This past Saturday I got invited by my brother to go with some of his friends through the Samariá Gorge, one of Crete’s most well known tourist attractions, and national park.

My sleeping schedule is all messed up now in the summer, so I got only about half an hour of sleep before waking up at 5:00 AM, in order to catch the first bus for Omalos at 6:15. Inside the gorge, I got the chance to experiment a little with my new phone’s camera and GPS functionality.

We did the 13 kilometer hike in 4:15 hours, and after another 3 kilometers, one can reach the village of Agia Roumeli. After spending some time at the beach and for eating at a local taverna, we took the ship to Sougia where we would camp for the night. Unfortunately, being somewhat sleep depraved, and over tired, caused some funny sickness on me, so me and my brother had to catch the bus back to Chania after arriving to Sougia.

However, just the hike through Samariá was worth it on it’s own, and I got to take a few very nice pictures of scenery you really don’t see everyday.

Thanks to my über ability to always forget something, I managed to end up with no charger for my cell phone for the summer. Since it was an ancient Panasonic X700 it was long due to be replaced, so I decided that is was time to pick up a new phone.

Originally I was planning to wait for the first Google Android platform phones to enter the market, but since I needed a phone ASAP I had to compromise. So I started considering the iPhone, since it is the only thing currently in the market filling the same niche as Android.

Unfortunately the iPhone, even though it offers the best user interface money can buy at the moment, feature-wise it is way too disappointing with way too many limitations. Since I tend to keep my gadgets for many years without replacing them, I needed something better.

So after considering countless of different phones, I finally found the one. The Nokia N82 Black.

Even though the N82 doesn’t boast an impresive touch screen, even though it is a little ugly and with a pretty disappointing battery performance, if I am to drag around a device with me for the next few years, it better be able to do as much as the N82 can.

Being a Nokia smartphone, it uses a real, WebKit based, web rendering engine for it’s browser, not some mobile WAP-style crap. A cell phone will never be the ideal tool for web browsing, but with a real web browser with Flash Lite support, it gets the job done in case I need to check something on the go.

Built in Wi-Fi support makes sure you don’t have to pay a fortune in order to enjoy it’s online features, which also include online radio, SIP support, instant messaging, uploading tools for Flickr, Facebook, Youtube etc.

The included A-GPS module is pretty accurate but unfortunately I couldn’t find any detailed enough maps for outside Chania (only the center), but back in Heraklion it will be really usefull (yeah, I get lost a lot). Yes, it supports voice navigation.

However, what really sets the N82 appart from any phone I know of, are it’s truly impressive (for a phone) photographic abilities. While it’s true that no cell phone can be compared to a true photo camera, the N82 gets pretty close. With a 5 MP sensor behind a Carl Zeiss lens, and a proper xenon flash – not a led, the only thing missing is optical zoom.

What is really cool is that it can automatically geotag your photos as you take them, using the built in A-GPS receiver. Video recording quality is pretty good as well, at 30fps in VGA resolution. More test photos, including a failed night shot, are available on my flickr profile.

Of course it also includes some useless features that I will never actually use, like TV-out and barcode scanning. What where they thinking? Fortunately most of those features don’t get in my way so I don’t really care. It’s also really nice that Nokia uses standard connectors and slots for everything, from micro USB and micro SD, to a standard 3,5mm jack for audio and hands free.

Performance wise it’s doing pretty well, with plenty of muscle to handle my everyday multitasking without any slowdowns. The downsides I’ve found so far is lack of optical zoom, not detailed enough maps for suburban areas of Greece, and somewhat tricky management of WLAN access points. The last one can easily be overcome with a third party application called Psiloc Connect, and I can live with the other two.

All in all I think it is a great phone which will last me for some time. Even at 400 euros it offers more features than most 500-600 euro phones, and it does it at a convenient candybar form factor.

Just today an article popped up in Ars Technica about the proposed EU telecom amendments. It seems there are certain rights groups that oppose heavily those amendments because they “are dangerous for users’ freedom and harmful to network neutrality”. However by digging in the actual amendment text it becomes apparent that none of the fears promoted by those activists actually hold any water at all. There is no three-strikes rule mention at all, no “Great Firewall”, no filtering rules, nothing. Well, unless good old QoS can be qualified as network filtering…

Quite to the contrary to the image that some would like to promote, the EU parliament has been much supportive of user rights, not to mention freedom in general. One need to look no further than the software patents case to see that the EU parliament is one of the least corrupt governmental bodies active today. But yet many seem to have an inherent need to dismiss most everything the EU does.

There’s no better example to this than the treaty of Lisbon. Thankfully most people are not stupid enough to not understand that progress and freedom are good things, which allowed the treaty to be ratified in most EU countries, but euroskeptiscism has been present just enough to be a pain in the ass. It took a complete anti-Lisbon campaign in Ireland, so it could be marginally rejected in a referendum. There has hardly been any significant pro-treaty promotion in Ireland but yet the best a full fledged lobbying campaign probably funded by US anti-EU money could do was 53%? Color me unimpressed, and unconvinced.

But what are the reasons for opposing the treaty of Lisbon, or even rejecting the EU Constitution in the first place? I’ve heard various arguments thrown around, the most prominent being that Lisbon is in reality the Constitution in disguise, and that the text is intentionally long and hard to read so the people won’t understand it’s content.

The Treaty of Lisbon is actually a long list of amendments to the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, which is why it is complicated to read; one needs to cross reference 3 separate documents in order to study the Treaty of Lisbon. However, this is blatantly ignoring the fact that the consolidated versions of the amended treaties are available online at all official EU languages. Anyone can do an analysis of the text, but apparently most won’t at all before criticizing. Outlines of the Treaties content are available all over the Internet, including even Wikipedia.

And yes, the Treaty of Lisbon is almost the same as the rejected EU Constitution, minus the part about official European symbols. Can anyone remind me what was wrong with the constitution in the first place? Besides being called a constitution.

All kinds of arguments have popped up against Lisbon/Constitution. Some have argued that the treaty establishes an EU army and attacks state sovereignty. The text is available online, emphasis mine.

The Union’s competence in matters of common foreign and security policy shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union’s security, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy that might lead to a common defence. The common foreign and security policy is subject to specific rules and procedures. It shall be defined and implemented by the European Council and the Council acting unanimously, except where the Treaties provide otherwise. The adoption of legislative acts shall be excluded. The common foreign and security policy shall be put into effect by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and by Member States, in accordance with the Treaties. The specific role of the European Parliament and of the Commission in this area is defined by the Treaties. The Court of Justice of the European Union shall not have jurisdiction with respect to these provisions, with the exception of its jurisdiction to monitor compliance with Article 25b of this Treaty and to review the legality of certain decisions as provided for by the second paragraph of Article 240a of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Within the framework of the principles and objectives of its external action, the Union shall conduct, define and implement a common foreign and security policy, based on the development of mutual political solidarity among Member States, the identification of questions of general interest and the achievement of an ever-increasing degree of convergence of Member States’ actions.

Sovereignty also doesn’t really seem to be an issue when you actually bother to read. So again, I’m overwhelmingly unconvinced by the much conservative arguments against Lisbon, and the EU Constitution as well. In contrast, it seems delaying the much needed evolution of the union, has proven to be a real danger. For a very real example, the US government is lobbying to get their hands on private EU citizen data. This is exactly the kind of thing that the EU parliament would kick out of the door, no questions asked, and the Treaty of Lisbon is exactly the kind of law that would give more decision making power to the EU and national parliaments.

Which begs the question. What really is the force behind resisting European unity? Is it just plain old conservatism of the human race, or is it in reallity the result of anti-EU groups lobbying? After all, individual states no doubt are a lot easier to loby and control. With the EU parliament showing no signs of abandoning citizen privacy and rights any time soon, there are bound to be forces scared to hell at the prospect of a united Europe.

On the plus side it has Edward Norton. The rest of the cast is ok, and it has relatively good directing and special effects. Also a cameo appearance of Iron Man at the end.

Other than that, an average action movie. Not painfull like Transformers or Jumper (oh god Jumper was traumatizing). Watchable, but I wouldn’t watch it for a second time.

http://eu.blizzard.com/diablo3/

I sent my last project for this semester yesterday, and as of today, it’s summer time for me. So I decided to do it. To start the blog I wanted to for so many years now. This is gonna be awesome

This is gonna be mostly a little from everything blog, what I am doing, my views on technology, whatever I feel like writting at the moment, including maybe some occasional politics once every 3 years. Most posts will be in english, but now and then I might post something in greek, if it is mostly aimed at a greek audience. I will be using the the english and greek tags where apropriate.

For now what I want to say the most is this.

Καλό καλοκαίρι.