Here is a small funny video combining music and science in a geeky mix. I know, the music could have been less 80's rap and the dancing... well, could have been dancing. I mean, if even I noticed a lack thereof, it must really have been awful. But then it wouldn't have been geeky enough, right ;)

What a fun course this was. The lecturer of Introduction to Number Theory, Ed Burger, a math PhD, looks like what one would expect a mathematician to look like: thin, tall, geeky looking, wearing a rather bland costume, but with a colorful tie, curly hair and large glasses, with a sincere smile that seems a bit sad. The thing is, he is also a lot of fun and his enthusiasm regarding mathematics is not only obvious, but catchy as well.

The course itself requires very little if any mathematical education to understand, being mostly about ideas, rather than formulas. It is a Teaching Company course, and each lecture builds upon the understanding from the previous ones, making surprising and really fun connections.

I was very sad when the course ended, I wanted more! Happily, I've got "The Joy of Thinking" and "Zero to Infinity - a History of Numbers" that are also lectured by Ed Burger and I can't wait to watch them all. I highly recommend the course, even if one is not interested in math. It opens the mind on a way of thinking, useful in any situation, rather than anything specific.

Every time I've heard about this anime I refused to watch it for the very simple reason that the American "brand name" was Samurai X, which pretty much sucked tremendously. But, while reading a list of Shōnen anime series, I've decided to give it a try. And it, real name Ruruoni Kenshin, was a decent anime.

Staged in the beginning of the Japanese Meiji era (the reconstruction, as they call it, after American battleships forced the country to open its borders to the outside world) it features the adventures of former samurai assassin Himura Kenshin Battousai, fighting for the imperialists in the Tokugawa era, now reformed as a wandering samurai and having vowed not to kill anyone anymore. He manages this feat by using a "reverse blade" sword, which has the cutting adge on the inside. He thus manages to beat the crap out of people without actually killing them.

The series reminded me of Twilight Samurai, the movie that I liked so much, because it shows the feelings of people in the middle of great social and political change. Featuring 95 episodes, it is split in three main parts.

The first is how Kenshin moves into a sword dojo ran by a beautiful and single girl (heh!) and how they save a little boy from thugs and thus they become sort of an unofficial family. His "man slaying" past is slowly eroded by the contact with this pure hearted people. During this period he gets to fight several enemies, each stronger than the others, but keeping his vow not to kill anyone.

The second part is a large story arch in which he fights against a plot to overthrow the Meiji government and bring Japan to another period of chaos and war. The story culminates with the battle against a former "manslayer", the mastermind of the said plot.

The third part is mostly a mix of different stories that pretty much breaks the spirit of the first two parts. Instead of getting better, it grinds to a stop and then even gets worse. In this section he gets to fight "Feng Shui" masters and participate in all kind of filler episodes.

I felt that the series had a very nice feel to it, so I would recommend anime fans to watch it, but with the third part optional. There are also several OVAs that I am yet to watch. Happy viewing!

Update: I have watched the 6 OVAs and I was blown away. There are 4 episodes that make up an "origin story" for Kenshin, then a fifth episode which kind of summarises the series (badly) and then an ending that is both positive and extremely sad (in that typical Japanese suicidal way :) ). The animation is way more mature, the plots more complex, the characters have real feelings and there is no comedy whatsoever, getting back to that good feeling I had when I started to watch the series. Also the audience is different: the battles are realistic, with wounds and lots of blood, no magical mambo-jambo, while the characters behave more traditionally, with the women being more passive and the men more closed up.

All in all, the origin story makes the series seem childish at best, however I would recommend it being watched after seeing the series, just as I did.

I got this book as a recommendation and at first, I thought it wouldn't work. The scope was large, the characters many and the OCR was really bad so I had to guess some of the words from my text file. So I started reading other books. Left with only this on the PDA, I decided to attempt one more read. I don't regret that decision.

After a while I thought I've started another series of books from the middle or something. A lot of characters, with deep histories, placed in a vast historical context with lots of cool stuff like magic and wars and empires and gods and undead creatures and all that. But no, Gardens of the Moon is actually the first of ten books in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. Wikipedia says: The Malazan world was co-created by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont in the early 1980s as a backdrop to their GURPS roleplaying campaign. In 2005 Esslemont began publishing his own series of five novels set in the same world, beginning with Night of Knives. Although Esslemont's books are published under a different series title - Novels of the Malazan Empire - Esslemont and Erikson collaborated on the storyline for the entire fifteen-book project and Esslemont's novels are considered as canonical and integral to the series as Erikson's own.

The plot is very complex, revolving around the Malazan empire, ruled by empress Laseen, who has just recently staged a coup d'etat and has overthrown and killed the emperor. The empire itself has only one goal, to bring all free cities under its rule, therefore a thick weave of scheming in order to juggle the armies that are partially still loyal to the fallen emperor, the many enemies of the empire, including vary powerful mages and the various high ranking officers who don't see with good eyes what is happening with the empire. And on top of this, Ascendants or Gods are meddling in every important aspect of life. The result is a soup of personal stories, epic battles, shrewd politics and lots of cloak and dagger stuff.

I have to say that I liked the effort a lot, including all the small details that are quite different from books with similar subjects. For example the magic comes from warrens, each a different flavour with influences that diminish and grow like tidal waves and which feed powerful beings whose purposes are never clear or directly expressed. Gods are equally likely to fight amongst themselves, meddle in the human affairs or purely possess some unlucky sod in order to manifest in the real world.

I will now end this entry in order to get the rest of the books in the saga. I highly recommend the book for all fans of fantasy and sci-fi alike.

A while ago, before the election craze began to grip Romania, someone asked me what I think will happen. At the time (as now) I knew more about the plot of the TV series I am watching and the insides of .NET than what was going on politically in my country. Of course, I answered anyway, as the truth is often found in the mouths of children and crazy people. Being both, I said Basescu, the current president, would win the elections, due to populace inertia, and the coalition of parties that wanted to replace him will see each of the inner parties split into people that don't want Basescu and people that want power, making the Democratic Party even larger, even meaner, even worse.

A month after my prediction, month spent in the hope that I was just a fool and didn't know anything about anything, it came true.

And, as if things couldn't get worse, I get to see how the difference between candidates has mostly been provided by the Romanian diaspora, rather than the poor bastards that have to live with the decision. And I know these guys, people that left the country in search of better payment, better conditions, maybe some respect. Knowing nothing about Romania anymore, they just vote as they see from afar, smug in their belief that they do one good thing or the other. Like fighting communism. Maybe it would have worked 20 years ago when you left! That, my friends, pisses me off. If you left, dear diasporans, leave us the fuck alone! Choose a president where you live, not where we do. I can't believe that the same people shouting the country is shit, that they want to go live in a "real" country, that they want to be treated with decency and so on and so on, gather en mass outside the borders to vote with the same idiot that ruled us so far.

And you know what is the funny thing here? People that see how this went and are just as disappointed and disgusted as I am... they say this could have happened only in Romania and they want to leave! It's like a zombie infection, isn't it? And we all got bitten.

A while ago I was blogging about a Romanian jazzy band called DuteVino. They didn't have an album, just leaked songs over the web, and they sounded rather nice with their female singer having a wide voice range.

After quite a while, they are releasing their first album, "0.1 Prototype", maybe a subtle irony to their lack of activity these past three years, or something to do with all the 2.0s clogging the names of new media. The album itself is formed of their songs so far and, hopefully, it means they plan another soon enough. Nice enough, it is freely downloadable from their site.

The release is due on Friday, December 4th, at 21:30, at Control Club. More information on their official site. If you have difficulties seeing the site, look for a popup poll (which is actually not a popup, but on the edge of the screen) and close it.

All Tomorrow's Parties is part of the Bridge trilogy, together with Virtual Light and Idoru. Placed in a world that is not too distant from our own, but changed brutally and irreversibly by the advent of new technology, it features some of the same characters as the previous books and tells the story of nodal points, as viewed through the eyes of Laney, the quantitative analyst, and of the people that are inadvertently in the middle of profound change. Laney is a guy that can sense accretions of data intuitively, because he was subjected to trials of some weird drug, and he notices a large nodal point, a place where data points to a change in the way the world works.

I will let you read it and see what this is all going towards. I must say that it felt like an easier book than Idoru, maybe because it has more action sequences and (a bit) less descriptive prose. It is a strange thing to understand the world of Gibson's imagination and feel so strongly about it, yet in the same time see that the world is not really going there. The details that the author infuses in his stories make all of his books seem part of reality and, having finished some story, I feel that the world around me is a bit fake. I believe that is a mark of a great writer.

It seems that I started William Gibson's the Bridge trilogy in reverse order. I finished reading All Tomorrow's Parties and, before I could blog it, I started reading Idoru and realized that it was set in the same universe and had some of the same characters. And this only to find out by Wiki'ing that there is a third (and first) book in the series.

Well, I can't possibly hold up until I start and finish that one, and I may even not read it. Not because Gibson is not brilliant, but because the level of attention necessary to enter the atmosphere of his books is not appropriate for my daily subway trips to work. Because of this I recommend reading William Gibson books somewhere alone, in bed, well rested, ready to virtually go somewhere else and abandon reality for a while.

Back to Idoru, a book about a Japanese popular idol (hence the name of the book) who is entirely virtual, a programatic entity made for the sole purpose of entertaining. However, this inadvertently turns into a proper AI, becoming more human as the data from her fans becomes part of her being. Of course, a lot of characters are doing their thing in a typical for Gibson very detailed world that mixes the increasingly neglected realilty with emerging virtual worlds and concepts.

It is a good book, but I recommend you start with Virtual Light, go through Idoru and finish the proper way, by reading All Tomorrow's Parties.

For a few weeks I have been having problems running Silverlight on my machine, especially since I had SL3 installed and also Expression Blend, version 3. I didn't mind much, because I don't need Silverlight most of the time. But since sometimes I do, here is the solution for the "Your Silverlight developer components are out of date" error when trying to install Silverlight.

Go to http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9394666 and install the Silverlight tools. Yes, they are version 2. No, I don't know why Silverlight 3 would have problems because of version 2 Silverlight tools. However, installing the tools solved my problem.

I've stumbled upon this Windows port of a Linux application called HotBabe. What it does is show a transparent image of a girl over your applications that looks more naked as the CPU is used more. I wanted to use my own pictures and explore some of the concepts of desktop programming that are still a bit new to me, so I rewrote it from scratch.

The project is now up on Github and is functional. Please report any bugs or write any feature requests here or on the project page in order to make this even cooler.

Features:

• Custom images responding to custom measurements
• Custom measures (included are Cpu, Memory and Random, but an abstract class for custom monitor classes is included)
• AutoRun, ClickThrough, Opacity control
• Interface for custom images and custom monitors
• XML config file

Update: After adding a lot of new features, I've also written a blog entry about the highlights from HotBabe.NET's development, a "making of", if you will. You can find it here: Things I've learned from HotBabe.NET.

Enjoy!

After the horrible dissappointment with the third book from the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay, I even forgot there was a fourth book coming. Thanks to my friend Meaflux, who kindly remembered me to not miss on my education as a serial killer, I found out the fourth book, Dexter by Design, was out and, (thank you, Jeff!), without any of the fantasy monster crap that made Dexter in the Dark so bad.

Dexter by Design was a really nice book. It captured the dark humour only a geeky psychopath would have, caught in a world of emotional people, it added a lot of tension, it went cursively from start to end. The only problem I could possibly have with it is that it made Dexter look bad, easily surclasses by not one but three people on three separate ocasions.

The conclusion is that it was one of the best, if not THE best in the series. Not a lot of killing is done, though, not by Dexter in any case. And if you are wondering, it has no connection with the third season of the Dexter TV series, except for the ending :).

The last book (in story time) in the Deepgate Codex series, God of Clocks was a huge disappointment. It started nicely enough, preparing us for epic battles of wit and weirdness. Reading it, I was about to forget all about the slight drop in quality in the second book, Iron Angel, and was preparing for something grand. Then Mr. Campbell did what he never should have done: he altered the time space continuum. Before I knew it I was thinking at that old sci-fi movie where a ship boards another ship while in hyperspace and because of chaotical relativistic effects they all end up getting old, then young, then meeting themselves, fighting along their older grandsons, fighting the enemy with sticks and so on. For the love of God, I don't remember the name and I did Google it, but got only crap pages.

Anyway, Mr. Campbell, haven't you watched sci fi movies until now? Haven't you read a lot of SF books that make the same mistake, drowning in their own pool of possibilities. Time travel, unless it is the main subject, always messes up a story. And I was already confused with all the gods that were nothing more than angels with over inflated egos that anyone could capture and kill, the assassin that turned into mother-do-good, the boy demon who thought John Anchor was his father and that little child that is older and more powerful than him... so all this became very jumbled. No wonder a lot of the threads just remained hanging. What happened to Devon? Who the hell was the little girl? What did Carnival do? Everything just got negated by a race towards the beginning of time, when Ayen blocked the gates of Heaven. And then poof! A lot of fast scan scenes and the book ended. The fight never took place, or if it did, it was never described. And don't worry, if you preferred any other ending, there must be a broken timeline floating like a disolving icecube in a water glass that you can climb on and enjoy whatever reality you desire.

This book must be one of the most (if not THE most) WTF book I have ever read. In the end I was pacing, swearing and regretting my lost time. If the Deepgate Codex series would have been a video game, it would have never been released, with all the lack of documentation and obvious bugs.

My conclusion: what a nice beginning with Scar Night, but what a faltering fiasco up to and through God of Clocks. It did manage to make me think of a book where the main character would be Carnival, and all the rest would be just detail. I just loved her character and I feel so unfulfilled because it was never properly developed.

If you watched one of the episodes of Rescue Me you possibly have noticed that there is a cool song in the opening. It is Com'on Com'on by Von Bondies. Here is a live performance for Letterman's Show:

Iron Angel starts where Scar Night left us. Even if the scope of the story now expands tremendously, doing credit to the author's imagination, I didn't feel so good reading it as I did Scar Night. Frankly, I don't know exactly why. It may have to do with the several character groups in the plot, which we follow separately for quite some time and that I know are bound to encounter each other or influence each others destinies. When that fails to happen for a long time, I get nervous. Also, while the description of hell was very nice, I found it difficult to swallow.

That doesn't mean it is not still a brilliant story, just that it seemed to falter a little in the middle. Now, almost close to the end of God of Clocks, I can say that the quality will improve, at least as measured from my own level of pleasure, although it doesn't get close to Scar Night yet.

I love that Alan Campbell really worked on his characters, making them very different to the formulas we are used to see in the field. Heroes are cowardly and impotent, women are strong, gods are flawed and some characters are simply likeable even if they don't see reason and exist for the sole purpose of physical revenge.

I can say that God of Clocks is at least intriguing, although I have to ask myself if the author didn't bite more than he can chew with the new concepts involved. Anyway, that is another post, coming soon on a blog near you.

A while ago I was writing of the ending of the anime series, well before the story in the manga, leaving me wanting more. Well, a new series has been started that continues the plot. The English translated first episode of Inuyasha Kanketsu-hen has been released on the 4th of October 2009.