The conference day.  We woke up early to get in queue at registration which opened at 08:30.  When we got to the Olympia Conference Center, which was about 5 minutes walk from our hotel, it was full of people.   More than a hundred people already, and we were early.  Got our badges and notepads...

A few days ago I went to see “Frost / Nixon“.   A movie with the one of the USA presidents in the title?  Just a few days since the whole world has watched the most hyped up inauguration of the USA president in history?  And just a few days since I’ve watched another political ...

During the last few month I’ve been explaining software engineering to management types quite a bit.  Most of the “bosses” that I talked to weren’t technical at all, so I was trying to stay away from famous concepts, examples, and terminology as much as I could.  Of course,...

I’m slowly catching up with the news stream and all the jokes of the last few weeks.  “If programming languages were religions” is a nice one.  Here is PHP, which I spent the most time with now: PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity - Fights with Java for the web market. It draws a...

A couple of days ago I got my hands on a PlayStation 3.  Boy, was that a wrong day of the week!  But let me tell it to you properly… I am not much of a gamer.  I like games and all, but somehow I don’t spend all that much time playing.  Most of my gaming activities in the last few ye...

I have been really silent on this blog for the past three month or so.  That’s because I was totally consumed by my work.  The team in the office is growing, and we are having more stuff to do than ever.  But to add to the usually routine, we were doing some really huge restructuring.  Whe...

We’ve been doing some interesting things at work, as always, with yet more people and Linux boxes.  And of the side effects of mixing people, Linux boxes, and several locations is this need for some sort of centralized logging.  Luckily we have either syslog-ng or rsyslog daemons installed o...

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia.  It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005.  Except that: the sound was really crap this time WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by a...

I haven’t been following the US presidential race closely.  I remember watching a few speeches by Ron Paul, and thinking that he is a really nice guy.  But somehow I doubted that he could win.  Barack Obama’s speeches were the next best thing, even though I saw just a few of them.  H...

I’ve been a bit quiet for the last couple of month.  That’s because I was leading an ambicious project at my new job - migration of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 3 to SugarCRM Community Edition version 5.0.0.  There were only three people involved, non of us could afford to work ful...