Sunday, June 30, 2013

No more Humanitas bookshop in Timisoara

The Humanitas bookshop, one of the oldest and most respectable places has recently closed.
It is a great loss for the city as it was for a long time the only place where I could buy the books I wanted wether they were fiction or technical.
I am feeling that Timisoara is loosing every year more and more from its cultural heritage.


Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Looper


From time to time a good sci-fi movie breaks the patterns of the commercial "box-office" stupidities. Looper is one of these movies - interesting, dramatic and and extremely dystopic.
The movie is in the same line (and shares an actor - Bruce Willis) with another dark masterpiece - Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. 

Google Reader backup script

The "subscriptions.xml" file can be obtained from Google TakeOut export. It is just an OPML file that might be imported into another RSS Reader.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import urllib
import re


def downloadData(feed):
 feed = urllib.quote_plus(feed)
 url = "http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/stream/contents/feed/"+feed+"?n=9999"
 urllib.urlretrieve(url, feed)

def parseFile():
 result = []
 f = open("subscriptions.xml", "r")
 xmlUrl = re.compile(r'.*xmlUrl="(.*?)"')
 for line in f.readlines():
  m = xmlUrl.match(line)
  if m!=None:
   result.append(m.group(1))
 return result
   
if __name__=="__main__":
 feeds = parseFile()
 for feed in feeds:
  downloadData(feed)

Monday, June 17, 2013

Importance

What is more important for our press?

The fact that the bimbo Alexandra Stan has been beaten by her manager?

Or

The death of father Justin Parvu, founder of the Petru Voda monastery - the only place dedicated to those who died in the communist prisons?

...


Thursday, June 6, 2013

Raise and fail...

In the small IT community of Timisoara there are always some "shooting star" companies that attract the attention of the most talented people. It was the case for Dapredi, Caatoosee, Savatech, Masstech - just to name a few that I remember of. Now the spotlight is on "Three Pillar Global".

One of the most interesting quality of this one is the fact that they are very social and try to create a community around them - maybe in order to have a good recruiting pool.

Will it last the test of time or will it fail as many of the other ones?

The same question might also be asked for the old and established names as Alcatel-Lucent (that is losing talents at an alarming rate and its core business is challenged acutely), Continental or the good old Berg...