aberrare humanum est!

Pasta with tuna and roquefort

2011-01-02T00:39:00.012+02:00

Since it's all I could assemble from my fridge and cupboard tonight, and I haven't found it on Google, I will assume I invented this recipe (yeah, right) and I will share it with you.

Ingredients for one person:

3 handsfull of pasta -- I use penne for these kind of things, I find them more appropriate
1 can of tuna pieces "nature" (100 grams) (in water that is, not in oil)
40-50g of roquefort
5 green olives from the can, "nature" -- not spiced or anything
1 table spoon of olive oil
20-30 minutes of your precious time

Boil the pasta by your own method, but make sure the method doesn't include cooling them in cold water at the end. I personally boil them in a lot of water (so that they don't get stuck) and with the table spoon of olive oil (with a little bit of salt as well usually, but in this recipe the roquefort is already salty enough).
In the mean time, prepare the plates to serve on. For this recipe (and its sister recipes, see below) I use relatively deep bowls rather than shallow plates, it helps better achieving the purpose of the recipe. Put a layer of tuna and cheese cut in little cube pieces (or whatever shape your roquefort takes -- if you manage to cut it in cubes please post a comment and explain me how :) ). Have the rest of the tuna and squared cheese next to you. When the pasta are done, drain the water and put some of the hot pasta over the fish and cheese layer in your plate. Then put some more tuna & cheese, then another "layer" of pasta and so on, as many times as you feel necessary (the idea is that the heat of the pasta will heat a bit the tuna and melt the cheese) -- I for one had only 2 layers of pasta and cheese. On the top, throw in the olives and a little spread of cheese.

Here's a picture of my dinner:

The recipe feels rather light, although the sensitive souls might not like the combination of roquefort cheese and tuna (the roquefort is a little "strong" for tuna). For those (and not only), I should mention that I did the same in the past with goat cheese (the light, "tartinable" one -- like the one in the wikipedia picture), and my cook nose would say it should work fine with feta cheese or danish white cheese as well, which are lighter and combine better with tuna. For these lighter versions, I would even go that far and spread a bit of basil on top -- fresh or dried -- it will do miracles for the appearance.

Bon appetit!

P.S. Wow that was long, it took me a full year to post again!

Farewell 2009, happy new 2010!

2010-01-02T22:47:00.003+02:00

2009 is gone now, it was a long year, at least that's how it felt for me, with goods and bads, sometimes packed together. In one word, I would call it "intense".

It was quite some traveling, plenty of contacts, pretty good work, also bad work (and learning from it), I got my master (done with school but still haven't decided where to go next), did nice progress building together with the XWiki team. It was especially a year of intense relations with people, in general and with closed ones in particular (physically close as well as spiritually close), with myself trying to learn through all these. The change of years finds me feeling in the very middle, the passed experiences only revealing that there is more to come for the next year.

Never planning too much ahead, hoping for the best but expecting nothing other than the unexpected, I look forward to more intensity from 2010 and the next decade, and I wish you all a

Happy new year!

My Balaur.ro real life test

2009-12-18T01:47:00.011+02:00

Today I went on the Balaur.ro to see some options for a friend who's about to get jobless (independent of their competency, it's a business matter). What I first liked was the way the balaur greeted me with nice personal words, as if indeed it was the lil' dragon addressing to me. Pretty fancy and quite relaxing (not ugly formal), along the good guidelines set by the funky dragon, like, I'm about to change job, I'm stressed enough, it's cool to have a friend talking to me.

It's nice to see that kind of interface for a serious app in Romania, usually the friendly addressing is reserved to party/fun/social websites ("vino sa te distrezi cu noi!"), while the stuff that help you get the job done treat you like some sort of a grandpa ("Aici puteti sa va rezolvati toate problemele existentiale. Inscrieti-va acum!")

Since I had no CV and no interest in a long term experience (I just looked around to checkout the options), I went to the plain search:

I looked around, found a few nice things (as in nice jobs) and I liked the way the balaur showed duplicates so that I don't get emotioned twice for the same job.

Then, knowing that my friend is a bit demanding, I tried to filter by salary amount. I just loved the dragon letting me know that my filtering is messing it all up since very few of the jobs have salary level filled in.

I knew about the nice linkedIn references feature before (showing who are the people on linked in that specify that company as a workplace) but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work tonight...

Not really showcase-of-all-features kinda story, but it's really the first time I needed the balaur, and it does a pretty good job! I admit I never looked on the jobs sites to compare the experience but I like the aggregating balaur, and most specially it's semantic features (filtering, eliminating duplicates, basically helping me a lot with the search).

Great job guys!

If you're going to Saaan Franciiiisco

2009-11-10T23:29:00.005+02:00

As I mentioned in the previous posts, before the GSoC mentors summit, we spent a few days (from thursday noon to friday afternoon) in the beautiful city of San Francisco, "the Europe of the US", they say. Indeed it was nice, we had Starbucks coffee, saw most of the touristy places: Pier 39, Coit tower, walked through the China town, rode the cable car (no pics from there unfortunately), and of course, biked over the Golden Gate bridge.

And, since a picture is worth a thousand words (and this is also a very good excuse), I leave you with exactly thirty four thousands selected words.

Google Summer of Code Mentors Meeting last day

2009-10-27T23:07:00.003+02:00

Day 2 at the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit didn't start to well as I woke up later than I should have. But I recovered well, arrived to Google and, after a Google coffee, went to the day 2 sessions, starting with a half of discussion about how to handle conflict / offensive situations on OS communication channels.

Then, after a talk about project forks with real stories, we had lunch, to continue afterwards with the great "Advanced trolling" session: very funny, with more or less serious advices about how to troll and of course, lots of live trolling (I couldn't tell you the name of the speakers but they just rocked).

To get back to normal, following we had a rather serious and educative conversation about the open source business models, of course, with real life stories, after which a healthy conversation about how to fail a student with grace. It was more towards how to detect early and prevent the situation of a failing student, but we had a few conclusions, the most important being that the student needs to hear the word "fail" as soon as possible, just to know it exists.

Closing session followed, by Leslie wonderful as always, with a list of ways to improve the GSoC. Pretty voted was that we need to go back to the black tshirts. Definitely.

After that, some of the mentors headed to the airports for their homes, and the rest went back to the hotel to sit in the hot tub. It was a fun night, full of enjoyable conversation with (I hope I can mention everybody, because I don't know names nor projects of all the nice OS people we had fun with): Mark and Jorge from Turbogears, Marten and Vincent from Crystal Space, Tobias and Tobias from GCC (yep, they're called the same), Greg from PostgreSQL and Google (who was very nice and drove us to the hotel from Google), Leslie of course (very happy with the hot tub) and the other cool guys whose names I don't know. Ah, I also met the author of the inappropriate email :), at the closing session.

The GSoC mentors summit is very joyful and animating, a very diverse experience, it's great to meet so many people (some of which give the feeling of an "Open Source school") and chat about everything from students strategies to stories from the visa interview.

Now, after a long long day (with a bit of the night in the plane flying towards the day), here we are in Paris, in a short stop on our way home, with me surprised that I managed to finish this post, and that my fingers still listen to me and continue to type.

If you're going to Saaan Franciiiisco , to the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit

2009-10-25T04:04:00.003+02:00

So the first day of the Google Summer of Code mentors summit is done.

After arriving in San Francisco Thursday at noon and spending Thursday and Friday there -- blog post to come, with pics -- last night we arrived at the Sunnyvale hotel for today's mentors summit. We had a nice (well, tastes are discussable) thai food dinner and met some of the open source folks: John from the Ascend project and a Scottish guy (whose name I don't remember -- Jim?) from a language processing project.

Today we went to Google plex for the first day of the Mentors Summit, saw a bit of where Google people work, ate their food, drank their drinks and snacked their snacks. We've got the mentors yellow shirts -- I start to believe more and more that the whole purpose of this years GSoC was to make people wear ridiculous colors :) -- and had a short cool opening from Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona after which we did the session proposing and scheduling.

Also in the bus this morning we socialized with some nice people from the Fedora project and over coffee we met the other Romanian guy in the mentors gang (at least that's what I know about), Stefan Bucur.

First session we went into was about project hosting, all the platforms out there with their goods and bads, including self hosting.

Then some more thai food and caffeine free coke for lunch in the sun, accompanied by nice flute (?) music from one of the mentors.

After the lunch, we went to the talk about how to make mentoring a continuous activity, with discussions about potential similar programs initiated by OS organizations, and successful stories about motivating students.

Then we went to see how to teach college students to be "hackers" (yeah, I intentionally didn't go to the women in open source talk that was in the same time), how to make them use the real-world tools and how to motivate them, with a successful story from the university of Chicago. With this occasion I discovered that there are a lot of people in this year's summit (maybe in the program in generally) which are part of a university team (teaching, researching, etc).

After a short break, I went to see "pretty pictures": discussion about alternative methods for documentation (image, video, anything non-text), how to produce it and how to stimulate others to. Bottom line is that you need to make your users "ecstatic" about the project so that they feel the need to show it to the world in a screencast :).

Then, the last session of the day was about the relation between the academia world and the open source one, and how nice would it be if all knowledge in the academia would be published and maintained as an open source project.

Now we are back at the hotel and we're gonna have a cool pizza party by the pool. I tried on my mentors shirt over my khaki long-sleeved shirt and it's actually pretty decent. Going out now to amaze everybody with this combination (and eat), and hope to be able to stay up longer than yesterday (I fell asleep at 23, dear me).

Ubiquity fun (at the Scripting Challenge)

2009-06-04T01:58:00.006+03:00

The PSW command I told you about in the previous post was my entry for the Scripting Challenge at the Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web Workshop, which took place on Sunday, in Crete, collocated with ESWC 2009. The challenge idea is to create a < 1000 lines script which uses the Semantic Web to create real-world applications.

I couldn't go there to present it, so I created a screencast / demo to replace my live presentation:

Unfortunately I didn't win, it was the Researchers map that took the prize this year, but I got quite nice feedback (thanks everybody!) and new Twitter friends :). Also, it was very fun from one end to the other: from creating the script, to the paper describing the script, to creating the screencast (interesting experience, long live recordMyDesktop and mencoder) and getting feedback about it almost live on Twitter and Facebook, as the scripts were presented at the workshop and I was home having (late) lunch.

I'm now working on advancing the idea, to also have it a part of my MSc (that's why blogging takes a while, because MSc takes the other whiles in my life :) ).

Ubiquity fun

2009-05-16T01:49:00.011+03:00

And my new Ubiquity command is done!

It's a simple prototype of a semantic search command, using data from semantic data repositories available through SPARQL endpoints to answer user questions like find director of Closer or find author of Parallel Algorithms in dblp and microformats to insert the result in the web page, to preserve the semantic markup of the response when user is editing web document (rich text areas or simple text areas).

Have a look at it on its info.uaic home: http://students.info.uaic.ro/~lucaa/psw/. (Update: the new 'home' is at http://www.infoiasi.ro/~lucaa/psw/ since my infoiasi account changed).

It can be heavily improved in terms of data operation, as well as user interface, but it's quite a nice toy.

(I'd love to show you how nice it finds the license of XWiki on dbpedia but somehow my print screen command does not work when Ubiquity is up, and I also need to find out why it fails to load the results when I add it from an extension and register it programatically, but that's gonna be another night...)

I'm going to FOSDEM!

2009-01-26T01:12:00.004+02:00

I'm going to FOSDEM, the meeting for open source and free software developers meeting in Brussels, on the 7-8 february weekend.

I will be there with Marta and Sergiu (not with Marius too, unfortunately), (lightning) talking about XWiki's new GWT WYSIWYG editor we're working on these days (and I am heavily into), on Sunday afternoon in the Ferrer room.

Otherwise I will be wandering around the halls and rooms and talks and workshops of FOSDEM, just like last year, proudly wearing my XWiki tShirt, socializing (!) with geeks and exchanging open source and free ideas with anyone interested.

so, I'm going to FOSDEM. What are YOU doing on the 7-8 february weekend?

Google Talk has Voice Chat... NOT

2008-11-13T00:46:00.004+02:00

As you probably all have already found out, Google has launched voice & video chat from GTalk.

Here's what a friend got when he discovered it and, excited by this great news, tried to share it with me:

q.e.d.

Wrong operating system?

2008-09-07T14:10:00.009+02:00

I love this world: I love the new software and technology launches, the fuss around new services and new applications, the way we use technology, the way we combine it, etc. I start thinking that I'm living the best possible worlds and sometimes I feel so surprised and somehow proud of being contemporaneous and partially part of this.

This week brought us, among so many others, Chrome (the oh-so-talked-about Chrome) and the new Picasa (namely 3) + Picasa web . Nice stuff from google, cool things to play with.
Today I wanted to install the new Picasa and, of course it is not available for Linux, yet. Not to mention that Chrome is only available on Windows. Not to mention how much did I wait for Picasa 2.7 with (finally!) upload to web albums for Linux and how thrilled I was to have it this spring.

And I could mention such a long list of applications following the same pattern...

With so many cool applications available on Windows and Mac and the application developers completely ignoring Linux users, I found myself wondering today: am I using the wrong operating system for my software needs? I mean, maybe the type of user I am, the software I need and the way I use my computer in conjunction with the web is not the stuff that a Linux user would do, or what Linux is made for. It's not about not knowing or not wanting, I can tweak stuff, I can hack my Linux system, sometimes I get too involved in trying to make a webcam work or fixing sound / network / etc drivers problems, etc but I might be too social (wtf other would I need a photo management program for?) or too "trendy" for a Linux (wtf other would I want Chrome for?)

But still, I am using Ubuntu (8.04!), the Linux for girls ;) and given its popularity I should have more!

Yeah, I know my problem is obsolete in the context of the web operating system (or whatever the name of the concept is) but still, some doubts darken my clear skies of hope: Chrome on Linux? Firefox on Linux at the same level as for other OS? Plugins?

Don't get me wrong, I love my operating system, I love its openness, I love its freeness, its ubiquity (being able to have it everywhere just the same and for the same 0 charge) but I'm wondering whether we're the right one for each other.

I understand it's all about money and business (why the hell would application developers write Linux versions of the applications when Linux OSs users are so few (supposedly) and can wait anyway since they use a free operating system and should not expect too much from life because they don't pay?) but I just wish we lived in a (more) perfect world...

XWiki at Infoeducation

2008-08-30T19:31:00.001+02:00

A couple of weeks ago took place the Infoeducatie computer science camp, and XWiki was there, to do a teaser presentation about our platform. I went there with Jerome and Thomas, who was visiting the Iasi office at that time. Although it's been happening for a while and it is the place to be for computer highschool students, I didn't go to the Infoeducation camp ever as a student, but fortunately I grew up to get there as a 'lecturer'.

Our "host" all through the days was Vlad Giurcanu, my computer science teacher from highschool who was there with his (successful) team of students.

We spent two days at the camp, its last two days (it's something around 6 days) and got the strong taste of the computer science at Galaciuc during the Infoeducation camp (in the very nice romanian mountains). We met a lot of interesting people and some of the smart kids there -- it is a very nice place to find out things, to have IT discussions and the crowd there is a very nice gang to hang around. I only wish I did this kind of things earlier...

Then, after the camp, we took a very detoured way home: we crossed the mountains towards Brasov to have lunch with my sister there (who was on holidays from Bucuresti), and to there, we went through Tg Secuiesc and to the Sf. Ana lake. After meeting my sister (I resaw her for the first time after returning from France therefore somehing around 6 months) we took the road back to Barlad through Oituz and Onesti. Vlad drove all this time, in his own very particular way of doing it, yet safe (I did live to write this post).

From Barlad, we, the Iasi guys, took the train to get to work next day, after a tiring weekend but very, very, very nice. And since the pictures (and maps) are worth another 1000 words, here you go: Thomas's and Vlad's (1 and 2) pictures from the camp, and a map I've created.

One year at XWiki

2008-08-30T18:25:00.002+02:00

and also my first year in a job.

While waiting for my soup to boil, I tried to write this post that I've been wishing to write for a while. Somewhere after two paragraphs of writing into it, I realized that it's dangerous, I won't do it, it won't be. Even with all my "artistic talents" I cannot mask it (or I'm too lazy to do it). Even if it would be nice to have an anniversary blog post in which to do a recap of the last year, it won't happen.

Amsterdam, baby!

2008-07-16T22:18:00.003+03:00

This weekend, since it was kindof my last weekend in this side of Europe, I decided to go to the place I haven't been to and I would really want to go (within a cost margin, of course). I tell you, it was a tough choice, especially as some France cities sounded very tempting.
I decided to go to Amsterdam, too see a little piece of Holland and bigger piece of "the vice city".
So far it's a very nice place, a very nice country (tuliiiips, windmiiiiiiils, wodden shoeeees and coooooows), too bad they ruined the city with the sexturism and narcoturism.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is also a pretty good excuse for me to stop writing, I leave you with the pictures. Enjoy!

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Microformats dinner at Strasbourg

2008-06-20T20:49:00.007+03:00

Since microformats are turning 3 today (their day, the american 20th june), and all the fans in the world should celebrate it properly, let's do it:

Microformats dinner @ Strasbourg,
on Saturday, 21 june 2008, 20:00 CET,

at Fondu d'Art, 48 rue du Jeu d'Enfants, 67000, Strasbourg, France

Comment this post or direct message or reply me on twitter if you plan to come.

I should mention that the place I chose is supposed to have WiFi so you can also "register" for a remote dinner!

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ICEIS 2008

2008-06-20T03:09:00.003+03:00

And so I'm back from ICEIS. I should be doing my work right now envisioning the planned release tomorrow (XWiki Watch 1.0 RC1 will be out these days) but I just thought to share some thoughts about the conference:
Very nice international experience, also national: met a lot of people from various countries working on very interesting projects, heard way too many accents my English receptor can take and also (re)met the people back home: Oana and Diana which I already knew and some other people from Bucharest and Cluj.

The value (in my personal system) of the papers presented varied from 2-3 to 9-10 (on a 0-10 scale). Too many threads (4-5 I think) and, at one point, badly distributed papers in the threads.

Pretty good keynote lectures, as much as I could follow, although some of them a little deviated from the announced topic...

VERY BAD WiFi: nice advertised Wireless and Wired internet connection but none of them working before 5-6 in the evening. The organizers blamed the scalability of the system (which was the hosting hotel's system) but I still think they should have tested it before and make sure everything works fine.

(Re)Met Alina and met Toni who helped us get around in Barcelona. Re-met Dennis and faught a lot on open source vs non-open source software, business and principles (I am so teasable, should fix that).
Met Carlo with whom we had a lot of fun (yet another example of how cultural barriers are no barriers at all).

Finally, visited Barcelona, on bad (unfortunately) weather and not so much time to do it. Nice town, modern in some places and old in others (fewer), always in construction. Very "party-town", kind of dirty, full of youngsters, people selling beer on the streets, bars full at 3 o'clock in the morning on the Ramblas. Food on that side of the world is good (pretty much fish so I cannot not like it) and pretty cheap compared to other places in the world (e.g. France or Italy).

Thanks to all the people who made this possible for me: Sabin for all the encouragement and support with the paper, the university for sending me in Erasmus exchange so that I'm closer to Barcelona, all the people that put up with my mess while working for all this and the guys that payed various taxes for me that I could not with my lousy stupid credit card: Marta and Ludo.

Now let the pictures speak (some more will come, once I get them from their owners):

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Look, ma, no code!

2008-05-24T23:42:00.005+03:00

I read the other days an article about a guy that devised a method to turn off the lights in his bedroom by tweeting about it. My mind immediately started flying towards writing Jabber protocol extensions for communicating with the fridge, the washing machine, the dvd player or the heating system. E.g. "coming home with a girl / guy" on the home group would trigger synchronized actions: heat a little up, cooling wine (only if it's white), start slow music, etc, etc. Since it works for Twitter it would definitely work for Jabber, on both ends: the sender and the home appliance implementation: it's just the same thing (same 80, same plain text, same openness). Jabber also feels more like the right way to implement it: its extension mechanism can allow from a simple text message (which you could actually send without extensions) to sophisticated any-purpose structured data, all thanks to XML almighty. Actually I start to wonder right now if that does not exist already, it seems so clean and cool and not even rocket science.

It was no earlier than today that I asked myself: ok, then WHY didn't the guy (or anybody) do it for Jabber? It's obviously a better choice. But it isn't as simple as Twitter. Jabber is a heavy protocol, although open and everything, there still are 2 (or 7, if you want to be strict) RFCs about it. Yeah, a lot of libraries come to save us from reading them but still, library? look, on Twitter I can only do it with a simple regexp! ("Look, ma, no code!"). It hit me that this might be the explanation for all the "twitter hysteria": not the need for social interaction (bla, bla), the need for microblogging in an ever time constrained world, the need of accessibility in the increasingly mobile world or whatever, just its simpleness. And it's no surprise, in the end: all the right things in life are simple.

Definitely something to remember, if we happened to forget it, for the next world changing application we design!

Software doesn't matter?

2008-04-20T02:13:00.002+02:00

The kid published tonight a post in which he stated that the software doesn't matter, it's the final result that people achieve with the software that does matter and that software will not make things happen if users are not set up to so good software's main quality is not being in the users way towards their goal.

While I very much agree with the first part, there are some things I would put in a different light for the second.

Indeed, nowadays software is just a tool (like almost everything in the world, actually): no one makes software for the software, or maybe some computer scientists in some laboratory -- that's the main difference between computer science and software and that's why I love the latter. We build software to help people do something, as good as we can, as good as they can: we give our best to create the best software we can to help people take maximum advantage of their possibilities.

And now we get to the second part: is the software that does not stand in your way the best software?

On one hand:
Is your friend that never criticize you your best friend? If we look at the question with user eyes, yes, it's most of the times like that: regular users generally don't have a particular attraction to learning new things and dealing with "the damn computer" or "the stupid software". I say that the software has to have an opinion, its purpose is to show the user "the good way" into computers and to help him getting better and better every day (remember, as good as they can), even against his/her will.
Our job is to really implement "the good way", to make sure our software does not create bad user habits or doesn't cultivate them, au contraire. There are situations when we have to take risks, we have to implement the good way even if everybody will hate us for it (that sounds so socially familiar) and nobody will use the software hence we'll get no money -- like persisting in caring for web standards when users use the browser that doesn't implement them . It might pay off at one point in the future, in which case we'll take the pride (and money) of being amongst the chosen few pioneers, it might not.

On the other hand:
Building a software that just doesn't stay in the way of it's users , isn't it a little too low for an aim? Why just that when we can do more? Yes, we start with that as a basis, always, we need to sell our software, people have to love it but let's set our minds to amaze them, user just satisfaction should be at the other end of the feature list. Why not propose to make the user fall in love with the software and do things he had never done before and go places he had never gone before? (that sounds socially familiar, again) Achieving this is a challenge, we have to take it and use it as a doorway to slip into our souls, both as users and developers, the joy of going beyond what we used to call "our limits".

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Perfect Office Setup

2008-04-15T19:41:00.003+02:00

Because the kid provoked me and because I've been here for a while and I thought it would be nice to offer some insight (read pictures) about how I live, here you go, my perfect office setup:

Version "school cafeteria setup around the only power source in the stupid place for which students fight eachother":

you can notice the lunch, the drink, the healthy part of the lunch sitting on a used napkin (used for explaining some code to a faculty colleague) and, of course, the big star: "the pig".

Version "in my room in the campus, the clean edition":

starring, in the order of appearance: devil tail, headphones (because have a hunch that my neighbours don't like my music that much), the booting pig in whose display you can notice the reflection of the cracked window (I swear it wasn't me), empty pill box, pens here and there, XWiki cup with some coffee left from this morning resting on the useless "Master de Sciences Mention Informatique. Livret pedagogique" (actually it's very good for resting the cup on, that's what I use it for), the lamp whose role is only to make me look like a smart hardworking student, used napkins, some mix of wires (cell phone cable, webcam, cam cable, small headphones, maybe some stuff I can't identify) mixed with a couple of cigarettes choco (left from the revision before exam I had the afternoon and night before), pills blister (again), knife (you never know when you need one), paper handkerchiefs pack, mobile phone, used subway tickets (from Paris, I hope -- I have a subscription for the Strasbourg transportation for 2 months now), some papers (I think it's actually important stuff written on), important papers plastic envelope, napkin roll.

There is also the "in class not paying attention to teacher" version and the "in bed" version for which I don't have pictures.

So, what's your perfect office setup?

I got naked

2008-04-09T19:24:00.003+02:00

Let me see you stripped! – Rammstein, Stripped

As proposed by the CSS Naked Day Initiative, I got naked today: my blog has (almost – because Blogger is a little shy when it comes to it) no styles, for the evening of April 9th and the following night!

Dare to get naked too!

Soup blog

2008-03-23T00:21:00.005+02:00

This weekend I am visiting Marta and Sergiu in Lille, in the short French Easter break.
We spent today visiting the city, through the rain, so that our visit degenerated into shopping at one point: sweets, iPod (yeeey, I got a Shuffle), music, films...

One of the planned things for this weekend was to cook a 'ciorbă rădăuţeană' (Rădăuţi soup) with Sergiu and maybe, Marta, but with some restrictions: use french ingredients, don't use meat, use fish instead (not that bad though) so we came up with a new one (we ALL contributed to it), which I share with you – remember that it's derivated from the great "ciorbă rădăuţeană":

XWiki Geek Soup Lilloise

Ingredients (for 4 portions):
- 2 medium carrots
- 1 medium to large parsnip
- 1 medium celery root
- 1 medium onion
- 1 kg salmon
- 2 eggs
- 0.25 l sour cream
- vinegar
- salt, chervil, dill, garlic
- 3 hungry geeks

Preparation:

Husk the carrots, parsnip, celery and onion, cut them in large pieces, and boil them in a pot in approx 2.5 litres of water. DO NOT put salt at this point ("Patientia est mater sapientia"). When the veggies are half boiled, add the skinless salmon cut in large pieces (you should have the 1 kg in 3-4 pieces).
When all these are boiled, remove from heat, take the salmon out, remove the bones and cut it into smaller pieces (about the size of a nut). In the mean time, blend (or mash through any other method) the veggies in the hot water. You can choose the quantity of veggies to use for this operation dependent of the final aimed consistency of the soup. Put the minced salmon back in the pot and place it back over low heat.
Add salt as you consider suited. Add between 4 and 8 table spoons of vinegar, depending on the desired sourness and stir them well into the soup. You can also add some garlic too, preferably pieces (3) but if you don't have, powder is good as well, or you can leave it to the choice of the user.
Personal advice for the brave adventurers who will attempt to reproduce the Easter Lille miracle: TASTE the soup all through this spicing process, don't just follow my instructions, use your own better judgement and taste (remember Ratatouille? Anyone can cook!)
Stop heat and let it cool for the time you execute the next and final step: whisk eggs with a little bit of salt together with the cream and then stir it into the soup. Scatter chervil and / or dill on top of it, and let it cool to eatable temperature.

Your masterpiece is now done, bon appétit!

This recipe is available under Creative Commons.

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@ Strasbourg II

2008-02-16T04:18:00.004+02:00

Finally, no more Romulus blogging, McDonalds dinners and hanging out on the schools hallways: I am connected with the world wide web from my room but that means that now I'm working all day and don't have time to blog anymore...

In the mean time, I took some more pictures of the city, walked around, did some more papers and even got to school (the thing that looks like a UFO) in the Parc d'Innovation d'Illkirch. The stuff look simple for now, I understand something around 50% of what my teachers say and realize that I already knew that stuff (maybe the new things are in the parts I don't understand). My classmates are ok but we're very few girls in classes, of course (I should have expected that when I left home but I forgot to)

So it's vacantion right now (fr school rules, we just started and we're already in vacation) and I take advantage of this to code a little, then go visit the XWiki office in Paris and then go to FOSDEM next weekend.

So, overall, besides feeling a little lonely and lost sometimes, it is all ok (I have internet hence I have all my friends with me) and I only expect better!

@ Strasbourg -- blogging from "le Romulus"

2008-02-12T09:57:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I arrived in Strasbourg and, after a very interesting orientation phase to find the university and the campus (I'm really good at it, u know, I just can't get lost in a country that uses latin alphabet -- I proved myself that yesterday) I got my ULP student card and room in campus. Unfortunately, no internet in my room yet so I'll be spending most of my time in wi-fi access restaurants and school libraries (le Romulus is pretty close and they have good tuna sandwich)...
And since I am alone now, with no en-fr speaking companion, I started speaking french (if that thing that I speak can be called french) all day which is an interesting experience...

I don't have too many photos of yesterday since I was both not in the mood and out of batteries but you can still enjoy some french-german city pictures that I took throughout the day:

@ Paris

2008-02-11T01:13:00.001+02:00

Today I arrived well in Paris and took an extended walk, thanks to Sergiu and Marta, trying to get everything in one day: la Tour Eiffel, le Dome des invalides, le Louvre, la Cathedrale Notre-Dame, Montmartre (impressive at sunset)

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I'm leaving today

2008-02-10T02:36:00.001+02:00

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I'm gonna be a part of it
Strasbourg, Strasbourg

I will be leaving in a couple of hours for Strasbourg, with a Paris stop tomorrow. I will be there through the whole spring, for my second semester of master studies, at Université Louis Pasteur. While there, I plan a lot of visits all over France: the XWiki office in Paris, Sergiu and Marta in Lille, fosdem (I know that's actually in Brussels, don't worry) , and a little piece of Germany, no matter where.

The non bright side of the story is that I will miss a lot of things from home: my family, my friends and the places (when I left Iaşi today I couldn't believe it was for 5 months!)

And I hope I will manage to make some time for my blog, too, starting tonight!

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3, 2, 1... GO!

2007-12-23T05:43:00.000+02:00

My Christmas break has just started this morning, when I woke up at 5:00 AM to leave to the country side to spend Christmas.
I hope you all have been good kids so that Santa will drop by with nice gifts and lots, lots of sweets!

Meeeeeeeeery Christmas!

XWiki Iaşi team @ Durău

2007-12-08T19:27:00.000+02:00

The last weekend we gathered 'all' the XWiki Iaşi team to go to the mountains, as some sort of goodbye party for JV who left Iaşi this week. Well, 'all' the XWiki team meant, after all, without Marius (who had some school assignments he had to finish until monday) and without Evelina & Cristi who also had some school deadline changed to monday without notice. Finally, the XWiki team was: me, Raluca, Jerome and Jean-Vincent (JV for short) and Petru (who is a xwikier only 'by association').
Friday afternoon was shopping afternoon ('Let's go to the mall, today!'): after a tough negotiation for boots (J and JV wanted the same shoes and are the same size but there weren't 2 pairs available in the shop), and a 'girlie-girl' shopping style from me (3-4-5-6 shops but no boots for me to like :D) we deviced the next day's wake-up plan and went home.
Saturday morning we left Iaşi at 6:00 am and, after a 'niiiiice' 3 hours trip and some sleep (only for some of us) we arrived in Durău: nice fresh air smell and some snow here-and-there. We checked in at the hotel, grabbed something fast to eat and then left for the trip to Fântânele.

From XWiki @ Durău

Once we got there, we had a cup of hot wine, took some pictures with the nice view and, despite the original plan to get to Fântânele, drink, and then return to Durău, decided to go further until we can see the "Izvorul Muntelui" lake and then return.

From XWiki @ Durau

A kind caban dog lead the way towards Dochia caban: he went on and, when we stopped it stopped and returned to see if we all are OK. At 'La morminte' (around 1300m altitude), the path started to be snowy: it was not dangerous (yet) but still, it was a sign that we cannot go further without proper equipment. We went a little further to see the lake, took pictures (to testify that we indeed were there), Raluca gave her share of food to the dog (who was clearly planning to continue the path to Dochia) and then returned to 'La Morminte'. There we had a nice picnic below 0 degrees Celsius with bread and french camembert. We continued our trip back to Durău through Fântânele and then through 'Poiana Viezuri'. In Durău, we had a romanian dinner with 'Tochitura Moldoveneasca' and red wine at the hotel and a very 'personal' interpretation of some famous international songs from the guy at the keyboard in the hotel restaurant.
Although some of us were very sleepy, the night continued with a delightful cards game, romanian Whist and, upon Raluca's request -- who was tempted by the music she heard from outside, with a visit to the 'disco'. And when I say visit, I mean visit, i.e. 30 minutes. The 'disco' was actually a lame 'village club' (you know the kind of club I'm talking about), which made the visit 2 times more fun!

From XWiki @ Durau

The next day, we were supposed to wake up at 6 o'clock so that we can go to 'Duruitoarea' waterfall too. Of course, I only woke up to make a couple of calls to the others and agree that it is better to sleep on and see more about it later, when everybody was up. At 10, we talked about staying some more and leaving Durău in the evening but the unavailability of the bus seats in the evening ruined our plans. The trip ended with a walk around Durău, a visit to the monastery and some more pictures of the surroundings.

From XWiki @ Durau

The trip back was 'spectacular', as usual in Romanian buses (I really need to buy a car!): a lot of people going in and out of the bus, the driver's stops for each one of them, loud conversations, people crushing into each other to fit the size of the bus, and the eternal travelers that know that the bus might be too crowded but never, ever make reservations, etc, etc.
All in all it was a successful outing, and until the next one, we will enjoy the pictures:

The book has appeared!

2007-11-27T09:45:00.001+02:00

The "Web 2.0 programming" book is now ready to be released in shops: yesterday I have seen (touched and smelled) the final and printed version of the book. The Polirom publishing house has done a great job after all and the result is one we can be proud of. In the book you can read:

Andrei Mihaila's chapter about load balancing in web clusters

Sabin Buraga's chapter about JavaScript programming. Sabin is also the coordinator of the volume, i.e. the one that 'directed' the whole process of writing and publishing the book.

Ciprian Amariei and Andreea Pantescu's chapter on collaborative code review

My chapter on web recommendations using microformats

Cati (Ecaterina Valica)'s great chapter on mashup applications

You can find more details about the book either on the blog dedicated to the book (where you will be able to comunicate with the authors and the other readers), on the presentation page of the book, or on the polirom website.

What have I been doing in the past few months?

2007-11-17T13:49:00.000+02:00

Yes, it's been a long break and, as you already assume, here comes a (long) post with a bulleted list of all that happened in the mean time and deserves to be mentioned:

First of all (I've been trying to write this for a while now) I started working for XWiki Iasi. We are a team of 9 people but only 7 of us are in Iasi and only 5 of us are Iasi employees: Sergiu and Marta are in France for studies, Jerome and Jean-Vincent are employees from the Paris office that came in Iasi to help setup the team here. The romanian team is made of: Evelina, Raluca, Cristi, Marius and me, closely collaborating with the big french team in Paris.
I must mention that this is my first job and I'm learning things as they happen: the development process of a big project, the teamwork, the communication, the skills, getting used to "doing only one thing" (as opposed to school where I was doing a different thing everyday, writing code in 3 different programming languages at the same time, learning and trying new technologies, banging the head against the wall for all these reasons but enjoying every minute of it). Still, XWiki is a nice place to do "more-than-one-thing": there are various areas where you can spread your work if you want and creativity is encouraged.
We also had a nice XWiki Iasi launch party in october where we invited a lot of friends (some pictures can be found on picasaweb).
I also learned that cultural barriers are no barriers at all and all it takes is just a little time to get used... (a subject that deserves a post of its own...)

Second of all, I started the master courses at infoiasi that compensate the "doing-only-one-thing" at work. Not too many opinions on this yet, besides the shock that, after trying for 2 years (the final years) to teach us how to write code and how to look at things from the practical side, they are now going back to the theoretical side (that gave us nightmares in the first 2 years at the faculty) and expect us to understand everything and agree... I know, it is supposed to be like that and it is OUR job to put the two together, etc, etc, but it is a little hard to bear anyway...

Third, I started my classes at the faculty: I am teaching web technologies laboratories to the fourth year students. This whole "getting on the other side" experience is very interesting on its own and deserves a full post, too (maybe I'll do it, just maybe). I can say that I am having a lot of fun teaching, although you should probably get some opinions from my students too...

Fourth of all, I wrote a chapter about web recommendations using microformats embedded data for the "Web 2.0 Programming" book (in Romanian) to appear at Polirom. While doing this, I finally finalized the Java Firefox extension example that I talked about in the last post, realized that it's incredibly hard to talk about some things you are very familiar with while trying to be clear enough and explain that stuff to someone who potentially does not know a thing about them, and also learned how valuable good feedback is! The blog dedicated to the book is at http://webpro20.blogspot.com/, designated for communication with the readers of the book, so feel free!

Java Firefox Extension

2007-10-11T23:12:00.001+02:00

I know, you won't find this as the first search result on Google, but anyway...

Because I promised some (many) posts ago and because recently I found the time to create a decent example (actually, I HAD to find the time), here's the long waited demo of a Java Firefox extension, i. e. Firefox extension that uses Java code. I first got this idea from Simile's Piggybank extension, and then I got their example from http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Java_Firefox_Extension. I found that to be quite complicated so I created a new one, simpler (and optimized in some points) and, I think, easier to understand.
I assume you are familiar with the Firefox extension development. If you're not, have a look at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Extensions.
What we already have in Firefox:

LiveConnect

that allows us to connect to Java code from javascript code. We can write stuff like var x = new java.lang.String("test") and x will hold a reference to a Java object. We can then call all x's functions from javascript and get the results back. We can not send javascript objects other than numbers (integer, double), strings and arrays to Java. I mean, we can, but we'll get a JSObject object which is kind of empty and useless (no functions, no members).

XPCOM

that allows us to build a COM-like component for Firefox, platform independent (because it is written in javascript).

We will create a XPCOM component that will use LiveConnect to get to the Java code.

Why can't we do it only with LiveConnect? Because XPCOM allows a single instantiation of the component through all the browser instances (shared). Now you decide for yourself why you might need that (I personally needed it because I had some native libraries loaded by the Java code and I had to be sure that happenned only once since I would get an error otherwise).
And it's pretty cool to learn how to do both the Java access and the XPCOM.
Now get the code from this temporary deposit (change extension in xpi and drag it to a Firefox window to install) and follow me:
Any XPCOM component must implement an interface, at least nsISupports, which is the most general so that it can be managed by the Firefox component manager. The trick is that we don't need any function from the interface, we will get the javascript object that implements the interface and call its functions, so we should implement an interface with no functions at all -- we can create our own (like simile's example does) and go through all the mess of compiling the idl file in a xpt interface definition file or we can simply implement nsISupports.
Once that is done (see the GreeterComponent.js file in /components) we can simply call:

Components.classes["@lucaa.students.info.uaic.ro/je-greeter;1"]
.getService(Components.interfaces.nsISupports);

to get an instance to our component ("@lucaa.students.info.uaic.ro/je-greeter;1" is the component's contract id, specified in the implementation).

But what's the trick to access the Java code? One might say that we have LiveConnect's java object and that is enough. Well, not quite, since our own classes ar not loaded and we can not access them. We need to load them dynamically through our own class loader (this is done by the component upon initialization):

var greeterURL = new this._java.io.File(greeterJarLocation.path).toURL();
//create the classLoader
var classLoader = new this._java.net.URLClassLoader([greeterURL]);
//get an instance of the GreetingGenerator through reflection
var greetingGeneratorClass = this._java.lang.Class.forName(
"ro.uaic.info.students.lucaa.je.GreetingGenerator",
true, classLoader);
this._greeter = greetingGeneratorClass.newInstance();

Then, the call to the java functions of the GreetingGenerator can be simply done through:

this._greeter.generateGreeting()

Remember that the java LiveConnect object is not provided by default to the components environment and we must pass it from the calling code, upon initializing the wrappedJSObject of the component:

//get a component
var greetComponent = Components.classes["@lucaa.students.info.uaic.ro/je-greeter;1"]
.getService(Components.interfaces.nsISupports);
//initialize the wrappedJSObject
greetComponent.wrappedJSObject.initialize(java, true);

In the example, the GreetingGenerator class in Java holds a counter incremented by each call to the generateGreeting function. Go to the Tools menu, the "Greet!" menu item and get your greeting. Now open a new browser instance and do the same. The counter goes on, as a sign that it's the exact same object called.

Starting from this, you can do all sorts of stuff: you've just created yourself an unique entrypoint in the Java code, making sure that if you have configurations to set up, servers to start, etc, etc, those will happen exactly once.

Happy coding!

Please, don't send me .doc attachments!

2007-09-06T13:42:00.001+03:00

.doc as in Microsoft Word's proprietary format file

I know, thousands of MBytes have been written on this subject, but
beside the fact that it's a proprietary format and all those points that I support:

Microsoft Word documents cannot always be read by other word processors.

Documents produced with one version of Microsoft Word cannot always be read by other versions of Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word documents are not guaranteed to look and print the same way on every computer and printer.

Microsoft Word documents are extremely large compared to other file formats.

Sending Microsoft Word files can violate your privacy.

Microsoft Word files are a security hazard.

I'd like to highlight one more aspect: if it's not a DOCUMENT then you should not send it as an attachment at all: just copy the bloody text in the email body. Or, at least, attach it as a text file that most email readers can parse and print in the email body.
Why am I so mad?
I received, a few hours ago, a simple table (1 page long) where I had to lookup my name and confirm some data written there. But guess what, it was an attached .doc instead of plain csv in the email message. And I had to go through all the mess of downloading it and opening the editor to read it.
I also received announcements (like "some papers are due until day x, 12:00 PM") in .doc attachments, or even empty emails that gave no sign about their purpose until you opened the attached .doc.
I cannot see the rationale behind these kind of actions: I mean, I know, it was probably easier for that person to attach the .doc she created for HER OWN PURPOSE then re-format that for the rest of the world, but you don't speak your native language that the other one does not understand just because it's easier FOR YOU. If you knew what you are doing and still did it for YOUR OWN COMFORT then you're a stupid lazy bastard and you fully deserve my eternal hate!
I can't imagine that people that send .doc attachments don't now that:

it is so damn annoying to have to download things (where to store it (damn, the desktop is full)? oh, and now I have to wait for that to download?, etc, etc)

the office editor (either MS's or OpenOffice) takes some time to load and this gets really annoying if you have some other applications running (you must now this, don't you?)

Imagine how much time this takes compared to just reading a piece of text in an email! I'd probably ignore that email if it didn't concern me too, and this is actually what you were counting on, isn't it? You devil! The next time I will send the response in hexa, because it concerns you and you're the one responsible of reading it and making communication between us possible!

For all these reasons,
PLEASE, DON'T SEND .DOC ATTACHMENTS!

What's the time, Mr. Google?

2007-08-22T12:41:00.000+03:00

"Whatever you want, kido!"

These days my computer's clock has gone mad: it shows a chaotic time, all the time, always behind (sometimes even with a couple of days gap). I set it and, after an hour or so, it goes wild again. While this is not a problem in Ubuntu (I just set the time to synchronize with a time server, namely the ubuntu time server), it is causing me a lot of trouble in Windows, because synchronizing it with a time server just returns an error or smth. The manual says that I should check the address of the time server: well, I'm using their default server list (but maybe this is the problem ;), actually).

Anyway, for some activities I am stuck in Windows: e.g. writing a damn .doc file with various ms fonts that render veeery strange on Linux, playing World of Warcraft (but I really don't care that much what's the windows system time when I'm defending the Alliance :P ) and so was the case this morning (the .doc file, not the WoW!!) when I realized that the only time-showing-devices I own are my computer and my cell phone. The first was down, the other one too far away, so I decided to ask Google, because that's why I Google, isn't it? Guess what, the wonderful time-depending gadgets on the iGoogle page actually display your own system time, so never use them as reference. I wonder now if this is good or bad... I mean, for me it was obviously bad, but I wonder if someone benefits from this, EVER: maybe the guys at Google didn't find a reliable time server, maybe they didn't get it from an internet source because then you would need to change the iGoogle time zone setting every time you travel (though I'm pretty sure it's not that hard to find out where is one accessing the page from), or maybe some people like to set their computer clocks to lie to them and want the whole world to consent.

The Bicaz Gorge

2007-07-31T23:38:00.000+03:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, the past weekend we took a trip to Sighişoara. We left Iaşi Friday evening at about 18:15, all happy and joyful (except for Cati who was a little nervous). According to Cati's calculae, it was a 345 km trip, which meant about 5-6 hours and yes, we were supposed to do the last part of it in complete darkness but we all fully trusted the superdriver Cati, although she had never been to Sighişoara before and didn't know the places. We equipped ourselves with all the things necessary for camping (because we didn't expect to find any rooms in a hotel on Friday night, at the end of the first day of the festival).

The main attraction of the trip towards Sighişoara was the Bicaz Gorge, at the midpoint, which we would reach somewhere around 21:00 (maybe I forgot to mention that I love mountains :) ).

From Trip to Sighişoara

We divided the tasks: Cati drove and watched the road, Edy was the guy with the map and, together with us, watched the side of road for signs to guide us: since we had never been there before, we were cautious not to get lost, especially inside the towns where we had to watch out for the right turn.
In Roman, Edy was the guide since he grew up there;

From Trip to Sighişoara

in Piatra Neamţ, although we missed the road we had the chance to realize it in time and turned around,

From Trip to Sighişoara

and in Bicaz the road was properly marked (you could not miss the signs even if you tried).

Suddenly, as we were approaching the gorge, Cati noticed that her car makes a strange noise... She lowered her window and we all heard well the concerning noise... We had no idea what it was, but we realized that it wouldn't be wise to continue the trip, as it was getting darker and darker... We returned in Bicaz (when this happened we had only passed it for 3 km or such) looking for a car service. We found one as we (re)entered Bicaz, but it was closed and we had to call the guy and finally go at his house for him to take a look at the car. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell what it was and his suspicions were not restful. Since it got very late (22:00), the smartest thing to do was to spend the night in Bicaz and contact the official car service in Piatra Neamţ the next day. We found some sort of pension there where we ate the sandwiches we brought from home, played some cards, saw the medieval festival on TV (some piece of news showed how happy was everybody visiting Sighişoara) and took a nice sleep.

From Trip to Sighisoara

For the next day, we planned to split: me and Petru would stay in Bicaz and somehow visit the gorge we were so anxious to see and the rest would join Cati to the service, and if the car was fixed in the right time, they would continue the trip and pick us on their way (no, this wasn't the case).

The next day, we found some bus to take us to the entrance in the gorge and then took a 7 km walk to Lacul Roşu, in the middle of the gorge, and back. I'll shut up now, because the pictures are worth a thousand words (each):

From Trip to Sighişoara

All in all, I can declare this a successful weekend: even if we didn't get to the festival we saw some very beautiful places – if you ever get the chance to go to the Bicaz Gorge, don't use a car to pass it, it's not even a long walk and it's really impressive.

The Danube Delta

2007-07-27T15:38:00.000+03:00

As I announced in the previous post, the past weekend we took a trip to the Danube Delta (Synygy's team building, again). We have never been there before (shame on us, a natural monument in our country and we waited more than 20 years to visit it) so it was a nice experience and a lot of new and fine places to see. Since I was refrained from taking the laptop with me (it's a vacation!!!) I only had the 512MB on the card for pictures. I also realized that my camera is pretty lame: 3x optical zoom is not enough to capture the details of the wonderful nature and it can not take pictures when the sun goes straight at it (it produced some completely white images).

We left Iasi at about 8 o'clock in the morning, had an 8 hour trip until Murighiol

From Danube Delta

then took the boat to Uzlina

From Danube Delta

where some of us visited the pool first, even against their will

From Danube Delta

We checked in on "Cristofor, the floating hotel"

From Danube Delta

had our fish-based dinner (actually, we ate fish the whole 3 days)

From Danube Delta

and then ended the first day with a nice sleep.

The next day we took a trip on the canals with the boat and saw some wonderful places (seeing the clear blue sky from land to land -- as opposed to "from building to building" -- always makes me feel good):

From Danube Delta

This whole days, team-building polo was everybody's favourite activity:

From Danube Delta

In the night, we also did some classic team-building treasure-hunt game

From Danube Delta

which eventually required a swimming contest to decide the winner (my team lost)

From Danube Delta

The next day we left Uzlina and returned to Iasi with a new 8 hours trip

From Danube Delta

In the mean time (this week) I became a proud M.Sc. student in Distributed Systems at FCS (classes starting in october).

This weekend, thanks to a great idea from Cati, we are going to Sighisoara, at the medieval festival (actually leaving in a couple of hours so I must hurry). I'll be back with pictures, as usual.

On vacation

2007-07-17T15:09:00.000+03:00

No, I haven't quit blogging (though I haven't posted anything in the last month). It is partially because I'm enjoying myself and take (some) advantage of the summer vacation:

first, in the country side:

From Brusturi, june 23

second, visiting Bucharest, with its nights:

From Visiting Bucharest (day 1)

its museums: Grigore Antipa

From Visiting Bucharest (day 2, part 1)

and the Village Museum,

From Visiting Bucharest (day 2, part 2)

its parks:

From Visiting Bucharest (day 2, part 3)

its Palace of the Parliament:

From Visiting Bucharest (day 3)

and third...

Fourth will be coming this weekend: I'm going to the Danube Delta and I will be back with pictures.

Fourth and a half, I've recently become a happy listener of Mika and Leonard Cohen (which I have rediscovered through the wonderful soundtrack of NBK).

Anca Luca, B.Sc.

2007-06-21T11:44:00.000+03:00

It's all gone: yesterday I presented my BSc paper to the examiners, got my final grade and celebrated.

waiting to get in

It was a little easier than I expected, the examiners were even more biased than I thought they would be :), I was a little more nervous than I thought I would be (I wouldn't have realized it if my mouth didn't get very dry – that's how I know I'm nervous and I hate it because I can't speak properly). Anyway, the smiles I received all morning helped a lot, and I want to thank all the people that produced them: either face to face, either online (the instant messaging hugs), either on the phone. I managed to insert my usual jokes & smiles in the examining room so I biased the examiners a little more (oh, the priceless smile of the commission head, that made me realize that everything will be fine, though I kind of "missed" a couple of questions). The presentation was far more important than the actual work (at least, that's my opinion in my case), but it couldn't have been done without it.

waiting for the results

Then our BSc supervisor told us the final results, after a half an hour of waiting: I got the maximum grade (as everyone besides myself expected it).

Phones to friends & family, congratulations, etc, etc.

And then, in the afternoon a nice beer and chat between us, the winners (clockwise, from the top right corner of the table): Augustin Ciubotaru, Cati Valica, Sergiu Pantiru, Stefan Vrabie, Andrei Zanoaga, Amariei Ciprian, Andreea Pantescu, Adina Aniculaesei, Sabin Buraga, Radu Munteanu, Andrei Mihaila (two more winners, not present, were Adrian Duhnea and Cristian Luca).

celebrating

Now I'm searching for something to do, maybe I'll clean up the computer a little (uninstall the useless stuff, free some disk space 'cause I badly need it, etc), or maybe I'll clean up the house, or maybe I'll cook something: though at some point I doubted it, it really is UNcool not to have anything to do, not to have a project that would keep you up in the night or give you codeful dreams.

Relaxng @ Ciric

2007-06-19T09:48:00.000+03:00

on Sunday I went to a team building party (organized by Synygy) at Ciric, which is a wonderful place to go this time of the year, so if you have a spare weekend, use it wise ;).

It was a nice day, a little cloudy, ergo not as hot as Saturday (though at some point I wished it had been :D )

We had some nice barbecue, lots of beer, team building talks and, most important, football!!! It was a pleasant surprise to see that girls also played football along with the guys so I decided to join:

I almost forgot the taste of it: indeed, team games are so fine!

Because there were three teams, whichever lost more than two goals was kicked out, leaving the winner to play with the spare team. My team was the loosing team though we had a very good goalkeeper (Andrei), a nice (surprisingly nice, for some) defender (Petru) and some good attackers (amongst which I dare to count myself – except for the moments when I totally missed the ball :D ).

This competition for the field pushed me to an unconscious move: we desperately needed the goal and I was attacking: only two defenders to pass, both girls! Yeeeaaaah, I can do it! But seemingly, I played too many football computer games because I thought I can stop the running ball suddenly (and leave the defenders behind) like I'm doing with my console when controlling Ronaldinho. Guess what? Noooot so! (to quote Borat) So my right knee had an unpleasant meeting with the asphalt and my jeans doubled their value (that's how some of the guys expressed the fact that they were torn by the contact).

(No, no pictures of that – but you wouldn't want to see blood on the blog, wouldn't you?)

As if this wasn't enough, a terrible muscle pain haunts my body since yesterday morning (because of the sudden decision to practise some sports).

But all this is nothing compared to the wonderful Sunday afternoon...

Changing the PATH from a Firefox extension

2007-06-16T00:46:00.000+03:00

Since (almost) everything is ready (even my new cool XUL sidebar for recommendation list), I must deal with the install process, don't I?
Everything's ok, all the things are in their place (thanks to the .xpi packaging) except for the BDB XML dlls that have to be visible to the jvm in the browser. We have two options: either we copy the dlls to Program Files/Mozilla, either we set the PATH environment variable to extension directory, where Firefox unzips the .xpi.
Yep, I chose the second...
It's easy to execute a batch file from a firefox extension, you just use a

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/process/util;1"] .createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIProcess)

initialize it with your script and then run it! (actually, if it wasn't for the extension developer's extension code, I wouldn't have known that now...)

But... how should we write the script? Since I couldn't find out how to execute a script at the moment of the extension install (that is, only once in the lifetime of the extension), I had to run it every time I open the browser so the script is a little more complicated: it must check the PATH for the existence of the directory path I want to add, and, if it's not there, put it. I found out from Merlyn that I can write a batch file in Javascript and, with a little help from Microsoft Tech Net I managed to produce this file:

//command line arguments
var args = WScript.Arguments
var dir = args(0);
//get the env vars
var objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
var colUsrEnvVars = objShell.Environment("User");

//TODO: test if path exists, else, create it
var path = colUsrEnvVars("PATH");

//TODO: should use regular expressions
var pathToSearch = ";" + path + ";";
var dirToSearch = ";" + dir + ";";
var index = pathToSearch.indexOf(dirToSearch);

if (index < 0) {
WScript.echo("update...");
var newValue = path + ";" + dir;
colUsrEnvVars("PATH") = newValue;
}

called from this bat:

set DIR_NAME=%1
set SCRIPT_PATH=%2
cscript //nologo "%SCRIPT_PATH%" "%DIR_NAME%"

with DIR_NAME and SCRIPT_PATH passed from the firefox code to match the firefox extension installation paths and the path to the js script.

All fine, until I got the wonderful error:

Execution of the Windows Script Host failed. (Not enough storage is available to complete this operation. )

but thanks God, other people got it too, before myself.

Now it sets the PATH but I still have some issues: the update takes oooooh so long (I kind of stare at the bloody console waiting for it to finish) and, at the first run (when PATH gets actually set), the jvm does not 'see' the PATH, it still fails (maybe it loads before I get to set the path)... A browser restart does it, though, so, until I have some spare time, I guess it's ok in the current state...

P.S: ignore all the "we"'s in this post: I'm actually alone in this, but I got used to the "we" from writing the paper associated to this work.

How to shoot yourself in the foot...

2007-06-13T10:10:00.000+03:00

How to shoot yourself in the foot in a browser extension environment (let's say... Firefox)?
You first device a niiiice gun overlay, in XUL, styled with CSS, with a trigger interface in like 346524563425 languages using the wonderful firefox i18n mechanism, you connect your gun to some serious killing machine (preferably written in Java) and then, when you're finally done with all these and you shoot your gun:

Security check failed: permission denied to access 'body.lowerbody.foot&side=left' from content at "chrome://gun/content/bigshotgun.xul".

On my way...

2007-06-10T15:57:00.000+03:00

Yeey, I sent it!

The almost-final version of the BSc paper is now on its way to being reviewed, after a couple of days in hell, trying to write my best...
I never thought it would be that hard to write things (not necessarily a scientific paper – though it's reaaaaly hard to name my creation a 'scientific' paper): I always thought that writing about things you produced should be easy; explaining how you created an application, an idea, a formula or anything must be a piece of cake, after all, you KNOW what you're talking about, don't you? Well, it's NOT! (and now my BSc supervisor would say: "I told you!" :) )

Because you just know too much on the matter, you 'miss' stuff: everything seems obvious or natural to assume, to you, everything's connected, class diagrams are clear as daylight, you have no clue about what references to quote because you 'just know' the stuff and, most of all, the purpose of the paper is like "d-ooh!"... Well, I'm pretty sure I screwed it in all matters and, what's worse, I don't know what to do about it! I guess that if I asked my mother to read it and tell me what she understood of it, I would get a clearer picture... But, until my mother learns English, I can only rely on my own (fuzzy, these days) judgement and on my supervisor's constructive critique...

Fredo & Pid'jin

2007-06-04T14:02:00.000+03:00

It was about time...

Fredo & Pid'jin are two little pigeons (well, Fredo is not that little) set up to destroy the world (I have no bloody clue about why they want to do this but they seem pretty determined). In the mean time they hang around with women, kill Gugustuck and do all sorts of stuff non related to world destroying. This week they celebrate their 2 years / 100 episodes anniversary and all the web is there singing 'happy birthday' so I thought I should join:
Haaaapy birthday tooooo youuuuuuu, haaaaappy birthday toooo youuuuuu, haaaapppy biiiiiirthday dear Fredo & Pid'jiiiiiin, haaaaappy birthdayyyy tooooooo yoooouuuuuuu!

Graduating (II)

2007-06-03T21:39:00.000+03:00

Yep, I've managed to take some time to post about this: the graduation fest@UAIC and the graduation party – actually, all the time I needed was for the pictures sort :).

Here:

graduation -- official last course & fest

are the pictures from the closing ceremony and the graduation fest oganized by the university, and
here:

graduation party

are some pictures from the graduation party.

Have fun!

P.S.: yeeeey! Now the 'S' key doesn't publish the post anymore, it saves it as draft! thank you a million times, blogger!

Too much...

2007-05-31T09:48:00.000+03:00

Q: How do you know you did too much browsing?
A: You start middle-clicking the eclipse file tabs expecting for them to close...

Actually, this is not a joke!

Graduating (I)

2007-05-27T14:06:00.001+03:00

The moment has come... (sigh).
This morning we had the graduation ceremony at FCS, here's a sample:

Please notice the shirt under the robe (it had to be present, didn't it?)

We had nice speeches from our valedictorian, from mr. Cristea (who gave the official last lecture), from dean Grigoras and from all the other teachers; we got our unofficial graduation diplomas (with a very touching "last call" moment); we sang "Gaudeamus Igitur" and then took the graduation group pictures.

This evening we're going to the university's graduation fest and tomorrow evening, to the graduation party.

More pictures will be available once all these events will be over...
I'm gonna miss it...

Advertising...(reloaded?)

2007-05-24T23:38:00.000+03:00

Yep, on stupid ads again (hmmm, is my blog becoming a repository of proofs of the existence of absolute stupidity on earth?)

Can you see the webpage?
No, because it's an ad on top of another ad on top of the page! :)
Can you see the close button?
No, because there isn't one!

Thanks to Stefan Ciobâcă for the print screen (see, he didn't have a close button at all so he could print it before he closed it :) )

Advertising...

2007-05-22T12:24:00.000+03:00

I posted about annoying advertising some time ago, and now I must add one more to the row:

Can you see the close button?
Ok, it's the one in the top right corner of the big bubble.
Now that you see it, can you click it?
(trust me, no scaling was involved in the production of this image)

I must thank Dana for the print screen: the ad displays only the first time you access the page (no reload/refresh can get it back again) and I am just too absorbed by the fact that I must close it to remember that I'd better get a print screen first...

Last exam @ FCS

2007-05-21T12:23:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I went to my last exam as a BSc student at FCS. I really enjoyed being a student here – that's why I'm pretty sure will continue with MSc, but it won't be the same. This is the reason for which I took my camera with me and took some pictures of the 'event'. The pictures are here:

IRC exam, 20 may 2007

have fun!

P.S.: If anyone appearing in those pictures has a really good reason for which he/she should not appear, please tell me (email or comment on this post or on the picture) and I will remove the picture.

End of Summer < Web />

2007-05-13T23:59:00.000+03:00

So it's gone now. It was a very fine workshop with talks on all kind of topics: it started with Mădălina Cocea's journalism 2.0 on Saturday morning, then went through Marius Măruşteri's medical collaborative systems and Sergiu's web accessibility standards presentations and Ştefan Tăbăranu's presentation of Levi 9. Then, a short coffee break (oh, btw, veeery good coffee). Then, when we just got more into the "tech stuff" we went out of it again with Alina's presentation on e-business in relation with semantic/data web, Radu Sora's presentation on how to be a successful programmer in a company where you have so many other things to deal with besides programming, and Cristian Bârlădeanu's presentation on developing a web product by one's self, in a failure minimizing manner. Coffee break, again, and then we got back in the tech stuff with Andrei Iacob's presentation on Silverlight (I was eagerly waiting for this one, since I read about it a couple of days ago and I was very curious to see it in action – we had some demos as well) and Augustin Ciobotaru's SQL injection demo. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for Bogdan Pistol's presentation on ArgoEclipse.

The second day (which is today, but will be yesterday by the time I will have posted this), we got heavy teched with Caty's presentation on mash-ups (again, a very interesting thing to learn more about), my presentation on microformats, Marius Butuc's presentation on XHTML 2.0 (with some fine demos) and Sorin Damian's presentation of Visual Studio ORCAS (with some code as well). Again, coffee break (it seems we had some cookies left from the other day).
Then we watched the youngsters in competition (the web applications competition) and realized that indeed they had a lot of things to learn from our tutorials – if only they had listened carefully enough. After a British Council offer presentation, we got our prizes and dropped a goodbye tear for this year's edition (there were the prizes for the competition and some 'public awards' for the 'performers' as well – I got a fine 'Java for web applications' book).

The pictures are here (I hope I will not crash in bed tonight before I add the captions so you know what's it about) – there will be a selection and only a few of them will remain online but for the moment they're all up there.

Despite my concerns on the presentations I had to make, seemingly it went fine – it could have been better but hey, I'm not perfect every day!

Yes, I really got the taste of it, waiting for the next...
(sigh)

A break...

2007-05-12T01:32:00.000+03:00

Well, this is what I call a cool night.
Because tomorrow I'm going to summer <Web /> (just found out these days that it's the last edition – damn it, just when I was getting the taste of it), and because today I created the 0.4 pre alpha version of the bsc (with a cool XPCOM to singleton the connection to java – long story, I'll put it in a dedicated post), I'm not working right now (I hate to start things and then abandon them unstable because I have to do something else). Just hang around on the web. Reading lifesux because I remembered he writes cool stuff, watching a short movie on youtube, saying hi to Alinuţa – the true hypertext: just go with the flow (of the links). And because I saw npunctc put a last.fm chart on the sidebar of her blog, I thought I could actually fight my wish-of-not-touching-any-tech-stuff-tonight and narrow the columns of mine to fit my blog and put it there, too (damn it, I wanted to be the first – at least of what I've seen).

Since my presentation is on Sunday (here's the program (in Romanian)) I don't even want to take a fresh, critical look at my presentation. I'll do that tomorrow night. Yes, it's my first such presentation so I haven't got a bloody clue about how I am going to talk EXACTLY 30 minutes, how I am going to adapt the presentation to the public reactions (I would really love to be able to do that), nor if somebody will understand a single thing of what I will say. I know a bunch of people who would say that I worry too much – I'm only overreacting for the effect of this post :). I probably won't find an answer to these questions tomorrow night either, I'll trust my 'professor gene' (as Mr. Ciortuz put it) and just go there and do it!

Yes, it was a post from the heart – I can do this too: of course, when I'm not talking about microformats. And I would lie if I would say that it didn't feel good writing...

Yeah!

2007-05-09T11:56:00.000+03:00

They had some nice outfits at the microformats dinner.

I should first mention that this is not faked:

Yes, I finally did my microformats t-shirt... And don't you think is that easy: just buy the shirt, get it printed and done!
Noooo, sir!

First, produce the image: svg exported in png with GIMP. Test the position of the text: hmm... vertical left, vertical right, below... hmmm... Well, we'll keep them all and I'll decide later.

Then, buy the shirt. That's no ordinary black shirt, it's a ladies black shirt: stretched and feminine. And you can't find a single ladies simple black shirt in Iasi: all have their own prints, with pink flowers or little flying hearts and stuff. Anyway, good things come to those who... search!

Then, you go to the print shop. The guy is stretching my shirt all directions to test the fabric:
"it's over 90% elastan, man, it's the only I could find, sorry"
"hmm... ok..."
"here's the image!"
"mmmmhhh, it's a little problem here... I want to do it from rubber and I only have one shade of green..."
"That shade of green is important, man! What if you DON'T do it from rubber?"
"Because your shirt is from elastan, it will disappear the first time you wash it. Maybe if I put some yellow...".
"NO! NO yellow! just do it any shade of green you have!".
"Ok, come back in an hour and a half..."

Whaaat? an hour and a half???? Anyway... hang in the Mall for an hour and a half... Sooo boring! I saw some awfully overpriced jeans which I would have bought if I hadn't realized in time how overpriced they were... A lot of girls shopping... you know, the Mall.

Oh, yes, it's time, it's time!

The guy shows me the shirt. The shade of green is not that bad, but:
"Where's the text? There was a piece of text there! You must have missed it because of the transparency!"
"Oh... I remade your image in Corel and I didn't see it... I can print it now if you want...".
Whaaaaaaaaat? I worked so hard for that image for you to 'remake' it now????
"Oh, you can? ok, print it!"
Another 20 minutes waiting and bugging the guy: "No, not there. Pull it a little to the left, please!"

And finally, it's done! Soooo coool!

P.S.: I must apologize to those who read my blog for all the 'false alarms'. In case you didn't notice, I first publish one or two lines and then come back with the rest of the post. That's because I'm used to hit 'Ctrl+S' once in every 2 words (programmer's bad habit) and 'S' is the shortcut for 'publish' in blogger interface. Sorry!

POOO

2007-05-06T16:57:00.000+03:00

Plain Old Open Office

I had big plans for today: to create the draft of the summer <web/> presentation. And, as I am always aiming for the best (:D), I tried to do it in LaTeX, with prosper. I should mention that I am suuuuch a LaTeX beginner (I can't even insert an image without pain and shouts (that would be 'strigături' in Romanian) and Google. After half an hour of searches, I finally managed to compile an example from the internet (they all seemed to use all sort of packages that I don't have). OOok, cool! Now, I don't like these templates (seriously, they're reeaaaaaly ugly), I want to build my own, light green (microformats like light green) style. So I started to edit an existing style, hoping that it won't be that hard: I have the source and the output so I should be able to figure it out...

Guess what?

Two hours later, I'm back to OpenOffice!

Now I really wonder (maybe you were, too) why I started with the formatting: I should have written it first and then mind about its look, shouldn't I?

Here we go again...

2007-05-04T16:24:00.000+03:00

Yes, I do stare at XML all day long

Just when I thought I saw everything...
Today, Yahoo! Tech!
First of all, there is a special reason for which the guys that designed microformats figured out a method of specifying uids for each of the microformats: when parsing the same page twice, we MUST have a way of testing microformats equality to realize that we already know the precious info one has to offer! So, yahoo tech guys, you might wanna add a rel='self' (or rel='bookmark' or anything that would mean 'id', with its most permissive interpretation) to the 'a' tag in the title of the review!

First-and-a-half of all, the 'description' of the yahoo tech review is its 'item fn' as well. (according to this, the text of the review and the formatted name of the item are semantically equivalent) Now what could that mean? Hmmm... Seemingly, that it's reviewing the "I bought this product 2 days ago and I think is really cool" item. Is this just because 'item' is required and some 'specification compliant' programmer thought he/she should stuff it in somehow?

Second of all (and this is the cool part – I tend to keep good things for the ending), the short review links to a 'longer', 'one-on-the-page' review, through that 'a' tag I mentioned. But guess what: NO hreview markup AT ALL on this new page. Nothing. Empty. Stupid simple html. Pleaaaase, have mercy!

Notice now how I am writing my post in a conversation-like manner: because Neil was so kind to react, I am probably expecting that to happen again (yeah, dream on!).

Now I decided that I REALLY should do something to prevent things like this in the future: and I will start by highlighting some 'tips on how not to screw up semantics' in my presentation on microformats. Even if it won't change anything, at least I will be sure I tried my best.

Google desktop update

2007-05-02T10:46:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I remembered I have google desktop installed and that its sidebar plugins can read RSSs and display googleCalendar. Because I needed those functions (I finally decided to read blogs through RSS and to manage deadlines better by using a calendar), I brought it back to light.
Since some of the plugins stated that I need the 5.0 version in order for them to work, though I'm not an 'update fan' and I had some unhappy experiences with updates, I decided to do it:
Well, WHOA!

Notice, from top to bottom: wikipedia search, googleCalendar (expanded), the default webClips, todo list, scratchPad and photos (collapsed) and the search box.

A year ago I was using gDesktop simplicity to make a point in my project for the CHI (computer human interaction) course. It seems it was not a principle, but a 'mistake'.
Now it looks very 'vista', and all the fades and decorations (notice the frame around scratch pad) get it pretty close to yahoo Widgets from the GUI design point of view. Despite all this, and the fact that it doesn't match my classic windows theme, it's pretty cool. I also noticed a few changes in the gadgets so that they fit better in the small space designed for the sidebar (for which I am eternally grateful).

Long story made short, I decided to offer 100 pixels of my widescreen to google desktop's sidebar, again.

Microformatted week

2007-04-27T14:36:00.000+03:00

First of all I must mention that last week I was pleasantly surprised to see the reactions to my post about Summer <Web /> online.
I must thank Edward and Neil for their immediate responses (changed markup on eventful and added summer web on upcoming). Also, I was surprised (and happy) to notice that the class=url's on upcoming are now attached only to the right elements, yeeeeey!

(I also noticed that Tantek Çelik was wearing an upcoming T-shirt at the microformats dinner at web 2.0 expo. I want one too!)

Second of all, I've just started v0.3 pre-alpha of my Bsc project. I also have a print screen of v2.0 "in action". I was just browsing microformateurs.org (using the dev firefox profile by mistake) and it highlighted the microformats dinner event:

Now don't get enthusiastic, it's just the urlRecommender outlier there... :), no 'smart' predictions yet.

I also thought of some things to mention in my microformats presentation at summer <Web /> to make it cool and attractive for everyone and to tease the developers.

And, I almost forgot to mention, I am now a very happy listener of Queen - Greatest Hits, volumes I, II and III.

So it's a joyfull, microformatted lunch I'm having right now:
<div class="hLunch">
<span class="mainCourse">
<a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/230458" rel="vote-for">Yummy potato moussaka</a>
</span>
with
<span class="drink">sparkling water</span></div>.

Summer online

2007-04-20T14:00:00.000+02:00

Since everybody is blogging and spreading the word about it (well, at least Sabin Buraga and Alina Mierluş) I thought I should contribute too: I started submitting the thing online, to "major" events websites: Eventful and Upcoming.
I had some fun with that tag in the title of the event, but the great discovery was that, as opposed to upcoming's policy on url classes, eventful just does not allow you to add an url (a class="url") for your event. At all. Whatever you do, wherever you add your link, it will not be THE url of the vevent. Their class="url" is for the permalink of the event on eventful. That is, still on their website. I wonder if this is marketing (all events homepages are on eventful) or just plain wrong applied semantics, AGAIN.

The happy end of this story is this.

For the upcoming story there is no happy-end: I couldn't add FCS as a venue on upcoming (I tried like 3-4 times):

and because you cannot add events without venues, summer <Web/> 2007 is not on Upcoming. Yet. I'll try again the next days, maybe this is only because of the changes they're going through now (merging upcoming accounts with yahoo accounts), though I can't see any connection.

Does anyone know if there is a Romanian events website? We should submit it there, too...

Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that I will be talking about microformats at Summer <Web/> 2007. See you there!

Far from a better world...

2007-04-17T15:54:00.000+02:00

Motto: the optimists say we are living in the best possible world. The pessimists fear so!

Anyone missed my outraged posts on idiot markup and stupid programmers?
I thought so!

Upcoming.org seems to have had a checkbox on their hiring form saying:
"Are you a dumb head that cannot cope with correct semantic markup?"
and hired only the ones that checked it!

My newest discovery regarding the upcoming.org markup (no, I will not go insane from reading XML all day long) is that they just throw URL's (class="url") wherever they feel to! Their event details page is one huuuuge vevent div stuffed with all sorts of things (let's not discuss about this now, they're not the only sinners), among which a list of all users attending to / watching the event. Since those are users, of course they also have user pages on upcoming. Why not put the link to the user page here? Why not add a 'url' class to that link? So, it's enough to write your simple XPath to the url of the event and you'll get yourself a list full of crap (the more people attending the event, the more crap in your event url list!). The author of the event (the one that posted it on their wonderful website) is also a user and the link to him/her is also a url class link. Inside the vevent div as well, why not?

I would really like to know what those guys think "semantic markup / microformats" mean...

Back for more...

2007-04-10T16:59:00.000+02:00

I'm back from my 3 days Easter trip, with pictures, as I promised.
The short version of my trip is: Iaşi - Tg. Neamţ - Brusturi - Easter night at Crucea Monastery - Suceava - Botoşani - Iaşi (if Romania would have been scanned closer by online maps, maybe I would have tried some coords).
It was a traditional Easter, with traditional food and a beautiful Easter service at the monastery.
You can take a look at some pictures here.

I picked Picasa Web (after googling for some comparisons and evaluating features). I also downloaded Picasa and played with it a little (it also resizes the pictures when it uploads them (automatically) to the web album - a 48MB folder became 12MB - which is pretty good given that the space limit is 1GB (but they say it's counting)).

Now I'm back for more (brain damage) and waiting for the next holidays...

Happy Easter

2007-04-07T08:51:00.000+02:00

Happy Easter to you all!

I will take off in a couple of hours for a short break in the country side to celebrate Easter. I will be back with pictures!

See you in a few days.

Later edit: and since you're here, maybe you could help with this: Picasa web or Flickr?
Picasa has the advantages of being "Google's too" and that all the blog pictures are stored in there, I don't need a new account, I already have the google account, but Flickr, on the other hand, first of all, is (the) Flickr :) and second, is has gorgeous semantic markup (of what I heard) -- but I didn't check picasa's yet, it might be better (yeah right). So please, if you spare a moment, drop an option in a comment. Thank you!

I wonder what does this button doo? (reloaded)

2007-04-04T10:08:00.000+02:00

Well, I got it: the print-screens! Unfortunately, I'm pretty slow (in thoughts) and I couldn't get a print-screen of the progress bar...

1. The panel appeared: notice how it covers the text and its close button in the bottom-right corner:

2. I clicked the button. Notice how the advertisement disappeared but the panel didn't: the black thing is still covering the page!

The same webpage displays another advertisement, pretty much in the same way: a non-closing-panel on top of the text. But this was only the container: the actual ad was a smaller panel bouncing inside the container. And guess what: the close button was attached to the bouncing panel!!!! Sooo, in order to close it, I had to move around to catch it: of course, I missed twice so I got myself two popups opened by the stupid ad!

Finally, I had to reload the page until no ads were displayed at all (it seems it does such things besides changing the ad) in order to read something (a pretty interesting article after all).

This is to prove that reading newspapers online is one of the best things to do to "relax" -- it seems somehow that newspapers pick the most stupid programmers for their websites.

I wonder what does this button dooo?

2007-04-01T15:22:00.000+02:00

Motto (from Cartoon Network ancient wisdom):

Deedee: I wonder what does this button doooo? Can I push it, Dexter, can I, can I?!?!?!
Dexter: No, Deedee, do NOT push that button!

Remember the pop-up advertisements that we all hated? Thanks God (or the popup blockers), they're history now!
But because creativity is a key component of a web developer, another invention invades our browsers: the javascript popup panels with advertisements. The blockers didn't get them, yet! :)

For those who haven't seen them yet, they are panels that open when you enter the page, covering parts of the page content, that show text and/or sounds to get your attention and make you buy whatever they want you to buy. Besides this classic version, there is a new variety of the ad: there is a regular ad panel but when you hover it, it gets laaaaarger and starts making sounds. Of course, this kind of hover-activated panels are 'strategically' placed in the page: you'd have to take a 700 pixels wide ellipse detour to avoid it. But, hey, that's their purpose, to annoy you until you buy!

There is no really big problem actually: they all have a close button, a mute button (not like the stupid beer that made sure all the office knows you read gsp), or whatever annihilation method.

I mean, that's what I thought until a few days ago, when I entered some online newspaper (I don't remember which one) and it popped:
millisecond 1: 'OK, I'll close it!'
millisecond 2: 'oooh, no close button...'
millisecond 2.5: 'oooh, it hasn't loaded yet (it's just a blank panel covering my web page), that's why...'
seconds 1 to 5: the ad's PROGRESS BAR saying: 'Loading, please wait...'
Whaaaaaat? NO, I will NOT wait for you to load an advertisement I don't want to see!!!!

So what do we do know? Should we stop visiting the annoying websites? Is it fair to avoid bad-designed websites or bad-programmed websites? What makes us come back to a website: the content or the design? (I sound like Carrie Bradshaw again!)
The publisher of the information is, frequently enough, not the one that designes/programmes the website. So, by not visiting it anymore, we actually hurt the publisher when it's the developer we should hit.
Of course, the publisher chooses the programmer so if it's stupid, he/she should pay. Yet again, frequently enough, the publisher has no idea about technical stuff, so he/she cannot evaluate properly the work of a programmer (I could bet that the online newspaper had no idea about the fact that a slow internet connection might cause an advertising to load for a few seconds and annoy me (the user)). Doubtless, the programmer will always blame the content if a website isn't visited enough.

So (to make it an awareness raising post): PUBLISHERS from all around the world, hire someone and pay him/her damn well to TEST your website's functionality in all the imaginable and non-imaginable ways because it's your image and your money we're talking about!

Porkoo, season 1, episode 2 - At the game (cont'd)

2007-03-23T23:49:00.000+02:00

NNNNOOOOoooooo...
But wait: if they can't tell I'm a Poli fan, I'll be fine, won't I?

So was Porkoo thinking and planning his one piece escape from the middle of the vasluians. He pretended he was cold, wrapping his blue-white scarf around his neck under his coat and went on eating his seeds. Terrorized by the fact that a single smile might reveal him, he showed a serious, immovable face, and even looked away when important game moments took place.
For Porkoo's misfortune to be complete, Poli had all the chances to score you can imagine but they didn't. At one of them, when Porkoo was looking away so that he wouldn't be tempted to cheer, a sunflower seed fan behind him remarked: "Hey, smartie, have you grown a face on the wrong side of your body?" Oh no, Porkoo, don't let them become suspicious! If it wouldn't be a serious face he has to show, he would even cry looking at the Poli horde on the other side of the stadium, all happy that their favorites are "on them, on their mother!" (also a Romanian hooligan saying).

But look, another chance for Iasi to score, it's the 88th minute and Balba is going inside the square with the ball, he's gonna scooooore... but, no, he's illegally stopped by one of the vasluians... Penalty shot!!!!! yeeey!... but Balba is hit pretty bad... the ambulance takes him straight to the hospital! You bloody vasluian bastards, you hit our star!!!! DAMN IT, DAMN IT, I cannot hold it anymore, damn it! Onut shoots the penalty kick and he scores!!! We wooon, we wooon!

"Yeeeey!!!! GO POOOOLIIII!!! YEEEEEEYYY!!!"yy... Oups...

Again, his seat companions weren't as happy as him... The big sunflower seeds fans behind him - remember them, don't you? -, after a short grief, look at Porkoo as if they want to send him to accompany his idol, Balba.

"Sorry guys, I meant BUUUUU... a-a-accc-tually I said BUUU, you must have misheard it... i-i-t was the echo from the other ss-s-s-i-d-d-d-de..." He didn't get to finish his new sonic theory: one of the guys slapped him really hard on the back of his head. The birds are singing again, it's spring time. While all the others were leaving the stadium and the big guys were in the middle of a lesson on "Sound trajectory through punches and feet - with practical examples", a tall blonde girl with a perfect 90-60-90 body, big boobs and golden hair stops in front of their seats and shouts: "Hey, brother, where were you? I've been looking for you all evening, damn it!" It was the beautiful sister of one of the big guys and normally Porkoo would be fascinated but now he's only enjoying some punchless moments! The girl comes to them and his brother explains to her what happened, ending with: "Well, that's it! Love hurts: you must suffer for your team else is not true love! Ha-ha-ha".

She looks at Porkoo who tried hardly to stand and walk, with his Poli scarf all dirty now and with blood on his face. "C'mon, guys, you were mean... Look at him!" she says and then she gets her perfumed napkin out of her yellow-green purse and delicately wipes his face. OOOOOHHHH MMMMYYY GOOOD, maaaaan, punch me again, please! thinks Porkoo. She bends to his ear and whispers: "Hey, how about a 'game' between you and me tonight?" OOOhhh mmmmyyyy Goood! "well... let me think first... ... YEEEES!". So they leave the stadium, arm to arm, all giggling and making fun of some people's exaggerated passion for the favorite team.

Because she is the daughter of a wealthy Vaslui business-man, she has a room rented at a luxury hotel in Iasi. They get inside the room all hot and kissing, they tear their clothes off (even her yellow-green bra), but suddenly "AAAAHHH, my god, my back aches, I can't move... It must be your brother's feet! Oh, God, it hurts so bad!". "Oh, Porkoo, I'm sorry for this!" "Well, it's not your fault, let's continue" says hot Porkoo. But "Ahh, damn it, I can't!! It hurts! It hurts!". "It's no problem, Porkoo! We'll only sleep in each other's arms... I'm happy just to hold you!" said the girl cuddling in his arms.

They spent a few more hours chatting and then went asleep with Porkoo's mind focused on a single thought: next time, he will support the right team!

The w3b: 2day and tomorrow

2007-03-23T14:34:00.000+02:00

Documenting for the bsc and in actually no mood of doing it (yes, Buraga WILL kill me!), I stumbled upon an article on Metacrap.
You might find it resembling to my article on tags here-and-there.
And I know, you already knew all that stuff, it's obvious, isn't it?

Anyway, it made me ask myself: does web converge asimptotically to 3.0? That is, are we going there but will never actually GET there?
Either way, for its beauty it is worth...

Porkoo, season 1, episode 2 - At the game

2007-03-23T00:28:00.000+02:00

Well, spring has come (actually there was no winter) and a young bird singing on a campus window frame reminded Porkoo (that full of Counter and Brood Porkoo) of it: one morning he turned his head away from his computer and realized that the weather outside is gorgeous and that, probably, at this time of the year, the girls abandoned their heavy winter clothes and are now walking in the sun wearing only transparent shirts, waiting for his eyes to caress their bodies. He turned back to his monitor longing for what he has missed by sitting in the house so long... And there, on the opened gsp page was his salvation: "Poli Iasi vs. F.C. Vaslui, tonight, on "Emil Alexandrescu" stadium in Iasi"!!! Not so many girls, actually, but what does it matter? It's fresh spring air, THE football game, and he MUST be there to support his white-blue love: POLI!

Now I must interfere and mention, for the football noobs, that there is a big rivalry between the two teams, and that many vasluians live in Iasi for a reason or another (students, most of them). The distance between the two towns is of 60-70 km so imagine a stadium filled with football fans: half white-blue, half yellow-green.

Said and done: at 19h he is in front of the stadium armed with entertaining tools like: sunflower seeds (great popcorn replacer) and two Beck's beer cans, one in each of his jacket pockets. To prove his love, he immediately buys a POLI scarf and wears it proudly on top of his coat, for every vasluian looser to know he's there for POOOOOLI! Even that group of skinhead vasluians over there, to whom he shouts loudly, so that the entire Copou hill can hear his manifesto: "Is not Vaslui!!!!!" (that, in Romanian, sounds like "Vaslui sucks" and is very common among supporters). One of them comes towards him prepared to show him who is not, but the others stop him with "Leave him alone, man, can't you see he's stupid?"s. "F***ing bald coward!" thinks Porkoo and walks on, to inform other people of his passion, too.

At the entrance in the stadium, the bodyguards give him a light body check and, touching his jacket pockets, they remark: "So you're here for big fun tonight... ;). These remain with us, though!". "Oh, no! Bloody bribees! I have a ticket! They pretend bribe to get on the stadium with a ticket too, damn! Is not Dinamo!!!!" (Dinamo is the police force's football team). But you cannot stand against the police, can you?

Well, finally he finds an empty seat, with no beer but still decided to enjoy the game: he's there for the team after all, beer he can have anywhere. The seat is not so well placed (on the corner of the stadium) but, hey, he's there for the atmosphere, not the game itself, game he can have on TV. His seat is pretty dirty (big (and i mean physically big) sunflower seeds fans behind him) but, hey, POLI is gonna score so much, and he's gonna cheer so much, that he won't have time to actually sit. The teams get in the court: YEEEEEEEEEEEY! GO POOOLI!!! (thinks Porkoo) but just when he is about to open his mouth to let his love come out, he realizes that no one around him is as happy as him... au contraire... They're no real fans! What are they doing on the stadium, then? Look at that fat guy, two seats farther, with his yellow shirt with green collar: no real passion in his eyes... and his that tall skinny one on my left with yellow-green scarf... and that guy near me with his yellow trousers and green coat.. and the otherrrr with yyyyyyeeeelllloooowwww-ggggrrrreeee...
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!! My f***ing perfect luck! f**************!!!!!! f**k, f**k, f**k!!!! damn it, damn it! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! damn iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOoooooo..... :(((

TO BE CONTINUED...

What will happen next? Will Porkoo come out one piece from the middle of the Vaslui fans horde? stay tuned!

Towards a better world...

2007-03-19T12:00:00.000+02:00

Why people ignore tagging?

I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.
When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!
BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?
And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all).
I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).

So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...

If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...

Porkoo, season 1, episode 1 (teaser)

2007-03-15T01:22:00.000+02:00

Because I know you haven't got a damn clue about who Porkoo is...
Previous, on Porkoo: he is a young pig from a small town near Iasi and, as he just finished highschool, he comes to study in Iasi. He knows (he has heard from his older friends) that Iasi is a big city, with good universities, cool discos and possibilities of having fun as well as getting culturalized. Porkoo is pretty smart, with good marks in highschool (actually his colleagues often called him 'geek') but no big plans with his life: he's not really decided what he wants to study. So he decides to go up on the Copou hill (where his parents told him he could find the most studentish atmosphere and the greatest university of Iasi) and check on the faculties to see whichever he likes best (armed, of course, with strict and relevant criteria like: how good does it look, how amiable is the personnel, how far does he have to go for classes, and so on). His wanderings brought him, tired and bored, about midday, in front of the C building... There, he checked on the building: not the coolest he had seen, the personnel: pretty cool (checked!), how far the classroooms aaaaaarrrr... BBBUT, WHAT'S THAT??? A veeeery, veeeeery beautiful blonde girl has just come out of the building. Another two, equally beautiful, follow her. They giggle about something and light up their slim cigarettes talking loud and joyful about economy or smth, it doesn't matter anyway. The July sun is playing in their shiny hair and the mild wind spoils their delicate skin with its dance (enough bla-bla). Porkoo is enchanted: he cannot take his eyes away while his mind is far away into elaborating plans (from the smug 'hey, missy, lonely-lonely?' category) of how to get such a 'piece' for himself. Remember when I said that Porkoo hasn't got any big plans? Well, he kind of has one: he wants to get laid, he has seen it on TV, it seems cool; his friends also dropped some hints about being 'cool, man!' and sometimes, when he reads 'Sports Gazette' online and sees the beautiful girls, he feels some sort of strange feeling, like a sudden powerful desire, he dreams of hot nights and lazy mornings with such a lady. After the girls' cigarettes finished and they went inside, and after ten more minutes of staring at the wall against which they stood, Porkoo's brain finally comes up with an idea: they are, most probable, attending the faculty in this building so if he would join this faculty... He rushes inside looking for an office. Oh, there, on the left. In five minutes he was out, dreaming of a new life, proud of his new badge saying:

Porkoo,
Faculty of Computer Science student

Why I hate IE (#1)

2007-02-23T12:17:00.000+02:00

Each morning I take some minutes for reading newspapers (online) and for drinking my coffee.

So I did this morning and it hit me that too many of the websites that show click-to-see-larger-version pictures at some point, enlarge them in a javascript activated popup.
It's so damn annoying: first of all, it is a popup window which carries the bad reputation of belonging to some sort of unwanted advertising; second of all it's disturbing my good desktop organization (I don't like irregular things here and there on my desktop); third, most of these popups are fixed size (which usually is the size of the picture, larger than the desktop); fourth, it shouldn't be this way: a picture is a part of the website, is not something 'additional' to pop near the website, it should be displayed inside the website, in a unitary (style-wise) frame so that when I (the user) see and memorize it I also see and memorize the frame, thus the identity of the website: it's OUR picture, the users must remember that. (This is is not even code-wise difficult!)

Naturally, I wondered why... The first reason that came in my mind was that of the need to keep the user on the picture index page: usually you have more than one picture, in thumbs, and the user wants to see a larger version of one of the pictures. Opening the picture must not navigate the user away from the thumbs page so he/she can enlarge another picture if he/she desires. A target blank is not a choice since it would launch another browser instance which is even more annoying than a popup :).
After this reasoning I realized, once again, how much I 'love' Internet Exploder (it's a pun!): their lack of tabbed browsing encouraged 'the popup solution'. In a tabbed browser it's easy: you just open the picture in a new tab (I don't know if such a thing is possible but it should be), or even in the same tab and leave it to the user to middle-click or ctrl+click the enlarging link to open it in a new tab. With firefox 2.0's new functionality of opening all target blank links in new tabs instead of new windows, this is even more simple (even if one shouldn't rely on this kind of particular browser behavior). Worse than this is the fact that IE is way to spread to just ignore your website's UI on this browser.

Since IE 7.0 was too recently released, I suppose people didn't have time to change their websites...

Eagerly waiting for the world (wide web) to turn the other way, I end here wishing you happy non-poppy browsing!

Stupid feelings...

2007-02-21T11:11:00.000+02:00

Why do I necessarily feel stupid when using other people's libraries for REAL things?

I'm using now bdb xml and saxon8 for some code and I really feel retard... Nothing goes right, just when I think I nailed it I find out about another 'undocumented feature' or 'oh, so well known and so reported bug' to workaround, not to talk about the situations when I just want to find out more, or to do things 'by the book' (when I only have the 'quick-quickest-in-the-flashiest-of-the-flashes getting started' guide).

I admit, I'm no specialist in anything, I just happen to be able to handle multiple domains and, in my humble opinion, I should be able to work with things... I'm not saying I'm that smart, I'm just saying that things should be stupid enough... :)

I read a blog about why one hates frameworks, and, since then, I tend to find those flaws in everything I use: huuuuuge bushy architectures (incompatible, just to make things more fun), some interfaces to access the huge bushy things (don't instantiate it, GET an instance) and the polymorphism that isn't always the best choice (don't get an instance since the framework does not dispatch your call properly, just instantiate the FactoryImpl).

I know, I know, I choose java (known for some other bad things besides being slow) so I did it consciously to myself but I appeal to your better nature!

All the libraries are great as long as you just want to see if and how they work (that would be to take the "Hello, world!" and modify it in "Bonjour, monde!"), or maybe use it as a 'buzz-import' (you know, that import com.net.x.y.sophisticated-(non)abbreviated-name.framework.BigSmartFactory that we all love because it proves that we know how to 're-use code' and 'not reinvent the wheel'). When one gets over this and really wants to understand what is happening there, write code that not only works but is also readable, safe and in fully agreement with the principles of writing programs (if X.createY() actually returns a cooler subclass Z of Y, but the documentation states that it should return Y, I will never cast Y to Z), then one is in big trouble and the clouds of complete idiocy threaten to darken his/her blue skies of knowledge aspiration.

P.S. The title is NOT wrong, is a pun!

Updating

2007-02-08T10:11:00.000+02:00

There is a line in American Beauty which I love: "In life never trust anyone but yourself" - this is a piece of wisdom passed by Carolyn Burnham to her daughter Jane after Carolyn and Lester argue at dinner (that scene when he throws the asparagus plate at the wall).
I would put it another way: "In software industry never trust any code but your own!". A few days ago I installed the new and fabulous update of Firebug. It's a great extension, indeed "Web development evolved", but the 1.0 version, though is cooler than you ever thought you'll see, it crashes my browser! 1.0.1 is now available too (and I thought: "oh, goodie, bug fix"), but it does the same. Whhhhyyyy? :(( Not to mention that it lacks functionality that the previous version had: console options that allowed me to see my messages (not only errors and warnings) sent from the javascript code inside an extension using Mozilla's console service.
But, until writing my own firebug (:D), I'm still thinking if I should stop using it (as a protest) or just "Restore previous session" again and again and again...

P.S. this post should have been written last night but there was a power failure hence no internet. This seems buggy as well...

Finally...

2007-02-06T22:13:00.000+02:00

...my time has come: I'm blogging!
...about the small things that fill my time daily: school projects, new things in software, computers, and techonolgy, world-wide non-computer related news, other stuff that manage to pass my attention spam filter, school projects and maybe about school projects sometimes.

Happy reading! (if anymore than this :) )