I realize that the original format of the post was confusing, so, before you start reading it, here is a summary of solutions. You should read on afterwards in order to understand the context of each solution in part, though:

• Torrents seem to keep a reference to some of the proxy settings when they started downloading. I don't have a clear solution for this, in my case changing the configuration of the proxy and restarting both proxy and Bittorrent eventually solved it. An aggressive solution is to remove all of your torrents and readd them later.
• Sometimes the settings file gets corrupted or the settings don't make a lot of sense. Save all your ongoing downloads, remember all the relevant settings - like download folder -, stop Bittorrent, go to your user's Application Data folder and remove the settings.dat and settings.dat.old files in the Bittorrent folder. (usually C:\Documents and Settings\YourUser\Application Data\Bittorrent or.and C:\Users\YourUser\Application Data\Bittorrent). After restarting Bittorrent you will have a fresh set of settings, so change them to what you need and reload the list of torrents that you saved.
• Check the connection settings. Sometimes you want to minimize the number of connections Bittorrent makes because your provider gives you only a limited connection pool. Make sure the value is not too small. Bittorrent needs a lot of connections: to find peers, to download and upload stuff, to open new connections in order to find the faster one, etc. In my case 15 was too little and I had to restore it to the original 150, even it 15 worked with previous versions of the program.
• Solution from a comment: check your firewall settings and the firewall settings of your router/modem
• Solution from a comment: check your internet provider. Some, like Comcast, are throttling some types of traffic. This link might help: Stop your ISP from Throttling Bittorrent Speeds
• Solution from a comment: enable Bittorrent protocol encryption and restart the application
• Solution from a forum: disable DHT from the Bittorrent client settings (or enable it, if it is disabled?)
• Solution from YouTube: start the torrent client 'As Administrator', suggesting there may be some file access issues you have.
• Solution from a comment: enable DHT. If only some torrents seem to be stuck, see if you can enable DHT in those torrents' properties.

Hope that helps. Now for the original post:

Update (again): While resetting the settings did solve my problem temporarily, I had the same problem the next day as well. The only meaningful thing that I had changed was the global maximum number of connections (Preferences -> Bandwith) from 150, which seemed excessive, to 15. I changed the value back to 150 and it started downloading immediately! This is strange, since the value was 15 for years, I think. Well, I am getting tired of these solutions that only work until the next day. Hopefully this is the last time the problem appears.

Update: The enthusiasm I had after making some of the torrents work faded when I noticed most of the other torrents were still not working. My only solution was to go to the Application Data folder, then Bittorrent, and delete settings.dat and settings.dat.old while the program was closed, then restart Bittorrent. Warning! You will lose all the torrents and settings so save them first (I selected them all and copied the magnet links, then added them back one by one afterwards). The weird thing is that, while it worked, the software also looked quite different from what I was used to. Perhaps just blindly updating the version of Bittorrent all the time is not the best option. Sometimes we need to reset the setting to take advantage of the new software settings.

I've had a problem with a router which prompted me to remove it and put the Internet cable directly into my computer port. I wouldn't recommend it for you, since a router adds a level of protection against outside access, but still, I was not home and a friend of mine "fixed" the problem. Since then, I couldn't download anything on Bittorrent, as it got stuck at "Connecting to peers", even if it connected to the trackers, and saw all the seeds and leechers. Googling around I found a suggestion to remove "resume.dat" from the Bittorrent Application Data folder, but it didn't work for me. I tried a lot of things, but none worked until I found an obscure forum asking about a proxy server. And it dawned on me that it could be from there.
You see, I had previously installed a free proxy program called Privoxy, but I had bound it to the previous IP address of the computer. As a result, it didn't load anymore. The Internet settings were OK, I had removed any reference to a proxy, but strangely enough something in the Bittorrent client kept some information relating to the proxy. After I only bound the proxy to the local address, Privoxy started and miraculously also did the Bittorrent downloads (after a restart of the program).

So, if you have issues with the Bittorent client getting stuck at "Connecting to peers", check if you have recently changed your Internet proxy settings.

Update: I recognized the voice of Brad Dourif as Piero (how can one not?) so I went to see who the other voice actors were. If you, like me, felt a strange attraction to Callista Curnow, that's because her voice is that of gorgeous Lena Headey. Also you might recognize Susan Sarandon as Granny Rags (hee hee!) or John Slattery as Admiral Havelock. But pretty much no one comes close to Brad Dourif, except perhaps Roger Jackson, who is the voice of Mojo-Jojo!

As you may know, I am a great fan of Arkane Studios games. They did Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, Might and Magic X (which for all intents and purposes was Arx Fatalis 2) and now they did Dishonored. You will probably say that Ultima Underworld was actually a Looking Glass Studios game, but when they dissolved, some people from their team went on to work for Arkane and the resemblance of the games is pretty obvious. Anyway, I am now in a small village in Italy and only have Internet at my work. Imagine my great surprise when I discovered a kit of the Dishonored game on my laptop. I immediately installed it and played the game for a non stop 20 hours until I finished it. However, it was my desire to see the entire story (and to get some sleep in the weekend) that made me finish so quickly. You see, the game is a first person shooter-adventure that follows a storyline. However, on each stage you can explore and find a lot of secrets and side quests and even influence the story a little bit through your actions. The universe in which the game is played is a wonderfully crafted steampunk world, driven by whale oil and technology invented by mad scientists and filled with political intrigue. I can safely say that the game is a combination of Arx Fatalis, Thief/Assassin's Creed and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

For an analysis of the game, there are a lot of things to be said. One of them is that the 3D world was, as far as I could see, almost perfect. I didn't get stuck in some fold of the wireframe, I didn't reach places I shouldn't have reached even when having the power to Blink, I didn't see through textures or seen any major bugs, actually. The game is a huge collaboration of companies, with people from all over the world, they could have screwed up anywhere: design, storyline, sound bits, software, 3D world, etc. It did not happen. You can also see the love that was poured into the game when the story does not end with an obvious finish, but continues on for a few stages. They could have worked less for the same money, but they somehow chose not to.

The gameplay is a joy. You have different ways of solving problems: you can kill anything that moves, you can choose to not kill them, but perform a chokehold on them and hide their unconscious bodies so you can avoid detection or you can go on high ledges and sneaky paths to avoid conflict all together. An interesting component of the story is The Outsider a supernatural being, probably a god, that looks like a normal guy, dressed normally for the age, but having black eyes. He is treated as the Devil in the official religion of the country, but he acts like your ally in the game. His only obvious interest is to have fun watching the chaos. For these purposes he gives you his mark and the gift of magic, which allows you to teleport, possess small animals and humans, summon a pack of ravenous pack of rats to devour your enemies and other fun things like that. The world if very interactive. You can, for example, take a random item like a bottle and throw it away. This would either unbalance your enemy, if you hit them directly, so you can deliver a deadly sword strike, or cause them to go to investigate the noise of the bottle breaking. One interesting option is to take the head of the enemy you have just beheaded and throw it into another opponent. Each level had hidden magical artifacts which you can find using a special Outsider device, a living heart with mechanical bits which you hold in your hand and that talks to you - told you, fun stuff. This usually prompts you to go out of your way to find said artifacts. The complexity of each stage is staggering. The first two stages I tried to play as completely as possible, which took me a lot of hours. After the first level ended I felt pretty good about myself. I had explored a lot of the map and I felt pretty smug about it. In the final summary of the mission I saw, to my chagrin, that I had found about half of all the valuable objects that I could have found. The rest of the missions I just breezed through, in order to see the ending. If I would have played this game as thoroughly as I possibly could, it would probably have accounted for many tens of hours of gameplay. Well, maybe it's me, but emergent gameplay is the coolest thing since fire was invented.

The devices you possess are old school enough to be a lot less effective than magic. You have your trusted one bullet pistol, which you must reload after each firing, you have your crossbow, which can fire darts, sleep darts or incendiary bolts, you have delicious bombs which, when triggered, fire a fast winding metal wire that cuts your enemies to pieces, grenades are always fun, and so on.

There are some issues which I had with the game though. It seemed to me that the magical spells were rather unbalanced. I cannot tell you how much they are unbalanced until I play the game again in another way, but it seemed to me that you absolutely needed to have Blink and Dark Vision and that the best offensive spell was the summoning of the rat pack. The rest were almost useless, at least by description: something that allows you to attack stronger and more enemies at once if you have enough adrenaline, something that allows you to possess animals, but there aren't that many animals in the game, and only partial possession of people, something that causes a gust of strong wind. Well, I will try them soon so I can tell you more in an update. Another thing that felt useless to me were the bone charms who gave me stuff that didn't really seem important. I did play the game on Easy, since I didn't have a mouse for the laptop, so that may explain my disdain of the things.

It is important to realize that the game has downloadable missions and content through Steam. This means the story can go on. I intend to explore this avenue. Also, after playing a second time I have to say that I was amazed of the option to not kill anyone the entire game. Even the assassination missions have ways of getting rid of the characters without killing them (even if their fates are usually worst than death). If you want to go that way, please always check that the unconscious victim is actually unconscious. Otherwise you end the mission with one or two dead people and there is no going back. One example is if you choke one guy, then let it fall with the head in the water. He dies even if you immediately remove him.

All in all I cannot recommend the game enough. Add to this that after you buy it, you also get extra chapters as downloadable content and, who knows, maybe they will allow the community to make their own chapters. It was just fantastic. Go play it!

I embed here an example gameplay from someone who is obviously more skilled than I am.

I've reviewed two books of William Golding already and both of them were complex analyses of the human nature. This little novel, The Double Tongue, is similar in complexity. A note at the beginning of the text is explaining perhaps best why Golding's books are so great in details. You see, the novel was published posthumously, after a draft of it was found in Golding's belongings. He has already finished the book once, wrote another version and had started on another draft. No wonder his books were so reflective and self referential and connected to so many other works of literature or philosophy.

About the content, it is rather interesting, as it details the story of a girl in ancient Greece, just before Romans started dominating the country, who becomes the Delphi Pythia. The story quickly goes to the decorative role a "well bred" female would have had in those days, carefully instructed how not to draw attention, kept in total ignorance, all for the moment when she would be offered to a husband. After attempting escape from this fate, the only option her father has to "do with her" is to give her to a priest of Delphi called Ionides. Thinking she was going to become a servant of the temple, sweeping floors, she becomes the oracle. This is used to analyse concepts as religious sentiment, political use of faith and to describe the parallel system used in this world of superstition and showbiz.

I thought that it was a really short story. Told from the point of view of an octogenarian woman, it dwells on the adolescence, the initial shock of coming to Delphi, but very quickly skips entire decades to bring the conclusion. The title is relating to both the Python that the god Apollo killed in the Delphi cave, which gave him the forked tongue that said two things at once, but also to the double system of religious ecstasy backed by very real intelligence networks and the duplicity of people who either declare themselves religious while lacking the sentiment or the other way around . The story is inspired by Ion of Euripides and the ending is revealing only to a select few who understand the reference to a passage of the Bible (see here and here).

I can say that I liked the novel. It wasn't a "wow" thing like in the case of Lord of the Flies, nor did it cause me to feel more enlightened with the final reveal. Being that short and the last novel of Golding, there is really no reason not to read it.

I have already spoken of the incredible lack of Internet connectivity in the area or Ispra/Cadrezzate. Of course, they are only villages. In Romania you would be lucky to have a telephone. However, this situation has brought to my attention two interesting and strange things.

First, lacking the distraction of the web and of other people, I found myself rediscovering introspection. It felt like meeting an old friend, as my brain was beginning to spout ideas for movies or short stories, computer programs or blog posts. It felt nice and perhaps I ought to try this more often. Apparently, I will have the opportunity every weekend, but already the universe is working toward bringing me a cellular card, so I don't know if I will have the disposition. If you want to try it, go somewhere where you have no Internet, don't call anyone and don't take any other creatures with you, be them dogs, cats or humans, and stay at least two days. I am already after a month of not working, so if you find yourself focusing on work issues, you are not doing it right.

Second, I actually found a magical spot, almost no metaphor here. So strong was my need for connectivity that I actually found a place where a wi-fi connection was available and I could guess its password. It must have seemed weird to see a guy with a cell phone in his hand, triangulating wi-fi spots. The magical part of it is that the spot is on the sidewalk and restricted geographically to an area of 2 or 3 squared meters. Apparently the wifi comes from a clubhouse, but I could not find it in the area and whenever I make a step to exit the area, the signal strength goes down and disappears. If you are old enough to have played Quest for Glory, you know there was a magical area in the forest where you could sleep and find yourself refreshed, without fear of attack and even having a fruit tree that you could eat from. It's kind of like that. Now, I have no idea what Italians think when seeing a big guy standing in the sun on the sidewalk in front of a metal sign for Cadrezzate and either furiously tapping on his smartphone or reading some web pages, but at least I get to read my e-mail and RSS feeds.

The metal sign is probably the reason this works at all, it must function as an antenna. I wonder if my landlord will be OK with me trying to install big metal plates on his balcony... My search for Internet took me almost 2 kilometers away where, after unsuccessfully trying to find a bar or a restaurant with wi-fi and not being able to guess a single password from private networks, I found one that was an actual ADSL line! Couldn't guess the password for that, either, but for someone to have ADSL in this starved out region and not share it felt like a crime to me. Perhaps I will be able to get a contract for myself here, then share it in the building and become the hero! [Enter Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero soundtrack]
Anyway, tomorrow will be my first day of work here, so probably my hunger will be alleviated a little, otherwise I am half a mind to root my Android phone and then install wi-fi cracker programs.

This would be my first post from Ispra, Italy. There is no broadband Internet. Anywhere! I guess I will have some at work, but soiled by IT guys with God complexes who will filter every port that is remotely significant. When asking about it everybody recommends cellular cards that have "a flat rate" of 12 euros, which would be pretty cheap if it weren't limited to 2 GB transfer and wouldn't have ridiculous speeds. So probably I have a lot to say, but I will write blog posts when available. This one, for example, I am writing as a text file on my lonely laptop, hoping to get a chance to post it soon.

Well, after ranting about the lack of Internet access, which was probably the least of your curiosities, I can continue. I got here using the plane from Bucharest to Malpensa, which is one of the airports close to Milan. I've bought the ticket online, checked in online, they gave me a PDF to download, I printed it at a local printer service and so I had my ticket. Being a tall guy, I requested extra leg room and being a lazy guy, I requested priority boarding. In order to get from Malpensa to Ispra I would have had to take a train to Gallarate, then switch to one that would take me to Sesto Calende, then switch again for Ispra. This would have taken me 2 hours and a half, carrying the mother of all baggage. You see, my wife prepared everything that I would ever need in a single bag (except the Internet!!!). Well, screw that. I also ordered online a taxi cab to wait for me at the airport and take me to Ispra, which did cost as much as a third of the plane ticket. Estimated arrival time: 40 minutes.

So I woke up at 6:30, got clothed, took the dog out, read some of the news, got in the car with the wife, she drove me to the airport, I brought my printed ticket to the lady in charge, she took my baggage and that was that. I was ready for boarding at 9:30, when the plane was leaving at 11:20. You see, in Romania the public services have been so poor for the last decades that people still expect something as simple as a plane boarding to take hours. I spent some time with the wife, connected to the airport Wi-Fi, downloaded two podcasts and then went to the boarding gate. There I found a lot of people standing in a huge line. I went to the girl in charge and asked her what should I do, considering I had a priority boarding ticket. She said "well, take a seat and we'll call you". And so it happened. The entire line moved back to allow me and a few other people, mostly foreigners, to pass through. Then people with children, then the regular folks. I guess this is one of the few advantages of having a child. The disadvantage being that it could cry the entire flight to Malpensa, which one of them did! Luckily I had my new smartphone with me, which allowed me to listen to two podcasts and watch most of a Japanese anime film with my headphones on.

I have to digress a little here, as I have mentioned my new smartphone. The reason I've abandoned my trusted Nokia E60 is that the head of the new project implied we could be writing code that would work for cell phones, as well. Another reason was that I wanted something I could watch films on and also read books. Previously I would have used my other trusted device, my PalmVX, a PDA built in 1998 that still works perfectly. Unfortunately, the way to connect the PDA to a computer is either via Infrared or via a 9-pin serial port, which have long disappeared from computers and laptops. And since I could not bring my trusted Athlon 2500+ desktop PC with me, I had to buy a smartphone that is faster than the desktop PC, has more features than the PalmVX and also functions as a phone. Pretty awesome, in a way, but also pretty shitty if you think devices that are decades old could easily carry the load of most of the usage of this incredible device. They couldn't do fart sounds, though.

Anyway, I passed via customs instantly, had to wait for the luggage to arrive (which is always a lengthy process, probably because it doesn't interfere with the plane schedule and we've already paid). Then I went outside. A lot of people there, some were carrying signs with pen written names. There was a cute little chick there, with a printed A4 paper with my name on it. It was like in the movies when they do that. I felt pretty good. Apparently, the designated driver had some delays with his previous customer and so they've sent this girl with a big van thing, even if I had only paid for a small car. I am not one to complain, though, am I? Don't answer that! The girl was very polite, knew English well and we conversed until I got to my destination.

The residence, which is a sort of long term hotel, was right across the street to my new job. I checked in, conversing with the owner's wife, who is also Romanian, and at 15:30 I was "home". By all accounts I will be living here for at least two months and probably for many years.

Next I phoned my new employer, who graciously invited me to a beer (he is Belgian, you see) and we got to talking. Well, things look pretty good, but also are really not well defined. I will not talk about details here, but let's just say that there is a deadline in two months and not many ideas on what exactly we are building. This is a Research Center, though, my new boss assured me, that's what we do: research.

My hotel is right across the street from my job, which is awesome, but one kilometer away from the nearest supermarket. Ispra is a small village, 5000 people or so living in it, and as far as I saw, there are a lot of small villages here, but very few services. You need a car to go to anywhere that matters, including daily shopping. Well, in a way that's the way in Bucharest, as well, but there are a lot more shops on the way instead of lizards running for their lives and squirrels running up trees. Supposedly there is a lake close to here that is warm enough to swim in, there are trees and green things (also known as plants) everywhere and it is rather chilly, which I love. One of the reasons I came here was to escape the horrible wet heat of my apartment, where my wife could not suffer air conditioning. Here I don't have air conditioning, but people assure me I don't need it, I will only need heaters for the winter. Well, let's hope so.

So after I've met with my new employer and most of the team (we will be five people in all working on this) I went shopping. I was very confident that 1 Km would be close enough to get to on foot. And I was right up to the point where I had to return with my hands filled with bags of stuff. But it was OK, I got myself some vegetables and eating utensils, even if later on I discovered I already had some. I went to sleep listening to music on my smartphone. The next day I made myself a salad, went for more groceries, and wrote this post.

In conclusion, I still have to get my "codice fiscale" without which I cannot buy things of importance (like cellular dongles to give me Internet), but other than that I am a brand new inhabitant of Ispra, of the Varese province in Italy. Although that is debatable, as well, since my job is certainly in Ispra, but my hotel seems to be in Cadrezzate. Next to do is explore the area, find some way to wash and iron my clothes, buy decent glasses, cups and water boilers, not these silly Italian espresso things, maybe get to lake Monate and swim a little and, of course, get myself some Internet.

Kara no Kyōkai, translated in English as Garden of Sinners, but literally as Boundary/Border of Emptiness, is a strange little series of seven Japanese anime films. The lead is a girl who has a double personality, conveniently both named Shiki, but written with a different Japanese character. One of the personalities likes to kill people brutally, while the other is afraid of human contact. Enter Kokutou, a guy in the same class as Shiki, who falls in love with her and accepts her as being split like this and even covers some of her murders as he, after all, is in love with the one personality that does not kill.

Now, this is the least weird bit of the films. This story that I have been telling you is not told as linearly as I present it, but starts from the middle, then shows what happened in the past and future by flashbacks, prequel movies, and something that I can only call experimental movies, since they show scenes from what actually happens, but not in their normal order.

You see, after Kokutou starts camping outside Shiki's house to stop her from killing anyone, she attempts to murder him, only she can't and attempts suicide by throwing herself in front of a car. Only the murderous personality actually dies and when she awakens from a two year coma, Shiki has the Mystical Eyes of Death Perception, which see the seams that bind things to existence. Once you cut those, the thing dies.

In order to make her understand and control her condition another chick appears, one that is a magus. Yes, magic! I told you it was going to get weird. In the end, these three characters form a sort of private investigator agency that often deals with the supernatural and rogue magi.

All in all, the animation is rather good, the characters weird, most of them displaying some sort of emotional detachment bordering on psychopathy, but the story leaves a lot to be desired. just like the erratic order of the films, the story also jumps violently from brutal murders, criminal investigations, magic, philosophy and romance, making a mess of it all. It's not that i did not enjoy watching the films, but at the end of the seventh, when Shiki says "this is the end of my story" I couldn't actually feel it was any end at all. Perhaps the manga makes more sense, but as such, I can't really recommend watching it.

One of my responsibilities is to create an email newsletter for some friends of mine. In order to do that I scour the Internet using Google Alert, RSS feeds and other nefarious means like that. The job consists of opening each page, copy pasting the URL, the title and then finding the most effective way to express the content of the page, which is often one of the first paragraphs. And what do I get when doing that? A sort of weird marketing spam that is as annoying as it is (in my view) pointless.

Here is what happens: first you go to a page using a normal URL, let's say you googled it. Once it loads you look at the address bar and see what is called a hash added to the URL, probably used to identify your visits for marketing purposes. Example NewScientist: mouse over the link to see the actual URL, then click on it to see what actually happens. I have tracked this to the AddThis scripts, when configured with the parameter data_track_addressbar:true. So in case you wondered if the site you are visiting chose to add that ugly hash there, yes it has!

Another thing that happens: You select a paragraph of a page, you copy it, you paste it in your email only to see added stuff to the text, like "See more - some URL". Check it out at Astro Bob's. Try copying something from the blog and pasting it into Notepad. The crappy string at the end is added by ShareThis, usually by its WordPress plugin. This time it was their fault, as they added some crap in the plugin. All Astro Bob has to do [hint! hint!] is to disable the feature.

Now all that remains is to understand why. According to marketing reports, the sharing of information on the Net via copy&paste is more than 80%. So they want people to be able to control what happens with the information they publish, and it is a reasonable goal, but this is not the solution. Instead, what users will do is either get annoyed with the spam they have to clear from URLs and pasted text or, and that should concern the site owners, not copy from them at all. And if you thought having your information disseminated on the Internet without your knowledge and/or consent was bad, wait until nobody cares about it at all.

I wrote a bunch of posts regarding my past employment, but said nothing about the new one. In fact, I was a bit superstitious, didn't want to jinx what was going to happen. Now it shall all be revealed! Well, long story short I will be relocating to Italy (re-boot, get it?)and working at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra. That's it, cheers!

Just kidding. How does one get to, first, have the opportunity in the first place and, second, actually decide to go? For the first point I would have to say pure blind luck. I happen to have a LinkedIn profile that shows a lot of experience in the field of Microsoft .NET and so they called me, since they needed someone like that, and I turned out not to be a complete wacko (only a partial one) at the interview. The second point is actually the most complicated. Most Romanian developers of my experience are rooted, so to speak. Married, many with children and obligations, relatives and social circles, they often find it too hard or completely impossible to relocate to another country. Luckily for me, I have no children, I don't have any social circles to talk about, I will probably talk to and visit my relatives just as much from Italy as from Bucharest and I have one of the most understanding wives one could want. She stays behind, at least temporarily, to mind the fort, continue her own career and take care of the dog, while I go on to the adventure of my lifetime.

I may be exaggerating, but I will check out several experiences that I have never had before:

• living alone - I know it sounds strange, but in 36 years I have never lived alone. I was either living with my parents, with my business partner or with a girlfriend or wife
• living in another country - I have worked in Italy before, a few disparate weeks, but never lived in another country for long enough to understand the local culture and experience the way locals see the world
• living in a small town - Ispra is a 5000 people enclave, so it's not even a small town, more of a village
• working for the European Commission or some other governmental organization like that - I am afraid of the bureaucracy, frankly, I hope there is some sort of separation between devs and that sort of thing
• working with actual new technologies - I thought there are some people that inflate their resumes in order to get jobs they don't really deserve, but I never imagined that most companies would misrepresent themselves to appear more attractive as a workplace. I've heard a lot about what great new project I will be working on, only to be relegated to some legacy crap that no manager wants to rewrite even when it's bankrupting their company. Oh, I really hope the JRC people didn't bullshit me about an ASP.Net MVC 4.5 web site with Web API's, AngularJS and Google Maps.
• staying separated from my wife, but not being mad at each other - not that I have ever stayed separated from her while being angry, but still. Our relationship started as a long distance one, since we were living in different cities, and only after a year we moved in together. I am curious as to how this reversal will affect us. I believe it will strengthen our bond, but there are alternative scenarios.
• working and living in a truly multicultural environment - the place will have Italian, French, German, Swiss, Romanian and who know what many other types of people. I will have the opportunity to relearn all the European languages, express myself in them, learn about other cultures from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

All in all, this is the gist of it. You can see that I am excited enough (setting the stage for future disappointment). My plane leaves Bucharest next Friday, on the 30th of August, while actual work begins on the 2nd of September. Hopefully this will generate a deluge of technical blog posts that will compensate the lack experienced in the last two years.

When I first opened the ASP.NET MVC 4 Recipes, by John Ciliberti I was amazed. It seemed to transcend the reference book and go into a sort of interactive path thing. You know interactive books, where you read the book and at certain points you get to choose what the characters do by going to read one page or another? This is what Recipes seemed to be. You get to a point where the author tells you which chapters to read and in which order based on your role in the organization. That is and will remain a wonderful concept and I would see more books steal it for themselves. However, the actual content of the book did not feel as great as its presentation, I am afraid to say. This is not to mean it is a bad book, only that I expected a lot more from it from reading its "mission statement". The book is Microsoft centric, obviously, but it says very clear that it will solve problems with Microsoft products as a rule. For example it favours KnockoutJS as a JavaScript framework. But that's not really annoying, though.

I think what bothered me most was that the content was all over the place. There are some chapters in which there are specific problems. The problem is described, then the solution is provided. Very nice. But then there are some problems that are vague and general with a very specific solution, lending a lot of lines to some issues and moving past others in a hurry. Of course, I would have liked all of the problems to have their own book and that was impossible, but the compromise here did not feel as great; I thought some of the problems were not really something someone would have more than once, and sometimes never, so using the book as a reference helps only so much. Some examples of problems to be solved: You would like to begin working with ASP.NET MVC Framework, but you do not understand the MVC pattern and why it is beneficial. - why would you start reading an ASP.Net MVC book if you don't even understand the MVC pattern? You would google something first. Or: You have started using the new .NET asynchronous programming pattern and love its relative simplicity compared to other programming models. However, you would like to have a better understanding of the code generated by the compiler so that you can improve the designs of your asynchronous methods. So you jump from not knowing what MVC is to wanting to read IL. Maybe I am just mean, but it soon turned into a very hard to read book from jumping from one issue to another like that, from level to level. Not to mention some "loaded" problems that have a description several lines long in the form of "you have found that your company strategy sucks, because of 1,2 and 3, and you want 4,5 and 6 because 7,8 and 9". It doesn't sound like my problem at all :)

Bottom line: I have not started working with ASP.Net MVC, yet, nor do I believe that my first job with it would be as an architect, so I will have an opinion on how it works in real life in a few months, probably. The book seems useful now, but not the ASP.Net MVC start to end tutorial that I wanted when I started reading it, and maybe that is why I had such a critical eye for it.

In a recent news article I've read that Bradley Manning has received a 35 years prison sentence. I can't even begin to understand how to feel about this. On one hand, he was a member of an organisation that specifically prohibited what he has done. On the other hand, the same organisation was swearing to anyone having ears that it doesn't do what Manning revealed they did. The multiple levels of "law" that are apparent both in this case and the Edward Snowden case are sure to make even jurists scratch their heads. In cases where some guy is arrested based on a secret law, incarcerated and pretty much tortured in a secret prison then sentenced by a secret court, it all seems like an alternate reality. We've had people close their web businesses, then declaring they can't discuss why they did it because it would be illegal. Please feel free to read the links above, although that may well put you in a special category for US surveillance, for all I know. (OK, let's not be mean!)

The thing with Manning, though, is that he was a mere private, a kid. By the accounts revealed in the court, he was the product of an alcoholic mother and had gender identity issues, as well. He revealed some information (I will be discussing that in a moment), then he was pretty much caught and incarcerated. Do pay attention to the last paragraphs of the Ars Technica article on his sentencing:

During one period of his pretrial incarceration, Manning's clothing was confiscated every night, and he was then forced to stand for inspection by guards while naked. He was also prevented from sleeping between 5am and 8pm and not allowed to have sheets on his bed.

. Then they sentence to guy to 35 years in prison, maybe he can get out in 8 if he "behaves well". This is the story of a screwed up kid with a conscience that now gets even more screwed up. Of course, there is the possibility that he gets out of prison, writes a book, sells the movie rights and becomes a rich hero of the masses...

Then there is the extent of the information he leaked, information that was then published by another entity, Wikileaks, which at least in theory should have restricted publishing any material that exposed specific people to harm. Wikileaks continues to do well, just as the news outlets that published information like this from Manning and Snowden (arguably harassed by governments, but still in business), which for me makes no sense, since that should mean the publishing of those articles is legal. So the only illegal thing these guys did was give information that is legal to publish to publishing entities. It is hard to see this as anything else than punishing people for telling on you. I see it like a bad teacher beating children who told on him to their parents, bureaucratic institutions that are flexing their muscles when being confronted with even the idea of oversight. Can anyone explain to me how this is different?

Now, obviously the upbringing and psychology of the guy leaking government information shouldn't even be on the table here. What we should be discussing is what is reported in those leaks and what the effect on the people (and their serving government) is. However, that is way over my head. I can read reports of torture of an American private by Americans and be flabbergasted, I can feel disgust when watching the video of a helicopter pilot shooting dead a dozen people kilometres away because he thinks he sees an RPG, and they are actually reporters with a camera, but there are a lot of documents that were leaked, from foreign diplomacy and espionage on allies to reports of wrongdoings by army and intelligence entities. I can't claim to know enough about this stuff to make a statement, but as far as I can see, nobody really appears to know enough about this. It seems like the little government oversight we expect as people was missing to begin with. And that is what worries me. Stop making examples out of people who come forward with untoward things because you can't adapt to the reality of the people who hired you!

This is the second book about LSD that I read, after The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, by John C. Lilly and it is also the autobiography of a scientist, but unlike Lilly, who seemed to have gone bonkers while writing his book, Hoffman maintains a scientific attitude about the whole thing, objective when needed, subjective in more personal chapters that he clearly delimits from the others. LSD: My Problem Child is the story of the invention of the drug, straight from its inventor, Albert Hoffman, a then chemist for pharma company Sandoz. In a nutshell I loved the book, the style, the author's integrity and the fine ironies that he slips from time to time. As you can see in the link above, the book is already free online so there is no real reason not to read it.

Hoffman explains in the book how, while researching the chemical properties of the ergot and attempting to potentate substances already discovered to have positive medical effects, he created Lysergic acid diethylamide. The substance had no visible effects on the test animals so he went on testing other substances. Five years it took for Hoffman to return to LSD in order to further understand its function. Usually a very thorough chemist, he touched some of the substance and only then the effect was understood. This simple anecdote hints on how many interesting chemicals we might have gone unnoticed, even after someone created them.

The method by which chemists work to find useful chemicals in nature is also very interesting. They take a plant, let's say, that has a specific effect that is testable via animal experiments. They isolate the active substance that produces that effect. Then they attempt to recreate the substance synthetically. After doing that, they test all kinds of related substances that they create via simple chemical operations from the original substance. This often leads to more powerful drugs or even completely new effects. Quoting from the book: "Of the approximately 20,000 new substances that are produced annually in the pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratories of the world, the overwhelming majority are modification products of proportionally few types of active compounds. The discovery of a really new type of active substance - new with regard to chemical structure and pharmacological effect - is a rare stroke of luck."

It took another five to ten years for LSD to reach mainstream. Until then psychologists and psychiatrists were using it to more effectively reach the patients and LSD was considered a wonder-drug. Sandoz was extremely happy with Hoffman's discovery. But then it became a subject of abuse. A counterculture of recreational use for LSD led to an institutional backlash that made the drug illegal, even if it was not addictive, not toxic and one could not overdose accidentally. However, it was essential to take it in a controlled environment, with someone to act as a guide and safety net. Many people did not do this and hurt themselves or others or had psychotic breaks. To get someone out of an LSD trip was simple: either guide them via calm words or (the technical solution) give them a calmer agent like cloropromazine which immediately cuts off the "high".

How come the black market is filled with toxic, addictive, nasty drugs, but someone considers LSD to be a problem? Anyway, I am quoting again from the book, a little bit that talked about experiments on primates, but one that I took to be a fine ironic jab at society's reaction to the drug: "A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very sensitively if a member of the tribe has received LSD. Even though no changes appear in this single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes the laws of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal order."

What I liked about the book very much was how thoroughly and objectively Hoffman researched LSD and other psychedelics (he also identified and separated psilocybin, another psychoactive substance present in "magic mushrooms" used by native Americans in religious rituals). He not once preached the recreational use of the drugs, deplored the misuse of these kinds of substances, but he also kept a strong position that they do no harm and can have amazing effects when used for medical purposes and the correct way. Far from being a "druggie" book, this is one of those autobiographies that you can't let down from your hands until finishing reading it. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The sixth book in the Dexter series is not really better than the others. I would have thought that five rehearsals would have resulted in a slightly better book, but instead it seems as if Jeff Lindsay is slowly losing the inspiration he started with book after book. In Double Dexter, the police is impossibly incompetent and this time even Dexter falls into the same category. It takes him chapters to do and act like he was supposed to and a lot later than even an average reader would see it coming. The opponent is inconsistent and not really a challenge, if it weren't for Dexter's apparent drastic drop in IQ.

If you have not read any of the books so far and maybe just watched the CBS series, be warned that they are completely different beasts. The show writing is clearly better and the plots are divergent to the point of being different stories altogether, but with the same character. Not that this eighth and final season is great writing anymore, but that's a different subject altogether.

Bottom line: Having read Double Dexter, I cannot say that I hated it, I really like the character, but I think Lindsay is bored with Dexter. Maybe he should just invent someone else and start writing better books.

I have been hearing about the AngularJS library for a few months now, people often praising it as the new paradigm of web development. It is basically a JavaScript MVC framework that makes heavy use of markup language in order to declare the desired behaviour. Invented at Google by Miško Hevery, it uses cacheable templates, databinding and dependency injection to combine the various components that otherwise are independent and testable. It also comes with its own testing framework (unit and end-to-end) and a way to describe unit tests Jasmine (BDD)style.

So I started reading about this new framework in the book intuitively called AngularJS, written by Brad Green and Shyam Seshadri. They start with an anecdote, discussing how they were working on a web application at Google. They have already written 17000 lines of code in about 6 months and it was almost finished, albeit with great frustration related to development speed and testability. This guy, Miško Hevery, tells everyone that by using a framework that he wrote in his spare time (you gotta love devs!) they could rewrite the whole application in two weeks. He was wrong, they did it in three weeks and at the end the whole thing has only 1500 lines of code and was fully testable. This was a great beginning for the book, as it starts with a promise and then (sorry, couldn't help the pun - you will see what I mean if you read the book or know AngularJS already) it describes how to achieve your goals. The book itself is not large, about 160 PDF pages, and can be used as both a primer and a reference. It describes the basic concepts of AngularJS and how they can be put to work, with some small app examples at the end. Of course, you have a link to where to download all their code samples.

What do I think about the book? It was pretty good. It shows the authors' preference towards Linux setups, but it is not annoying. Each chapter is clear and to the point. The framework itself, though, is original enough that after a few chapters it is almost impossible to understand everything without tinkering with the code yourself. Unfortunately I didn't have the time and disposition to do that, so just because I've read the book doesn't mean I know how to work with Angular, but I am confident that when I will actually start working with it, it will all come together in my mind. Also, as I was saying, the book can easily be used as a reference. It is not a complete overview, not every AngularJS feature and gotcha can be found in its pages, but it's good enough.

What do I think about the framework? It seems pretty spectacular. My only experience with JavaScript MVC frameworks is from a short brush off with BackboneJS. At a time I thought I would be working with it a lot and was boasting here that interesting posts would appear. Alas, it was not to be. Sorry about that, maybe better luck with Angular. Backbone was pretty interesting, but it had a horrendous way of working with data models and it was very easy to break something and not realize where it came from. There seems to be a lot more thought put into Angular. An interesting point is that the writers advertise TDD as a way of actually working and claim they do so themselves. I have seen many people trying and giving up, but I have hopes for JavaScript. You don't need to compile things, you don't need complicated servers or time consuming deployment steps: just change stuff and run the tests and/or refresh a page. I like the fact that the creators of AngularJS put this much work into making everything testable.

So go ahead: read the book and try the framework!

Update 24 Aug 2013: I've started reading dev blogs again and I've stumbled upon a 70 minute video by Dan Wahlin presenting AngularJS. His explanations seemed a lot more down to Earth than those in the book so I felt that his video really complements rather well what is written there. Here it is:

I was watching this spy movie where a general was talking about "turning" all kinds of nationalities to their cause. And it got me thinking: what is the real difference between them? Nationalities, I mean. When guys like Snowden or Manning spill out secrets to the press, what are they betraying, and to whom? When a spy sells the secrets of his country to other spies, from another country, what is really at stake?

The problem, as I see it, are borders. I've seen borders in my life. I may leave my city block and move towards the poorer ones. There is a border there, not physical, but social. Same applies to when I leave town and go into the country. You never know exactly when the city ends and the country begins, but the border exists. I've also passed between country borders. Spent a lot more time and money, of course, in order to do that - one has to have the proper papers and documents and IDs - but I've never seen a smaller difference between the people from one side and the other as I have seen with national borders. Of course, one country may be a lot richer overall than the other. See Mexico and the US, for example, as a brutal example, but everywhere I went I saw people from one side infiltrated, working or visiting, the other side. When you take those people into account, the border blurs.

Is Snowden more of an American than he is a conscientious member of the human race? He says no. Is a British spy selling secrets to the Russians more of a British than he is a spy? I would bet no. At least he doesn't feel that way, for sure. Who is the owner of secrets spilled? The country, one says... What does that mean? The land? The buildings? The people? Are the people really so different as to need those secrets? Are the borders between nations really necessary?

I really didn't mean to make this a long post. My point, as always rather unclear, is that I am more alike to software developers in Russia and the US than I am with a lot of my countrymen. The nationality of a person doesn't really matter except to the people that manage that nationality. They are the one that put those borders there in the first place and they are the ones that consider they have ownership of a country's secrets. Normal people usually don't give a damn. Am I very different from a Muslim terrorist? Yes I am, but that difference has been nurtured and created by these border managers. I do have to wonder, if those borders weren't there, would the terrorist still exist?

What is the modern purpose of borders anymore? I have no idea, frankly. Why can't I just move around wherever I want, speak the language I like, settle where I have space and work and, maybe, protect the secret of the people that employ me, rather than of those that are employed by me - like a government. What would happen if borders would suddenly be abolished, everywhere? I just don't know. It seems to me a lot of noise, about nothing.

Old Man's War is the first book in a space opera series that spans five books (at least at the moment). People recommend it highly and I do have to admit that it is well written, with an easy going style that is also well read. John Scalzi is not trying to create the perfect world, with details that always make sense and with crushing emotional depth, though. The book is something that you can finish in a day or two, with no sleep lost on what the characters are going to do next. For a while it did remind me of the excellent, if repetitive, Seafort Saga, by David Feintuch, but while that series felt dated because it was inspired by the British navy and was written in 1994, Old Man's War was written in 2005 and had no real reason to, but it did. If you haven't read Seafort's Saga, especially Fisherman's Hope, the fourth book, I would recommend it over this.

What is it Old Man's War about? Well, in the future, old people from Earth are joining the army when they are close to death because the CDF, or Colonial Defence Force, has the technology to rejuvenate them in exchange for a limited conscription. I won't spoil for you the exact method, but let's just say that it has a lot of logical problems that are compounded by the concept of the Ghost Brigades. So you have this main character, a funny old fart that joins at 75. One can assume that in the future 75 old people are still humorous and reasonably mentally and physically fit, as opposed to now, but even so, Scalzi was 36 when the wrote the book. What made him feel like he could pull off a character twice his age, with all the wisdom and particularities one gathers at that age? In my opinion, he rather failed, as John (why do people use John as their leads in books and scripts? Is the name really that common in the US? I have to admit that Lost ruined that name for me. Every time I hear about a guy named John I hear the phony people in Lost intone it with grave meaning while they're saying absolutely nothing important. Arrgghh! Anyway...) comes off closer to the writer's age (and having the same name, too). I might even have an issue with the title, since John is an old man for a third of this first book and then he's young and fit.

The rest of the book is about how he intelligently and valiantly rises from the rank of corporal (which he earned in training in an equally smart way) to captain in a few months and has a series of unlikely events happening to him (and here I am not making a pun of their explanation of "skipping", either). He makes connections to some people, which the writer attempts to infuse with meaning, but somehow fails, as when some died I didn't feel anything. Scalzi gets it right towards the end of the book, but then the book ends, and ends in a less satisfactory manner than I would have expected.

To summarize: I will probably read the next books to see what happens. However, it does seem a bit too light, too rational (in writing style), to make an impact. I do feel that John Scalzi has a lot of potential as a writer, but that somehow he misses the emotional component necessary for a book to "click" with the reader. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of rather failed first books that only led to the writer blossoming in the following publications. I do hope that's the case here. The fact that Paramount Pictures optioned the book in 2011 only shows it is rather shallow, as the really deep ones never make it to film. This doesn't mean I didn't have fun reading it, but most of the time I waited for something to happen. I felt that everything was a setup for something grand. When the book ended I was a bit shocked, as I thought I was in the middle of the story at least and still waiting for that big thing to occur. It's not a hard sci-fi book, it's not a personally jarring one and it is not a military heavy story. The obvious bias towards the human hero makes it all feel surreal.