Author Archives: Kyriakos Anastasakis

About Kyriakos Anastasakis

I was born on the beautiful island of Chios, Greece, where I received my primary school and high school education. At the age of 18 (in 1997), I moved to Athens to attend the Department of Informatics at the T.E.I. of Athens. In 2001 as part of a six month industrial placement, I joined Ulysses Systems, Piraeus as a junior Software Developer. In 2002 I received the degree of Informatics Engineer (Mihanikos Pliroforikis) from the T.E.I. of Athens. I continued to work for Ulysses Systems until the end of July of 2003. In 2003 I moved to Birmingham to study for the MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, at the University of Birmingham. In 2004, after I finished the MSc studies, I decided to stay in Birmingham and pursue a PhD degree in Computer Science. Since then I have been working towards the PhD in Birmingham under the supervision of Dr. Behzad Bordbar. Since 2005 I have been a part time self-employed software consultant. An interesting project I was involved in, was the development of a small scale CRM software for the Birmingham branch of MLP Private Finance. Since 2004 I have also been responsible for development and maintainance of the website of the Hellenic Society of the University of Birmingham.

Convert MyTV recorded files to DivX

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Update: Please note that I am in no way affiliated to the mytv service, in fact I am no longer abroad and I have stopped using it! So please do not send comments or e-mails for support requests! This post is just describing how to convert recorded mytv files into divx format! Thank you!

There is an internet service ( http://www.greeklive.tv/ ), which broadcasts greek tv channels over the internet. It is a subscription service, but it is probably worth the money considering you can watch all shows of the most popular greek tv stations of the past 6 days. Anyway, I only use to watch basketball games.

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This service has its own program (myTV.exe) , which has the ability to record a show. Now, the stream data is encrypted and the videos saved are not easy to transfer as they are encoded using a very unpopular codec. If you want to convert the video files saved by the application to DivX or other popular video formats, all you need to do is use the anyMP4 Media Converter.

Hard disk spring cleaning

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It is time for spring cleaning my hard disk at home. I am sorting/deleting files that I no longer use. I will post here files that I do not need now, but might need in the future.

So… I found a small linux shell script  that individually compiles every java file in a directory and all its subdirectories. The code is:

#!/bin/bash

for d in `ls`
do
javac $d/*.java > $d/compile.txt

done

The text file can be found here:  batchcompile

Log4j result in JTextPane

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I recently wanted to redirect the output of Log4j to a JTextPane, so as to output messages to the JTextPane using a different color depending on the severity.

I spent some time searching for information and I quickly put together a small example. The following screenshot shows the output.

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screenshot.jpg

The source code is available here.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mepis: Personal Experiences

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Kaspersky antivirus and comondo firewall have rendered my windows 2000 laptop to be very slow. So I decided to give it a try with linux.

My set-up: A Toshiba 2450-S203 laptop (P4@2.8), an nvidia video card (don’t remember the details of the chip) and a wireless pcmcia linksys WPC11 version 4.

My experiences:

Mepis 6.5

First I tried Mepis 6.5. It worked very well out of the box and the wireless card connected to our router without a problem. However since Mepis 6.5 is based on an older version of ubuntu its repository has reaaaaly old versions of software. This was a problem and since Mepis 7.0 is coming out, I decided to try version 7.0 RC2.

Mepis 7.0RC2

Installed well, but I couldn’t make the wireless card work. I sent a post to the mepislovers forum and received a number of useful answers. It could be the version ndiswrapper that comes with Mepis 7, or the driver. So I had to either download the latest source code of ndiswrapper and compile it, or try different version… Too much work for a RC version.

Kubuntu 7.1

As I have been a windows user, I decide to go for another kde distribution, kubuntu. The installation went smoothly. However I couldn’t connect the wireless card to our router. Kubuntu would recognise it, but as soon as I tried to connect to the router… kernel panic! The caps lock light flashed and the system was unresponsive. I tried to blacklist the native drivers and use ndiswrapper with my windows drivers… but to install ndiswrapper it asked for the installation cd! (Even though I was already connected to the internet with my ethernet cable).

I managed to make it word with ndiswrapper and the system was quite stable. So, now let’s try ubuntu for a change…

Ubuntu 7.1

As expected I had the same problem with the wireless card and  resolved it using ndiswrapper again. I have to confess that I liked the interface better than KDE. It was quite fast and stable. The problem is that I need windows anyway (some .NET development, software which don’t have a linux version) . I can use virtualization (vmware) to run windows from within linux, but to do that I need more hard disk space and probably I will need again the firewall and antivirus installed.

The verdict?? I might try to switch to linux after I finish writing up, but right now I don’t have the time, resources (i.e. hard disk space) to do it properly. However there are some things I didn’t like. First of all in (k)ubuntu, when the native wireless card drivers crashed, NOTHING was logged in the log files, no warning, no nothing (at least a windows blue screen gives you a message with the address/module that caused the crash.).  The other annoying thing… why do you need the installation cd if you are already on the internet and the package manager can find the binaries on the internet?

I mean ok… you blaim windows for the blue screens of death, you blaim them for asking the installation cd all the time… so people say switch to linux (or get a mac).. you switch to linux and see things are not much better there.

Having said that I hope that some day I will have the time to be actively involved in a linux distro.

TexnicCenter Profiles

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I recently created a new profile in Miktex to generate PDF files from latex through DVI (similar to the Latex=>PS=>PDF) profile that comes with the TeXnicCenter distribution. The new profile is a shortcut to what I was usually doing (i.e. latex => dvi and then dvi=>pdf).

The profile is called Latex=>DVI=>PDF. The profile file (which contains my other profiles as well) can be found here: TexnicCenter Profiles

Please note this profile file contains also the build-in profiles that come with the texniccenter distribution. Using this profile file, will override your current settings.