For those who haven’t noticed yet, there is an open poll in Gentoo Forums for a new default avatar for Planet Gentoo. This will apply to any subscriber that hasn’t set a gravatar. Right now a tux is shown in such case, and nirbheek suggested to replace it with a Gentoo logo, so I’ll let the people decide on which one to use. Vote now!
Candidates:
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So, let’s assume you are a movie producer, and you want to create a new one. What would be the first idea that pops at the top of your head? Of course, a new sci-fi movie, with lots of visual effects and a meaningless script, that combines every possible aspect of every single science, so it can become too hard for the viewers to even bother to understand it. That way, you will impress your crowd by creating a new HD 3D movie, and trick everyone who will think that the story is genius because of its complexity. And what about the characters? Hm, we need a very beautiful woman (at least one) that is in a big trouble (or joins the trouble while the movie goes on), gun experts (at least two), a bunch of vicious villains, a bunch of random people in a difficult situation, the president of the United States, hm, I am definitely forgetting of someone. OF COURSE, THE HACKER. Let’s see some details of the hacker’s personality, outfit, acting way, background etc etc:
Take this as an open letter to the movie industries: PLEASE STOP DESTROYING OUR PROFILE! No, we are not like that and we don’t even try to be that way. After those movies, when people come to my place and see 2 monitors on a single PC (WOW WTF HOW DID HE MOVE THE WINDOW FROM ONE MONITOR TO THE OTHER), they start asking things like: "Why don’t you hack in a bank to become rich?" or "Can you please hack in my university? I’ll pay you of course". Why can’t the hacker guy be an everyday guy? How does he manage to transform from the typical nerd to a super cool guy after half an hour movie only? Can’t he be on a normal relationship, having a normal job, and living in a normal house? And most importantly, can he be the main actor, just for once? For a change, who knows, it might look better if it is closer to the reality.
P.S. Thanks to nikhatzi for his original ideas. I stole two of the above points (at least)
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The last part of my summer holidays was Serj Tankian’s concert in Athens, where I attended with some colleagues. Well, it has been way too long since I’ve last been to a non Hip Hop live but this was a bit different. I was listening a lot of System of a Down the last months while I was writing my thesis, and I fell in love with Serj’s Symphony album. It was unclear whether the live act would include classical music players or only a rock band, but, either way, I would be satisfied anyway. But who could guess…
The concert took place at Terra Vibe, which is a large park used primarily for outdoor events like this one, a perfect place for that kind of concert. We arrived there a bit late, so we missed most of the performance of the support band, called Viza. From what I heard, their sound was very similar to System of a Down’s early albums, and I kind of liked them, although I wasn’t paying much attention to the stage yet. A short pause took place after Viza’s act, where some technicians were preparing the stage. It was very clear at that point that there were seats for classical musicians as well as the usual equipment for the rest of the band. After about half an hour wait, Serj and his band went on stage.
He was brilliant, a true artist. He was on stage along with 3 guitarists, a drum player, a keyboards player and 8 Greek classical musicians, with the keyboards player acting as their conductor when needed. Serj performed a lot (maybe all?) of his tracks from Elect The Dead album, and about 8 tracks of his new album (plus an Armenian song) with a mix of Rock and classical music, that produced an outstanding / strange / new / pioneer sound. There were the "hard rock" moments, as well as the acoustic only moments, either with guitars and such or just with the classical musicians. Serj did applause them many times, while they seemed not to be used in pure Rock lives, but clearly they were enjoying it as well. Serj seemed very excited for being in Greece, using many greek words (personal highlight: "Music comes from the universe, from the Μούσα (muse) , we are just the performers") or speaking about Greece, the history, the ancient civilization ("The Americans told Greece how democracy should be, they told the country that created democracy that"). It was a bit short, less than 1 hour and a half, but what the heck, I really enjoyed the unique sound of the band together with the classical musicians, as well as the awesome performance (and voice) of Serj Tankian.
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This summer I had some fantastic holidays. What made them so special was that I didn’t plan to go to the places I visited, I mostly just followed my friend Alex while visiting his relatives in different places across Greece. Apart from the usual (and boring) seaside resorts near my city, I also went to a mountainous village (first time in my life that I went to a place which was cold on July, usually it is over 30°C), Athens (twice), Thessaloniki, Heraklion (Crete), and the highlight, Corfu.
Corfu is a Greek Island on the NW side of Greece, in the Ionian Sea. A magnificent place for holidays, as it consists of a beautiful city, with many archeological places and other tourist attractions, the best beach I’ve ever been to, and of course a very vivid night life. The old town has among the others a huge square, two fortresses (located on high spots, a very relaxing and impressive place to have a drink or coffee in the cafe-bars located inside them and enjoy the view), and a labyrinth of very narrow streets (in greek: καντούνια (cantounia)). I’ve been in Corfu again in 2004, twice actually, the first time on a school trip, so I skipped the historical places and went straight to the drinks. It was very nice to be again in that beautiful Island, and see all those people, since I haven’t seen most of them since then, as well as meeting new ones.
And some photos of the old city, the fortress, us getting drunk, and the partyyyy!!!
After that, Alex and me traveled for 23 hours to Crete, where I’ve been again last year. Another great place to visit, where I had fantastic time with the RPG guys. And a photo with Petros at a party he was DJing.
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"Linux Team of TEI of Larissa is participating in the celebration of the Sofware Freedom Day. The event is open to the public and will be held at the Central Square of Larissa, Saturday the 18th, September 2010."
Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. We (my college’s Linux Team) participated last year as well. What we did was to set up a booth at the most popular place of our city, the "Central Square", with a bunch of linux stuff, and talk to people about Free Software. We had about 4-5 laptops with various Linux distributions installed for live demonstration, a bunch of distro LiveCD’s, a custom made CD which included Free Software applications for Windows, 2 OLPCs, stickers, flyers, and much fun! Many people were curious to see what we were offering, and how that can help them either professionally or in their everyday life. All kinds of people stepped by: students who could learn how Free Software can help them with their education, kids that enjoyed the OLPCs, professionals of various areas who asked how they can use Free Software in their business to save money/time (as an example, there were graphic designers and photographers who were impressed by the GIMP), even old people and guys that don’t make an exaggerate use of their computers were tempted to try or install a Linux distro.
So, since it was that exciting last year, we decided to repeat it. Same place, the same geeks will be there to educate the curious passengers, outside the boundaries of our school. The sad thing is that this year we couldn’t get many official liveCD’s from the greek distro communities, but this gave me the opportunity to burn KDE 4 only liveCD’s (and spread the virus to the others): Kubuntu, Suse, Fedora (KDE 4), Sabayon (KDE 4), Mint and of course my beloved Gentoo. Below is the poster that also contains other Greek cities that are going to participate. (In case there is a Greek city that is going to participate to SFD and isn’t included, please mail me ASAP).
Happy Software Freedom Day!
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Following my previous post, I’d like to share with anyone interested a Gentoo Drupal theme. This one was originally developed by the Russian Gentoo Community for their website http://www.gentoo.ru. The Greek Gentoo Community decided later to create a drupal website, and alexxy was kind enough to give me this theme. Me and wired applied some small fixes and improvements to this to fit our needs. It is now hosted in a git repository at our server, feel free to grab it. Any feedback and patches are always appreciated.
Gitweb also provides tarballs of every revision. To download one, browse at one commit (the most recent 
) and select one of the snapshot (tar.gz tar.bz2 zip) selections.
EDIT: Git path has moved from gentoo-drupal-theme.git to drupal/gentoo-theme.git (the above links are updated)
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We are very close to move the Gentoo developer blogs from b2evolution to WordPress, mainly because of Akismet. I already tried the multiuser installation and I was impressed with its simple and quick installation process, as well as its features.
So this is a call to all Gentoo users out there, if any of you has created or found a WordPress Gentoo theme, I would highly appreciate it. In case someone is interested to create one, feel free to contact me. I don’t have anything in mind to be honest at the moment, but I guess we could try a few things.
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Part of today’s KDE Team meeting:
KDE 4.5 status and plans to put it in Portage
We agreed that KDE 4.5.1 is suffering of some important bugs, and after a long discussion we decided to put it in portage, but it will never make it to stable branch. We are mentioning the upstream bugs, as we think that users should be aware of them before updating:
Also, keep in mind that KDE SC 4.5 lacks the KDEPIM suite, so users should use KDEPIM 4.4.5 instead, which is also stable in portage tree.
In case of an update it should be smooth.
The whole summary and log can be found at the KDE project space.
The Qt Team also had a meeting one our later, summary and logs at the Qt project space
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