I' ve been in Amsterdam for a couple of days (went there Friday November 10, flew back Wednesday). The city was great, the weather was... well, not good for photographs, and the joints... just too many. Joke of the day: I was there for business.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had two cores?

Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two gzips at the same time, man.

Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had two cores, you'd do two gzips at the same time?

Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had two cores I could hook that up, too; 'cause processes dig CPUs with cores.

Peter Gibbons: Well, not all processes.

Lawrence: Well, the type of processes that'd double up on a PC like this do.

Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?

Peter Gibbons: Besides two gzips at the same time?

Lawrence: Well, yeah.

Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

Lawrence: Nothing, huh?

Peter Gibbons: I would idle... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.

Lawrence: Well, you don't need two cores to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's got a 386, don't do shit.

Source: Slashdot

One floor below. At one side a dance-floor, at the other a bar. Tables and stools around on raised floor levels. Black worn-out carpet on the floor. Walls painted black. Chocking-full of smoke. On the dance floor three girls in full goth-attire---plus the accompanying hair-styles, make-ups, tattoos, and everything. They are moving to the music: A Birthday Party song, followed by "Kick in the Eye" by Bauhaus, followed by something that sounded a lot like Tear Garden (maybe it was). The color spectrum, as sampled on the decoration, the patrons' clothes, and their make-up, consists almost entirely of black, plus maybe some red and burgundy here and there. Faces mostly white and pale. At the bar, a girl with a foot-tall mohican is serving. Then she jumps over the counter to go dancing. I mentally check the calendar: Yes it's 2006, and then my clothing: Thanksgod, it's almost all-black. I spot my company over by the corner. I go there. They introduce me to a guy I haven't met before---I don't remember his name, damn! He asks me what kind of music I listen to. I tell him. He then asks me if I'm into 70's garage and psychedelic stuff. Not particularly, by I wouldn't mind a few good samples. He jots something down on a piece of paper and gives it to me. It says:

lost-in-tyme.blogspot.cnm

Then he gets on the dance-floor and starts dancing...

[[[ This post is for the friend who always asks me "where on earth you find these deranged stuff?" whenever I show him something on the Net ]]]

Warning Signs For Tomorrow

Source: Chris's Wiki

Friday afternoon I took my brand new Honda CBF-250 motorcycle from the dealer's. During the weekend, the weather being excellent, and the engine requiring some run-in kilometers, I took a couple of rides around Athens. By Sunday afternoon the first 500 km were on the odometer.

Saturday, September 30: From Pagrati I go downtown to do some shopping. I buy a jacket---the weather is good but not that good as to ride without one. Back to Pagrati then, and from there, after a quick stop, I set course to cape Sounion. I take the coast-side drive (Poseidonos Ave, etc). After a couple of stops for photographs I'm there. Coffee at the place near Poseidon's temple, and then back to Athens, this time via Lavrio, Paiania, etc... During the return part I hit some rain. Not much but enough to test if my new jacket is waterproof (it is).

Sunday, October 1: I have about 350 km on the odometer, and the fuel-tank is almost empty. I stop at a gas-station near my place for my first refueling. It fills up with 12.9 lt of unleaded. Average consumption: 3.7lt / 100km (or 19.4 km / lt). From there I go north this time: Kifissia, N. Erythraia, Ekali, then turn east towards Dionysos. At the top of the pass I stop for coffee. My brother calls me and tells me he's at the office. I decide to go there. I cut through the mountain to Penteli and Halandri, and after staying there for half an hour or so, I go back the same way. Now I descent towards Nea Makri and from there I head to Marathonas. I stop by the lake for a few minutes, and head back to Athens through Ag. Stefanos.

A couple of hours latter I go to my new house to check on the progress of the works. I'm still in the mood for riding so from there I start climbing-up wherever I see an ascending slope. Soon I leave behind the built-up area and I'm in the Penteli mountain. I pass a monastery and continue going up. The view becomes magnificent and the air cooler. I continue climbing until I reach some military installations close to the top. I stop there for a few minutes and then head back to Pagrati... As I park the motorcycle, I see 495.9 km on the odometer.

Today I went to the dealer to ask when my new motorcycle would arrive; sometime next week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday. While there I saw it: A Honda CBF-250 in blue that had just arrived. "Is this available?" I asked. "Yes, you can take it home tomorrow morning". In a couple of minutes I had decided. This would be my first motorcycle. We took it aside, removed the seat, assembled the rear case-rack, filled its battery and put it on the charger. Tomorrow, sometime after noon, I will take it home... Pray for good weather this weekend.

While assembling the rack, I took some pictures.

A few photographs of my new house. The concrete frame is ready. Brick-work will soon begin, after leveling the surrounding space...

It's Time Somebody Did Something About Bread!

Did you know:

1. More than 98 percent of convicted criminals are bread eaters!
2. Exactly half of all children who grow up in bread - eating households score in the bottom 50% on standardized IQ tests!
3. In the 19th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 55 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox and influenza ravaged entire nations!
4. Statistics show that more than 75% of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread!
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." Researchers have proven that as little as one pound of dough can choke a large animal like a horse. The average person eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Bread is known to be extremely addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water, actually begged for bread after just two days!
7. Bread is a "gateway" food item, which usually leads to such items as butter, jam, peanut butter and even ... bacon!
8. Bread has been proven to kill. Scientists have now uncovered alarming evidence that 100% of the people who eat bread will eventually die!
9. Unattended newborn babies can choke on bread!
10. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 425 degrees Fahrenheit! Don't laugh...that kind of heat can kill a full grown adult in less than five minutes.
11. 96% of cancer victims eventually admit that they've eaten bread!

Source: A smartmaniacs forum posting

Hunter S. Thompson had a thing for motorcycles, not much unlike the thing he had for drugs, as well as for practically every forbidden pleasure. Once he found himself with a Ducati super-bike and he had to write a review about it for the CycleWorld magazine. The result was a very characteristic document (a classic gonzo-style piece) titled The Song of the Sausage Creature. I came upon it lately and, for no particular reason, I made an attempt to translate it to Greek. I tried to maintain the overall feeling of Thompson's writing without staying too close to the exact words. Regardless, I'm still not sure if it makes any sense in Greek. Read it if you don't have anything better to do, and tell me what you think about it...

Some points I would particularly like some input about:

• I really I don't get the Genghis Khan reference, so I have probably totally mis-translated it...
• Who the fuck is Ron Zigler?
• I'm not comfortable, at all, with the way I translated the title, but still I cannot think of something better. Any suggestions?

Seeing my last post, somebody mentioned in a reply Robert Persig's novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, taking for granted that I would have read it, or at least that I knew about it. I haven't and I didn't. Luckily the text is available online, and since I'm maybe the last person on the planet not to have heard of it, I read the first few chapters yesterday. I'm still too early in the book for a solid opinion, but one thing I can say for sure: I would have enjoyed it immensely had I read it as a teenager. I mean, there are books that when you read at a certain age they expand inside you to something much more that a simple reading, and sometimes even mark whole periods of your life. This, I'm certain, would have been one these books.

It's the story of a father and his son, traveling by motorcycle, together with another couple (Sylvia and John). During their rides the narrator has a lot of time to think about the world, about ancient cultures, about modern society, about science and technology, about the classical, versus the romantic way of thought, about the role of man in the modern world, and so on. So the book often diverts in long philosophical musings which sometimes, while not uninteresting, neither exactly boring, sound a bit too didactic in tone and attitude. Then again, it is twenty-something years since the book was written, the author was a beatnik, people used to write like this back then, and he does call these interludes Chautauquas which, I guess, means that they are supposed to be didactic in style and content. Also remember I have read just a few chapters... Regardless, I find the book a great pleasure to read; I mean in a honest "can't wait to get back to it" way.

Looking for the book, I came uppon this ZZM Quality site devoted to the study and adoration of Pirsig's work. Among other things it features some 12 photographs Robert Pirsig took during the actual trip on which the book is based. The following picture of the author and his son seems to be the most characteristic.

I'm building a house. This is neither a figure of speech, nor some geeky jargon to obscure the point. I'm speaking about a real house like those where people live in:

People construct houses as dwelling-spaces for human habitation. Such dwellings generally feature enclosing walls, a roof and one or more floors. This overall structure provides shelter against precipitation, wind, heat, cold and intruders [...] The house often provides a permanent residence for a family or for a similar social unit. When occupying a house routinely as a dwelling, English-speaking people may call this building their "home". People may leave their house most of the day for work and recreation, but typically return "home", to their house, at least for sleeping.

-- From the Wikipedia entry on houses

Yep! It will have all of these: Walls, a roof, more than one floors, the works!

After about 15 years of living in the same 65 square-meters flat down-town in Athens, I took the big decision to change place of residence. Initially I thought that buying a new, spacier apartment in a decent neighborhood would be the most economic way to go. After asking around, and after doing some rough calculations, it became obvious that building a house---in a lot my brother and I had inherited from our mother---would cost about the same and the result would probably be much better.

The lot is in Nea Penteli; formerly a village sitting on the slopes of the Penteli mountains. Now Nea Penteli has become a suburb not too far from the center of Athens, especially given the very good access to Attiki Odos ring road. The area is still surrounded by a lot of greenery (mainly pine-trees forests) and is quite agreeable. The exact coordinates are:

38o 03' 27.36'' N
23o 51' 01.00'' E
Elevation 352m

Digeni Eoka 24,
152 36 Nea Penteli
Attiki

I'm new to all this construction business, but the consensus among friends who have done it before seems to be that in each and every stage---even if you take for granted an engineer that oversees the project, and whom you can trust (something that is usually not so very much granted)---even then there is an enormous amount of work for the owner.

Currently works on the concrete frame of the building are almost finished. Soon brickwork will begin, after cleaning up and leveling the surrounding area. If you are curious you can take a look at the floor-plans for the ground-floor, the first-floor, and the basement. All plans are in 1:75 scale and were prepared by yours truly using the very nice, open-source program QCAD. If you see anything flaky in them (like "oh my God, the elevator door opens in the bathroom!"), please point it out. Maybe there's still time to fix it.

I'm thinking of occasionally reporting here on the progress of the construction, as well as on experiences gained from it. I'll tag the relevant entries using: "hacks/house".

I hope next time I also have some pictures to show you.

It's been quite a while since my last post. At least this time I have a good reason. No, it's not that I've been way too busy at work (though I was), neither that I was preoccupied with other personal projects (about which I'll write in another post). It was because during these months I came very close to actually... dying. Of course we all are, all the time, very close to death, but I never was as conscious of this as I became this summer. A few months ago, after returning from a business trip, and following a couple of frantic weeks at the office, I got caught-up in a health-related adventure. One that, had I been less lucky, could have easily killed or incapacitated me.

It started with a rather innocent-looking pain in the back evolving to a strong pain in the pelvis, and then to an excruciating pain in the muscles of my right leg. Still I refused to be admitted to a hospital, despite the constant nagging of my family, my friends, and the doctors I had consulted. Gradually becoming completely unable to walk even the shortest distance, becoming unable to even stand with my leg extended, I gave-in and was taken to a hospital. As it turned out, I was suffering from a rather severe case of DVT: Blood had clotted in veins inside my body, including the deep veins of the right leg and thigh. Apart from causing an excruciating pain (because muscles cannot be properly fueled, so to say) the most serious risk with this is a piece breaking from the clot and going to the lungs causing pulmonary embolism. So there I was, in a hospital for about four weeks or so, with strict orders to avoid any kind of movement or effort that could upset the clots. Four weeks staying in bed, sleeping, trying to read anything interesting---or just distracting---getting pinned by needles a couple of times each day (for every blood test ever devised by human), but mostly... staring at the ceiling. I left the hospital the doctors there being unable to find a concrete reason why this happened to me---which is quite common, in such cases very often they don't. I was instructed to take anticoagulation pills (pills that make the blood clot less easily), and avoid strenuous activity for some time. While the pain was mostly gone, I was feeling very warn-out. I was unable to walk for more than a few hundred meters without getting tired, especially so on a rising slope. This, they told me, would take some time until it got better.

But this was not the end of my adventures. As I told you, I was instructed to take anticoagulation pills. The exact dosage of these has to be frequently adjusted by taking blood samples and measuring the clotting characteristics. Of these characteristics we care for an index called PT-INR. Normal people have a PT-INR of 1.0. I, due to the medication, was to maintain one greater than 2.0 but no greater than 3.0. Up to 5.0 or 6.0, its relatively safe. Above this you are risking internal hemorrhage, and must be treated in a hospital. Well, my luck has it, and something went wrong in this process. I woke up a morning with my mouth filled with blood, my stomach aching (from having ingested too much blood during the night), and my right arm bruised as if it was beaten by a mallet. I went to a lab near my place, and measured my blood clotting index. It was 12.5. So back to the hospital. Same room, same bed, same ceiling. For one week this time, taking blood plasma, and antidotes for the anticoagulation medicine.

It's been a couple of weeks now since I'm back to normal. I have managed to stabilize the medicine dosage (or at least I think so; I hope I don't suddenly turn to Mr. Hyde or something). I'm not feeling too bad---I still get tired more easily than before, but all in all things seems to be getting back to normal. Let's hope they stay in course.

See what happens when the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, with 22 years of computer engineering experience, discovers the default test-page of the Apache web-server included in the CentOS Linux distribution...

The story is now also in the Tuttle, Oklahoma Wikipedia entry, covered by the The Tuttle Times, by the Register, and probably by every other site on the planet.

This is a link to an essay by Stevan Harnad titled "Post Gutenberg Galaxy: The fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge".

Who is Stevan Harnad, and what kind of psychedelic essay is this, you may ask?

Harnad is a cognitive scientist and can be considered the father of the Open-Access Movement, a movement that evangelizes the free publication and free distribution of academic writings; something akin to the Free Software movement, but focusing on academic output instead of computer software. As a matter of fact, Harnad is sometimes likened to Richard Stallman. In the essay linked above he presents his vision that the free flow of academic knowledge, empowered and accelerated by the modern electronic communication technology, and the global network, will result to a revolution in the way knowledge is produced. This is what he calls the "fourth revolution" (the previous three being: speech, writing, and typography).

In 1994, Harnad published a subversive proposal (Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing), presenting methods that can be used to hasten the arrival of the day when esoteric, peer-reviewed, electronic publishing becomes ubiquitous. From this proposal is the quote that follows:

We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion's share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL the words. The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's contributions in that cumulative, collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry. For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was their only option.

Source: lwn

You know of course that all this bitching by the studios, the publishers, and the record companies is about protecting and compensating their beloved artists. Here's what Terry Gilliam says about it:

It's hard for me to worry about the studios losing money. I'm not very sympathetic to their money problems, because they certainly haven't been sympathetic to mine.

When you look at one of their accounting sheets you realise you're never going to see a penny, so if someone wants to rip them off that's fine with me.

If you're going to pirate, though, make sure the quality's good. Have some respect for what you're pirating!

Source Bit of News

I came upon this proclamation of digital rights (document in Greek) through Asteris Masouras's "Non-Linear Complexity" blog. While I'm not against any of the points in the text, I would not sign it.

Come on guys, this is not a manifesto!

What a weak, lukewarm, confused, boring, and mostly meaningless text is this? A manifesto is supposed to be the masthead of a movement, not a timid list of bureaucratic suggestions. It must be militant and political, incisive and incinerating, bold and polemical. It must be able to serve as a call to arms, not read like a shopping list. It must bind its followers together, and draw the line between them and their opponents. Above all, it must make clear, in no vague terms, the ethical and political position of the movement it represents. You cannot mince your words when you write a manifesto.

I repeat that I have nothing against the ideas and political positions of the proclamation, it's the execution that's lacking, and it's lacking badly.

Follows a random list of some famous political and artistic manifestoes. Use them as examples of what true manifestoes read like.

• Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels
• The dotCommunist Manifesto, by Eben Moglen, January 2003. A direct adaptation of the former to the electronic rights and digital freedom movement
• The Futurist Manifesto, by F. T. Marinetti
• The GNU Manifesto, by Richard Stallman
• Manifesto of Surrealism, by Andre Breton