Architect, IT architect

So what does an (IT) architect do, apart from designing railroads? Apparently this is a role that started to appear in IT projects around the begging of 21st century (I never heard about IT architects in Star Trek, so I guess they solved the problem of writing software meanwhile) and does something to handle complex projects. I don't see myself as an architect (at least for now), but if you receive an envelope giving you this title, what can you do? Hopefully I'll have some fun when playing the architect part :)

Horse jumping contest

Last weekend I went to an interesting event: a horse jumping contest at Hipocan club in Corbeanca, near Bucharest. I occasionally saw this type of event at TV, but it was the first time I saw a live contest. It was very nice to see all those horses, although the weather was rather chilly. I didn't have a camera to take photos, but I found some from this event on another blog here.

Addictive

Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

Ender's Game is probably the best science fiction novel I ever read. It was somewhere towards the end of high school and I liked both the science and the fiction in it. I stopped reading science fiction books in that period (more about this in another post), but recently I stumbled upon some books by the same author. On the cover of Ender's Shadow I read that it tells the same story as in the original book, but from the point of view of another character. So I bought it and after a couple of days I was done with it. The same fascinating story, but with new points of view and interesting twists. In the next couple of weeks I read the other three books (Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant) from this new saga and they all live up to the expectations raised by the first one.

Economists and economics

I read two articles recently that lead me to writing this post. One by Paul Krugman who analyzes how most of the economists didn't anticipate the crisis that hit the world last year and another one (in Romanian) who criticize exactly Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for their omnipresence in mass-media where they impose their "leftist" ideas.

First I should mention that I read both books of the Vienna school economists (like Mises and Hayek) and Stiglitz. The science of economics mainly tries to create models that explain the interactions of people in the context of goods and their value. Apart for the various competing models one big disputed point among economists is how much the state should be involved in economy. The adepts of a liberal ideology claim that we should always let the market free to reach its equilibrium, as the free market is the most efficient way of allocating resources. But the ideal market model has one important assumption: that the agents act rational. And this assumption is not true many times, for example in the recent asset bubble people were driven by an "irrational exuberance" and they kept buying properties at ridiculous prices. One may say that a model is limited by its nature and cannot account for all the complexities of reality, but if a model cannot predict bubbles in various markets that keep appearing and have devastating effects on the economy when they burst then that model is not very useful. On the other hand, if we understand that such bubbles can occur than maybe public policies that act to prevent such evolutions are desirable: for example, counter cyclical monetary policies like raising interest rates when the economy grows strongly.

Moreover, economic theory doesn't question the morality or rationality of our goals. For example, in U.S. under free market conditions it is clear that not all people will have health insurance. The fact that a society may choose to offer health insurance to all its citizens it's not an economic issue, but a moral one. Thus, the fact that the state collects taxes and redistributes money to achieve such a goal should not be seen as an interference with the free market, but as an voluntary action of that society. This particular example of health care was acknowledged even by Hayek in his Constitution of Liberty as a legitimate case where the state might play a role in the economy.

The free market theory says that given certain assumptions an equilibrium state is reached, having the expression of the equilibrium price of a good. However, it is important to notice there can be many possible equilibrium states. Some of them might be more desirable than others (for example having fewer unemployed people, or having universal health insurance, avoiding financial meltdown), so in this case the intervention of the state in the economy is acceptable. The same argument applies when talk about ecology and global warming. Although some say that no intervention is necessary cause the free market will lead us to an equilibrium state, what if this state is one where life is no longer sustainable on Earth? We'd better make sure that the equilibrium state where our environment is heading is one where we can also live around.

Space garbage

In the last 50 years the space exploration changed our lives: think only about GPS and satellite communications. But what happens with the satellites that are no longer in use? Some of them (the bigger ones) are driven back towards Earth and they burn in the atmosphere. But most of them are just left orbiting around the Earth. Thus the new place where garbage accumulates is in the space around our planet. This is more and more a concern because this kind of garbage can hit at any time a functional satellite or the ISS producing significant damage as satellites are designed to be as lite as possible, not resistant at impact with other objects. So now DARPA started to investigate ways to remove this garbage. Some more details here.

GDP to be replaced as a measure of well being

For a long time most of the people looked at GDP as the measure of well being of a country. This is misleading from at least 2 reasons in my opinion.
First, as the GDP measures what is produced inside a country it measures as positive output the work done by the firefighters after a fire, or the medication bought to cure an illness also contributes to the GDP. But the negative consequences of these events are not taken into account.
Secondly, we arrive at a state where the consumption is encouraged in order to increase the GDP. As we consume more, the GDP increases, people have jobs and everybody is happy. But the environment degradation (pollution and resource depletion) is not taken into account anywhere in this equation.

A number of organizations proposed alternative ways to measure "user satisfaction" and also the state of the environment so we can have a better picture of the real state of a particular region. See an example of such measures here.
The European Commission is heading in this direction too and it will investigate alternative ways to GDP of measuring the development of a country. I hope this trend will catch with other countries too, so the governments get rid of this obsession of increasing the GDP at any cost.

Even more pictures

The Danube river seen from Serbia


Plivice National Park

Pictures from Croatia

Brela seen from the sea


Dubrovnik


Dubrovnik


Baska Voda


Brela - the storm is approaching

Garbage collection in the countryside

So this is not about garbage collection in Java, but in the countryside of Romania. Large parts of Romania looks still like an old style programming language where no garbage collection takes place. People in the countryside are still throwing the garbage in some improvised landfills at the end of the village, or by the local river. But the garbage that used to be mostly biodegradable tens of years ago now consists mainly of plastics, cans, metals and whatever else you could imagine. No wonder many river banks look like this:




This is the first project I heard of where the garbage collection in the countryside is being greatly improved. It's in the Dolj county and 9 villages are involved. This is a tiny number from the over 2000 villages in Romania, but at least it's a start. Now I'll go back to Java and its automatic garbage collection.

Dream vacation

For those who are craving for a vacation on a remote island (see one of the earlier posts) should also consider the Garbage Island from Pacific Ocean. It's the newest island on Earth, it's bigger than Texas, so there should be plenty of room for many people. And if you are a scientist maybe you can join the expedition to study it. More information can be found here and here.

No more bottled water

A town in Australia has voted to ban the sale of bottled water. The issue arose after a company proposed to extract some water from an underground reservoir in the region, ship it to Sydney to be bottled and then bring it back for selling it. This shows just what a waste of resources we are doing every day. The full story is here.

You can't feel anymore

Is this the reason so many people are constantly looking for the next new sensation? But if they can't feel anymore isn't this search in vain? They should look inside themselves maybe.

I'm just rambling around here, in fact I'm just hooked on this song from Franz Ferdinand (the video clip is very nice too):

Things people would like to do

I read recently a kind of survey about what would various (young) people want to do in their free time if they had the means. What puzzled me was that most of the answers were in two categories:
- doing some kind of extreme (or at least exotic) sport like skiing, scuba diving, horse riding, paragliding, motorcycling;
- going to a more or less exotic place like Africa, South America, Asia or an exotic island;

So, basically, all these people are looking around for is a new sensation: adrenaline, visual and more.
I'm kind of tired of looking again and again for this next new sensation. I would like instead to have a couple of hours each week in which to lay in bed and look at the ceiling of the room (or even better at the sky) and re-imagine the world, each time in a different way. Cause if you can imagine it in your head then it is real, isn't it? (For music it is scientifically proven to be this way as Oliver Sacks describes in his book Musicophilia, but more on this later.)

Doing as much good as you can around you

A couple of days ago I read an interview with Gabriel Liiceanu. It is mostly about the state of the Romanian society and it has a part I like a lot. I will try to translate it here:

Question: Do you think, Mr. Liiceanu, that the progress of this country depends in any measure on the political elite? Can we still consider that the president of this country represents a force that determines in any way the social progress? And I ask you these questions because there was no other president than Traian Basescu with more good intentions and determination for the social progress.

Answer: "For a long time I asked these questions in the same manner as you and, having the tendency to think pessimistic, I thought that, indeed, there is not much hope. Years passed and I realized it is not productive to think in such radical terms. I start to think that the <> that you talk about is done mostly not by the <> of the good, but by decreasing the chances of evil. I'll always think that I'll have to chose between a smaller evil and a bigger evil and that is enough in order to achieve progress in an invisible way. And I tell to myself: Basescu didn't manage to do much, but maybe he didn't have a majority in Parliament to support him, maybe he didn't have a government to work with. Maybe after the next elections there will be better people in the Parliament, etc. And when I am desperate, like you, I think on the following: 1. that I live the miracle to have escaped the communism's nightmare (which I couldn't imagine as possible before 1990) and 2. that from 1990 till now there have been some big advances in a couple of areas.
We have nothing else to do but to struggle all of us, there is no refuge. It is enough if each of us is doing his best wherever he is. And to persuade the people around him that they have a choice between a smaller evil and a bigger evil. That's what I think we can do: as much good as we can around us. If the number of people who think this way will increase then the our society will progress irrespective of one political figure or another."

What stroke me in this part is the same argument that I heard a long time ago. Our philosophy teacher (Mr. Marica) used to challenge us in class in a Socratic way. And one day he asked one of our colleagues what would he do in life. My colleague answered that if he would be the leader of Romania he would change this and that, but for now there is nothing he could do. To this our professor replied that it is not productive to think this way. We should always think of the best we can do now, instead of dreaming on a distant future or relying on another person who has power for things to change.

You know, maybe my philosophy teacher and Mr. Liiceanu went to the same school :)

M is for Michael

That was the motto on MTV over the week-end. And indeed, Michael was the idol of the MTV generation from the 80s. I remember Smooth Criminal was one of the first video clips I ever saw on a video tape that my dad copied from a friend. And I watched that video many times, cause there was no MTV to watch in Romania at that time.

And M is also for the Man in the Mirror that we should try to make a better person every day:

Joi.megaJoy

"Joi.megaJoy" by Katalin Thuroczy at Odeon Theatre

A group of old people is having a party every Thursday. With all their memories and nostalgia for their lost world and friends. But they still have a hack of a party. The problem is that after about an hour I checked my watch and asked myself: is this the only idea from this play? And that was almost all, with a little interference from the present and a confusion of whether the time of the action was during the communist era or in post-communism. Overall the performance was good, but a real plot and a resolution are missing in this play.

Do we still have a city?

This is how Bucharest looks more and more:



Can we still call it a city?, or is it just a jungle. The debate about how the architecture of Bucharest is ruined every day will take place here. And this is just about the beauty our eyes don't see, but what about the dust, the crowded places everywhere, the transport and many more? No wonder Bucharest has the lowest rating among the main cities in the European Union for the quality of life.

Destroying the planet

We are doing it every day: when we drive our cars, buy that stuff we don't really need, eat too much and then go to gym to keep us fit, wander around the planet to see it with our own eyes. We do it time and again until nothing will be left, or it will be too late to bring it back. Until we will make the Earth so hot, or so cold, or so dry, or so wet, or so acid that we will not be able to live here anymore. Some insects and plants will maybe still be able to live around and maybe it's better this way. We are the people that rule the world and know everything about it, too bad we are that blind.

Or we can try to save it, but that takes a lot of effort, perseverance and relinquishment. Will I do it, will you do it my friend, will all of us do it?

Doesn't this bother you?

The Seville Communion

I finished reading The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. This novel is a little different from other novels I read by Reverte, as the background theme is not an area such as Flemish painting, rare books or maritime life, but losing of battles. Each character in the book is losing something in the end (faith, marriage, money, dreams), and each one of them is coping differently with it. At some point I got the same sad feeling I used to have when reading Kundera's novels (Unbearable Lightness of Being, Book of Laughter and Forgetting), but as Coldplay says it so well: "just because I'm losing doesn't mean I'm lost, doesn't mean I'll stop".

Pintado una Canción

This site is really amazing. Try it now!

More theatre plays...

The end of theater season is approaching fast, but I'm not sleeping in my shoes, so here are the latest plays I've seen:
- The Egoist - National Theater Bucharest - 15th of April 2009
- The Death of a Salesman - Bulandra Theater - 30th of April 2009

"The Egoist" features Radu Beligan and as you guessed is about an egoist, which is not that a bad person in the end. The play explores the fine line between satisfying your needs and helping others with their needs. If you can do something for somebody else and you're not doing it, you are considered a bad guy, but sometimes nobody asks what your needs are.

"The Death of a Salesman" is one of my favorite plays (thanks to my high school friends who made me read it in the 12th grade when we studied a fragment of this play in the English class). And this interpretation is really impressive, Victor Rebengiuc actually won the best actor award at Uniter 2009 for this role.
The distorted perspective of life of Willy Loman and the never ending search of what to do with his life of Biff which conflicts with his father's vision of success is striking right into my heart yet another time...

Should software makers be liable for their code?

Many software vendors have an EULA (end user license agreement) that basically says that they do not guarantee their software makes a specific thing or is fitted for a specific purpose. Also they state they are not liable for almost anything that happens as a consequence of using that software. Here is an example from the Firefox EULA:

"4. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. THE PRODUCT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITH ALL FAULTS. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, MOZILLA AND MOZILLA'S DISTRIBUTORS, LICENSORS HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES THAT THE PRODUCT IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGING. YOU BEAR ENTIRE RISK AS TO SELECTING THE PRODUCT FOR YOUR PURPOSES AND AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PRODUCT. THIS LIMITATION WILL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING THE FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY REMEDY. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO THIS DISCLAIMER MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

5. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. EXCEPT AS REQUIRED BY LAW, MOZILLA AND ITS DISTRIBUTORS, DIRECTORS, LICENSORS, CONTRIBUTORS AND AGENTS (COLLECTIVELY, THE "MOZILLA GROUP") WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATING TO THIS AGREEMENT OR THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE PRODUCT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF GOODWILL, WORK STOPPAGE, LOST PROFITS, LOSS OF DATA, AND COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY (CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE) UPON WHICH SUCH CLAIM IS BASED. THE MOZILLA GROUP'S COLLECTIVE LIABILITY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF $500 (FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS) AND THE FEES PAID BY YOU UNDER THIS LICENSE (IF ANY). SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS EXCLUSION AND LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. "

This practice has become common because the complexity of today's software, the almost endless possibilities in which a software can be used and the interaction with other systems. This makes offering a guarantee on what the software does a very risky thing for the software developer.

It seems the European Commission wants to change this practice and force the software providers liable for their software. Details can be read here. As a consumer I can be only happy that more rights are granted to me, but as a software developer I think enforcing such liabilities on a software provider will lead to dramatic changes in the way the software is produced and priced. It will be much more expensive and more limited in communicating with third party pieces of software. Is this good or bad in the end? It's hard to say, but this kind of law should be carefully evaluated before enforcing it.

Universities in Europe

A very interesting article in The Economist about the universities in Europe in the context of the Bologna process. Apparently everybody understood and implemented what they want out of this process. The article also argues that the difference in performance between European and U.S. universities can be explained by the amount of private funding a university gets. Basically, the more private funding you have the more likely a university is to produce better research. The article can be read here.

Where do Romanian universities fit in this picture? They implemented the 3/2/3 years cycles, but on the other hand they are plagued by nepotism and plagiarism, so should we even count them as European universities?

Movie season

Each year in the period around the Oscar awards ceremony I usually talk around about the nominated movies. It's a kind of movie season. I remember one (Quintana) year when I saw almost all the important nominated movies. I saw a couple of the nominated movies this year too, and even movies that were rumored will be nominated, but in the end were not. The ones I liked most from this season are: Revolutionary Road and Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. The first one quite moved me and in the second one Penelope Cruz was exceptional, even when she made me laugh with Spanish-English mixture of cultures.

Earth Hour

A couple of weeks ago a global action called Earth Hour took place around the world. The idea was to turn off the lights for an hour between 8 and 9 in the evening. This year I was not at home at that time, so I couldn't take part, but I took part at this event two years ago. One of my colleagues at work argued this event is useless and even damaging as the electricity was still produced and wasted since you cannot stop an electrical generation facility for just an hour to make up for the lower demand. And since electricity cannot be stored it ends up wasted somehow in the system. I know this might be true from a technical point of view, although I might imagine somebody else (like a processing plant) could have scheduled some activity at that point to use the excess electricity, but the real meaning of this event is to make all of us aware of how much electricity we consume and many times just waste. For example, I know the TV consumes quite a lot of electricity while in stand-by mode and I started a while ago turning off the TV from "the button" (not by remote control) when I leave in the morning. So all of us should start thinking how to lower our electricity consumption. And that hour when you were supposed to sit in the dark was a good time to think about such things.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

I saw this play by Luigi Pirandello last week at Bulandra Theater in Bucharest. Extraordinary performance for an extraordinary play. Rebengiuc, Caramitru and Andreea Bibiri (the step daughter) were very convincing. A must see if you are in Bucharest.

The funny thing is that I saw this play about 10 years ago at the same theater, but I didn't remember much from it. I remember only that I liked the subject and it was with Virgil Ogasanu, but that was about all that I could say about it. This time I guess I'll keep a lasting impression :)

Keeping a promise

I'm always amazed on how things work in our society. Imagine you are traveling to a city in a foreign country. So you go to a website and make reservations for plane and hotel. And all you have is a piece of paper where it says that on the day X, at hour Y a plane will take off and you will be allowed to board on that plane. And then in that foreign city you go at the hotel with another piece of paper and they will just let you sleep and eat there. This is really the magic of the modern society, the fact that people learned to respect a contract, even if they never got in touch with their partner. Of course, it is not flawless, and it varies wildly by country and the type of business you are doing, but it is still amazing IMHO.

On the other hand, apart for the B2B, is the P2P promise land where you have no written contracts, but you have expectations. You have expectations even if there is no promise made and others have expectations from you too. And when you fail to meet the expectations or, even worse, you fail to keep a promise you made disaster strikes. And it can be very bad, as you don't loose some money, you loose the trust of others. I remember one such occasion when me and a group of friends organized something funny. But on the day we were supposed to do it I missed it. It was not like I ruined all the surprise, they did it without me anyway and it was fine. But then I was told this: how do you expect somebody to trust you again since you didn't do even this simple thing? I was only puzzled and amused at that moment and only later I realized how tough that was...

Is there a conclusion here? Only that I appreciate when the promises are kept, I know how hard is to do it.

P.S. Last Saturday I saw "Eduard the third" by Shakespeare at TNB. This particular play of Shakespeare is not one of his masterpieces, but most of the drama there was in characters that had to choose between different promises they made explicit or implicit: fidelity to your husband or serving the king's wishes, fidelity to your father or to your best friend and so on.

Carbon added tax

This year the countries around the world are supposed to reach an agreement for the next treaty on preventing global warming. This new treaty will replace the current Kyoto treaty and it is hoped it will have bigger targets and involve most of the big polluters countries (one of the shortcomings of Kyoto treaty was that big countries like U.S., China and India didn't sign it). So there is much discussion about what this treaty should stipulate and how it will be enforced. I don't follow all the news on this subject, but in general (main stream media) I didn't see articles written by economists about how to handle global warming. And this is an economic matter after all, since we will have to pay somehow to protect the environment. I thought of the economists I read and I imagined Stiglitz should have written something about how to tackle global warming. And indeed, I found this interesting paper on his site. It discusses various proposals on how to tax CO2 emissions and how the implementation might work or not. The most fair solution in my opinion is the "carbon added tax" which is similar in concept with the VAT: each part of the production chain is taxed according to the emissions it produces for the goods and service he delivers. The total tax in fact is paid by the consumer, which thus has two incentives: to consume less and to consume "greener" products (that carry a smaller tax). For sure it's not trivial to enforce such a tax world wide, but this is a sound solution from the economic point of view.

And even more

The yellow semi-submarin



Fish and corals



The desert and the Nile valley



Temple of Hatshepsut

Finally, some more photos from Egypt

Obelisc from Karnak temple



On the way to Luxor




The camel and the pyramid



Pyramids of Keops and Kefren



A beduin village

Brother Lee

Whenever somebody calls me on my mobile phone I hear this song and I feel like running to find my brother Lee who's just like me... :)



...where they know when you're fakin' it...

Cu dus si intors

I write this blog in English (because I want to practice and also because I have a lot of friends who don't speak Romanian and they might read it some day, if they don't already do). I read, write and speak English almost every day. I often use English words when I talk in Romanian and many times I just say whole phrases in English although I am talking in Romanian to somebody. And yet, it is so far away to be "The language" I speak. I like to play with words a lot, I like to coin phrases with two meanings (depending on the listener's knowledge), I like the twisted meanings from hard crossword puzzles (I don't remember most of them, but there is one that somehow got stuck in my head: se pune greu la cale - lest), but I don't remember doing ever such things English (btw, if you ever notice that at me let me know :)). So definitely, Romanian is my language.
And what was I saying in the title? That was my busy status at one point on messenger (Romanian has diacritics too, which most of the time I don't use when I write on the computer).

Blogging is hard

I have a couple of things I want to blog about, but it's getting harder to find the time and the mood to write them down. I'll just make a brief list so at least I don't forget about them and hopefully I'll come back to each of them later:
- more about Egypt and maybe some more pictures;
- more about "Letters to my son", a very beautiful book indeed;
- some articles from The Economist about the planetary ocean and what mankind is doing to it;
- the paper about the carbon tax proposed by Stiglitz;
- the account I got for Google Apps and the release of Python 3.0; maybe I'll trick myself into learning this programming language, you never know :)

World seen from the back of a camel

Just a teaser from the trip to Egypt. More to come...

Body of ideas

I noticed I have this habit of not mentioning the names of the persons when I tell a story or talk about something. I somehow feel it is not the exact person who was the subject of the story that matters, but the story itself with the meaning it has for me. It is the same when I say a quote, many times I forget who initially said it, it is never my intention to become a fan of somebody who said something interesting, what matters is the idea she/he expressed. Any idea in fact becomes "open source" once it was uttered to the world. I think it is a body of ideas we are always talking about, isn't it, buddy?

Hamlet's prolog without words

European House (Hamlet’s Prologue Without Words), Regia: Àlex Rigola, Compania de teatru Lliure, Spania, Festivalul Uniunii Teatrelor Europene, Teatrul National Bucuresti, Sala Mare, 2008-12-20

First of all, it was not in Spanish or Catalan, but without words (and it was not pantomime) which made it quite challenging to get the idea. It was not Shakespeare, but some parable with the characters from Hamlet and one needed to know well Hamlet in order to identify all the characters. I didn't know Hamlet that well, but in the discussion we had afterward many of the mysteries were elucidated. The acting was good, but you needed a lot of imagination to fill in the the blanks (i.e. the missing words), otherwise you could get easily bored and lost. And the scenography was very nice.

For a different opinion on this performance read Less is bore.

New book - letters to my son

I started a new book, Letters to My Son by Gabriel Liiceanu. It's the first book by Liiceanu I read, I felt he is kind of a fashionable writer (not at the same level as the trio Eliade, Cioran and Noica, but still...) and I usually avoid reading fashionable writers. But since I received this book as a gift, I said I'd give it a try. And I like it, although this is supposed to be some kind of philosophy, the story telling style of Mr. Liiceanu is captivating. A while ago somebody said about me that I read philosophy (as a compliment I suppose :) ), but I was very puzzled when I heard that. I don't remember reading a philosophical system (like the one of Kant for example), I rather like story reading/telling. And if it happens the story has a deeper meaning that's for the better. But what I don't like from such stories is when the author explains at the end what you are supposed to understand. That is plain stupid. That's why I stopped reading Coelho.

City FM

City FM is probably the only radio station in Bucharest where you can listen Iron Maiden at 8 o'clock in the morning. One of their jingles sounds like this: "Hey, pelican, did anybody say you are not allowed to listen rock music in the morning?" They totally rock most of my mornings :)

Mathematics is hard, even when it's fiction

I finished the novel about the murders in Oxford. The book was fine, but I got somehow disappointed about the mathematics story the author was telling. One of the main characters was a professor of mathematics and he was trying to somehow minimize the consequences of the incompleteness theorem of Godel. So his idea, as the author puts it, was to show that the statements that cannot be proved true or false in an axiomatic system will be somehow not-natural and at another level of detail, so they will be irrelevant for the work of a mathematician. But this is completely wrong and we have a famous and well known example of the Euclid's fifth axiom (parallel postulate). It took mankind almost 2000 years to prove it cannot be proved true or false based on the other axioms of geometry, but has to be considered as an axiom. And for sure the Euclid's axiom is not some obscure statement or at another level of detail, but a very intuitive and "obvious" statement. And in 1963 another not such obscure statement in mathematics, continuum hypothesis, was shown to be impossible to proof or disproof in the context of the standard axiomatic set theory. So Martinez's character was in an impossible quest, but luckily for him and the readers he got involved in a series of crimes just to entertain us :)

Romanian stand-up comedy

I heard a while ago about this club in Bucharest, Cafe Deko, where there are stand-up comedy shows. I didn't have the chance (one wins the tickets at lotery of course :))to go there yet, but here is a very good piece from Teo (one of the comedians) found on YouTube. It is called "reflexive verbs and Eminescu". So in case you understand Romanian, enjoy!

New book - The Oxford Murders

I started reading a new book this week-end: The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. So it is about some murders, finding their author and it also involves some mathematics. It should be fun to read, since I enjoyed other thematic mystery novels, like the ones of Arturo Perez-Revert and also novels about mathematics like Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture.

18 years

In 1995 when I started my studies at University of Bucharest I met a student at Mathematics who was in the sixth year (master degree) - Ionescu, who became a good friend of mine. And he told me one day: you know, Bogdan, these very steps that we are walking on in the Mathematics department were full of blood in June 1990; the blood of the students beaten by the miners, who also devastated the computer science labs (they were told the computers were used to print fake US dollars). Last night I saw comrade Iliescu again on TV giving advice about the economy. Seeing Iliescu on TV alone is a reason for me to go yet again to vote this week-end.

Prostanac

Go to www.google.ro type in "prostanac" and press "Ma simt norocos" ("I'm feeling lucky").
Mr. Geoana, you were (Google) bombed :))

Somebody to vote for

The elections for the parliament are approaching here in Bucharest. It is the first time when people will vote a person, not a party list. In fact, it is a mixed system (and also very flawed), but I think it is still better than the previous one. Unfortunately this new voting system didn't bring many new faces on the political scene, and even among the new faces there are few that one can trust. Still, in this "black sea" of Romanian politicians there is one name that I would like to recommend: Theodor Paleologu, the son of Alexandru Paleologu. Read his blog and his resume and see for yourselves. Since I cannot vote directly for him, I wish him good luck in the electoral college #9 from Bucharest. And I encourage everyone from that electoral college to go and vote for him.

Coming to an election near you

If an election is coming to your place then watch this video. And then send it to 5 of your friends.

New book

I'm kind of slow on the Deaf Sentence novel I started, but meanwhile I bought a new book by Lucian Boia Occidentul O interpretare istoric (Occident - A historical explanation). It describes the history of the western Europe civilization proposing a theory for the reasons why it became so successful and dominant in today's world.

The black hole in their heads

So the new Cern collider will aim recreate conditions from the times closed to Big Bang and possibly even black holes and that made many people worried that the end of the world might come with this experiment. The Conservator Party from Romania even sent an open letter to some European institutions to stop the experiment :) The good news is that if a black hole is indeed produced they would not even feel when they will get past its horizon (the line that once passed you cannot escape the gravity of the the black hole). So we will not see them anymore!

Green Day

Green Day (Ziua Verde) is not the rock band, but a series of events organized in various cities of Romania to encourage people recycle more, especially electrical devices. Last Saturday it was in Bucharest as a concert with some rock and ethnic bands. I liked very much the old Timpuri Noi (the best Romanian rock band from my high-school years) and Zdob si Zdub which I saw live for the first time. As for recycling, I hope they open many more recycling corners, so I don't have to go half of Bucharest to recycle a light bulb (I already recycle plastic bottles and paper at the containers next to my house). The best moment of the evening was when they were showing samples of electrical devices brought by people for recycling and they showed a HC85 computer! :) I guess I have my HC91 computer somewhere in Constanta, I should proudly dispose of it at a recycling corner for the sake of the planet.

New book - Deaf Sentence

I managed to finish Doctor Zhivago on a sunny beach (actually Sunny Beach - Bulgaria). Now I started reading Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. A novel about a man who becomes deaf and how that changes his perspective in life. Sounds interesting and being written by Lodge I suppose it will also be funny.

Vacation

It's official, I'm on vacation! Each day felt just longer and longer for the last two weeks (am I missing something?). Although it's only a week I hope to come back with some more energy.

The phenomenom called Phelps

Michael Phelps is probably the greatest swimmer of all times. So far he won five gold medals at Beijing Olympics, all of them with world records and he is on track to win eight gold medals, which nobody ever did.
The number of world records at natation in this Olympics is huge. I know there is a new swim suit designed by Speedo and NASA that helps a lot, but still, aren't we seeing a little bit of cyclism here?

Iron Maiden in Bucharest

Last night I saw Iron Maiden live in Bucharest. The show and the atmosphere were just incredible. See a sample bellow, Fear of the Dark with the whole stadium singing along.

BBC in Romanian is gone

Yesterday was the last broadcast of BBC in Romanian. This was one of the iconic radio stations in Romania (starting 69 years ago) during the WW II and the communist era. This was also my favorite news source in the 90ties and the place where I first learned about what market economy means and what was wrong in our country in those days. They will put up online an archive with many of their broadcasts here. Good bye BBC in Romanian, I will never forget you!

Well done Nadal and Spain!

This is the year of Spanish sport. After Spain won the European Cup at football after 44 years, tonight Rafa Nadal is the first Spanish tennis man to win the Wimbledon in 42 years. Both the Spanish football team and Nadal won in style, playing superb matches. Felicitaciones a ambos.

Update: that does not diminish the merits of Federer, this final was the best tennis match I saw since I started watching this sport. Both Federer and Nadal are great players, it's a pleasure to watch them.

The cost of wind energy

I read a very interesting analysis regarding the total cost of using wind power to generate electricity on The Register. Basically, the idea is that since wind is not guaranteed to blow all the time, you need to have back-up energy generating capacity to keep the energetic system in balance. There are various theories and proposals to fix this problem like: wind doesn't blow in one region/country but might blow in another one so the spread of wind mills will create a balance, or when you have excess wind you can use a part of the energy to pump some water uphill and use hydro-energy as back-up when the wind doesn't blow. This study demonstrates that in the case of UK these solutions are not feasible (using statistics regarding the wind intensity patterns), so in the end you need to have gas/coal back-up power plants. This leads to a total different cost of wind energy. It's interesting to see who will pay this cost. Normally the ones who install wind mills should be asked to pay for the back-up capacity too.

New book - Doctor Jivago

I started a couple of weeks ago to read Doctor Jivago by Boris Pasternak. It took me a while to get in the mood for reading, so only a few days ago I started reading more than a half a page per day :)
It has many characters so it takes a while to fix them in your memory, but I'm enjoying it. I also saw the movie many years ago, but I don't remember much, just the atmosphere and a sleigh going through the Russian fields covered in snow.

Federer

Federer during a training session

Nadal

Nadal serving in the first round against Bellucci.

Roland Garros

I spent a fantastic week at Roland Garros. We were in a group of tennis fans who go to grand slam tournaments for about 10 years. This was the first time I went to a grand slam tournament (I went to Romanian Open a couple of times and at some Davis Cup matches) and I really enjoyed it: all the big players, the atmosphere, everything, even the rain was fun :) I didn't see much of Paris this time, a short walk to La Defense and on Rivoli street and Tuileries gardens, Brancusi's studio (which was also nice) and I met my old friend Danutz. I have some pictures too, I'll put one or two samples here.

The bare necesities and me

Good point!

In front of the Royal Palace in Madrid: good point your majesty!

Consume less instead of consuming green

Today I read an article that says it all regarding consumption in our society. Basically, the author argues that it is not enough to start consuming greener products (like using economical light bulbs, hybrid cars) but we need to decrease our consumption altogether. If this would happen we would end up with more time for contemplating the world around us and more money in our pockets. Isn't this good for us after all? Of course, we would want to do this mainly to still have a planet to live on :)

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 :)