This is the last post from Edinburgh. I am about to return to Scotland for a few days at the end of August and for the Graduation Ceremony in November of course - but still this is the last post from my flat. Ten months have passed, a whole academic year has nearly come to its end. Not sure what was the exact "taste" of this period, definitely a special one that I am going to remember forever. What is now left for this summer is to finalize my dissertation and spend some days with friends on an isle of our choice. Given that everything works fine with dissertation and other academic duties, even if I still can't tell where do I start from now on, at least I can tell a little bit more of myself. That's not bad at all...

ps: Did I forget to mention that I am already posting here for more than a year?

It has been a very fascinating year so far, a wonderful experience of studying abroad in one of the best universities in United Kingdom. There are many things one could write down about these nine months that I stayed in Edinburgh; it was not only the academic level and facilities but the general aura of this city that granted a very special character to my studies. Fully satisfied from all the knowledge offered there is nothing left to do but follow the developments in the field of IT Law; now that one has learnt where to search for information and how to interpret them, the most important is keeping in touch. Apart from excellent knowledge, this year offered me great friends and the unique and sometimes humorous experience of living alone in a flat; but still it was a "student's flat", so no one is claiming a real simulation! There is no time and I am not in the mood to summarize this year; will never forget the gold medal from scottish universities athletics events! Never expected to win a gold medal abroad, six years after I had retired from training and races; so there is so much to talk about, so little time to waste. There is only one thing I am sure of: Ready for Athens or not, there is lots of work that has to be done; and quickly!

Taking a break from Creative Commons licences (dissertation mode: on) I browsed through one of the most famous and useful Web 2.0 services, the Technorati engine. No better way to understand what exactly this service bundle offers, than reading their own "About Us" article. The question triggered was if Technorati is able of monitoring online activity in sites that consist of "News Blog" entries and other relevant content under a common domain (like gsake.info) and how effective this monitoring is. Will the monitoring expand to all content of the web site or will their engine fail to monitor anything posted here... It is more than obvious that the Technorati engine is optimized for Blogger and Wordpress software, or relevant to them clones. The registration with Technorati will also test the engine's interoperability; do we all have to create a typical blog in order to be listed in Technorati or not? Hopefully I will find out soon and come back with more details.

Having some more ideas about this repository, I found out that 10 gigs of web space were just getting wasted, since only 25Mb were used till now for the files of this site. There could be no better idea than installing an image bank. That was a plan made long time ago, but the limited web space had always been a problem. I do not claim that I am a good photographer, so I should upload my photos, I know nothing about photographs. But it is enjoyable to take your camera and shoot landscapes or beautiful areas within cities or random nature scenes. The creation of a small selective collection of photographs is the goal for this gallery, since it is more preferable to host my own image bank than uploading to random servers; it gives a more personal feel to the pics and a better integration with the rest of the site. For the present there are only a few Edinburgh's pics, as a "showcase" mode for the image bank. Hope there will be time for more; back to Creative Commons licenses now...

After having a long conversation with grammo about RSS feeds, I realized that apart from providing a "manual" link for all users who want to add the available feeds, a website should interact with the new generation of browsers that recognize the RSS compatibility feature and display a small icon next to the address bar (Opera and Firefox), or make a button to flash indicating that feeds are available, like Internet Explorer version 7. This means that users should always have two ways of subscribing to RSS feeds: Using the browser's compatibility engine by single clicking on the RSS icon, or manually for those who have older browsers or other software, via clicking on the link of the the feed. In this website I used only the latter, since I had no idea that I should do the coding in order to have a browser displaying the RSS availability. I actually thought that this would be done automatically; silly me. So viewing the source code of grammo's blog, I found out that there was some code within the header that did the trick. I felt like I discovered America again, and was ready to write an article - guide about it. Then I understood that I just found out something basic I did not know, but still in order to satisfy my joy I am writing this news blog entry! Being aware of the code, I found an exceptional article about RSS feeds and compatibility issues. Feeling a bit wiser I moved forward to add the code. The whole work is done within the "head" tag of the page. One can add as many feeds as one likes, all latest browsers are robust enough to display a little menu including all RSS syndication options. For the record, if anyone is interested in this, here is the added code within the "head" tag that made the difference and now the feeds are automatically recognized:

<link rel="alternate" 
    type="application/rss+xml" 
    title="News Blog RSS Feed" 
    href="http://gsake.info/backend.php" />
<link rel="alternate" 
    type="application/rss+xml" 
    title="Sections RSS Feed" 
    href="http://gsake.info/modules/smartsection/backend.php" />

<link rel="alternate" 
    type="application/rss+xml" 
    title="News Blog RSS Feed" 
    href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/gsakenews" />
<link rel="alternate" 
    type="application/rss+xml" 
    title="Sections RSS Feed" 
    href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/gsakesections" />

Feeling depressed because of being away from the beautiful, warm and sunny Greece, I started browsing through the official web site of the Greek National Tourism Organisation (G.N.T.O.). I was delighted to see that they update regularly their portal, already added multilingual support and many other sections and information about tourism in Greece. It is well known that Greece depends on tourism and the number of tourists who visit Greece on yearly basis exceeds the Greek population! This means that the advertising and promotional campaigns should be carried out very carefully and with no tolerance of aesthetic failure. This year's campaign was really astonishing; I was impressed by the images and designing concepts used for the multiple posters that G.N.T.O. released for its advertising purposes. The result is exceptional and the quality of a high level. I managed to download all sample images for my personal image bank. The question is under which license are these images released? Is one allowed to use them as a banner at a web site linking to G.N.T.O.'s site and promote the campaign or not? It is not clearly stated that these images are provided to the public "as is" in order to be used for promotional purposes; on the other hand intellectual property law applies to all works, including these images of course. So am I allowed to post a small banner to my web site without their special permission to do so? I have already done this, but I will mail the web site admin in order to find out how they feel about it... No matter what comes out from this communication, I strongly advise for this summer to... "explore your senses" in Greece!

Two days after the FOSS NTUA Community's debate "Open Software and Alternative Technologies", I am more than happy that I was given the chance to take part in this wonderful panel and make a small presentation about patents on CII and their future within the European area. The organizing committee did a very good job. Not only did they provide a live video feed of acceptable quality (real format), but they managed to set up a video conference connection for me to deliver my speech live. Unfortunately the problems that we had with sound made things a bit difficult, since I could only see and talk but not hear what was happening in the auditorium through the conference connection. So I had to deliver my speech without "interaction". Rest of the debate was available for me through the live feed (streaming has always at least 20-30 secs delay) and I think that the level was really high and the audience paid attention, even when they disagreed or could not follow the legal terms used by many speakers on various topics. The workshops that were presented after the end of the "legal debate" were very good organized as well, even if I could not deal with most of the technical details... This experience was great and I am looking forward to having more opportunities to discuss and exchange opinions with people that are not originating from the field of law, which means that they have a different aspect of the whole debate, about patents, licenses and generally participation in the information society. Feedback about the debate can be found at a special section on their wiki; material is all in Greek of course. Well done FOSS NTUA Community!

Almost five years have passed, since the first ever "gsake homepage" site was online. Using a free service provided by the ISP, a five megabytes space with FTP access and only limited capabilities grammo and GSake designed and developed their first online space in Greek. MS Frontpage and Paintbrush were used for this cute design that would load fast even under a 56K dialup connection. Divided into six sections, it contained a full editorial and a latest news module at homepage, an articles section, a calendar-like section for upcoming events, an MS Access based free forum (not integrated into the site's design), a Java IrCQ chat client (!) and a web links list. All content was static, built in HTML code page by page and every single change meant that the user (me) had to tweak all pages (nice)... It was just a week before the site's uploading when the the Academic Staff's Association representatives of the University of Athens announced that all exams would be postponed, since they were going on continuous strike. It was just the beginning of World Cup 2002, and we pretended to be "alternative reporters" with grammo, commenting every single game and doing a daily presentation of our own! The site "died" before the semifinals, in the middle of the summer there were more "real" things for 20 and 19 years old students to chase... Browsing through my old files today I bumped onto the last archived update of the homepage: 15.06.2002, 02:00 am...

Following the "wind of change" I thought that the "News" title for this section was too formal, closer to a news portal than a personal site. On the other hand, I don't think that typical blogging is what this section represents, it tends to be different than a typical blog. Thinking of combining these two categories, Guardian Unlimited provided the best solution: News with less formal style, approaching a blog-like model: News Blog! It is funny how internet and its new "tools" have added strange words to our vocabulary. Even today, most spelling software utilities that accompany document writers do not recognize "blog" as a correct word...

On Firday 15th June 2007 the Free and Open Software Community of the National Technichal University of Athens is organising a daily debate - workshop about free and open software at the library ground floor auditorium. The legal debate will focus on the role of free and open software in the information society and on the legal problems that emerge through licensing and patents. Various workshops will be carried out about how to implement free and open software in a professional or educational environment. All presentations seem to be very interesting and it is the first time that the students' FOSS community is organizing such a large-scale event. It is a great pleasure for me to contribute to this event, even from tsousands of miles away... More information is availabe at their wiki.