Have yourself a merry little Jazzmas

Jazzmas

Christmas and Jazz is a fun combination. If you fancy some jazzy X-mas tunes for your iPhone or iPod Touch, check out my first iPhone application: Jazzmas.

Ten of the most popular Christmas tunes packed in a neat little application for your iPhone (or iPod touch), together with a Christmas Countdown indicator over an original blue-ish X-mas illustration I’ve created just for this app.

The songs are performed by pianist / composer Manolis Gerempakanis in a jazzy, cozy and festive mood and are decorated with original improvisations as well as some bass and drums.

All this for just $0,99 (0,79€).

Get Jazzmas on the iTunes App Store

Jazzmas Website

Tracks included

• Christmas Tree
• Deck the Halls
• Feliz Navidad
• Jingle Bells
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• Silent Night, Holy Night
• The First Noel
• White Christmas
• We Wish you a Merry Christmas

Wordle fun

I just discovered wordle.net, a fun website that lets you visualize the most prominent key words in a bunch of text as a “word cloud”, a website or a feed. Here’s the generated image for my blog:

Head on to wordle.net to create your own.

Bye bye Facebook

I have finally decided to delete my Facebook account. I could write a long post analyzing this decision, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just quote a short note that I’m going to publish on my Facebook wall.

I have decided to leave Facebook. I never really liked it in the first place. It was fun commenting on your photos and your status messages, learning all those little details about you that I never really cared for and watching you throwing Britney Spears’ to each other.

I won’t miss the myriads of utterly useless groups you’ll continue to become members of, nor the bazillions of ugly applications cluttering your “walls”. And I’m pretty sure Facebook won’t hire a designer before either cold fusion replaces oil or Google hires one.

I am going to delete my account on February the 27th, a day after my birthday. This way you can all wish me happy birthday by writing on my wall and save the phone call or sms! (That is, before Facebook reads this note, gets mad and kicks me out of it before that date!)

I am jumping off the social crap wagon, but you’ll still be able to find me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis). That is, until I delete myself from there too, but I don’t think this will happen pretty soon.

I urge you to re-consider your goals in your everyday time-wasting habits and ponder the question of whether you need to create detailed records of your lives on some (rich by now) twenty-something guy’s servers. I won’t do that anymore.

So take care, have fun and be well. I hope to see you in the real world.

Day 2 of the No-Internet experiment

The second day of my No-Internet experiment wasn’t the most suitable test subject, since I lost all morning running for errands and taking care of stuff outside of the office. I finally faced my computer about one hour after midday, and when I checked mail (this was the morning check) I was cheering to see that Apple finally approved my company’s enrollment for the iPhone Developer program!

Since I’ve been waiting for Apple to complete the enrollment process for almost 3 months, I decided I could make an exception and stay online for a little while to browse around the iPhone dev portal. This, however, didn’t last long, as I felt an urge to continue my work; the pressure of all those lost hours was intense. This made me realize another important facet of my new working habits:

Time matters. I have to track the time wasted and compensate for it.

Upon getting back to work, I managed to become quite focused, with almost no distractions at all, online or external, for about two and a half hours until my lunch break. Even though the task of styling my client’s CSS menu was becoming quite tedious at times (styling becomes more and more tiring for me as the years are passing by), I didn’t deviate from it, something that wouldn’t have happened last week; I’m sure I would have engaged into some online activity to rest myself a bit.

During work, at one point I was talking with my wife of the phone, and she asked me how it’s going. “Do you still have the Internet off?“, she asked. I was amazed to find out that, I didn’t know whether it was on or off! After checking it out, I discovered that it was on, yet I hadn’t used it for the past couple of hours. So it looks like not using the Internet is becoming a habit to me.

As the days are passing by, I see that this experiment is quite valuable in adjusting my daily habits and schedule while at work. However, the real value of this experiment could be the need to answer the underlying question: “what is information, and how much of it do we really need?“

Day 1 of the No-Internet experiment

It’s almost half an hour past eight in the afternoon and I think it’s time to call it a day. Evaluating the first day of my No-Internet experiment, I can say that it worked well, distractions were reduced and overall I worked much more than I would on a typical day with the Internet on.

At first, thoughts of performing those almost ritualistic time-wasting habits were surfacing my mind, but the instant I was initiating such an action I reminded myself that the Internet was off, so I kept getting back to work. When I felt that I needed a break, I’d have to get up and walk around the office a little bit, have a snack or drink some juice, or just gaze the hill outside of the window.

I realized that these breaks were much shorter than those in which I spent time online. Most of the times they wouldn’t last longer than five minutes, quite less than an average “online time-wasting” break. Upon returning to the computer, I’d go straight into work again without wasting any time on the ‘Net. This makes me realize that the most crucial moment of potential time-wasting is probably when I was getting back to work; instead of continuing the task that was interrupted, I used to take advantage of the interruption to perform some other task, i.e. check mail or Twitter. Now, with the Internet off, this isn’t the case.

There were times when I needed the Internet to perform some task for my work, i.e. check out online documentation or google for some specific CSS hack. Since I’m turning off the Internet in order to assist my work and not the other way around, I had to turn it back on at times to find the information I was seeking. Later, I decided to let the router on, and just disable Airport (wireless) during the day, so when I needed the Internet for some crucial part, I could instantly turn it on.

This, of course, requires some discipline since it’s quite tempting to make thoughts like, for example, “hey, since I had to turn it on, let’s spend just a few seconds to check mail…“. Luckily, when I had to turn the Internet on, I used it only for the task that required it, and immediately turned it off again. The discipline that I portrayed, amazed me!

Until now, I checked mail once, upon returning to the office after lunch, and I’ll do it a second time after I finish writing this post. I realized that having the mail notifier off helped a lot into minimizing distractions, and decided to remove it from my auto-launch group of applications and keep it always that way.

Considering a whole day without Twitter, Facebook, news and e-mail, makes me feel much calmer, more isolated and focused, and eliminates the anxiety of information overload. No more stress to have to catch up with the news, and no more need to filter dozens or even hundreds of tweets to find out the few that may be worthy of attention. It amazes me when I realize that the process of information filtering is a quite stressful activity.

So day 1 was a success, but it’s not long enough to make a verdict. I’ll just publish this story and go home. I’ll tweet about this post, but I promise not to peek into other people’s tweets!

The No-Internet Experiment: A week without connectivity

Part of my resolution for the new year was to get things done, stop wasting time and make my plans come true. But after the first working week of 2009, I see that there are still old habits that are plaguing my productivity, as I found myself pondering at the end of the day, why my work didn’t advance as much as I’d want it to.

I came to the conclusion that the main reason that’s hindering my productivity is getting distracted, not away from my computer but inside it! I do spend most of my day (while working) in front of my iMac, sitting in my office, but am I doing what I am supposed to be doing, or am I constantly wasting my time in a never-ending cycle of tedious distractions?

Reading the news, connecting via Twitter, checking on Facebook, reading (and replying to) e-mail the moment it arrives, engaging into some chatting on MSN or googling that thing that occured to me during the previous night while I was trying to sleep is a huge time-waster. All of these tasks seem quite innocent and may require no more than a couple of minutes to perform, yet there’s an urge to do them again and again during the day, which results in a big waste of precious time without realizing it. I guess this applies to many people who work online.

For example, here’s a quick list of thoughts that trigger such actions:

• “Hm, what’s going on in Twitterland right now? I’ll only take a quick look.“
• “Let’s check my friends’ status on Facebook for a minute.“
• “Gotta check the news, maybe there’s something big happening right now, I’ll just scan the headlines.“
• “Hm, new mail, gotta check it out, I want my inbox to be empty at all times“
• “It’s been some time since I last checked Google analytics, how’s my blog doing lately?“
• “Is a replacement for the Epson R2400 out already? Maybe it’s time to get myself a good color printer“

and the list goes on an on and on…

Not only do these things feast on my time, but more importantly even if they’re only distracting me from work for a couple of minutes, I still have to set my mind again into working on the problem that got interrupted, which can cause mental fatigue if it happens too often. So here I am in 2009, postponing all of my great plans until I’m done with some client work that has been already delayed a lot.

I realized that finishing this work for my clients is a big barrier for me, since I can’t dive into anything big (i.e. start developing an iPhone app) until I’m done with it. If I ever want to begin doing all those things that I long to, I have to get over this barrier, get all those distractions out of the way and boost my productivity.

Shutting down the Internet

In order to do this, I have decided to shut down my office Internet router for the week to come, and see how much more (or less!) productive I’ll be by Friday evening. Not being connected to the Internet means that I won’t be able to do any of the aforementioned actions, therefore I’ll be able to focus on my work and, hopefully, get it done after a week’s hard work (it’s a project stuck in 90% for quite some time).

But why go to such extremes? There are other successful ways of getting things done, i.e. batching your actions, time-scheduling etc. True, these methods are quite effective when it comes to minimizing distractions and focusing on work, yet I think that shutting down the Internet for a (working) week will have a much more powerful effect. It’ll be a standard, to which I’ll be able to compare the amount of online time-wasting I’ll be doing when I turn the router back on next week.

So, starting on Monday morning, I’m shutting down my office Internet router and start working in an environment without connectivity. That means that I’ll also have to turn off e-mail auto-fetch in the iPhone and not allow myself to peek into the Internet over 3G! I’ll still check mail once or twice during the day, only to see if there’s something urgent that I need to act on, and I’ll blog about the process daily when I get back home in the evening, but that will be all.

I think it’ll be an interesting experiment!

Brief notes about the iPhone Tech Talks

The banner for the event

Last week I’ve been in Rome for the iPhone Tech Talks, Apple’s so-called worldwide event promoting iPhone development. Apparently the moto “Stay where you are. We’re coming to you.” didn’t apply to Greece, so I decided to fly to Rome and attend the one-day seminar. In the beginning of the day, we were informed that the event was considered to be confidential and we shouldn’t blog/tweet/facebook about it, but I think it’s ok to express my impressions about the event as well as my (probably useless) comments about my trip.

Roaming with the iPhone

Apart from the original frustration of not being able to connect to any cellular network (because for some stupid reason my carried switched roaming off when I upgraded my plan), the iPhone’s done well roaming into a foreign country. I don’t know if italian 3G networks are slow or if it was the roaming, but even on 3G everything was pretty slow.

Getting to the event

When I walked to the La Sapienza University, I thought I’d spot the familiar Apple logo on a banner or something, directing me to the place where the event was held, but as much as I looked around, I saw no apples at all. And almost everyone I asked was either unaware of it, didn’t speak english or would rather not talk to a stranger. I spent about 15 minutes asking and going from one place to the other, until I finally found it. They had a banner, but it was up on a balcony at some place.

A few minutes before the first session began

Event sessions

The day consisted of many sessions, some of which were more informative than the others. I’d rather like it if all sessions were tech talk, but hey, it’s their promotional event. Information on the actual technical stuff was coming fast enough so you can keep up and yet include as much as possible. Some people were taking notes but I think it wasn’t really useful to do so. I wouldn’t consider most of the talk being confidential, since in essence it’s all written down in the Apple documentation about the iPhone, but oh well.

One of the reasons I wanted to attend the event was to get to ask some questions to an Apple evangelist, but I wasn’t that lucky. The only chance to ask a question was to find the one Apple guy during the breaks, but that means fighting your way through the crowds that engulfed him instantly the minute the sessions ended. And all this talk between the developers and the Apple guy was in italian, so it was useless to me. Well, at least I had time to visit the buffet, but hey- don’t forget it was a free event.

It was funny that I was the only non-italian person attending, so the host had to speak in english throughout the sessions even though he was italian as well. Sorry guys!

Some interesting notes

Being there among all those italian developers, I quickly came to notice some stuff (most of which I Tweeted about anyway). First, I thought everyone would have an iPhone, but that was not the case. However, almost all laptops were Macs, I didn’t spot a PC in there. New MacBooks could be seen, but old aluminum Pro’s, plastic MacBooks and even my 12″ PowerBook G4 diversified the gamut.

When the audience was asked, quite an impressive amount of people raised hands about using Xcode and Objective-C. Less people were actually developing an iPhone app, and about a dozen and half already had an app deployed on the app store. I wonder how many of the rest of the developers are actually going to build an app, since it was a free event and it was obvious that some people attended maybe out of curiosity only.

Evaluation time

So was it worth it? Well, if they come to your city, it’s definitely worth it to go if you’re interested in developing for the iPhone. But flying abroad just to attend the event (at least the European schedules) wasn’t something I’d recommend, since most of the stuff is readily available in the documentation. The event was probably a good chance to hook up with other developers (an italian start-up was looking for developers there) and often great start-ups form out of such meetings. So if you’re an upcoming developer that haven’t dug deep yet into iPhone development, you should definitely go since it puts you into a mood and briefs you about the technical difficulties involved (i.e. memory management etc.)

Night shot of the Pantheon using the iPhone's camera

As for me, I tried to increase the value of my trip to Rome to make it par with the money I’ve spent, so I took a nice walk the evening after the event, re-visiting most major sites in the historic center. Piazza Di Spagna, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo Di Fiori, Fontana Di Trevi and other small piazzas here and there, a taste of italian pizza and buying souvenirs and gifts for my wife made that evening worth the trip! And since it’s all about the iPhone, here’s a (slightly enhanced) night shot of the Pantheon using the iPhone’s built-in camera.

Going to iPhone Tech Talks, Rome

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Apple confirming my registration for the iPhone Tech Talks in Rome, on 19 November 2008, so I’m glad to announce that I’m going. Hopefully the event will be useful for a newcomer to iPhone development, like myself. Plus, Rome is a wonderful place and it will be a pleasure to be there again!

When I get back after the event (and NDA forbid) I’ll share as much as I can. If anyone else who’s reading this is attending the event, let me know!

During my trip and on the day of the event I’ll be posting updates via my iPhone which you will be able to read on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Your life in 2GB of e-mail

Last night, I woke up after a bad headache around 1 am. My headache was gone, so was my need to sleep. I convinced myself not to get up, so I went on and on swirling around in my bed until 5am. Being unable to sleep, I was thinking about new ideas regarding my website, as well as future services I would like to develop and deploy (maybe this was the reason I couldn’t sleep!).

During this process of mentally designing and organizing my new website, I remembered something I had long forgotten: Google Apps For Your Domain. I don’t want to use Google start pages or Google Chat, but why not use gmail for my e-mail addresses? I decided that I had watched enough distant lights of the passing cars through the highway (plus the night train passing by — the railroad is parallel to the highway at the area I can see from my window), so I got up and opened an account to Google Apps for my domain.

Delegating your e-mail addresses to Google is simple: all you have to do is delete the existing MX records from your domain, and add the proper MX records for the Google servers (all found in the instructions). Then you just wait for the service to get ready (from the side of Google). In less than one hour, I could log-in to my e-mail account through a subdomain on my own domain (e.g. like webmail.karageorgakis.com), in a gmail-like interface. Nice! But why should someone do this in the first place?

Web space

The #1 reason that may come to most people’s minds is web space. Yes, 2GB of storage per e-mail account is a nice feature. It does sound like a lot of storage for a free e-mail account (like gmail), since the service appears to be quite generous to provide (practically) every Internet user with that much of space. But having a hosting package of 100GB to host my e-mail accounts, space is not a problem. I could as well not delete messages for a long long time, until my space was full. So, web space is nice, but not the most useful reason for moving your mail to Google.

Search functionality

The second characteristic that comes to mind after web space, is Google’s search functionality, and this is what they’re really good with. If there’s anyone on our planet that can provide us with smart mechanisms to search through any data, and come up with fast and accurate results, then it’s none other that this search giant. How many times did you strive to find that colleague’s e-mail that was sent months (or years) ago, through vanilla plain search provided by Entourage (or Outlook, for Windows users), with no effect? Google mail makes this efficient and simple at the same time. Most gmail users are (or should be) already familiar of the way one can search e-mail in gmail.

First of all, in the simplest case, you type a word and hit search, and there you go: instant search results of all mail that contain occurrences of the word either in the subject, sender address or body of the message – no need to specify where it should search for the word. You can always fine grain your search by using the proper modifiers, like “from” etc. By combining all these modifiers, the user is capable of limiting the search results to just those few (or just the proper one) messages he was really looking for. Most of us, however (not excluding myself) do not remember all of the search modifiers gmail provides, simply because we never really need them —plain search does the job well. But if we need to go deeper, Google mail gives us the power to do so.

World-wide accessibility

One other advantage of using Google mail for your e-mail, is accessibility. Sure, every hosting package comes with some sort of webmail, but I have not yet found one that’s as accessible and efficient as Google mail. It is supported by all browsers. And please, don’t tell me about Safari not supporting all the features — who is using Google chat anyway when we all use MSN Messenger? Plus, it’s always a benefit when you find yourself strangled in a place with no computer and in need of accessing your e-mail with your mobile phone. I’m sure that most webmail apps don’t work well (if they work at all) through a primitive phone browser (by primitive I mean almost all phone browsers, with the exception of the iPhone and maybe Nokia’s latest one which I haven’t used yet). Google mobile mail scores very well in this area.

It’s a time machine!

It’s spacey, it finds what you need and you can use it from almost everywhere in the planet. But there’s something more subtle that’s equally (or even more) important, that may not come to mind instantly. It’s none other than time invariability in your e-mails. With enough web space to keep all of your important (and fun) messages, you rarely have to delete any. This means that messages that have been sent to you yours ago, are still there.

Back to last night’s oddysey: after I set up my e-mail accounts and forwarding, I could now access all of my e-mail addresses through just one: my gmail address. I have to admit, though, that my inbox was quite messy, so I had to clean things up. Being obsessive-compulsive in keeping things in my life neat and tidy, I cannot help but feel the urge to apply this obsession in electronic stuff too — like files and e-mails. So I went on to either label, delete or archive messages, starting from the end of the mailbox, all the way to last minute’s message. The dawn was greeting me with faint sunrays, reminding me that I should get back to bed before the new day comes for good. But an obession is hard to beat: I had to clean up my inbox, and so I did.

It stroke me when I found out that I was looking to a brief history of my life throughout the past few years! Google-mail time for me was starting back when I was in Chania, Crete, finishing my master’s. A lot of correspondence with my supervisor and colleagues about my thesis. Messages to friends, describing how sad I was to leave Crete, after getting the master’s. News from my cousin, Paulina, while at her journey through Europe with InterRail — Paris, Madrid, Lisbon. Old jokes friends have sent to me and I had forgotten, old projects I was working on, some were successful, some where never finished. But what really stroke me the most was my girlfriend’s e-mail while I was at the basic training camp, when I joined the army, kept inside there for 24 days with my mobile phone being the only window to the outside world.

I reached the last message, phew! That took some time, but it was fun! I never thought that the process of cleaning up my gmail inbox would indeed be an epitome of the last years of my life! Some messages were pretty useless, but I felt the need to archive them; they shall have sentimental value sometime in the future. Who knows how much longer I am going to use my gmail address? Will it be forever? I doubt that Google will ever stop the service, and it’s highly improbable that it will stop being free — at least for the basic version. As long as the service is provided and I don’t quit this account, more and more details of my life, ranging from important steps in my career to silly “hello” messages, fragments of my real life will continue to get imprinted in the non-material time machine that’s called web space (or call it cyberspace if you like).

Nothing’s absolutely free…

Unfortunately, having a time machine like this comes with a cost, not in currency, but in privacy. An e-mail account is not a stronghold or an absolutely safe vault in which you can store valuable information. It’s not that hard for some third-party to have access to it, and this means access to all of this information: who you really are, who you’re hanging out with, what you do; what worries you and what makes you happy; where you are at any given time and your plans for the future, details about your everyday life like phone numbers and real addresses; it’s all in there.

What would happen if someone had access to all this information about us? The time machine that e-mail accounts constitute, is all the missing information that our blogs lack, the “glue” that could give insight about our lives, reveal all those things we tag “personal” and even expose our darkest secrets. Can we really imagine the power that is in the hands of those, who have all this information about thousands of people’s lives? And do we know, how they are going to use it?

No, we can’t imagine, and we don’t know. But does it really matter, when we are willingly posting on the Net so much information about ourselves, our lives, our contacts and our social networks? When we upload photos of ourselves and of our friends and families? When we boast about the music we like to listen and the movies we enjoyed the most? Perhaps, we should be less afraid of what others could do with the information that doesn’t belong to them, but begin to shake our heads about the information we are willingly and knowingly giving them day by day…

A new life, a new (web) home!

I am very glad to announce that I am done for good with the obligations that were devouring hours (or even days) of my everyday time. And I like it!. This (positive) change shall be reflected in my online presence too. For quite a long time I was longing to find some time to spare on deploying my own website/blog; but time was a leisure. Now that my life is back in it’s normal mode, I have begun the process of doing new things, and finally finishing all the unfinished tasks, and this site is one of them.

The outline of the plan is this: re-shape my company’s workflow, services, identity and re-design it’s website, and also design and deploy this very site. I have decided to opt out of the hosting business (too much of a hassle for so little profit), so I had to find a new home for my websites. This new home would be the host for this site, my company’s website as well as future websites and/or services I shall deploy.

After doing some research into the market field of web hosting globally (not only in Greece), I decided to go with (mt) Media Temple. The offer sounded superb: 100GB of storage, 1TB of traffic, RoR support (in a container), SSH access, grid infrastructure (eliminating the disadvantages of shared hosting) and other features, all for almost 150 euros per year? I’m in! This is the first site I have moved into MediaTemple, which by now (only some hours after the account has been activated) seems to run smoothly. A more detailed article about moving into MediaTemple will follow shortly (in the next couple of days hopefully).

So, my dear visitors, please bare with me while I am in the process of materializing my inner thoughts into this website. I have decided to make incremental changes to it, instead of just waiting for the final edition to publish, so you may be witnessing changes happening (hopefully) quite often. I am confident that the final version will be good enough.

Take care,
Panagiotis