It nearly two months since I last wrote anything in my space (this one i mean :P), so I guess it’s time to update the few fellas that follow me electronically.
Not long ago, i was introduced into indifex, a company specializing into scalable content distribution technologies. I joined that fellowship and currently I am intrigued by its merits. First of all I got acquainted with django [1] which is a web design/implementation framework written in python. I really like python so this is, in principle, cool!
In the past few weeks every day is a new challenge workingwith something unique and ultra nice. For instance in the previous week I got involved with rabbitmq[2] and celery[3]. Rabbitmq is a distributed queueing system implementing AMQP protocol [4] (other cool servers are zeromq[5] - a really good comparison based on hard facts among them can be found here [6]) Celery on the other hand is a distributed task queue, designed -at first- for django projects. It is used for executing tasks asynchronously, routed to one or more worker servers on the same or distinct machine(s), running concurrently using multiprocessing on each one of them.
Another challenging task I faced was the overall design of the web services of transifex.net, using bleeding edge performance targeting applications like haproxy[7], nginx[8]. On this design many questions and objections were raised against the proposed design, but after all the architectural superiority prevailed and stayed.
Soon I will update with the cloud (amazon ec2 and rackspace cloud) experience 
Αυτή η εβδομάδα (μάλλον το τέλος της προηγουμενης μέχρι την δευτερα) βγήκα και πήγα σε πολλά public events, και στα οποια θα ήθελα να αναφερθώ σε επόμενα posts.
- Escape Lanparty
- Artware festival
- Η ΚΙΝΗΣΗ ΠΟΛΙΤΩΝ ΠΑΤΡΑΣ ΕΝΑΝΤΙΑ ΣΤΙΣ ΚΕΡΑΙΕΣ ΚΙΝΗΤΗΣ ΤΗΛΕΦΩΝΙΑΣ
Στα επόμενα post θα αναφερθώ μερικώς η διεξοδικά στα παραπάνω events
All the good stuff in upatras happen by individuals offering services and organizing events on their own. In the upcoming weekend 22-23-24 / 5 /2009 two major events will take place in the upatras campus.
First and most important is the Escape Lanparty v5.2 [1] . Although this is an event for geeks and hardcore gamers, it seems , that it will draw a lot of attention over the student corpus. Many PWMN members will join the party as well (estimated numbers are 20-25 people of the pwmn community attending of the 200 available seats so this will be at least 10% of the attendants) Prepare your shares 
This event will take place on the students dormitories hall[2] so be prepared to rock.
The second event is the artware[3], a mixture of artistic creation on various fields i.e. music, drawing, etc and will take place [4] in the computer engineering department.
I hopefully will attend both in a time sharing basis, so I will keep you informed. Of course you can get informed yourself by attending either or both of the events.
Cheers 
as promised and within the 16hours deadline the kOlga is back online. The new feature set installation (hotspot, gardenwall, red queueing on all interfaces, etc) is postoponed for the future.
Enjoy the beautiful saturday and the weekend 
PS1. The tzikis link was decommissioned due to poor performance (4mbps up 4mbps down) but may be brought back if noone else provides a link for him.
PS2. To the guy that broadcasts in southwest patra region with mac address : 00:0B:6B:09:F2:7E and hidden SSID @ 5180Mhz please contact me if you interested for a link. My scans indicate a very good signal from your side (-55dbi with SNR of 50db)
the wifi node due to maintenance is down and will be down for at least 16hours.
There will be installed new ap cards, new casing and some new cool features.
My apologies for the inconvenience
Cheers
After a while trying establishing a new link among korki[1] and hawk[2], today the seed was grown. Since some rearrangement took place over tzikis roof (this guy had the worst cable management and efficiency I’ve seen ever) The link is pretty solid in at tzikis part. I have to align better but the results are quite cool for a first connection and given that his part isn’t at full height while mine isn’t the best alignment (-79 ~ -82 dbi)
OSPF and other thingies are setup and the only important thing is for tzikis to provide for some service and to organize his local lan (his subnetting skills are … )
Please welcome 10.140.31.0/24 to the network and with him the Panoulix (welcome back dude)
Cheers
Το Πανεπιστήμιο Πατρών [1] έχοντας σκοπό να υποστηρίξει τους φοιτητές του που δεν διαθέτουν μέσο μετακίνησης εισήγαγε τον θεσμό των πανεπιστημιακών λεωφορείων[2].
Όπως κάθε χρόνο έτσι και φέτος τα πανεπιστημιακά λεωφορεία δρομολογήθηκαν μετά το πέρας του χειμερινού εξαμήνου (επί 4 και πλέον μήνες οι φοιτητές ήταν υποχρεωμένοι να ανέχονται το ΑΣΤΙΚΟ ΚΤΕΛ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ με το πανάκριβο εισιτήριο και την άθλια αξυπηρέτηση - για να μην πω οτι μέχρι και αυτό το σημαντικό για κάποιους από εμάς ζήτημα αποτέλεσε χώρο μικροπολιτικής αντιπαράθεσης). Και όπως κάθε τι γίνεται σε αυτό τον τόπο από τους πολιτικούς δυνάστες μας έτσι και αυτή η υπηρεσία που υποτίθεται θα αποτελούσε το αντίπαλο δέος στο ΑΣΤΙΚΟ ΚΤΕΛ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ αυτή την στιγμή αποτελεί τον καλύτερο διαφημιστή του.
Με χρόνο αναμονής στην στάση από 40λεπτά μέχρι 2 ώρες , με αραιά και ανοργάνωτα δρομολόγια, και χωρίς να προγραμματίζει αυτά με γνώμονα τους φοιτητές και τα μαθήματα που αυτοί παρακολουθούν επάξια κατακτά την τιμητική διάκριση ΜΟΥΤΖΑ 2009.
Η απορία μου είναι απλή: δεν υπάρχει κανείς που να μπορεί να υπολογίσει πόσοι περίπου άνθρωποι θα είναι στην στάση κάθε δεδομένη ώρα; Τόσοι μπακαλίστικοι πολλαπλασιασμοί υπάρχουν για να κάνετε μια προσέγγιση. Θέλετε πιο ακριβή αποτελέσματα; Κρατάτε στατιστικά στα λεωφορεία. Ζητήστε ΟΥΣΙΑΣΤΙΚΟ feedback από τους οδηγούς (πχ που γεμίζει το λεωφορείο και τι ώρα). Αν δεν μπορείτε να το κάνετε ευχαρίστως να σας βοηθήσω (κόβω και τιμολόγια παροχής υπηρεσιών)
Μέχρι τότε:
Last friday some folks (including me) did an unofficial presentation of the pwmn @ upatras. The attendance was quite unexpected, and while the joke among the workgroup that planned the “event” was that there would be more pwmn members than students, the people that came was suprisingly high!
The purpose of the presentation was to intrigue students to participate to the open/free community called pwmn, and to give them some insight info about it, just in case they would like to get involved.
One of the major concerns back in my days when I was intrested in wireless technologies was the speed (aka Need For Speed. How fast one can download stuff was my primary concern, and the second reason that made me establish a core node. (The first was the companionship among friends). Yet nowdays people such concerns are no issue! And I am actully wondering why? Are we so congested by the “high speed” dsl (namely 24mbit ~ actual 10mbps? Aren’t we intrigued by wireless bandwidth?
On the other hand the people that participated ware more intrested in the wifi technologies in use like the OS running in the routers, the routing protocols, the parameters of linking among different areas, and how the linking can be achieved. Wow! totally different generation…
** I will update this article at some point with photos from the “event” and other thoughts about the event
Yesterday as I returned from the lab@upatras, I ran into some peaceful protest in olgas square (protests in greece are more than common ground since the unjustified murder by the “democratic” police state). The protest was about an attack with a war hand grenade (yes the ones that kill people during war) against an assembly of people in athens that were talking about greek army mobilisation. Thankfully the attack failed and no people were harmed.
Despite the fact that one may or may not agree with such protests or gatherings (and at that point I am quite sure that noone is in favour of attacking unarmed civilians) , there is one definite value worth mentioning at these protests! The music! Some of the tracks played I haven’t head them since I was in high school and I feel really youthful and maybe nostalgic about these times. In this post I present one of my favorite with great lyrics and instrumentation that I heard yesterday
Instrumentation is quite amazing! Through its simplicity the song manages to create a really ongoing extroverted feeling that each individual identifies it differently! And what can I say about the lyrics… This song is a masterpiece for the greek rock era, that cannot be overwhelmed by todays “productions”.
The song is dressed by Paul Sidiropoulos’ [link] and Maria Fotiu [link] voices
some (freely translated) portions of the lyrics;
and how the new day shall arise when the errors capture (your) time?
and hot the new day shall arise when the lie lead the way?
draw a sun in the ceiling, talk with the night breeze and dance with your shadow, in a weak’s heart beat!
call your lonliness or march towards the streets of fire
If you are not greek and you have no idea about the greek language and the particular song, I would be very intrested hearing from you about my (flawed) translation. What did you understand?
In my last blog post I commented dev-c++[1] to be way problematic! It is time to justify my saying.
So this article sums up to : why dev-c++ sucks! Remember that the dev c++ in question is the 5 beta version!
- Ancient platform
- last updated: something in the last decade
- gcc 3.4.3 (WHAT??? - I am currently 4.3.3-p1 on my gen2) while the dev c++ stable -version 4 [2]- has gcc 2.95
- gdb 5.1.2 (lol - currently I am using 6.8)
- using cygwin (no winapi for native windows runtimes)
- Totally immature
- yeah right! after 5 years in beta stage this thing still crashes! yuppie!
- cryptic project development
- lack of standarized build tools (autotools, make, etc)
- the way the gui controls the gdb seems problematic
The real question when you are about to choose your devenv is why having the wannabe devenv while you can have the real deal! Even the most unattended linux (i.e. slackware [3] :-P) distro, have a decent gcc [4] accompanied with uptodate binutils [4] and coreutils [5],thus providing at least stable development enviroment.
If instead you insist on developing apps on windows make yourself a favour and choose a well adapted tool. i.e. Eclipse [5], netbeans [6] or Codeblocks [7]