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Summer Update (23 July 2002)
It's been a while since the last time I wrote something for my website, so there is a lot to say!

1. - I Met Richard Stallman
When I first heard about Richard Stallman , I thought I was never going to meet him, but I was wrong. The founder of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) and the author of numerous GNU utilities came to London for a short trip. He gave a speech at the headquarters of OneWorld (http://www.oneworld.net ). He was really passionate about his ideas, and I would say he was more of a philosopher.
I wish his dreams and ideas become reality one day...

2. - Red Hat 7.3 vs Mandrake 8.2

After playing with Red Hat 7.3 + Evolution Desktop I realised I have become addicted to Mandrake. So, Mandrake 8.2 is back on my desktop! Red Hat didn't appeal to me, mainly because things that seem extremely easy on Mandrake were too complicated in Red Hat . KDE 3.0 and the new Gnome were nice though!... I'm looking forward to the next Mandrake release!

3. - Icecast

What a brilliant idea! Select some mp3s and play them live - on the net! You need two programs for that: IceS which takes the mp3 and converts it to a stream, and Isecast that takes the stream and makes it available on the net. Whenever you are up and running your radio station appears on the http://yp.icecast.org website! Sounds great but a visit to the website will show you that the number of broadcasters is normally slightly greater that the number of listeners...
The not-free shoutcast (http://yp.shoutcast.com ) has more listeners however and good thing is that even if you are using the free Icecast, your station will be advertised for free in the shoutcast website.
There is a way of creating a live stream (i.e. not from mp3s but from speech). My friend Antonis will appreciate this feature! I will investigate this feauture soon (and will report my views as usual - so stay tuned!).

4. - cal command

If you type cal on the command line you get the monthly callendar for the current month. If you type "cal 1 1990" you get the calendar for the first month of the year 1990 and so on. By reading the man page of cal I was amazed to find that, in order to adjust the calendar back in 1752 , they skipped 12 days! Here is the result of the "cal 9 1752" command:

September 1752

(for those windows advocates out there: can you find that information on a default windows installation? ;)

5. - Gimp vs Photoshop

Gimp seems to be a very powerful photo editing program. I was amazed that I could convert the greek flag to this website at a click of a button!
But still photoshop is my favourite photo editing program, mainly because of the fact that my Cannon scanner works only under windows (grrrr...). The best feature of Photoshop for me is the automated procedure for making a web album from your scanned photos.
(Hint - there will be a web album in this site soon!)