Sunday, December 28, 2008

Nicu Alifantis & Zan Concert



Alfantis is an unique blend of styles. Ranging from folk to pop-rock he has been always exploring new sounds. The verses of its music are often based on the work of Romanian and foreign poets, Alifantis beeing able to create vivid melodies that give new lights to the verses. Maybe one of the most known albums of Alifantis is - Nichita - a tribute to the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu.
With a band of excelent players Virgil Ionescu, Relu Bitulescu, Sorin Voinea and Razvan Mirica (that was excellent tonight) they made a very enjoyable show.

It is interesting to mention that in public was another singer - Ducu Berczi.

Leapsa

Am primit o leapsa de la Adina:

"Ce tehnologie/concept/element/invenţie science fiction ai vrea să vezi prinzând viaţă?"

Adina a raspuns cu replicatorul din StarTrek. Probabil cea mai buna chestie posibila.
Am stat si am rememorat tot SF-ul citit si vazut de mine. Sunt multe chestii care mi-ar placea sa le vad realizate. De la chestii marunte si foarte marunte pana la unele de dimensiuni planetare.
In final m-am hotarat. As vrea sa vad un motor hyperluminic. Un 'warp drive'. Cred ca motorul hyperluminic e sansa noastra de a exista pe viitor ca civilizatie. Motorul hyperluminic ne-ar permite sa evadam dintr-o lume secatuita de resurse si sa ne extindem spre noi planete.

Sorin, Dorutu? Interesati?

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Sun presented the reference design for T2 workstations

The reference design datasheet was published those days.
In fact the design seems to me more like as a server not as a workstation (there are many redundant interfaces). I think that some things can be trimmed down or replaced with cheaper alternatives.
I think that my idea of a open workstation is going to happen.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Endless meetings

I totally agree on:



In the last year I counted about 680 hours of meetings.
No major breakthrough whatsoever.
No finalized project this year - so mostly no satisfaction.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

One hit wonders

From '94 to '98 i was a MTV fan. Two samples from that period:





After 98 - MP3 changed the way I had access to music.

Geek stuff:
1. First MP3 player - Fraunhoffer's WinPlay
2. My first MP3 song - Prodigy - Out of Space
3. First Linux MP3 player - Tomislav Uzelac's - amp (the engine was used in Justin Frankel's successful Winamp)
4. My player of choice for that period - CubicPlayer
5. What changed for me - gradually dropped the MOD players

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Grumpy Swing days

Swing is nice. Swing is well designed and natural.
Other components are not!
I am fighting with some native browser code. I have to embed a web browser into a Swing application. I have tried jdic and DJ Native Swing. They work quite well in standalone apps. but, as there is always a but, my application is JNLP launched and the display is on a JInternalFrame. The first issue is solvable. The second - not so easily as JInternalFrame seems not to behave with heavyweight components.
The only solution is to use a full blown swing HTML renderer(maybe lobo)

Back to work!

Monday, December 8, 2008

Crisis arrives in Romania



The trend is clearly descending.
Hard days for outsourcing companies in Romania. No more new jobs is the result of no more new projects.
Still all the supermarkets are full in spite of all the alarming signs.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Ubuntu polishing




I succeeded to install the bluetooth on Ubuntu.
For my Toshiba Satellite Pro U400-13k it is quite simple. I had to download the alternate modules from http://sourceforge.net/projects/omnibook/ compile the module and install it. A secondary

depmod -a
modprobe omnibook ectype=14

was needed. After this the bluetooth was accesible.

I have also installed Google Gadgets for Linux. The process is the classic configure, make, make install. They are nice, 'mac'-ish and and quite unuseful. But they seem to work better than the default Gnome screenlets.

On the other hand I wasted some time today with ANTLR.

Toplink vs. Hibernate

I have a dilemma. After a little work with both tools I am still in doubt which one suits the best my needs.
I have the following constraints:
1. DB Independent - both meet it
2. Easy persistence tools - both meet it
3. Fast operations - hard to decide - TopLink seems to perform slower on INSERTs than Hibernate. I couldn't find any reliable comparison.

In the meanwhile I am also looking for DB4O as a possible alternative. I am still reluctant to use DB4O as it has been sold to Versant that was producing quite a crappy and expensive tool that I had to use and I think that they will do the same with DB4O.

Answer to Zeitgeist

In my internet wonderings I found maybe the most sincere and profound answer to the Zeitgeist movie.
It was simply the Credo.

This discovery reminded me of the baptism of Nicolae Steinhardt in Jilava prison and made me think about the Credo and it's message.

OpenSolaris 2008.11

http://webcast-west.sun.com/interactive/09B12437/index.html

OpenSolaris is a very interesting cocktail. It is really a Solaris kernel with all the good things it brings (ZFS, FSS, LDOM/Zones) mixed with Gnome 2.24 and lots of GNU tools (replacing the awkward Sun counterparts).
I really wish that OpenSolaris will gain momentum and raise up from a niche player to a respected alternative in the operating systems world. It offers by far more features than OS-X, Linux and Windows. It still misses the stylish Mac interface. This is too bad because lacking a unique visual style it will be always associated with Linux flavours (it was the case in the '90 when Sun was pushing CDE. In that time the look of sun was sleek and minimalist and I really loved it).

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

South African Taste

1. Bushman's Peri-Peri sauce - heat index 10 - OK.
2. Bushman's Revenge - heat index 15 - barely suportable.
3. Bushman's Dynamite - heat index 21 - I do not dare to taste it.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Internet Banking



What to do when you are in a hurry an you do not want to sty in a line in a overcrowded branch at your bank. The reasonable olution seems to be internet banking.
WRONG!
I had the missfortune to work with BRD Societe Generale.
I made the payments yesterday at 19:00 and even in this very moment the transactions were not yet processed. It is already more tha 12 hours for my money to leave the bank. It will take maybe another 12 up to 24 to get to the destination. This is outrageous.
This is even slower than waiting 30 minutes in the branch and passing the paper to the clerk.
But I have to admit that I am stupid working with BRD. I have had already bad experiences with them. long lines in branches, idiotic credit officers and clerks(last year they refused to replace my expired card), pushing products (they send me a VIVERE card without asking for it), hidden fees.
By the way - re internet banking is crappy - you have to call the bank's hotline in order to add partner accounts. The set of operations is limited and the security is a joke - 8 digits username and 6 digits password - bruteforce will do it quite fast
I would drop them gladly if I could find a reasonable other bank.