Madrid holiday

I'm back from a five days holiday in Madrid. The city is not outstanding, but nice to visit and the weather was ideal (sunny, but not very hot). We went to Prado and the museum of modern art and rambled around the old town. We also went to Toledo, which is a nice old city on a hill. We didn't have a good map of it though and it was very confusing to get around the narrow streets and to find the particular places we wanted to visit. It was also difficult to get out of the old city in the right direction to the railway station, so we almost had to run to catch the train back to Madrid. I made some photos, maybe I'll post some here later.

Biofuels and food price

The food prices started to climb since last year. And some people are blaming the increased bio-fuels production for this. This is indeed one of the reasons in my opinion, especially since the production of bio-fuels is subsidized in some countries, which I think it's a mistake. The other reason is an increase in income in China and India, where people can afford to eat more. See an in depth analysis of the food crisis here. The good part of this is that some land that was not used in Romania because it was simple not profitable for farmers to cultivate them are now used. On my last trip to Constanta I saw lots of rapeseed (one of the plants the bio-diesel is made of) fields in bloom.

New book - Theft of a Nation

I started reading a new book "Theft of a Nation: Romania Since Communism" by Tom Gallagher. It is a history of bad governance in Romania traced back to the creation of the Romanian state in the 19-th century. What I expected from the book and it doesn't provide is a more in depth sociological analysis of the causes of the facts described. Otherwise I know most of the facts presented there, so it's not shocking for me. I can say though that the society evolved a little bit in the latest years. The miners marching towards Bucharest in 1999 seems so long ago...

I don't block the crossroad

The traffic in Bucharest is a mess: there way too many cars in the city, they exceed both the street flow capacity and the available parking lots. And to make it even worse, many drivers don't respect the law: they pass on red, drive on the other way occasionally and block the crossroads, by entering in it although the street in front of them is full and they cannot pass by the crossroad. So some guy created a web page that urges people not to block the crossroad. From that site you can get a sticker to put it on your car to show your commitment to this behavior. I totally agree with this guy, but in order for this to work you need cooperation from all drivers. On a one lane per direction street everything is OK: if I'm the first one and I see the crossroad is blocked then I stop and wait for it to clear. The ones behind me will have to stop too. But if there is a two lane street some other drivers from the other lane can still enter the crossroad and block it. Moreover, some of them will change lanes and block my lane too. This is an example of a game where everybody gets more if all respect some rules. Unfortunately, most of the people are too shortsighted and selfish to understand it. Anyway, I will keep not blocking the crossroads as far as I can...

You may notice that police is out of this story, cause the law is most of the time not enforced in Romania.

Downgrading an application

For the first time in my career I'm working on downgrading an application. We worked for about 7 months on an application where persistence is handled by Hibernate. Due to some license/patents issues with our partner it was decided to migrate the persistence layer to EJB3.0/JPA using the container provided JPA implementation(the application is supposed to be deployed on various application servers - WebSphere and WebLogic for sure - depending on the client). The problem is that the EJB 3.0 standard is less powerful than Hibernate and also the implementation is in version 1.0 (for example WebSphere uses OpenJPA from Apache which is in version 1.0.2) which means missing features and bugs, so this migration turns out to be a downgrading of the application :(

Earth Hour

Last Saturday I joined the people who celebrated the Earth Hour. I turned off all the lights and electrical appliances (except for the fridge) in the house and enjoyed the silence for an hour. It reminded me the times from the communist era when the electricity was cut every day. Except that back then they weren't doing it for the Earth, but for the "country" and without asking people if they agree. I didn't notice people around doing the same thing, anyway for sure it wasn't a massive turning off of the lights, but maybe in the future Romanians will be more aware of these environmental issues. Here is a report of what happened around the world with this occasion.

Einstein could be refuted

I read an interesting article in The Economist about some mismatches discovered between the predictions of the general relativity theory and some actual measurements. These mismatches were found a couple of times when various space missions used planetary gravity for acceleration (this is a cheap method to accelerate a space probe by swinging it around a planet, instead of installing powerful engines that also require a lot of fuel). The researchers are still checking the flight data of the various space probes to make sure there is no other explanation for this deviation, but this could become a serious flaw in the general relativity theory. Who wants to fix it? :)

The last Harry Potter

I just finish reading the last novel of the Harry Potter series. Impressive! I liked very much the last two novels, there is much more action and suspense than in the previous ones. Overall I think the world created by the author is quite complex with strong characters and conflicts and many twists to keep you on the hook. All the ingredients to get a best-seller.

Jules Verne goes to space

After more than a hundred years of wild imagination Jules Verne finally made it to space, in the form of an ATV, which is not an all terrain vehicle, but an automated transfer vehicle which can attach itself to the International Space Station without any human driving. This first ATV is called Jules Verne after the famous French science fiction writer. This is one big step in the European space program, showing some commitment into developing more and more advanced space technology. See details about first ATV mission here.

Down but not out

I spent the last three days in bed having a severe flu. I still have some fever, but it's getting better, so probably I'll go back to work on Monday. Meanwhile, I managed to finish the fifth book of Harry Potter series and I started the sixth one, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". It is very entertaining and I think this is the best book of the series so far.

The prince that went to war

It's not a fairy tale, it is about Prince Harry, the third in line for the crown of United Kingdom. Harry was enrolled into the British Army, and was deployed in Afghanistan last year. This was kept secret from the media in order not to spur an increase of attacks on those troops from the Taleban forces. Once media started to report about his presence in Afghanistan the Army decided to withdraw him from there. See a report here. Most people will not expect a prince will actually practice a profession nowadays, so deciding to be a soldier and actually going to the front line is really cool from his part.

Wines

I like drinking wine rather than beer and I find the diversity of wines fascinating. It's amazing how you can obtain from the same grape vine totally different tasting wines from one year to another. I read once in a book about wines an advice for amateur wine lovers like me to keep tracking in a notebook of the wines they are drinking in order to fully appreciate a wine from another. Of course, everything takes very long from draw board to implementation (especially in my case :)), but yesterday I finally started this "notebook". Of course it is a virtual one and can be seen here.

My own Java puzzles

Programming in Java for some time now (about six and a half years) I started discovering myself some Java puzzles. They first appeared as bugs in my code or in some colleague's code and investigating them lead me to discover some unexpected behavior in the core Java API. The two examples I found are the equals and compareTo methods in java.sql.Timestamp and the behavior of HashSet when holding mutable objects. Of course these issues are documented in the Sun's Java API docs(see the notes regarding java.sql.Timestamp and java.util.Set in the Javadocs), but I bet most of the people discover them the hard way :)

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!

So Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44 billions. The reason for the offer is to better compete with Google, but how do they plan to do that: they will definitely better control the instant messaging and web mail markets, but they badly need to improve in search. Also this move would mean that maybe Microsoft will have more open source and Java technologies on their (new) premises. Isn't that funny? :) Maybe we'll see some Java documentation on MSDN network, who knows :)

See two interesting comments on this move on The Register: here and here.

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.

End of the year

This year is coming to an end, I can't wait for the holidays to come. I'll head to Constanta for Christmas and then to Budapest for the New Year's Eve.

Skills you need to succeed

In a column I read on BBC Bill Gates talks about the skills you need to succeed in the current society. The ones that I find very significant are ongoing learning and having a "curiosity about the world". Note that it's not guaranteed you will succeed if you have these skills :)

Nevertheless I keep trying improving on them: I started the fifth book from Harry Potter series (you learn a lot of magic from there :) and this one is in English (I read the first four in Romanian). Now I have to match all the funny translations of names (for example Snipes = Plezneala, Muglers = Incuiati).

Another event that attracted my attention recently was the Bali summit on global warming. The good thing is the talks there didn't collapse, but the bad thing is the progress is minimal. The arguing between U.S., E.U. and developing countries continue. Are we running out of time here?

Making solar energy cheaper than coal energy

Google announced recently they will invest/donate a large amount of money into research on how to make the generation of solar energy cheaper than the one generated by burning coal. They also plan to hire researchers in a newly created department at Google to study this problem. More here and in an interview here.

What are my friends reading?

One of the cool applications I found on Facebook are those that let you show what books you read or are reading at this moment. The problem is there are multiple applications doing the same thing and I bet you cannot exchange data among them. Just looking at the profiles of my friends I saw three of them: Visual Bookshelf (the one I also use, being the first one I stumbled upon), Shelfari Books, iRead. I wish there was a monopoly in this domain :)

By the way, I finished the third book from the Harry Potter series. I started reading the forth one (the goblet of fire).

Waiting for the fiber-link...

I'm home, waiting for the cable guys to show up and install the new fiber-link internet connection. This is the second time I'm waiting for them, the last time they just didn't come :(. Poor services, but not much choice in this area: the cable operators just split the city building by building and they don't compete with each other. And I don't trust Romtelecom which is also offering internet services. They are more expensive and have an even poorer service quality record.

Cultural events

We went to some nice shows lately. First was "Carmen" by Bizet, a nice performance of the National Opera from Bucharest. Next we saw "Happy Days" by Samuel Backett: a "tough" parable about what hope means. And finally, at Ateneu we saw a "camereta" concert (there was something like a half sized orchestra, strings only, plus a flute soloist). They played pre-classical pieces, mostly by Vivaldi, including the Four Seasons concerts arranged for flute. Interesting experiment, although the presto and allegro parts were hard to play on flute, they didn't sound as good as violin.

Java Puzzles

Yesterday I saw a very interesting presentation on some Java programming puzzles. Done by Josh Bloch (author of well known book "Effective Java Programming Language Guide") and Bill Pugh (professor at University of Maryland with extensive research in programming languages).

Online social networks

I created myself a Facebook account a couple of days ago. I had previous experiences with social networks like Orkut and Hi5, but I was not impressed by what you could do in these networks. What makes Facebook different is the range of applications that you can deploy on your profile. The number of Facebook applications grew since they provided an API so that anybody can write such an application. Meanwhile Google released an API (OpenSocial) that will let you write an application deployable on any network that agrees to support this API (and a lot of them do, except guess who? Facebook). Let's see where this will take the online social networking buzz.

Recycle Bin

No, it's not the one from Windows :)
I couple of weeks ago I read some news that bins for recycling paper and plastic bottles have been placed in my neighborhood. So last week-end I recycled my first 6 plastic bottles. No giant leap, just a small step...

Tennis

I started (after a pause of two years) playing tennis with some of my colleagues. We're not that good at it, but after two sessions I can see we improved our play. And the team building is also good :) Last weekend I also went to see the semi-finals and the final of the Romanian Open, which was cool. There was also a demonstrative match between Monica Seles and Martina Navratilova.

Next Harry Potter novel and BPEL

I started reading the third Harry Potter and also started learning some BPEL for a new project. BPEL is not that fun (drag and drop programing in WID...) and will also not be that portable since another team in the project already uses IBM extensions.

Harry Potter

I started reading Harry Potter last week. It's nice and I'm already at the second novel in the series. I wonder when was the last time I read children stories. Could be "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" (a year or two ago)... That was a very nice and original one, go ahead and read it if you have the opportunity.

Usually I prefer to "consume" fashionable books and movies after a while. I still haven't seen Titanic :)

Vacation on an island

I'll be on vacantion next week on an island in Greece. It is called Santorini and it's famous for the volcano that created/destroyed it. Don't ask me what I would take on an island, cause I'm not going alone and I'll stay just for a week :) It's my first island vacation, but I hope it will be just the begining and I'll be able to stay longer next time.

More questions and a book

I took a look at some posts from the beginning of this blog and I saw a post with this question: why do people write blogs?

I still don't know why, but I have more questions:
- why do people start blogs and abandon them? (they are just too lazy?)
- why do people read (lots of) blogs?

I'm reading a book by Neagu Djuvara - Amintiri din pribegie (Memories from exile - although "pribegie" doesn't mean exactly "exile", but I don't know how to translate it). This guy lived in exile during the communist era (from 1944 to 1990). He returned immediately after the 1989 revolution and is an active and well known public person although he's over 80 years old. He spent about 20 years in Niger, so the book gives an interesting insight into African affairs among other things.

Alicante

I'm in Alicante (Spain) since last Sunday working on a new project for my company. I didn't see much of the town, just the turistic part around the harbour which is not very large, but it's animated in the summer. There's a lot of work to do, but we go out almost every night and try various dishes. Not to mention sangria... :)

Rolling Stones

Last night I've seen the Rolling Stones live in Bucharest (together with some other 60.000 people). Great show and what can I say: "I know, it's only rock and roll but I like it"...

Surgery

Today I got back to work after two months. I had a surgery for lumbar disc herniation. The good news is that I had a lot of time for reading in this period. More to come on the books I read.

Alive and well

Wow! It's been almost a year since my last post on this blog... This means the real life keeps me busy. I didn't even had much time for reading. A week ago or so I finished a novel called The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. Weird, but nice though.

As for computer science, I keep applying it every day :)

The fish doesn't think...

Busy period for me lately - I changed my job among other stuff - so I didn't blog for a while. I just stopped by to tell you that it's official now, according to the latest findings we evloved from fish.

...the fish knows everything.

Chat right from GMail

Google is about to introduce a new feature to GMail. You would be able to chat with somebody right from your GMail account if you see her online. This report says this is more of an attempt to attract more users towards GTalk (the IM service offered by Google). But I don't think it's necessarily this. I think it's primarily a GMail feature which will add value to the email service. I actaully sugested this chat capability a couple of months ago in the feedback form they have on the help page. We have the technology to connect to am IM network from a browser window: AJAX, not the old Java applet way. Check this cool site that lets you chat in many IM networks from your browser; it's very handy when you are on a machine which doesn't have your preferred IM client installed. So Google just added a natural feature to their service. Enjoy!

Walking on the frozen waves in Mangalia 

Touristic harbour was entirely frozen 

Next to the Casino 

Same place, more detailed 

Frozen (Black) Sea

It was very cold last week in Romania (-20 Celsius, and even colder), and the Black Sea froze near the shore. A spectacular view, that happens rarely here (I heard last time happened in 1985). I'll post some pictures from Constanta and Mangalia here.

Google Video

Google has for some time now a service where you can upload videos and search and see videos uploaded by others (you can see it here). Recently they launched a video store as well, where they sell some TV series, NBA games, as well as videos which anybody can upload and request some money for others to see them. I think this will become a huge business in the future, but I don't intend to buy videos any time soon. As for the free ones, I found some funny ones, like commercials or some videoclips of Romanian bands that were off the copyright radar (they ban the videos for which the uploader does not have the copyright as soon as they find them).

What needs badly to be improved in order for this service to be usefull is the search. Currently it seems the search is done based only on the title of the video, which gives a rather poor results. I think an easy to implement idea would be to let users add keywords about a specific video. This can be abused by adding wrong keywords, but if most of the users are well behaved the resulting semantic should increase search quality.

Talking about weather

That's what English people do, I, not being able to do just that, started reading a book "The Weather in the Imagination" by Lucian Boia. This guy is a Romanian historian, specializing in the history of ideas and the imaginary of people, i.e. he takes an idea or a concept and traces back how this concept was viewed or percieved (including in the form of myths and ideologies) in different eras and cultures. This time he takes it on weather/climate and investigates ideas like that of climate which determines the character of a nation, and the global warming and the end of the world through a climate catastrophe.

I read many of his books and I find his history much more enlightening than the one generally taught in school where you have to memorize loads of dates and events. He also manages to be funny many times, so the reading is also entertaining.

The best of his books is in my opinion "History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness" which discusses many of the myths of the Romanian history. I'm not sure how interesting would be this book for someone who is not Romanian (i.e. to understand the gap between this version of history and the "official" one), but for the ones that passed through our school system, were "brain-washed" in history classes and are still open-minded persons it definitely worth a read.

Be cool, but try to stay warm

Russia is having an argument with Ukraine over the gas price, and the rest of Europe is trembling. They depend in a large measure on the gas from Russia that passes through Ukraine. European Union will hold a summit today discussing their energy policy. The trend in the latest years was to increase the imports from Russia, as ecologists obtained the closure of many nuclear reactors accross Europe. Not that I'm totally opposed to ecologists, but to close your reactors, having no real alternative plans but to depend in a large measure by Russia doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

On the other hand, as we consume more and more energy to run our computers, it's good to see more efficency on cooling them. Here is a story about a company that is doing this: optimizing the air conditioning systems in data centers.

Happy New Year!

We started a new year, so we have a reason to be happy :)
And to go back to work :)

16 years ago

I forgot to mention that today we celebrate/commemorate the Romanian revolution from 1989. Celebrate because we gained our freedom, commemorate because of the (post)communists that confiscated the revolution and of the hundreds of people that died in the masquerade that followed the flight and catch of Ceausescu. Nobody payed for that...

Note: in Romanian "comemora" means to remember a sad or tragic event, as opposed to celebrate which means to remember a joyful event; in English I think this distinction between celebrate and commemorate it's not very clear.

New book

I'm reading "Loving Sabotage" by Amelie Nothomb (the Romanian translation). The book describes a strange, cruel world as seen through the eyes of a little girl. Not entirely plausible, but interesting in how she descovers the meaning of love.

Driving in Bucharest

If you ever want to drive in Bucharest you have to answer the question in this test firts! For those who don't speak Romanian the question is: Which vehicle will leave first the crossroad in the picture above?
The answers are:
A. The tram.
B. The truck.
C. The trolley bus.

Firefox 1.5

It's official! Firefox 1.5 was released yesterday. I used the beta versions for a while now, and I think it's faster and more stable then the previous version. So get it while it's hot :)

New book

Now reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the Romanian translation. It's a funny novel, about a guy that doesn't adapt at all to the society, but it's forced to do so by some circumstances.

David vs. Google

An interesting article in a German newspaper covering the evolution of Ask Jeeves search engine and the man behind it, Apostolos Gerasoulis. They say Ask Jeeves uses a better search algorithm than Google. I tried a search on "failure", a currently well known Google bombing, and Ask Jeeves returned some meaningfull results. It also has a feature called "zooming" where they offer some alternative search terms that could find better answers for you.

Universe in a nutshell

I finished reading "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking. He describes the current search in physics for a universal theory that would describe the universe, and reconcile the relativity theory with quantum mechanics. I knew some of the theories explained there from other books of science popularization, but this one is very well written and entertaining. There is also one chapter not related to physics theories, but to the potential evolution of the human society.
I think this is the weaker part of the book, as I don't think we will be in competition with any artificial intelligence any time soon, if ever. Nice to see the reference he mades to Popper and his epistemology. I think everyone doing science should be aware of Popper's theory and the limits of our knowledge.

Google and Sun

Google and Sun announced a partenership which will see Google toolbar bundled together with Java. That's a strange (at least for me) bundle to download, but many are speculating that what they really want to do is to integrate somehow OpenOffice.org into the services offered by Google. This will be, suposely, a big competition chanlange to Microsoft, and many (see for example here) want to see the "good guy" (Google) fighting the "bad guy". I guess they will "fight" eventually, but not as good versus evil (although Google tries to picture itself as being on the good side of the force, see their slogan "don't do evil"), but just as two companies looking for revenues and profits.
I have to admit that even myself look sometimes at Google as being "on the good side of the force" :)

Partial solar eclipse

Live partial solar eclipse in Bucharest right now! We're lucky the clouds are gone after the heavy rain of yesterday; one of my co-workers brought the special eclipse watching glasses he has from the eclipse in 1999, so we all watched it.

Measuring teacher's quality

The Romanian minister of education proposed recently that teacher's salaries should be linked to their performance in teaching. But how would you measure teaching quality? Clearly not by the grades pupils receive, cause in this case everybody would start giving 10 grades (in Romania grades are from 1 to 10). Instead you should measure the (improvement in the) scores pupils receive at national standardized tests, but this is also not trivial. Here's an article about a study made in US on this topic, measuring teacher's quality. Note that in US a teacher is hired by a school, and after a few years his performance is evaluated and he can get a tenure, i.e. a permanent appointment. In Romania, to obtain a permanent position (i.e. titular) you have to pass a contest, without any proof of your real teaching capabilities.

Summer is gone

It rained all day today in Bucharest, probably fall wanted us to notice her.
Maybe this will mean more time for reading, as I started a couple of books and didn't finish them.
Currently I read "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. It's funny how a non-techie describes all the technological changes that took place in the last decade and changed the world.

Machine translation

Machine translation is one of the holly grails of artificial intelligence. The first approach to this problem was to construct a set of rules by studying the grammars of the two languages (called symbolic approach), but, as with other problems in AI, statistical tehniques (inferring "rules" from many translations of documents from one langauge to the other) seem to be more succesful now.
Each year NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology in US) organizes a contest of machine translation software. The results for this year shows Google as the front runner. I'm proud to see University of Maryland (where I got my master degree) as a top contestant. I know they have a good research group in this area. Go Terps! :)

Photos from Italy

I posted some pictures from my trip to Italy. They're not the best, you have to remove my face from some of them to obtain a better view :)

I visited Rome plus Naples and its surroundings (Pompeii, Sorento, and the Capri island). A lot of beautifull things to view in both places, and the time was short for seeing and "digesting" everything. So I hope to go back to see more of Italy "in the next future", as a friend of mine would say :)

Sunset over Ischia island, while on the route from Capri to Naples 

Live dog in Pompeii :) 

Cave Canem mosaic in Pompeii 

Overview of Naples with a clouded Vesuvius in the left corner 

Me and the Colosseum in Rome 

Back to work

My vacation is over (pictures will be added later, if ever, as usually :), and I came back to work today, wondering again (as I entered my male only office) why is this imbalance between men and women working in computer science? :) I kinda found an answer today: in countries where math classes are mandatory for longer in secondary and high school, the imbalance seems to be weaker.
Read the details here.
So I should try to persuade the people in charge with our education system to add more math classes in the high-school, regardless of the speciality (in Romania high schools usually specialize in sciences or humanities) of a particular school :)

Open source beer and a vacation

Applying computer science ideas to real life just got a big boost with the new open source beer developed by the students of a Danish university :) A more detailed story here. Am I lagging behind in applying computer science to real life? Did these guys need a vacation, or maybe I'm the one who needs one? I definitely need one, so I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. That means staying away from any computer as much as possible, so this blog will be on vacation too.

Cheers! :)

Playing Moldovans at Tennis

I started reading a new book, Playing Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks. It's a funny book in which the author describes his "adventures" in the post-communist Republic of Moldavia, the misery and the wonders he finds there. For people from Western Europe or U.S. sometimes it's hard to imagine or believe what's described there, you really have to see it to believe it :)

New book

I finished reading Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding (author of Bridget Jones's Diary). It's one of the captivating books that you cannot let down until you finish it. It's not a "deep" book, but now it's summer and living's easy :) Another book of this type I read recently is Da Vinci Code, but Da Vinci Code has a poor style; sometimes it feels the author took large passages from a dictionary and pasted them into the book.

Society of trust

As new incidents happened today in London, we see how important is trust in the human society. We agree somehow to not hurt each other, and to cooperate for achieving goals. For my vacation I went to an office, I gave to the women there a plastic card (my credit card), received back a printed paper (my flight ticket). And I'm pretty sure at the date printed there a plane will be at the point indicated to fly me. This doesn't work if some people decide one day to blow themselfs up in a subway train. So we'll have to isolate these guys, and make sure that nobody comes to the conclusion that blowing himself up to kill others is something to do.
The chemistry of trust looks easy to decode, as described here, but the reality is far more complex.
Too much of what we accomplished relies on our cooperation, and trusting each other, so losing it is not an option.

Smile, you're in the biology lab :) 

In our classroom (I didn't write those formulas :)) 

This is how we looked ten years ago 

It's been 10 years

A week ago we had a reunion to celebrate 10 years since we graduated from high school. It was nice to meet my former classmates, and teachers and chat together about what we did "lately". There should be plenty of photos from that evening (I personally didn't have a camera with me), but only a few are online as yet. I'll post here some.

The Supreme Court

In US the Supreme Court is the highest judicial instance. Its rulings are taken as precedences by lower justices. They often rule over controversial cases, like abortion, and in these rulings there is usually a fight between liberal and conservative justices. Today one of the justices announced she will retire, and this will open a battle between democrats and republicans over the next nomination, which is made by the president and approved by congress. Read more here.

Finally some photos from Toronto, and a new book

It took me some time, but I finally posted a few pictures from Toronto. I still didn't get the pictures I took with the film camera I had with me.

I was somehow lazy on the book reading also, but a few days ago I started reading a new book which I bought in Toronto: Joseph Stiglitz - Globalization and Its Discontents.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel prize laureate in Economy, and in this book he describes his experiences as economic adviser of president Clinton, and his period as senior vicepresident of World Bank. He critisizes the policies IMF and WB had related to globalization, and the developing countries.

Canadian National Tower 

Downtown Toronto, which remembers me of Melbourne, Australia 

The building I stayed in (the one in the center) while in Toronto, as seen from CN Tower 

Heading towards Niagara Falls 

Google and Microsoft

Maybe you didn't notice, but these guys are fighting with each other. Read the story here.

In related news, IBM encourages now its employees to use Firefox. That's good news for my favourite piece of software. How is this related to Google and Microsoft? Well, Firefox is erroding Internet Explorer's market share. Since IE is the de facto standard in browsers, Microsoft controls what technologies people use when accessing the web. This way Microsoft can trump Google when they try to introduce more and more web applications to the public. So the interest of Google would be (IMHO) is to have more browsers competing and web standards defined by a third party like W3C. And Google already hires two main Firefox developers.

Toronto, China, and a new book

I think I forgot to post here some of the books I read recently. I was both lazy and busy, because just got back from Toronto (more on that later).

Currently I'm reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, a funny book about football (i.e. soccer), and life.

As for China, on BBC there are often reports about the new China, economics and social perspectives. This is just one of them.

The world is flat

One of the columnists I read in New York Times is Thomas Friedman. He often writes about globalization, and its effects. And one of them is the global competition in job's market. For example, computer programming can be done almost anywhere, so I (more or less) compete for my job with both Americans and Indians. People often don't realize that, or when they do they want the goverment to rescue their jobs by imposing retrictions on free trade. But that will be harder and harder to do, so they should start to adapt to that, learn more, etc. And the best place to learn these new skills is in school. The signal Friedman triggers is that the American education system is not prepared for this global competition. See his latest column, and his latest book. And it seems most of the them are not even concerned about this, but about teaching or not teaching evolution in schools. See the latest developements here.

Update: the link to Friedman's column is fixed now

Obsessive songs

From time to time I just run into songs that I just can't get enough of listening. Currently there are two of them: one from the movie Closer, "The Blower's Daughter" by Damien Rice; see also the first scene of the movie which is amazing. I first heard the second song in a commercial of Connex (a wireless phone company from Romania). Then a DJ from a radio station also liked it and started to broadcast it, so I was able find this song (it's from the 80's): "Supergirl" by Reamonn.

Wanna go to a conference? (Sure you want!)

You might know about the God of conferences from David Lodge's novel "Small World": you sacrifice some of your time, and neurons and then you get rewarded (by this God) with a conference participation (meaning free travelling, and drinking). Well, naturally, people really want just the free travelling, and drinking, so what they do is finding money so that they can organize lots of conferences. A new conference being organized, you want some other people submitting papers (so that your conference looks real), so you start spreading the word/spamming other people about your brand knew opporunity to travel and drink. It seems not everybody is happy about this, especially those weird students from M.I.T. who really sacrificed many of their neurons to get in there. What happens next? Read in this story.

One step closer

Yesterday, the European Parliament voted in favour of Romania's accession into E.U. On April 25th the accession treaty will be signed, and, if everything goes well, Romania will be a member starting from 2007. Enjoy! :)

Films

I've seen a couple of movies lately (some of them because they got an Oscar prize): Closer, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sideways, Dreamers, and Italiencele (The Italian Girls). My pick goes to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has another great screenplay writen by Charlie Kaufman.

Blog break

I didn't blog for almost two weeks, but I'm still alive and well. Blame it on my laziness :)

Although I read another two books, and I've seen about 4 movies, I'll talk about them later.
For now I have three online readings/movies I found interesting.

First is a webcast of a presentation by a Google guy about their products and some inner workings of their algorithms.
Next we have an article from The Economist about future oil price, and the effects it will have in the global economy.
And last, but not least, the this week's tuesday column of Paul Krugman from New York Times (registration required) about the growing conflict in American educational system between creationists and evolutionists.

The kids aren't all right

In case you didn't know already (from listening Offspring, of course :), computers make kids dumb. Ready here about a study proving this.

I don't read only books

Over the last three days I read three interesting articles pointed out by some friends:
- one about an autistic boy that wrote some poems describing what he feels;
- the second one is about new research that shows the importance of the X chromosome in humans;

The last article is about how to design a good interface of a search portal; it was written two years ago, but the ideas expressed there are very actual. I think as software become more and more complex designing a usable interface will more important than ever. Another online reference about designing good user interfaces in your software is here.

New book

I finished reading "Out of the Shelter". This novel is different from the other ones by Lodge I read (Therapy, Thinks, Small World, The British Museum is Falling Down), the author is not trying to write a funny book, but a realistic one. I also read some comments by the author and he was saying that in the period he wrote this novel there was a divide between generations who lived during and had memories from the WWII, and a new generation that knew this war only from stories. I feel the same is happening in Romania with regard to communism, and just by coincidence I read in Dilema an article about this (see the one by Robert Turcescu from March, 4-10 issue).

Now reading "If this is a man" by Primo Levi (Romanian version "Mai este oare acesta un om?"); a book about surviving the holocaust.

Google Maps and a new book

Recently Google started to offer a new service, Google Maps. This is gonna be much better than Mapquest, and people started doing interesting stuff using this new service. Take a look at this amazing demo.

I started reading a new book: "Out of the Shelter" by David Lodge (the Romanian version).

New book

I just finished reading Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb. A novel about a girl from Western Europe who takes a job in a Japanese company. Very interesting reading.

Anybody here?

Is anybody reading this blog? I was just wondering, because I didn't tell my friends about it. So they might have discovered it, but it's more probable they haven't. And I didn't see any comments posted yet.

Autistic people

I read an extraordinary article in Guardian (via slashdot.org) about one autistic person that also can explain up to some point what happens to him. I got interested in this area after a professor of mine (Yiannis Aloimonos) sugested us to read about autistic people as part of a computer vision class. It seems that we all have similar capabilities (like doing complex arithmetics mentally), but we just can't access this layer in our brains.

Comments on the interview with Bill Gates

This interview reveiled an interesting person. He realizes the importance of education, and I strongly agree with him on this issue. As important as education is the health system. And he seems very active in taking and funding initiatives in these areas.

My question is why do you have to break the law so many times (as Microsoft did) if you are, after all, a good and sensible person? One possible answer is that one may prefere to get rich, and then spend his money on noble causes. If he would have paid more taxes to the goverment for example, those money would probably have been spent less eficient. This goes down to the Machiaveli saying that "the goal excuses the means", and I don't think this is the right way to go.

So I hope Microsoft will be pressured further to play fair in the market (I guess the open standards will play a huge role for this), and eventually we will get there. Of course that would lead to a loss of revenue for Mr. Gates, but I'm not worried about him.

Bill Gates and Microsoft

I just read this interview with Bill Gates. It's very interesting, and offers some good insights about Bill's personality beyond his work in the software industry. I actually have some comments, and I hope to get them posted tomorrow.

As I also love to read, I thought of posting here the books I read. The current book is:
Ion Ratiu - Note zilnice (Daily notes) 1991. In fact it's a serie of three books that covers 1989-1992 period. Ion Ratiu was a Romanian who lived 50 years in exile at London in the communist era, became a millionaire there, and then came back to Romania after the communism fell "to serve his country" as he himself says.

I just read about a Google employee who was fired because of blogging about "company internals" (read here). Mmm, what about me telling you how my workplace is? ;)

Is this a blog?

Bill Gates said recently that he is studying the possibility of writing a blog, if he considers will be able to write at least once a month. It seems I don't write that often (the reasons are different from those of Bill I guess :)), so maybe this is not a blog. Then what is it?

Back in blog

It've been a long time since I wrote on this blog. A lot of changes happened in my life lately, and I have to redefine this blog too. I'll think about this in the next days. Luckily I still remember my login ID and password, so maybe I'll pass by here soon.