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.