Month April 2008

The Gevende Gig in Athens.

This past Thursday, the 17th of April 2008, Gevende performed at a packed ‘An Club’ in Athens, supported by Night on Earth and Sugah Galore. Overall, this was an excellent gig and I’m pretty sure most people had a great time. Here are some photos from the event. Night on Earth

Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted

It's funny, but statements like these are probably the reason a large, and increasing, part of the population chooses to treat religion with contempt. I'm quite certain that, at the end of the day, any religious leader would rather see his/her religion treated as a 'private matter' than a meaningless joke of yesteryear, for in a modern society it can probably only be one of the two.

10 Days to Hardy and GNOME's ugliness.

Following on from my earlier post on the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 ‘LTS’ release, I fear that my prediction, albeit harsh, was pretty accurate: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should have never been branded as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Despite the obvious shortcomings of having β-quality software (Firefox 3.0, GVFS) and new frameworks that — statistically […]

Η Spinalonga στο "Βήμα"

Σήμερα, στο Κυριακάτικο 'Βήμα', υπάρχει άρθρο του Γιώργου Σκιντζα για την ελληνική ανεξάρτητη μουσική σκηνή. Το άρθρο, αναφέρει --- μεταξύ άλλων --- και τη Spinalonga Records, τις τρείς συλλογές που έχει κυκλοφορήσει στα τρία χρόνια της ύπαρξής της, το μη-κερδοσκοπικό μοντέλο καθώς και τη δραστηριοποίηση της στον χώρο των live δίνωντας έμφαση στο επερχόμενο live των Gevende την ερχόμενη εβδομάδα σε Αθήνα και Θεσσαλονίκη [Facebook Event][Last.fm Event].

Screwing up the Classics, "Straight to Video".

It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, or even a particularly good movie, but WarGames (1983) was one of the few Hollywood flicks on the contemporary 'hacker' subculture set in a quasi-realistic environment and one that has since become a 'classic' of the genre. It's also one of the few movies by Lasker and Parkes (another being Sneakers from 1992 --- notice the similarities?). It's a shame then, that --- as with countless other films --- the studios chose to pick up the franchise once again. But even if this might make some sense to some, what certainly doesn't is following a movie like WarGames with a B-grade, straight-to-DVD release. I guess expecting the studios to get a clue is a bit too much...

A detailed case study of Magnatune

It was written by ORG's Michael Holloway, who did an incredible job of synthesizing information from our web site, interviews with me, and my dozens of comments.

Oh, the irony!

Gruber may be more articulate than the average Mac zealot, but I usually find his opinions irritatingly illogical and biased, especially when he tries --- and subsequently fails miserably --- to rebut perfectly valid criticism about Apple. This is not one of those times. Following on from earlier criticism about Google's 'demo' Huddlechat, Gruber sums it up perfectly in a very concise manner:
Even if you think it’s OK to copy someone else’s application feature-for-feature, the big fear for developers with something like Google App Engine is that you’re trusting Google with all of your source code. Why should small indie web developers trust Google when the first example app is a Google rip-off of a small indie web app?
HuddleChat was a Google product and it certainly was a clone of Campfire. Still, it remains to be seen whether there is an ethical issue with cloning existing, commercial applications/services and releasing them to the world for free. Isn't this more or less what Microsoft and later Google became well-known -- and in some cases loved --- for? Would Gruber, and everyone else --- and I'm not excluding myself --- have a problem if it was a text-book, Startup.com-like company that had cloned Campfire and released it as a demo of an app-hosting service + framework (ala Wordpress.com), or is the criticism firmly rooted in the fact that Google is rapidly becoming a threat to [everything] in the minds and hearts of so many?

HRDL 1.08 – OTE strikes again!

HRDLΆλλη μια έκδοση του HRDL ώστε να λειτουργει με τις σημερινές σελίδες του ΟΤΕ, και συγκεκριμένα τις αλλαγές που έγιναν πρόσφατα και απέτρεπαν το widget από το να δείχνει σωστά διευθύνσεις. Περισσότερα στο ChangeLog.

FontStruct!

A free, flash-based and easy to use webapp with which you can 'design, build and share' your own modular fonts. Excellent.