Umberto's Magic

As an hommage to Umberto Eco I have re-read some of his books. "Baudolino", "The Prague Cemetery" and "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana".

It is fascinanting how Eco creates characters that seem to modify their reality by inventing stories as Baudolino and Simonini do.

In the end the reality is a sum of tales told from generation to generation by so many Baudolinos or wicked Simoninis.

Childhood's End

The devilish form of the Overlords in A. C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" was nor a racial memory but a racial premonition...

What about the fear we feel from the immigrants? Is it a memory or a premonition? I would say that in this part of Europe is certainly a fear that is still in or genes since the XIVth century.

How will we evolve? Colapse or a hypermind?
In the light of PokemonGo, I am just skeptikal...

Last trip with Kalos

After 11 years we had the last long trip with Kalos. Like an old mule she travelled steady to Greece and back. Not as sharp or fast as it was in 2005 but still able to travel the 2000 km.

I have many memories with this car. She was the first car that I bought and it carried all the people I love. We went in countless places all over Europe. She carried Mara from the maternity to our home. She carried my grandpa in his last visit to Hunedoara.

She did it well with little maintenance costs. She was strudy, quite powerful and tolerant with my lack of driving skills. She was a beautiful Giugiaro design.

Farewell Kalos! I will miss you!

Oversimplification

In the past production factors were considered "work, land and capital". Nowadays things are rather changed. Work and land are now resources - this terms encompasses both the material resources as well as work and energy. The capital encompasses not only the financial valuation but also the intellectual assets.  Work on the other hand tends to be diminished in importance with the proliferation of robotics and AI/ML while the intellectual property tends to become increasingly important.

Wars are generally fought for resources and we clearly see some trends:
- as work resource devaluates the countries with high workforce become restless
- as renewable resources get used countries with big resource yields or these with resources that are about to be discarded become restless
- countries with high IP values get targeted more often

Probably we will assist to "Butlerian jihad" in some aspects.
Probably after this war the world will calm down a little and some generations will have peace. Not ours unfortunately and sadly not our children's.

Forgotten brothers

TORNA, TORNA, FRATRE! Povestea aromânilor, spusă de ei înşişi from Marian Voicu on Vimeo.

100 years of peace

Probably the positive attitude and the entrepreneurial spirit in Romania will arrive after 100 years of peace. Relative peace. No massive war, no empires, to land raptures.

100 years of peace that should heal some wounds, make people build and capitalise what they built both materially and spiritually.

  

Tooling in startups

What tooling does a startup need? Where should this tools be hosted in order to be accessible yet cheap?

Well the 1st choice is obviously the "cloud". GitHub and BitBucket are great for hosting source code.
They are not expensive and they offer offsite availability. So You cannot loose your code by using code in any case. If the company is, let's say paranoid about security, the only option I can consider is GitBucket a free Scala developed GitHub clone. GitLab or Gitorious are on the other hand just a pile of expensive junk. GitBucket does everything GitHub does and requires just a fraction of the resources that GitLab asks for. If pay the minimal fee on GitHub 7USD you are good to go with an almost perfect service. BitBucket services are cheaper but their interface is not as polished. Hosting your own GitBucket will go from 5 to 10 USD but there you can scale to as may users as you want paying just for some administrative talent.
 
The former mentioned tools offer VCS but they also offer wiki and issues trackers - maybe not as advanced as Jira or TFS but, heck, they are almost for free.

The second  category of tools is the build server. Here I couldn't find a decent online build provider, but with a little imagination one can have its own Jenkins either on OpenShift (albeit memory and storage limited - builds tent to take forever) or in even better in a cheap cloud server as these of Digital Ocean or Scaleway.  This means that you will pay from 0 to 10 USD to build services.

Then you need some productivity/office applications. IMO Google apps are just right for this.
GApps come almost in every domain name bundle and sometimes they can be largely discounted.
They also include GTalk/Hangouts and GMail - awesome apps for communication.
Additionally Slack can be used for team communication as their channels work as Google Wave was supposed to, offering a stream of information that anyone can join. Slack is also great for integrating services as it can be triggered or can trigger services that have a RESTful interface.

Summing it up a startup has to pay between 50 to 100 USD per mont for all its IT needs.

NB: In case that the shop is a Microsoft one - their alternative offering (Office 365, VS team services) is more than fair albeit it limits you to a Windows world.