Personal Blog

As a software developer you expected to write some code. The difference between a good and mediocre developer is a combination of knowledge and skills. I compiled a list of books that are necessary to all the developers. At the very early stage of the career, the developer should learn the basics: how to structure his code, how to write small functions, what is desirable and what is not. I can suggest two books for people starting in software development: "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" from Steve McConnell and "Clean code" by Robert C. Martin. The first one presents the basic rules on how to write good code, and the second one explores in greater depth the best practices for writing good code. A also strongly suggest to learn about the design patterns that exists in the software development. There are two well known books, the Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software by the gang of four (Erich Gamma,

Every summer I visit the old city of Rhodes in Greece. Every time i feel amazed from the liveness  of the city. People everywhere, shops, restaurants, and of course bars. Full of night life, crowded from young and old people. Here are some impressive photos: Rhodes, Greece, entry of the old city. Sokratous street, old town, Rhodes, Greece during the night. Full of life! Old medieval castle of the old town in Rhodes, Greece. Impressive also in the night. Old town of Rhodes, Greece view of the clock in one of the many small streets. Even in the smallest streets you can find open shops during the summer. In Rhodes, Greece.

Another day with heavy fog in the morning. These photos were taken around 07:30 AM. Heavy fog Nicosia early morning. Heavy fog Nicosia early morning. Heavy fog Nicosia early morning.

Spend one day to install and modify my new PC. I selected a Ryzen 5 1600 with 16 GB of RAM with an ASRock AB350 PRO4. I also installed a 850 SSD to speedup the IO. First impressions: really fast. The Linux part (Ubuntu 16.04) was mature enough, but the windows was not working out of the box. The only downside was that i had to update the BIOS of the motherboard to 2.5 to make the DDR4 to work in 2400 Mhz. The second issue was that i had to use the AMD pro drivers for my RX 460 to use the full potential of OpenCL. Played a bit with XMR (monero) mining. Despite what people are saying for bad performance in mining, i discovered 400-430 H/s with 7 threads and huge pages.

Many are thinking that the weather in Cyprus is always nice and hot. The reality is that it varies through the year. This is picture taken 3 months ago in Troodos (end of February), on of the mountains of Cyprus. Everything was covered with snow and the temperature was around 0. Also for small periods of time the temperature inside the capital city of Cyprus can go -1 or -2. Troodos snow Cyprus. And then, the spring came. We got a heat wave from Africa and the result was 32*C during the day inside the city of Nicosia. This picture was taken mid April. As we entering to the summer, we expect even higher temperature, up to 40*C. Temperature near Nicosia. Summer here we come! Can't wait the time to visit the beautiful beaches again! A beach near Larnaka. Notice the clean waters, the picture was take without any polarized filter.

Almost two weeks ago, I tried to connect one of my external USB hard drive to my desktop, but without any success. The files I wanted most were already backed up to a different disk, so I was not expecting a bit loss. However, I had a set of benchmarks that could be useful in the future. Ok I said, it is not a high priority, but how can I recover my data? Here is a number of steps I followed trying to recover the disk: 1. The disk is a WD passport USB drive. I noticed when I was moving the USB cable, the driver will disconnect from the PC. So the first obvious step was to try a new USB cable , but no luck. There was a small improvement in the transfer speed, but nothing serious (more on that later). 2. So the second thought was to open the case and connect directly the disk to the desktop PC. Unfortunately, the disk has embedded the USB controller and it cannot be attached directly to the PC with  SATA cable. WD Passport disk controller with USB connector. A bit of mor

I recently bought a new RTL dongle that supports Direct Sampling that allows frequencies less than 40Mhz. In particular, the model I ordered was the RTL-SDR BLOG V.3. DONGLE that was really cheap compared with other solution. It still can't reach the quality of the other more expensive receivers, but it still a step up. The Dongle comes with a long external antenna. The RTL dongle. So, the question now is how better is from my old SDR. I did a check with the RTL power tool to see what is the difference. My old SDR Dongle (Fitipower FC0013) has coverage from 22 to 1100 MHz. The new Dongle RTL Blog V3 a has Rafael Micro R820T has coverage from 24 - 1766 MHz, but it also contains Direct Sampling that allows for High Frequencies. A word of warning here, the reception using Direct Sampling is very bad, especially if you connect the antenna without a filter band or/and preamplifier. I did experiments using the rtl_power, and the results showed much more gain for the new Dongle.