to a slightly better CPU, GPU, memory and motherboard, and use my old workstation PC as the new server. This is a work in progress obviously; the server PC is now just a Virtual PC and the actual hardware server (to be) is just a bunch of cables waiting to be put together.
So, I went to pick up my PC on Saturday, on a part of Metropolitan Athens that I’ve never been before (GPS is cool!). As luck would have it, I caught the most extreme rain I’ve ever seen! I might be exaggerating about the actual rain – but it was one of the few times I’ve ever seen hail, and the first one that I was driving.
The quality of the new case and PSU aren’t really that great. The motherboard/CPU/GPU/Memory is doing great so far (I got a 5,3 in Vista Experience Index), but half the SATA power jacks have broken when I connected them, and there were some disconnected cables in the case. Of course after working in the obscenely huge Coolermaster Stacker, the Coolermaster Centurion I got seems way too cramped. Unfortunately the disk encasement on Stacker is really a torture device to plug in and out, so the sideways plug-in of Centurion is really a breath of fresh air.
Unfortunately the motherboard/CPU change did not bode well with Windows Vista, so I had to reinstall them. So once again, I’ll be installing software after software and manually migrating setting after setting. There should be an easier way to do this. Even from hosed installations. Why, oh why did Microsoft replace the good old “In-place Upgrade”, a.k.a. “Repair Installation” of Windows XP with the dumbed-down, slow as hell, check-your-disk-when-it-doesn’t-need-it monstrosity that is “Repair Windows Startup Problems” (or something)? Bring Install-on-top back! This was really the way to solve such “trivial” problems as changing motherboards. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to do the same thing for the fourth time at work too!
Don’t get me wrong, I like Windows Vista. They are truly better than Windows XP in most matters. And in spite of the fact that I’ve gone for the most incompatible path imaginable, namely 64-bit Windows Vista (Ultimate), I’ve only met with very few problems, probably less than 10 cases. There are some incompatible drivers (I can only think of two, a USB-to-Serial cable, and I think a MIDI device) and I can only think of Sysinternals’ Process Monitor that didn’t capture 32-bit applications once, although this was probably due to the state of anarchy I’ve managed to brink my work’s PC configuration to. Problems with 64-bit are more of an “a-ha” problem, such as converting a web site to 32-bit, or using the 32-bit cscript.exe to start 32-bit ActiveX objects etc. I chose to do this of course, in order to experience the problem class that comes with 32-to-64-bit transition. Even my new motherboard’s manual has a warning that 32-bit windows cannot see more than about 3,5 GB of RAM. In this new PC I already have 4 GB…
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