As a student living in the UK, I solely rely on the online Cypriot media to be kept up-to-date with life in my beloved island. Thanks to the efforts of my friends at WabbieWorks, I have a great website that aggregates all the Cypriot media in one place: Protoselido. It is to my great sadness, however, that the quality of the news published by the Cypriot media is declining, not only insulting the reader’s intelligence, but also sometimes altering the facts and shadowing the truth.

Before I start complaining, I should note that this post does not wish to defame the work done by all journalists in Cyprus — there are some who believe in what they are doing and the quality of their work is superb. This post is only meant to criticise the black sheep in that community, that expose the ugly side of Cypriot media. In the first revision of the post I also included links to various newspapers demonstrating the behaviour I will talk about, however, since my goal is not to accuse but to stimulate your thoughts I decided to leave them out.

First, there are noumerous examples of news articles that instead of exposing the facts, and just the facts, authors include their own personal opinion in them. Of course, everyone is entitled to his opinion, but when it comes to reporting facts and news your opinion, dear journalist, is irrelevant. Facts are facts, your opinion is your opinion, please don’t mess it up! If you want to express your opinion, please do so in a different article, marking it: MY OPINION. Some of us care to read just facts, I don’t need your commenting on them, I can figure out whats going on by myself. Additionally, mocking people and criticising their job, when you’re just in front of a computer typing an article doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a jerk. In foreign press, when you want to criticise someone else, you first must be ready to face the consequences and any further judgement upon your work and second you must know what you are talking about. If you are no expert, please shut up, and stop talking. If you want to report just the news, go ahead, thats fine, but KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.

Then I move on to statistics. There are plenty of articles out there that cite “scientific research” and “trusted sources”. There are articles warning us of “health risks”, “human behaviour” and so on. But they almost never cite their sources, or they never give clear statistics figures. Sometimes their statistics numbers don’t add up, where is the missing percentage dear journalist? Your dog ate it? They also never tell us how many people were chosen to participate, how many finished the survey and why the rest of them did not participate or never completed the survey. Not reporting part of their project is concealing the truth, and a concealed truth is not a “partial truth”, there is no such thing, its a LIE. Of course, the real issue is that the majority of your readers can’t read through the numbers, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but then again does this gives you the right to mess up with the numbers?

Continuing with the citation problem. You can’t tell us that “an american research said X”, you must tell us exactly WHICH american research. Was that research peer-reviewed via a journal or a publication, or you, my dear expert journalist, thought it was legit and it made its way into the news? This is how misleading facts are spread around via “legitimate” channels. The media must expose their source of information when it comes to scientific studies and warnings in order to stop spreading inaccuracies and avoid starting a general panic over illegitimate data.

Journalists and media ghouls must be really conscious on the amount of exposure a subject takes. We’ve all seen how manipulative the media can be, they can take a small incident and transform it into the issue of the century with overexposure, publishing the same thing over and over again in order to cause a general panic or expose someone they do not really like. Unfortunately Cyprus is small, and everyone is influenced by the political parties. For me, it is a blasphemy for a media house to be owned by a political party. It is outrageous when owners of media houses to say publicly that they elected a specific president because they exposed the “right news“. What are the right news, and who are you to judge that?

I sincerely hope that now that Cyprus is walking out of the shadows of the past, now that over 60% of our youth goes to Universities that this situation is going to improve. I hope that now that people are educated will start complaining more about the declining quality of the media in Cyprus and start demanding quality press, like the rest of our Europe neighbours have.

We engineers and developers are often expected to take an “always-on” role – always working, absorbing information, honing new skills. The situation becomes even more difficult for me when I am trying to take on another role as a PhD. Student, blurring the work and personal life boundaries, causing debilitating physical and mental effects. I am now called to take a head-on battle with burnout, and I am writing this article as a help and support to others that face the same problem as well as a numero-uno target for myself.

Burnout, a psychological response to “long-term exhaustion and diminished interest”, was first defined by an American Psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger. He defines burnout as “a demon born of the society and times we live in and our on going struggle to invest our lives with meaning. [...] (It) is not a condition that gets better by being ignored. Nor it is any kind of disgrace. On the contrary, it’s a problem born of good intentions.” [1].

Burnout goes through phases, but I am not going to write those here — its not the point. You can read about them here. The point of this article is to set targets on how to recover.

First step is to identify that something is going wrong. In my case I was able to identify it myself: nothing had the attraction it used to have. And what I mean by that: I was bored of everything: my research, my work, my life. I became more indifferent to some situations that I used to care greatly. Personal time was getting less and less with reducing sleep hours.

Then I tried to stop. However, stopping isn’t that easy: dependencies, responsibilities and promises. So I tried elaborating the issues I was facing at work with my employer, which understood the problem and things are starting to improve slowly on the work front. Being an engineer is extremely hard: you are expected to be on-call 24/7, you are expected to answer emails at 10PM at night, expected to check the status of the whole network. However, this sucks all your available mental power. I can not remember when I last had a holiday without having to answer a phone or check work-related emails. I can not remember a weekend passing without having to spend X hours catching up with email. I am taking a step back from that. No more email-answering on off-hours time, no more support or discussions on non-critical or work related issues when my work hours are over. And holidays are holidays.

Third step is to introduce boundaries and expectations. If everyone expected 110% from you up until now, let them know that you are not going to do that anymore. The days of 9-to-5 work hours are long gone and the boundaries between home and work are blurring. Especially when the office is “downstairs” or in the other room, in cases like myself. Unfortunately, I’ve learned the hard way that you don’t get a medal of honour for replying to email in the wee-hours, nor you become a better person if you check your Twitter every 1 minute. Setting sufficient boundaries between work and home has not only become a requirement in our ultra-connected and online world, but we must fight for it. Please understand people, its not all about the money, its about your mental health and happiness. Our lives are too short to be wasted like this.

As a creative type (yes, programmers, engineers and researchers are creative types. No balls no opinion, thank you), I find myself working more efficiently early in the morning, when everything is silent. The following words from Ernest Hemingway found a place in my heart when I read them:

“When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.“

I am trying to slowly move all my creative work earlier in the day, so I can be as fresh and energetic as possible when I am doing it. Even to the small percentage I’ve accomplished that I found that the work I produce during these hours is much better and I find myself to be more productive. Having the rest of the “business day” for 2nd class problems is a must, and free up that precious hour with creativity instead of dealing with instant messages and email.

This brings me to focus. Unfortunately, everything is instant nowadays: instant emails, instant chats, twitter, Facebook, phone calls. I tried closing my IM while working, and my productivity increased dramatically. And no, I am not chatting with friends, I am constantly interrupted by work-related questions and requests for hand-holding. Try to focus on stuff you are good and love doing, and leaving behind, if possible, what is soul draining: If you are a network engineer, focus on building scalable great networks not explain what is an IP to a client, if you are a developer, focus on building great web applications.

Balance via a process. A process guarantees to put your work into a timeline. It focuses more on getting things done than worrying what’s next. It is also important to let others know about this process, to understand how you work. When feeling overloaded and imbalanced: stop, decompress, communicate and focus.

A life should mean just that: life. You have your work-hours to be consumed by work.

[1] “Burn-Out: The High Cost of High Achievement.” Dr. Herbert J. Freudenberger with Geraldine Richelson, 0-385-15664-2, 1980

Spotify, is the name of a new revolutionary subscription music service. The service is available to its users via an application (currently supports Mac OS X, iPod Touch/iPhone, Windows and Android), which is very iTunes-alike. The concept is simple: all the music in the world available in your finger tips. LEGALLY. You just go ahead and search for a song/artist/album and voila!

It literally contains millions of tracks from almost every artist you can think of. Once you select a track it plays almost instantaneously at high-quality (premium users get an even better streaming service at 320kbps where available). You can also create multiple playlists which, if you are a premium member you can take offline (i.e. listen to even if Internet service is unavailable — handy if you’re travelling or on the mobile).

It also has a really nice artist info page, containing all available to Spotify discography, plus a short biography. It has also an artist radio: it composes a radio station with music alike to the artist you picked (like last.fm or Pandora). It also has a more generic radio feature, where you pick the genre plus the year range of the music you’d like to listen to. Pretty neat.

Now a little about the company: apparently the record labels own 18%+ of the company, so I guess thats one of the major reasons of the huge library that is available via Spotify. This seems to be a step forward, as record labels are realising they can’t fight piracy; instead change their methods of selling (or in this case renting) music. Why the record labels did not support such models earlier?! If this succeeds could send piracy into extinction.

Of course, all of these come at a price tag: £9.99/month. However, for all of the music of the world readily available LEGALLY I do not mind paying that, but for those of you that don’t like that there is also a free service (lower music quality plus no offline playlist support) if you manage to get an invite.

Recently, we witnessed the sacrilege and grave robbing of Tassos Papadopoulos. We do not know yet who did it, and under what pretenses, but the media argue that it is done in the light of the current on going talks for the Cypriot problem. This action has sparked the reaction of various politic fractions and individuals in Cyprus. This action also prompted for this blog post, not to comment, however, the action, but the reaction it caused in Cyprus.

I’ve heard comments criticizing Christian Orthodox religion for their burring customs. They bury their dead, instead of cremating them and they have yearly memorial services to honor their dead. Some, of course, do not follow this and its completely understandable. Its a free country, you can believe and follow whatever you want. No one is forcing you to bury your dead, or honor their memory. However, you can not criticize or discriminate others who choose to follow this, keep your criticisms to yourself.

A man’s grave has been violated. For his family, this is a terrible incident, it goes against their belief system, and this creates great sorrow. Out of respect to their grieve, defamatory comments, accusations and stupid remarks on religion should be thrown around like an outcry for attention. Even if the grave of Adolf Hitler was robbed, the same respect should be paid: respect to one another is what makes us humane.

Unfortunately in Cyprus everyone believes should follow their opinion, even if they are no experts on anything. It is a different thing to have an opinion and express it in a civil matter and another one to try to force to anyone. They even take it a step further: if your beliefs are different than mine, it is OK to make humiliating, discriminating comments about them, with no respect whatsoever. Hate and discriminatory speech is also illegal in Europe, last time I checked.

This way of thinking is unfortunately advertised by the media, the political parties and in school. It is everywhere. Everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as they all have the same, or else they get slapped. Either with improper comments, rejection in social life, tagging etc.

The foundation of a democratic and free society is respect. You must respect ones opinion and beliefs, even if they are completely wrong in your opinion. You also need facts, evidence, a cool head and the ability to accept when you are wrong and not.

Disclaimer: The author of this post does not take any political standing with regards to the above mentioned politicians. Instead, he is trying with a gentle way to point out mutual respect.

Reading through Guardian the other day, I came across an Oxford philosopher that gave away a third of his salary away to charity. Of course we hear all about noble actions that give money to developing countries every single day: The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation with over 26.1 Billion USD endowment, the Rockerfeller foundation with over 4.6 Billion USD Endowment. Those amounts make you think that they are doing a lot to help the poor and improve the situation in the third world countries.

Well, you are wrong.

First of all, the majority of these countries are constantly under war. Genocides, coups, civil wars, tyrants, rapes, hunger, diseases. The first logical question that pops in my mind when I see war in these countries is one: these guys don’t have food to eat, where do they find the resources to buy or manufacture weapons? Of course, you’ll say that the tyrants ruling these countries have access to valuable resources, such as gold and diamonds, and trade these for weapons.

Fair enough, but instead trying to stop the war in these countries, why don’t you just get those weapon dealers? Getting the knife out a child’s hands will stop it from harming itself. Why we do not do that instead?

Then, moving on to the next question. Where all these huge pile of money we are donating going? I mean, people has been donating actively for the past 40 years towards the development of these countries. The answer is quite simple: you buy them a plate of food and a pill today, but they need these and tomorrow. So your donation help 10 people live through the day. But what happens the next day? They need these resources again, because they have no means of growing their own food. They have no resources of buying the medicine themselves. So, even you can’t just throw at them 1 billion dollars for food and auto-magically they’ll start growing food of their own. You’ll need to constantly throw billions to keep them fed.

Instead of buying them food, why don’t we show them how to grow it? If they have water issues, why don’t we build them water desalination units? Why don’t we build them a city with that 1 Billion dollars and let these people live in it? Oh, but the tyrants aren’t going to let that happen, are they? Of course the won’t. UNTIL YOU START EDUCATING THEM. Until you get the guns out of their hands. Until you stop the weapon dealers of selling them bullets. Until you stop accepting blood diamonds. It is logically and fundamentally easier to catch and stop 100 gun dealers that are selling bullets to all fractions in Africa, than convince a tyrant to stop killing people. Why don’t we do that first, and then focus spending 1/3 of our salary on feeding them?

And then, there’s another truth that the G8 governments know really well: if African countries were as developed as we are the global warming would be accelerated, oil would be up 50 years earlier and food would not be enough for 10 billion people. Earth will have no resources to support our exponential growth. So, to summarize, our economies are grown in expense and thanks to Africa. It is to our interest that people die by the hundreds every day in Africa, so we can use the resources that normally would go to them for us.

Lets face it, earth’s resources are allocated unequally. The problem is not the tyrants, nor their unfortunate luck. The problem is that governments want Africa to stay like that. Why face resource exhaust issues in 100 years, when we just leave Africa die off? The real issue is that we are going to face these issues anyway, we are just postponing them. Why don’t we start developing technologies that will help make this world a better place? Why don’t we stop spending our resources on weapons and 500$ bags and open our eyes to see the real pressing issues?

But maybe I am just a conspiracy theorist, not a technocrat.

Three years ago I was about to be discharged from the Cyprus National Guard, with a confirmed place at Lancaster University to study Computer Science. I also started looking for a summer job, to save some money for the 3 years abroad.

I was fortunate enough to be hired from a small ISP, Wavespeed, in which I served a software developer initially, but I also got into networks. After the acquisition of Cablenet from Wavespeed’s people, I led the design and implementation of the company’s Nationwide IP backbone and integrating it with the rest of the equipment. Currently, I am (supposed to be anyway ) the IT Manager, leading the very dynamic team of Cablenet’s Network Operations Center, making sure to provide whatever is necessary to support the company’s rapid growth.

This job not only allowed me to develop my computer skills, but it also to improve time management, team working and managerial skills. Having this job concurrently during University sometimes meant psychological exhaustion, but I believe it was worth it: my university theoretical background has a matching practical understanding in the industry, which I believe is a very important and crucial thing for one to have, especially in Computer Science where theory must be backed with experience. Career-wise, I love this job. Working in an ISP however, can be very stressful. Especially when you are in charge for the 24/7 uninterrupted operation of the network in a rapidly expanding company with constantly changing parameters. Now with the start of my PhD I don’t know if I can still keep up doing both at the same time.

Now, academic wise I have successfully completed my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Innovation with a 1st class degree (highest grade in UK) and I am set to continue with postgraduate studies doing a PhD. During these three years I believe I have met most, if not all, my personal targets and for me undergraduate university education is what I hopped for: explore, learn, challenging and sometimes difficult. Now I will be continuing with a PhD at Lancaster University. I do not know the exact area yet, I want to poke around a bit before decide on a subject, but certainly it is going to be network-related. I would like to relate my PhD and work as much as possible (if at all possible), so I can find a way to keep both.

For now, I will try to relax as much as possible during the summer, clear my head and start refreshed the new long period of at least 3 years of PhD.

The exam period is over at last. I think I did well, but not great. I guess we’ll find out in a few days for sure . Apart from a few remaining lectures next week (Commercial Exploitation of Innovation) and official confirmation, I am a Bachelor of Science .

I have accepted Lancaster University’s PhD Offer, so I will be staying here for the next 3 years (at least). I am pretty excited about this, and I am looking forward for this new journey ahead of me. Academic wise I am going to work in Systems, particularly networks. Since I am already involved in the ANA Project, I will continue working there until the project finishes and start looking into stuff I’d want to do a PhD.

I am also moving out of the University Campus, into a decent apartment. I am paying 450 pounds rent for a 4×7m room, so I guess its time to move to town, where I can get something better and bigger for the same cost.

Check my super-duper girlfriend’s first comic strip! Please comment & Share . I am urging her to create a website for them, they look so cute & funny!

My last exam period is approaching, and I have already gotten into the studying mode. This exam period tho, is a little bit different than previous exam periods. My university examinations are always just after Catholic Easter, at the beginning of the Summer term.

At my first year at the University fortunately Orthodox easter was aligned with the Catholic Easter, so I had a chance to fly back home and rest, replenish mental supplies and come back refreshed for studying. Last year, unfortunately the exam period was much earlier and the two Easter dates were not aligned, so I had to stay in Lancaster and study. However I was lucky enough to speed two weeks with my girlfriend in UK, one holidays and one studying, so I had someone close to me with me at the Easter and during the very pressuring period of exams, which helped me get through exams like a blaze.

This year however, I am stranded alone in Lancaster. The bad weather feels even worse, the pressure from the exams seems heavier on my chest. Accompanied with worries about answer expectations and future aspirations to make the pita even worse.

During these times you realize that the only one that truly cares about you is you, and its you and only you that can guide you through this difficult process. There is this much a girlfriend is willing to do for you, this much a friend can say to make you feel better.

I am trying to forget how difficult the situation is emotionally, and think of this period as the last Hercules’ Labors, after which peace and relaxation will follow along with the honor to be a Bachelor of Science.

Amen

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.