Thoughts Serializer

Computer graphics, Games, Personal

Pop Corny is out!

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I am proud to announce to you the release of my first game “Pop Corny”.

The game was released earlier today and the response was overwhelming! The game managed to hit #1 Top Paid Game on both iPhone and iPad in a few hours and #2 in Top Paid across all app categories on the Greek AppStore.

The reviews are all 5 stars until now, and players seem to totaly dig it! We hope you will like it, too!

You can get the game here if you like: Pop Corny for iOS

Pop Corny Trailer Released

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Yesterday I released the teaser trailer for my upcoming game “Pop Corny”. The game is about to hit the AppStore and I really hope you like it!

http://youtu.be/AaLLUspUy6Q

My First Contribution to Django

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Hola!

about 2 weeks ago I created a multilingual version slugify for django! You can find the code here.

What is slugify? It the function that gets us from “This is my post” to “this-is-my-post” and its used widely on the web to make human friendly URLs, where the data are not accessed by their numerical ID but by the human readable “slug”.

Django provides a function to automatically create the slug from a phrase. However that only worked for English characters. Any extended character in unicode was ignored, which resulted in empty slugs if the language was other than English.

The “downcode” function I provided maps characters in other languages to English ones. Which allows to use the slygify function that comes with Django!

GMail Themes

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Google, Inc.Google added themes to GMail! You can access it under the tab “Themes” in the settings.

(It might not be enabled yet for some users)

Very nice! :D

Symfony, Ruby on Rails and Django : The unsual review (Part 2)

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[This is the second part of this post]

django logo
Getting back from Symfony to Ruby-on-Rails was a big relief! There is no comparison between Ruby and PHP. Anything said on the matter is wasted. Anyway since I had my troubles solved by the hosting company, now I had my first RoR application running on the server. Then I tried to elaborate it, and like immediately found a problem. The problem was internationalization(i18n)! It seems that Rails was not developed with i18n in mind from the beginning and its current version does not support it! You have to hack your way to it. In my mind i18n is a big and necessary feature for web. After all it is the World Wide Web! It turns out that Rails has a major problem with i18n what goes down to the language itself. Ruby does not support unicode for string representation. (actually it does but with the use of a module, not natively). However in version 2.2 of Rails, which is currently the edge version, they included basic i18n support. This meant that I had to use the “unstable” branch of Rails – which I did! Checked out the way i18n support was implemented and found it very basic. This is by design. The developers of Rails want Read the rest of this entry »

Symfony, Ruby on Rails and Django : The unsual review (Part 1)

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Ruby on RailsI spent the last week trying out web frameworks. I thought it was time to move on from my own hacked PHP scripts to something more elaborate. The first framework I was really eager to checkout was ofcourse the under every stone Ruby on Rails! The main reason was all the talks about it, along with the fact that I was very interested in the Ruby language.

I started by installing Ruby and then Rails on my system, and started following the famous Rails screencasts. I was going to create a Weblog application in 15min! So exciting! Unfortunately it just didn’t happen. Things started to get a bit hairy. It seems that there was a huge difference in the version the screencaster was using the version I was using. In version 2.0 of Rails the creators decided to change the scaffolding technique completely. So now you can’t follow the screencast. It is also very hard to find a tutorial to get you started, not to mention a good tutorial!

All in all I also completely scanned the internet for information but I didn’t find very good sources of info. The main site , other that the screencasts, has the Rails API documentation which is obviously not the way to start! I turned to books. The “Agile Web Development with Rails” I learned about Rails through that, even if that is also for the old version of Rails.

But going all over the internet, I got to find out about Zed Shaw. Read the rest of this entry »

The Google When it All Started

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Google 1998

I was looking for older versions of my home page in the web archive when it occurred to me that I can’t remember how the Google search page looked when the project started! So I hit www.google.com and traveled back to 1998!

I had forgot how the web looked back in 1998… No CSS, no fancy layouts, images and graphics. Just simple HTML with a few images. Read the rest of this entry »

Hackers attack Large Hadron Collider

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It seems that hackers started to attack the everywhere-in-the-news-collider! According to this article they successfully managed to crack the cmsmon.cern.ch web site!

The headline of the site sponsored : “GST: Greek Security Team”, which advertises Read the rest of this entry »

Picasa with Facial Recognition

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According to this post at CNET Google has implemented facial recognition in to the latest version of their photo management software Picasa!

Finally! I always loved to be able to search photos by people, but tagging all of your photos can bring you close to madness!

p.s. Only wait until they use this technology on the search engine… it will be too powerful, and will cause a lot of talking, I think..

NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA Technologies

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According to this press release, nVidia will acquire Ageia Technologies. Yeap! The well known physics software and hardware vendor. In my mind this means that the future nVidia based accelerators will support physics acceleration, too. It will basically mean the death of the PhysX processor, since the GPU can do that easily with no extra cost.

Actually the PPU solution was never to work. I find it quite hard to believe people would ever Read the rest of this entry »