We just launched a new entertainment/going-out portal for Cyprus. You can check it out here activecyprus.com.
Still in beta and not feature-complete but we’re adding new stuff to it daily. Our aim now is to get users to add their own content.
Title definitions in software engineering
- Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in One month.
- Developer is a Person who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver a Baby.
- Onsite Coordinator is one who thinks single woman can deliver nine babies in one month.
- Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.
- Marketing Manager is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.
- Resource Optimization Team thinks they don’t need a man or woman; they’ll produce a child with zero resources.
- Documentation Team thinks they don’t care whether the child is delivered, they’ll just document 9 months.
- Quality Auditor is the person who is never happy with the PROCESS to produce a baby.
- Tester is a person who always tells his wife that this is not the Right baby.
- HR is a person who thinks that a donkey can deliver a human baby if given 9 months.
p.s. I found this in a funny image. I don’t claim I own the copyright but I really don’t know if anyone does!
CYTA is still using Internet Explorer 6
I recently had to work on a web project for Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA) and to my surprise they still use Internet Explorer 6 in all their internal PCs. The default hard drive image installed across all their employee PCs includes Windows XP & Internet Explorer 6. The reason they keep using the now pre-historic version of Internet Explorer is that some of their legacy software still requires it to work properly. What’s annoying about it though is that the particular software is only being used by around 50 people while the rest 2950 employees have to suffer viewing the 1999′s state of the art web.
Apparently if you call the support help desk and beg they can agree to install Firefox for you but actually getting it done may take days.
Steve Jobs is not dead
Yesterday Steve Jobs sent his resignation to the board of directors of Apple and the internet went crazy. Everywhere you look, there’s people ‘crying’ about his decision. There’s articles about his life’s work, of how much he left behind, and of what kind of person he was. Everyone is looking back as if he is dead. I don’t hide the fact that I am not very fond of Apple and Steve’s reality distortion field, which makes me immune to all the trauma people have seem to be experiencing since the announcement of his resignation. I just feel like pointing out that:
1. He is still alive. Stop posting articles as if he’s dead (Read this for example.)
2. He’s still working for Apple – just not at the position of CEO.
3. He was just the CEO of Apple, a company that has tens of thousands of employees and each and everyone contribute to what makes their sum successful. Actually if you read this article you’ll see he’s not even the most important one.
4. Apple will continue making the same products.
Update: Well I guess now he is dead but at the time of writing he was not!
SportsCyprus.com
I finally finished and opened www.sportscyprus.com for public consumption. I had this site in the works for quite some time and it was nearly complete months ago but never got around putting the final touches until the past couple of weeks. Not being much of a football fan I’m still not sure how it will be received even though it made a good impression to the few friends I showed to until now. Whether it will be useful in the long-run remains to be seen. In the meantime check it out.
Firefox – a memory black hole
Since version 2 of Firefox I’ve noticed that it doesn’t release the memory it allocates back to the system after you close some of the open tabs. We’re on version 4 now and the memory issue is still there. I was actually running every beta and RC of version 4 and every time I checking to see if the issue was solved but no luck. I reproduced the problem both on Windows 7 and Ubuntu. To be honest, if Chrome’s development tools were as good as Firebug I’d probably have uninstalled Firefox already.
There is this open source guru/fanboy at my work who insists that Firefox is the best browser ever because they follow open standards closely. I told him that Firefox seems to have the biggest issues with memory consumption compared to other browsers but he said he never faced any similar problems. Then I noticed that he has Javascript, Flash and every other juicy web bit disabled which might explain it or he was just lying to support his cause. Either way here’s a nice screenshot I took this morning after leaving my work’s PC with Firefox open all night.
How to free up disk space when using Google Chrome
I’ve been using Google Chrome for a while now and one great thing about it is that it automatically updates itself whenever a new version comes out (some would debate this is a bad thing but I feel like its a great thing especially for non very technical users – if this feature was in Internet Explorer 6 web developer’s life would have been so much easier today). Unfortunately for some weird reason after an update is made the previous version remains on disk, it doesn’t take up a lot of space by today’s standards (around 150-200mb) but for people like me whose job’s PC is stuck with a 100GB hard disk having 7 versions of Chrome lying around makes a difference.
To get that space back all you have to do is delete the older versions. You can find them in C:\Users\username\AppData\Chrome\Application (change C and username to the ones that apply in your case). If you look into that folder you will find something like this:
Folders are named after the version build of Chrome, you can safely delete all of them except the latest release, in this case 11.0.696.25.
CyprusUpdates.com
Reply
A couple of weeks ago I launched a new WordPress based blog called CyprusUpdates.com. The idea came after the success of the Cyprus Facebook fanpage that I’ve been running for more than a year. The target of the site is obviously to provide news about Cyprus through a human face without the formalities of the regular printed and online press. The site is still in its infancy to run into any conclusions but it seems to be attracting a lot of traffic, and the readers are slowly starting to interact by posting comments on articles. For the time being I am handling news postings alone, trying not to bore the readers by keeping a balance of social and politics – hopefully in the near future I will manage to engage more people in the news posting to keep a fresher perspective and more frequent updates.
Check it out at www.cyprusupdates.com.
How to upload Event Photos to Cluboholic.com Gallery
Originally posted on Afterparty blog on 9th September 2009
Now Cluboholic.com users can share their event photos with the world. This feature can be used by anyone whether he’s a clubber carrying a camera, a photographer testing his low-light skills or a promoter who wants to show off his event. You can upload photos from any event in Cyprus that was posted on cluboholic.com’s event list, this applies to recent and old events (if you have some forgotten photos on your hard drive from an event that took place a long time ago you can still upload them for the sake of documenting clubbing history!).
To start an album you will need at least 10 photos. While logged in click on the Create New Album button which can be found at the top right of the Photos section.
The following is a step by step guide on how to create your first album:
- Step 1: Pick the Event you’re uploading photos for at the following screen:
You can use the Previous and Next buttons to move in time through the event list or use Search to quickly find the event you are looking for by typing in a keyword. When you can see the event in the list click on it and it will appear under the Selected Event heading, then click Create. Please note that each user may only create one album per event, so if you happen to find more photos from the same you want to add later, just add them to the album you already created.
- Step 2: Your Albums Page
After the album is created you will be taken to your albums page where you can manage all albums you have created until now and a new empty entry for the one you just created will be there like the screenshot below.
- View – that shows a preview of the album and lets you delete individual photos if necessary.
- Upload Photos – Pops up the upload window where you can select files and upload them.
- Publish -When you are ready this button takes the album online, once published your album will appear automatically in the Photos section of cluboholic.com.
- Delete – Deletes the album and all the associated photos. There’s no way to undo this so make sure you know what you are doing.
- Step 3: Upload the Photos
To continue creating the album, hit the Upload Photos button and the following pop-up window will appear:
Click the Select Files button and browse on your computer to the location where the images are stored. Select the images you want uploaded. You can upload as many images as you want in one go, but obviously the more you upload the longer it will take to finish. You may only upload images in JPEG format. You do not need to edit them in any way or resize them, most of the times uploading the photos straight as you transferred them off your camera will be good enough. The photo uploader resizes the images on your computer before uploading so even if the photos are quite large the actual file upload will be small.
After you select the files click Upload and wait, depending on the number of the selected photos, the performance of your computer and your connection speed it can take anything from a couple of minutes to half an hour so be patient.
Note 1: For better results make sure the photos you are uploading are at least 1024 wide by 768 pixels tall.
Note 2: In order to upload photos your computer must have the Microsoft Silverlight plugin installed. Silverlight is similar Flash and you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/. If you are using a recently released operating system such as Windows 7 or keep your system up to date you will probably have it installed already (it does work under Linux and OSX too).
- Step 4: Publish the Album
Once your upload finished and you reviewed the photos by clicking on View you can show the album to the world by hitting Publish. Keep in mind that you will need at least 10 photos for the album to be published. After that you will be immediately able to view it at cluboholic.com’s photos section. Moreover within 24 hours if approved the album will also be posted on the sites Updates flow on the front page to gain more exposure.
We’ve been testing the Photo Uploader for quite some time now but as always there could be problems we have missed so if you face any difficulties or any part of the process is not clear enough please just post a comment under this help article and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
KlubD – Been there
This article was originally posted on The After Party Blog on Mar 06, 2009
Lemos @ Klubd Flyer
It’s been more than three months since it opened but I only managed to pay a visit to Klubd last Saturday. I was one of the regulars back in the days when it used to be spelled with a ‘C’, so to me the most obvious things when going there after so long were the differences. The first thing you notice upon arriving, is the change in the entrance, the long side corridor has been replaced by a more direct entrance which, after entering the club, evidently saves a lot of the wasted space. The big bar has been moved and split into two, and the DJ box was relocated to the far end of the length of the main section of the room. You can’t but notice the LED panel on the roof and behind the DJ which is a nice feature for an otherwise completely black/dark place. What became immediately apparent about it, is that after the first five minutes it loses its novelty factor and you no longer even notice that its there. The sound system was sufficient, by Cyprus standards, nothing extreme but provided an above average club sound, at least to the dance section. As a non-smoker, I felt that they should improve with air-conditioning / ventilation which didn’t seem sufficient.
I was surprised the most by the people; not sure if it’s the same every time since this was a ‘carnival’ themed night and people on such occasions act a bit crazier than usual, but almost all of the 120-140 people who were there were dancing and enjoying themselves. The whole atmosphere had the same feeling of parties that took place 3-4 years ago when people used to go to electronic dance events to have fun and not to pretend they are someone else. I guess that goes with the whole philosophy of the club, there’s nothing pretentious about it, no VIP sections and other similar peculiarities, just a dark room for people to listen to music, have a drink and enjoy themselves. And since I mentioned drinks I have to say that the bar prices are lower than the competition’s; Jack Daniel’s Coke at Klubd is 7 euro while at Versus is 10.
The music played by Lemos is not exactly my style so I don’t think its right for me to make any comments about it, but seeing people enjoying it, I take it, was good.
Overall seems like klubd has acquired a stable crowd, after the first ups and downs with the entrance prices. It seems like a good effort, it definitely has its place in the Nicosia’s clubbing scene, filling a gap that was created when it closed.