Well, I arrived yesterday at Eleftherios Venizelos airport around 4:30pm. I finally found some power at the Madrid Barajas airport next to some nice chairs, and plugged in, I didn’t have any problems. I’m still surprised how few are available. The only thing I can figure is that most people don’t use the power too much when on vacation. After arriving in Athens, I took the metro to a station close to my Hotel, the Filoxenia after getting some cash.

The hotel is cheap. Very cheap. Granted, when you pay 35€ a night, you can’t expect too much, but there isn’t even an alarm clock in the room, and the shower isn’t really a shower as much as a bath with a convenient shower handle. The power for the room is completely off when you are not in the room, probably to keep people from running the AC all day. The one small favor that this room has is that - the AC works well, cooling the place to a chilly 68 when it’s left on for long enough. Otherwise, the room is basically a place to sleep and clean yourself. The owner expected me to bring my reservation, which I hadn’t thought of because everywhere else I have been the reservation was handled by verifying who the person was who made the reservation, and then having them pay.

After getting to my room and dropping off my stuff, Hyeun and I took a walk outside to find some food. We eventually went to a place recommended by the owner of the hotel - they had menus in english, and recognized us as tourists pretty quickly. I had a large σουβλάκι (Souvlaki), which was actually very good even with the tomatoes and lettuce. When supper was over, it was time to take the task of finding a charger (which I learned the greek word for: φορτισή) and SIM card for my phone so that calling home wouldn’t cost me $1.40 a minute, and also finding the best way to get to the conference hotel.

There was a internet cafe just across Αχαρνον that had reasonable rates, so we went there for some precious connectivity. I couldn’t plug in or log on to the wireless there, so I had to use one of the computers. I am always wary when using someone else’s computer to log on to the internet, especially so when I am trying to check my own email and do things that I wouldn’t want some random person to go to. I also couldn’t use my USB drive which has secure pocket versions of Firefox and the like. After the net surfing session we walked back to the hotel, and on the way I found a cell shop that I was able to buy a SIM card and charger at. They don’t speak English there, but they were very helpful and I was happy that they were friendly with me standing there very confused and patient when I was trying to find the greek words for things.

After we got back to the Filoxenia, we sat in the lobby while I tried to show Hyeun how to use the SIM card. Unfortunately I had forgotten to call T-mobile back after I put in my request to unlock my phone, so I had to call them back (at high prices) in order to unlock the phone and use the new SIM card. When I was done with them, I put the new SIM card in and tried to call someone, but the service started talking to me in Greek, so I was confused. The manual that came with the SIM card was only in Greek and I couldn’t seem to get anyone but this Greek voice when I dialed. After a short trip back to the Internet Cafe to read instructions in English at the Cosmote] website, I learned that I was just not patient enough - if I waited for the Greek to stop, it would talk to me shortly in English (telling me to dial 1313 for English support) and then connect my call. I assume it was just explaining the legal ramifications of using their cell network or something.

I was able to call home after that, and talk to Diana for a short time before the minutes that came on the SIM card were used up. It was time for sleep then, and I was completely jet lagged and tired, so I slept from ~10pm to 6am when we were meant to meet in the breakfast area before going to the conference.

Having got my bearings when going to the Filoxenia, finding Victoria (Βικτορια) station was pretty easy, and the ticket machine was simple and cheap for a single trip, only 0,80€. I’m at the conference now, where English is the lingua franca.

I’ve started on my first trip to countries that aren’t English-speaking today. I don’t really have any time at my destination today, so it’s a prelude to the real deal. I’m headed to Greece - Athens and Kos in particular, for a couple of weeks in order to attend MED 2007 and ECC 2007. My advisor is from Greece originally, so we usually send at least one paper to one of these conferences. This year we have two papers at MED and one at ECC.

I have a built-in downside of having two separate stops before my destination on this trip, mostly due to the ticket being much much cheaper than it would normally be. This means at least 8 hours in airports, waiting for another plane to board or standing in line. It seems like most of the day has been spent charging the laptop, or looking for power.

One thing that I have noted is that when you travel in airports, you need to be wary of power plugs. There are very few available, even it seems in modern airports. Surprisingly, the Iceland airport we stopped at last year on our way to england was much more accommodating for the traveler. This is very frustrating when you land with a dead battery from working on a flight after 7 hours or so, and you can’t charge up for your next flight. I found a wiki online which is trying to map the power available at some airports, and I added a couple entries on my travels just today.

I took a gamble on purchasing wifi from Boingo earlier, and I may sign up again with the “world unlimited” plan before the trip is over. Apparently the plan that I signed up on is 0.12 euro a minute at most locations in Athens, and I can easily see spending more than the ~30 euro it will cost for the month of unlimited. As an added downside, you can’t see your minute charge right away, so I don’t know if I have logged off here at Madrid.

I hope to take a bunch of bad camera phone pictures, but first I need to find a charger and SIM card for my phone. You can keep track of my travels on twitter, I’ll probably be updating it more often due to the high price of internet and relative cheapness of SMS. Suddenly texting has a whole new appeal to me.

Apple released Safari 3 for Windows and Mac a couple weeks ago, and of course as the early-adopter that I am, I was trying to download it before it was even actually available. I’ve been using it for the last weeks, and I’d like to boast and bitch about some of the features and misses that Apple seems to have missed.

The first thing that I noticed about Safari 3 is that they still haven’t fixed some of the bogus behavior that is present in Safari 2: the behavior of tabs. They have a preference that is selectable to make links that are clicked from other applications open in a new tab instead of a new widow, but any random site can create a new window by using the target=”top” or target=”new” tags to links. This can’t be a hard fix (there may be a way to do it in Mac Safari), but it is a major usability oversight in my opinion. At the very least, I would like to be able to ignore the targets that make a new window.

One of the biggest jarring things about moving from Firefox, my normal browser, to Safari for a couple of weeks, is that there is no Adblock Plus extension - meaning I see all of the ads that I would normally have completely blocked out. Some ads aren’t horribly bad, and I have even clicked on a few and learned something about a product or service I didn’t know about before that was actually useful. Unsurprising to me that almost all the ads that I ended up following were Google Adsense ads. Unfortunately, most of the ads on the web aren’t simple ads that just advertise, but they get in your face and flash and sometimes even make sounds that are unwanted. Most of the annoying ads are Flash ads - I feel like if I could only selectively run flash, the ads would be fine. They are highly annoying, and possibly the sole reason that I will be switching back to Firefox after this.

However, it is not all bad - Safari lives up to the advertising on it’s page. It is easily the fastest rendering browser that I have ever used, and I have used almost all of them. The speed is nice, and it’s something I need to get used to not having. It makes the web fast again, like it was before all of the new-fangled stuff. It is also pretty quick on startup, but I think that pre-loaded IE is faster on windows at least. The other good thing about it is it brings good font rendering to windows. I’ve been working on my Mac for a while now, and I’ve gotten used to the fonts that some people call “fuzzy”, and I actually prefer them that way. Working in windows is hard when I’m trying to squint through ClearType’s bad font hinting that makes reading a pain. The inline search is also fairly clean and nice with the animations. It is something I would gladly be happy with in Firefox.

The good isn’t enough to outweigh the bad, however, so it’s back tox Firefox (and iceweasel) for me.

Lately I have been thinking about switching source code management systems. In years gone by, I have used CVS, Subversion, arch, and most recently bazaar-ng for managing all the source code that I have to change. Lately I have been unhappy with the speed that bazaar takes to get some things done, and after watching a Google talk by Linus about Git, I thought I would give it a look.

I was surprised to find out that it actually models the way that I work normally slightly better than the bazaar model does. The main thing is that a repository holds a bunch of branches, but the working directory only has one of those branches checked out at any point in time. I use bazaar with about 4-5 branches per project, and only work on one of them at once (normally, sometimes I want to transport a bug across a couple branches) - so the “working space replaced by branch you want to work on” actually works out OK for me. I also need to collaborate with a bunch of projects at school and work that use other systems including CVS and Subversion, which Git seems to make it easy to do.

I did run into some questions that I don’t really have a good answer to, however, therefore the new segment on the blog: Ask the interwebs. Normally I would just ask on some IRC channel, but the Minneapolis public library doesn’t seem to allow anything but HTTP out. On to the question!

When using Git, how do you manage having multiple computers (at multiple locations) that you work on? I have approximately 5 different computers that I use regularly. Luckily I have enough space to have git installed on all of them, and I also have a web server that I can use WebDAV on if necessary. What I would like to have is a repository that I can pull from before I start work (if I am connected) and then push to when I finish so that the next computer I sit down at I can just pull again and get everyting. I would like this to include any branches I may have made on the first computer. Is this possible, hard, or easy for Git users? How much do I need to worry about slowdown? My WebDAV server is in the cloud, and I would prefer to be able to get up and go on say, a minute’s notice.

I’m also interested on what your workflow is like even if it doesn’t match the model I just described. I’m open to changing - the bazaar-ng to git change is big enough that I can probably incorporate a new workflow as well.

Today Diana and I went to the Cliquot Club Cafe for our weekly pizza place visit. We discovered this place on a long walk we took from our apartment on one of the recent lovely spring days, and decided to visit it today. It is situated slightly hidden, about halfway between Lake street and Franklin. The place looks and feels like it was an excellent coffee place that graduated into a happy cafe. Their menu is extensive, serving breakfast, paninis, pizzas, salads, deli sandwiches and even some more fancy fare. In contrast to the well-designed look, the atmosphere is very laid-back and inviting. I felt comfortable as soon as I walked in. We were greeted quickly by both the cook / barista and the server, and directed to sit “wherever, inside or out”

I had Pepperoni, because I wasn’t feeling all that adventurous, along with some green mango tea. The pizza was cooked on excellent crust with and tasted very good. It was cooked well and wasn’t too hot. The red sauce used on even my run-of-the-mill pizza was excellent and I was quickly finishing the individual-sized pizza. The waitress was always around and served well without being too invasive. I’ll definitely go back for another slice, coffee, or even breakfast.

Cliquot Club Cafe is situated on the corner of 25th St E and 30th Ave S in Minneapolis. Map Website Prices for Pizza + Drink: ~$10

I can write a program that counts up to 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but apparently that would be illegal, because whoever owns HD-DVD claims they own the number. Perhaps the DMCA has gone too far when numbers are copyrightable?

Your results: You are Jean-Luc Picard

Jean-Luc Picard 70% Spock 67% Will Riker 60% Worf 55% Data 54% Uhura 45% James T. Kirk (Captain) 45% Geordi LaForge 40% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 40% Chekov 35% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 35% Beverly Crusher 30% Deanna Troi 25% Mr. Scott 25% Mr. Sulu 20%

A lover of Shakespeare and other fine literature. You have a decisive mind and a firm hand in dealing with others.

Click here to take the “Which Star Trek character am I?” quiz…

..or he’s not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone – and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.

However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones. C|Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now – the Gartner study was released in October. Let’s give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.

Let’s look at the math another way. Cingular has 58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.

These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don’t think Steve is that crazy. I’m betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.

It’s not the reason that you think. Sure, it includes a bunch of iPod functionality, but that’s not what I’m referring to. Not the least of which is, absolutely everyone is talking about this device. I haven’t seen this much buzz over a device in a long time.

Buzz is definitely nice, and warranted, but that’s not why either. Back in the day when the iPod was released, everyone thought that it was going to flop - because it had a hard drive, and almost all of the players at the time were using flash. The iPod changed the mp3 player from a device that had a tiny screen that you could display maybe 2 lines of text (if you were lucky), and that you needed a course in computers to use, to a high-resolution screen, easy to use device. Nothing else at the time was even close. It succeeded because of it’s complete rethinking of the user interface, and that is why the iPhone is the next iPod. This got pretty long, so I’m cutting it. (Sorry, people who hate clicking!)

There are some things that I have learned over the years as bad practice. There are some that I have learned through reading and contemplation, and a little experimentation. One of the categories of bad things that I have learned is visual aids for statistics. There is basically one cardinal rule for data presented in a graphical form:

Let the user see the actual data.

It seems kindof obvious, doesn’t it? I’m presenting data, you should be able to see it. If you want to show me that there are 450 widgets, and 230 whazits, and only 210 whositz, then you should show those. The simplest way of doing this is by just listing them out in a table:

That’s simple, isn’t it? However, it doesn’t help the viewer any. They’re pretty good if you want to know exactly how many of something there is, but not great at other things that you want to do with data. How do you find the minimum (or maximum) of all of the values? You scan, remembering the highest one you saw so far, and then go back to that one and find out. If the goal is to somehow compare, the viewer will be helped out by using a graphical display of some sort. One thing that humans are good at estimating is length. Quick, tell me what we have the least of:

That was easy, wasn’t it. Bar charts are good - they can still be abused by people in evil ways, but most of the time they’re pretty useful.

All of this is working up to pie charts. What’s smaller, Whazits or Whositz here:

Is Widgets half or more than half of the pie? Pie charts are the bad seed of the graph world. They aren’t very useful, hang out a lot, and don’t help you much. The worst thing about pie charts is that they aren’t even good at the thing they’re supposed to be the best at: comparing relative sizes. Consider thanksgiving, or christmas, or whatever large gathering you prefer where there is pie. Lots of pie slices are laid out on the table. Which one is the biggest? It’s hard to tell. It’s even hard to cut even slices from a normal pie. Sure, you can cut in 4ths, 6ths, or 8ths, but I challenge you to cut a pie in 5 pieces equally - it’s really hard! It’s because humans aren’t great at judging the differences between angles. They’re only really good for seeing one thing: the largest piece in the pie. Even then, it’s sometimes questionable - if you looked at a evenly sliced pie, could you tell the difference between a 23% piece from a 20% piece? The bad thing about this is that they are ingrained into our culture. There wasn’t a finance report in the last 10 years without a pie chart.

All of this ranting was basically brought to you by a recent post on BoingBoing. This post features the most horrible monstrosity I have seen in a long time: the hierarchial pie chart. Feast your eyes on this monstrosity. I challenge any reader to tell me: what is the smallest third-level category? What is the largest?