ksymeon

Several years ago, on a sunny autumnal day, I found myself waiting for my plane in the lounge of "Ellinikon", the Athens' airport. I was flying to Leros where I was serving my military duty for the Greek Navy. And as every other sailor or soldier, I was counting my days until my discharge and the return to normal civilian life. It must have been late October 1998 when I had this idea of writing a program that represents a calendar year in a circular fashion. You see, when I was really young, at primary school, we used to have in my classroom a big poster hanging up the wall that illustrated the months and the seasons of a year. As a circle. Along with vegetables, fruit, weather and whatever else you may think of. Grapes in August, snow in January, yellow leaves for October and strawberries for May... Every month, a perfect 30 degree circular sector. I realised that I had always had that vision of the calendar months in a year going circular, clock-wise in a big big circle...

Almost two months have passed since my last blog post. Two hectic months. Holidays over Christmas and new year, then a little bit of work, then a week's skiing holiday in the Alps, then a bit more work. Decided that I can't bear the thought of living in the same flat for a sixth year and started looking for a new place. It took my almost a fortnight to find a place and I'm glad I did. I was a bit reluctant to start, but once you get to agents and look at a few you just can't go back... Here I am now, looking forward to move to my new flat and post some more stories to my blog. And the next story is a very interesting one...

Anybody remember Bryce? That classic 3D modelling program with the extraordinary user interface, developed by Kai Krause's old company MetaCreations? Several years ago - I think it was 1999 - MetaCreations sold Bryce to Corel and then last June, Corel sold to a company called "Daz" specializing in 3D Content and software ( http://www.daz3d.com/ ). When I saw the full version of Bryce 4 being given away for free on the copy of a magazine I immediatelly bought a copy. This one was not to be missed! Check the new home of Bryce and the galleries . And if you see it being offered on the cover of a magazine don't hesitate. Buy it!

I have been looking at the “ atom.xml ” blog technology recently, a publishing standard for news web sites and weblogs. This blog is automatically Atom enabled (see Blogger help ) which basically means that you can use a news reader such as the freeware FeedReader to subscribe and read the posts like in an NewsGroups program. I decided to get some hands-on experience on atoms, so I modified the program that creates my PhotoBlog (“ My Wandering Days Are Over... ”) to generate an atom.xml as well. The result is that you can now keep track of any new posts I create for “MWDAO” using your RSS Feed reader ;-)

From the moment I started my blog I have been thinking about a way to create a photo blog and post some of my favourite pictures. Last week, I managed to get some time off work and create my first photo-blog. While I was building it, I was listening to "Tigermilk" by "Belle and Sebastian" and decided to give it a title; " My Wandering Days Are Over " is now live, hope you like it... For those of you curious about the technology I decided that nothing is better and quicker than plain HTML/XHTML and therefore I wrote a little win32 application to automatically generate photo blogs from a list of jpg files, thumbnails and templates. It's very simple but does the job ;-)

A long long time ago I was still a teenager quite keen in computer programming when a friend introduced me to the realm of Turbo Pascal. It was my first year at the uni, and I was still writing in Basic using my Amstrad CPC464, when I got my first CPC6128 which had a 3" floppy disk drive and an additional operating system (CP/M). I immediatelly fell in love with Turbo Pascal. To these days I believe that a language that can have a statement as readable as "repeat until KeyPressed;", which was indeed very useful in those days, is a superior language. One day that friend of mine told me that actually nobody knows who wrote the Turbo Pascal compiler; the myth says that it was written by Frank Borland a guy who works alone and lives in a cabin high up the rocky mountains and only goes back to civilisation when he creates a new version... (!!!) Obviously this was a story hard to believe, it was however rather amusing and to be honest quite fascinating; I do not know of any...

My beautiful Cherry keyboard has arrived in the post today. I'm still struggling a little bit to get used to it, but I'm telling you what: This is the quality I was talking about in my previous post. Every single key has the same solid feeling when pressed, the feedback is excellent, the plastic material doesn't have the "cheap" feeling of the keyboards I was describing before and the layout is exactly how it should be without silly "innovations" just for the sake of making one. You know what I mean...