Pictures of Burned Trees

All this week I had a lot of appetite for photography. But my camera was somewhere else, in the evenings after work it's still dark and in the mornings it's hard to get up earlier for pictures. That leaves the weekend.

So this noon I packed up the Arca and went up the burned Hymittos hillside above Ano Glyfada. I passed by the area with the freshly planted trees, the one's we had helped to set. They look like they are doing fine.

I took three pictures, taking my time. The weather wasn't really on my side, with a mostly featureless overcast sky. Only rarely did the sun peep through to give a bit of structure to the landscape. It felt good being in the fresh air, walking and moving.

Παγκόσμια μέρα εναντίων της λογοκρισίας στο διαδίκτυο

Σήμερα από τους Reporters Sans Frontières έχουμε την "Παγκόσμια μέρα εναντίων της λογοκρισίας στο διαδίκτυο" (δική μου μετάφραση). Το διαδίκτυο μας δίνει - μεταξύ άλλων - την δυνατότητα να εκφράζουμε γεγονότα και γνώμες με πιο ανοικτό και ελεύθερο τρόπο από όσο το κάναμε πριν. Σε κάποιους όμως αυτό δεν αρέσει καθόλου. Με πολλές δικαιολογίες προσπαθούν να κόβουν το λόγο σε όσους δεν εκφράζουν την γνώμη του οποιουδήποτε "υπουργείο της αλήθειας" τους.

Εγώ θα χρησιμοποιώ την ευκαιρία να αναφέρω εδώ το blogme.gr... το θυμάστε; Δεν χρειάζεται να πάμε μακριά για τέτοια παραδείγματα. Ένας Liarkopoulos και οι "φίλοι" του "cyberμπάτσοι" φτάνουν να μας δείχνουν "την θέση μας".

Dark Yellow Morning Sky

Yesterday morning I woke up to a darker world. We had again reddish-yellowish sand from the Sahara (or from Africa in general) in the wind. At the same time it was cold, which is kind of weird. The cold wind came from the North, the sand from the South. Apparently the meteorologists can explain that, but don't ask me. What I saw, was the special light: Even when the sun had come out in the morning, it was almost dark. The light had an orange tint. It rained, so everything was stained with reddish dust. No, I didn't take any pictures.

This morning the blue sky is back, but my veranda, like all of the city, is still covered with red dust. The entrances of buildings have red pathways, people carry the dust inside on their shoes.

In an attempt to give a little bit of practical value to this post: Here is a link to the SKIRON dust forecast from the University of Athens.

Planting Trees

This morning we woke up a bit earlier than usual on a Sunday, to go and help with planting trees on the Ymmitos hills that had been burned down at the beginning of last summer.

The event was organized by the municipality, various nature and forest organizations and promoted by some TV station. The ground was prepared, holes were dug and seedlings were dispersed at the holes. We got handed a hoe (in Greek a "τσάπα") and then we marched up the hillside to start planting.

We went up to the higher part and started working our way to parts that weren't done yet. We set a lot of little trees in the ground, trying to prepare their new home as good as we could to increase their chances of survival.

Despite the cold weather with soft rain, there were lots of people working. Boy scouts, schools, families with children, young people, all ages up to pensioners. There were also firefighters from various municipalities around here.

Now I don't know how much sense this kind of organized mass planting makes. Some of the holes were prepared in rocky spots with little earth. We tried to move the seedlings to places with good soil. Whatever the sense behind all this, there's little more we can do except to have an eye on the little trees. All the rest will be nature's work and the little tree's luck and will to survive.

pjsua: The Geek Out SIP Client

There are many options for making SIP/VoIP phone calls over the Internet. There are some with nice user interface, some that get you over almost all the the little hurdles and problems (like for example X-Lite, which you should try if you're ever stuck unable to make a connection, as it seems to work around most problems on its own). But if you're a real geek at heart, there is only one choice: pjsua. pjsua does not have any such timewasting features as a GUI or an address book.

Strike in Athens

Today all the public services in Athens are on strike. That includes the public transport: No busses, trams, trolleys, metro are moving. People are taking their cars to the streets to get to work (well, those who aren't working in the public service and are on strike themselves). The result is a lot of chaos and traffic jams on the roads.

The reason for the strike are the economic measures announced by the politicians. Cuts on salaries and pensions, raised taxes. The economy will take a big hit for the worse.

Now, we've all heard the news saying "Greece has been living over its limits", "the Greeks have been spending too much" and all that. First of all, I'm tired of the generalizations. If you want to blame things on a whole group of people, try "the politicians" instead or "the speculators". Sure, there are a lot of people with "seats" in the public service who do nothing all day long. It would be nice to streamline the public service, but it's not going to happen by raising the taxes and doing random cuts on small people's salaries.

So, how about those fregates that the French government wants to sell to Greece? How about the - what was it, figher planes? helicopters? - that the German government wants to sell to Greece? Do "the Greeks" cut those?

(The picture shows Pireus Street leading to the center of Athens from the south-east. There is a traffic jam, but from this position the level of chaos on the streets isn't really perceivable.)

Safety First

Έφτασα στο δρόμο αυτό ακριβώς στην στιγμή για την παράσταση. 2 λεπτά πριν και δεν θα ήταν τίποτα, 1 λεπτό μετά και κατέβηκε ο "μάστορας".

Μου αρέσει και σαν φωτογραφία, σαν να κάνει εναέριο μπαλέτο.

Zope 2.12 eggified Installation Stuff Learned

There was a short zope-dev meeting on #zope today. I'm not a zope-dev, but after they were done, I asked a question^W^W^Wgriped a bit about the new "eggified" Zope 2.12 install procedure. A big discussion ensued. I learned / noticed a couple of things:

• The install instructions given in the 2.12 release were confusing not only to me. (A while back I had tried to get through them, without having really much prior experience with modern python stuff like eggs... I didn't have a nice experience there.)
• "non-dev installs shouldn't use buildout"
• "virtualenv + easy_install is much better" (both quoted from Tres)
• People set out immediately to rectify the install instructions, I don't know when the changed ones will appear online, but it's nice to see this kind of thing move.
• There does not seem to be something that gives me the functionality of installing Zope offline (like I used to have by having a tarball of a certain Zope release on my disk)... on any machine more or less (more on that below). Few people (or noone) seem to care about that.
• There seems to be a mild consensus that one recommended way to install is a Good Thing™. But we don't seem to be 100% there yet.

As for the offline-stuff (or the "why do I have to re-download all this each time"), apparently easy_install can do some kind of storage of the eggs it downloads. But this seems to work only on the same platform with the same libraries. I think it's a good idea to ensure that you get the exact same stuff in a reinstall on the same machine, but it won't help when for example the developer machines and the production boxes differ slightly. I haven't looked after it really, but there seems to be another way, setting up a local proxy of PyPi or something... but people sounded a bit like if that is a big, scary thing. Buildout seems to have a better solution there, but after my previous experience and Tres recommendation, I'm not going to go there right now.

Update: just noticed that Tres also mentioned using compoze to make a local "egg store".

Faking it on somone's tumblr blog

tumblr is a blogging service that is well known for its ease of use: Basically you can send in posts to your personal (and secret) tumblr mail address and they will appear on your blog. Cool. My COREblog has a similar "moblog" feature, but I have to give some special formatted information to make the post work - and to make it authenticate, I have to include a password (which is sent in cleartext, no real security there). This morning with my friend saad we wondered about the security of tumblr's offering: Given that someone got hold of your posting address, how good are they at weeding out faked posts?

Parnitha, 3 years later

Almost three years after the fire that destroyed a large part of the forest on the parnassos mountains (Πάρνηθα, parnitha), and a bit more than three years after I went hiking at parmitha, I went back.

Today, on a sunday with fine weather, we went for a short hike from the base station of the cable car to the Bafi hut. It took us around 2.5 hours up. Plus some extra time, because I had brought the Arca Swiss with me and I took two pictures on the way up. At the hut we had something to drink and eat.

We were a bit faster on the (same) way down, while I also took a third picture. Over all, we had no reason to hurry and instead enjoyed the fresh air and viewing all those growing things.

Not all was well and nice: we passed through many parts of the forest that had burned. Not a nice view, even though grasses, bushes and other green stuff is sprouting out. We even saw areas where reforestation was underway.

The picture shows some of the burned trees, with the hiking path marker. The hiking path marks have been restored in the parts that had burned, and apart from the reforestation, there were also signs of works to fix the soil against being swept away by erosion. Despite all this we had a great day and we're now back home, tired and refreshed.