Alex Natsios

My Services

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:00:57 +0200

Coming back soon™

Consultations with Drake

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:52:12 +0200

Coming back Soon™

Fosscomm 2015 at Athens

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 22:56:28 +0200

Fosscomm is the annual conference of the Greek Free Software communities. This year the event took place on November 7 & 8 at the Technological Educational Institute(TEI) of Athens. This time around openSUSE had quite the strong presence in the conference with 3 talks and a booth.

openSUSE-el

The Booth itself always had at least 3 persons busy answering questions with old time and some new contributors to the project and local community handling the organization and distribution of the swag in the booth and explaining the merits of our current structure, projects and releases.

My Browsing Environment

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 23:09:53 +0200

I did a huge cleanup of my firefox profile today, which resulted in me removing tons of stuff (from dead bookmarks to useless addons to many other subtle or not that subtle stuff). The whole process helped to return firefox in a rather working/healthy state, but also served as a good reminder of something i had in mind for quite a while now. I wanted to document my firefox setup once i decided that it is stable or has reached a state that pleases me usability wise (hard if you consider all the changes that happened to it throughout the years).

YAPC::EU 2014 at Sofia, Bulgaria - Day 3

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 14:56:59 +0200

Like every other conference in YAPC too day 3 was far less populated and way quieter.

R Geoffrey Avery (rGeoffrey) - Dancer: Getting to Hello World

A very nice and from the ground up talk from rGeoffrey, what i liked here is him going from the ground up showing the whole stack instead of bluntly talking about how to install run and end a ‘Hello world’ app.pl with dancer. As a small bonus he also showed the differences if you wanted to use mojolicious instead.

YAPC::EU 2014 at Sofia, Bulgaria - Day 2

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 14:51:37 +0200

Today was pretty much a “Devops” day for me, both by watching most of the devops track and holding conversations mostly about/with devops people.

Bradley Andersen (elohmrow) - Regex 101

This was a rather interesting talk in which Bradley went over the bare basics of regex, making an analysis and effective crash course about understanding them and starting to write sane regex. Unfortunately it was too beginner oriented for me but found it quite brilliant for someone who never saw regex before (or as some people like to say “ascii puke”).

YAPC::EU 2014 at Sofia, Bulgaria - Day 1

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:40:40 +0200

Two weeks ago, i went to Sofia, Bulgaria but due to being extremely busy with other work these posts got a little delayed. In this series of posts i will describe the 3 days of the conference.

YAPC::EU (short for “Yet Another Perl Conference::Europe”) is the annual conference of the European Perl community. This year the conference took place from August 22nd through the 24th at the Inter Expo Center (IEC). I arrived the day before the conference, just in time to have lunch and head to the pre-conference Welcoming party. The meeting took place to the “Krivoto” Beer House. in the center of sofia.

Fosscomm 2014 at Lamia

Wed, 28 May 2014 22:37:21 +0200

Fosscomm is the annual conference of the Greek Free Software communities. This year the event took place on May 3 & 4 at the Technological Educational Institute(TEI) of Lamia. This time we organized the road trip with Pavlos Ratis (dastergon) from Thessaloniki.

openSUSE-el

Most of the greek community was recuperating from the long and tedious journey to Dubrovnik, Croatia for the Annual openSUSE conference where some had a series of presentations while the rest helped as volunteers there. That left me practically alone at Fosscomm to have a talk and man a booth which we co-hosted with dastergon as a multi-community booth (openSUSE/Gentoo).

Scheme? Functional Programming? Why?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:39:57 +0200

Studying functional programming is an opportunity to greatly broaden your horizons, discover a whole new way to represent programs, to approach problems and reach solutions while thinking about languages. Programming in a functional language is pretty much fundamentally similar to programming in any other type of language (like logic programming), it represents programs and algorithms through distinct forms of abstraction and gives you a new toolset with which to solve programming problems. many of the techniques of functional programming are beginning to be included in new mainstream languages, so taking the time now to immerse yourself in them will leave you with a headstart and a thorough understanding of those techniques.

Fosscomm 2013 at Athens

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:10:34 +0200

Fosscomm is the annual conference of the Greek Free Software communities. This year took place on April 20-21 at the Harokopio University of Athens and I had a presentation with Ευστάθιος Ιοσιφίδης (Eustathios Iosifidis). We organized the road trip with friends from Volos and Thessaloniki.

openSUSE-el

The greek openSUSE community had a handful of presentations (most of them done by or together with Ευστάθιος Ιωσηφίδης (Efstathios Iosifidis). Iosifidis had a whole six of them, however i only managed to watch the first one about OwnCloud. Then we co-presented “Developments and Usage of E17 on openSUSE 12.3” a talk about the excellent Desktop Shell Enlightenment 17 and what work has been done for it to be packaged and ready so you can get an awesome openSUSE flavored experience while running it :). E-presentation

Single File VCS

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:24:36 +0200

It is no secret I like version control systems(VCS). As most SysAdmins i believe that pretty much everything should be versioned, any file that we tinker with must always be backed up and versioned somewhere.

I am pretty sure that by now you maintain a lot of stuff in modern vcs like Git repos (or whatever floats your boat), the point is you already use version control. However as you might have guessed even though systems like Git sound (and for certain situations ARE awesome) they tend to not work well for a SysAdmin’s purposes, especially when talking about configurations.

Gnome 3 6 Release Party

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:31:19 +0200

Yesterday in Thessaloniki, Greece we went to celebrate the Release of Gnome 3.6 with the Greek Gnome Community. The release party was held at Cafe Alfa, i attended the event with a couple more LinuxTeam members mostly as volunteers for the event.

The party was very nice and full of attendees, friends we haven’t seen for a looong time and a load of new people :) There were discussions about The new Gnome release of course but also about Open Source in general, communities, a lot of drinking and people networking.

Fosscomm 2012 at Serres

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:10:34 +0200

Greetings, i had some personal issues so this post got a “little” delayed.

Fosscomm is the annual conference of the Greek Free Software communities. This year took place on May 12-13 at serres and I had a presentation with Δημήτρης Παπαπούλιος(Dimitris Papapoulios). We organized the road trip with friends from Athens.

LinuxTeam

On the first day of the conference at 11:30 I had a presentation about an “open source college laboratory courses administration platform (Diogenis)” with Δημήτρης Παπαπούλιος(Dimitris Papapoulios). Dimitris Talked about what the application is how it works, who wrote it and all those stuff also about how can someone contribute to it. I explained the tech stack under which Diogenis operates, what we use for the server,what optimizations have we done etc.

Thessaloniki.rb second meetup

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:04:12 +0200

Three days ago on September 6th we had our second meetup in the Seminar#1 room of the Library in City College (location pinned in the map, found in the links at the end of the post). The room was almost full of attendees, hinting that we might soon enough need a bigger room for the meetups! :)

We had to rush things a bit, but in the end we managed to fit 2 presentations. Vasilis used his Macbook and Justin.tv to provide a live streaming of the event, video quality was quite awful though (old camera, insufficient lighting) but there was a good audio quality.