The Nutcracker

Last night I saw The Nutcracker ballet in the interpretation of Bolshoi Theatre from Moscow. Last year I saw the same Nutcracker at the Bucharest National Opera last year. I'm not in any way an expert in ballet, but what I think adds value to a performance is to transform as much as possible the music's rhythm into movements. The choreograph needs to imagine those movements and the dancers to be able to perform them. And that's what Bolshoi troupe did better than the one from Bucharest Opera. On the other hand the scenography was scarcer (they are on a tour after wall), and they sacrificed somehow the story in the second act in the favor of individual performances.

Shopping spree

Oracle is buying BEA for $8.5bn, Sun is buying MySQL for $1bn. So for now on when I'll work on a project with BEA Weblogic application server and Oracle DB I'll have only one company to bash at. I wonder if BEA closed that bug I opened regarding their server re-start last year. The application would fail to load on server re-start if some work flow exception logging table contained data in it. Cool, isn't it? Probably they closed it to look good to their potential buyers. Anybody buying Microsoft or Google? :)

The golden age of mathematics

I'm done with "measuring the world" and I started a new book "Mathematics: the golden age" by Keith Devlin. It's a captivating view of the progresses made in this field lately (after 1960), many of them with the help of the computer. So applied computer science in mathematics, yeah :)

New year and a new book

It's already old news, but a new year started recently. I interrupted my Harry Potter reading during the holidays. On our way to Budapest we stopped one night in Cluj and the friend were we slept over gave me a book she read recently: Measuring the World by a German author Daniel Hehlmann. I was not blown up by this novel, but nevertheless I found some nice anecdotes about Gauss' life.