Google Docs success story

As a member of the organizing committee of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD 2008), I spent some time (and still do as of today) in updating the conference's website (the original pages were created by the National University of Ireland, Galway for ISD2007, and we were granted the right to reuse them).

During this exercise, I found that Google Docs, and especially the spreadsheet application is extremely useful. For instance, while the authors were registering and submitting the camera-ready version of their papers, we used a dynamically updated spreadsheet to indicate the status of their paper.

Furthermore, while filling in the slots for session chairs and forming the program, we used another dynamically updated page which indicated which slots were empty. This page was updated in almost real time, as we edited the spreadsheet as soon as we handled the incoming emails and then the corresponding web-page was updated within minutes.

Finally, an important aspect of each conference is the publication of its statistics. In this regard, Google spreadsheets really rocks, not only because it allows to publish information dynamically, but also because it allows the creation of graphs which are also dynamically updated along with their associated data. For instance, we were able to publish a graph with information about the number of submitted papers per track, along with their acceptance ratio. Furthermore, using the nice gadgets available in the web application, we were also able to publish a map that illustrates the origin of the (affiliation of the) authors of accepted papers and the program committee.

Evidently, although an excellent tool, Google Docs is not perfect yet. One limitation I found is that I could not insert isolated fields of information in my web-pages (i.e., corresponding to a single cell). For instance, in one of the spreadsheets, I maintain information like the total number of accepted papers (which changes as some authors withdraw theirs). Unfortunately, that number had to be hard-coded in HTML, because I could not find a way to insert isolated (but dynamically updated) fields in my page. I understand that this can be solved with a custom gadget (if not done already), but of course it would be nice if it was provided as a standard gadget.

Although not perfect yet, Google Docs have really helped us with the organization of the conference, and I think this is something worth mentioning. As I really did not want to deal with anything but static HTML pages, Google Docs has proved to be an extremely useful tool.

Testing Google Maps for mobile again

Like I mentioned before, I am using Google Maps for mobile. While in my previous entry I praised the accuracy of the automatic positioning feature, I soon found out that this is not always the case. While at the new campus of the University of Cyprus, my phone centered my location as shown in the following screen-shot:





















It took some zooming out to realize that this is actually Buenos Aires :-) Only 12270 Km away ;-)

Update: Today (September 17th, 2008) I tried again and this time it gave me a somewhat more accurate reading. Again from the University of Cyprus campus, it showed me at the headquarters of my carrier (Cytamobile Vodafone) with an accuracy of 5 Kms. This of course covers more or less the whole city of Nicosia. Well, at least the results were imrpoved by a magnitude of X2454!

Google Maps in Cyprus

I have been using Google Maps for mobile for a while. Recently, I had to reset my E65 to install the latest firmware from NOKIA. When I reinstalled Google Maps, I apparently got a new version where the My Location feature if finally working (in Cyprus). Interestingly, the results were quite accurate (at least while close to the center of Nicosia).

If you own a supported device (most NOKIA smart-phones are supported), then check it out. Although the actual location is determined by inquiring the cell IDs via GSM, a WiFi or GPRS connection is needed for the map data.

The beginning

This is the beginning of my blogging life. Actually the beginning of my English blogging life. I was blogging in Greek before (and still do sometimes). But to enlarge my audience and allow more people to benefit from my wisdom, I started this blog in English as well.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Nearchos Paspallis and I was born and live in Cyprus (which is such a small and complicated country that people tend to add a link to its Wikipedia entry when they first mention her).

Back to myself, I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen. However, my tan (seen in my profile picture) is mostly natural due to sunlight I am exposed to during coffee breaks (rather than to LCD radiation). There are primarily two main reasons I spend this much time in front of my computer: First, I work as a researcher in Software Engineering (so, you could say it's because of my job). Second, I pursue a PhD in Computer Science.

The motivation for this blog is that it will help me organize my [public] thoughts, and have an archive of them in case I need to recall them. For instance, I plan to blog about technical stuff, and also thoughts related to my PhD research (e.g., try-and-fail lessons). Hopefully my ideas and opinion will not be completely useless to everyone.