Yesterday I found a piece of code that I wrote when I was 14. It was a simple IRC service daemon, PHP Oper Services. It had the ability to link with Undernet IRC Daemon in order to provide an operator service. In order to do that it required a parser, in order to understand what the ircd said, as well as a backend database for its users.

When I was younger, I liked playing with something, acquiring its “juice”, and then move to something else. While some criticized this approach to learn, stating that I will never learn anything this way and that I was behaving “immaturely”, since I was continuously changing subjects.

This service was one of those pet projects, I’ve developed a hand-written parser that was able to link successfully with the IRCD, obeying the server-to-server grammar. Since I never read any books explaining what a parser is, I just read code examples, I had to discover myself the “secrets” of parsing.

This semester I took the “Languages & Compilation” course, which of course started with what a grammar is, and moved up to a lexical analyzer, parser and finally compilation. Reading the theory and seeing the example code I had the feeling that I’ve seen these stuff before. And indeed I had. That first hand-written parser I wrote back then, gave me with the practical knowledge and experience I needed to have now a more solid understanding of how stuff works [TM].

This is just an example of the little pet projects I had. I have a bunch of them. Little small unfinished projects, focusing on different aspects of computer science. All that programming I’ve done, all those projects gave me the foundations to evolve my coding style and extend my knowledge, even a little. Now that I have real tasks to accomplish, I have that experience to start with.

I’ve started taking photos using my first digital camera. It was a Canon PowerShot 620A, I think, and I quickly fell in love with it. Since then I’ve upgraded to my loyal Canon EOS 400D. Unfortunately lately time isn’t enough for anything, and I’ve neglected it, tho I’m trying to change that.

So in order to give myself some motivation, I’ve included the photos section on the blog, so I’d be embarrassed not to post new photos. While I’m still thinking over which photos I should include in this online album, for the moment I’ve selected a few I like.

The pictures are uploaded into my flickr account, and then I use FAlbum WordPress plugin to retrieve those photos from flickr, and display them inside my blog.

I’ve done the initial integration, but I still need to fine tweak the CSS file of the FAlbum, so it can be more well integrated with the rest of the site, but hey, its a start (yes, I’m lazy :-). Enjoy!

I got back to Lancaster a few days ago and I am still trying to settle in. A week ago I was in Athens for a business trip I stayed there for two more days (the weekend) in order to see my girlfriend and catch-up with some friends. But from the moment I stepped my foot on the plane to go back, I realized how much I miss her.

I am back to UK now, in order to study a subject I love. Computers and their Science is the only subject that is able to excite and interest me so much, and being in a University studying Computer Science is a dream come true.

In Cyprus, on the other hand, I have my parents, more friends, and a job I love. Parents that I love to tease, friends that I like to have fun with and a job that I can’t sleep at night because I am thinking how to make things work.

How can a human put all these things into one heart, that each part misses one distinct thing?