Pasta with tuna and roquefort

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!

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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!

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?

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

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

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!