I am not working with barcodes or anything, but I think this new technology is kind of cool. Something that acts like a barcode, encodes more information and it is several times smaller. More than that, it can be read from multiple angles and from a distance of up to 20 meters!

I can imagine multiple applications, but what I specifically think could be great is augmented reality. It would start with markers that would tag objects from computer detection, but then it would probably transform into a communication system, if the codes are dynamic. And I am not talking about replacing IR or bluetooth here, but couldn't one imagine a programmable bokode that would change the tag of an object? Think picture frames. Or TV images. Something that would tag a dynamic object like a video screen.

A while ago I wrote a little post about pandemics. I was saying then how little we know about them and how little we are taught about disease outbreaks as opposed to, say, war. This post, however, it about the reverse of the coin: mediatization of pandemic fears.

I was watching the news and there was this news about a swine flu pandemic in Mexico. Thousands were infected, more than 100 people dead and the disease had already spread in the entire world and it was impossible to contain. Gee, serious trouble, yes? I had to stay informed and safe. (see the twisted order on which my brain works?)

So I went directly to the World Health Organization site and subscribed to their disease outbreak RSS feed. And what do I read? 27 cases of infections and 9 dead. Come again? They said 150 dead on the news. The news can't possibly lie! It must be either a) a US site where they only list US citizens b) a machination so that people don't panic when the situation is so obviously blown. [... a week passed ...] I watch the news and what do I see? The reported death toll from the swine influenza strain has dropped to about 15 people. False alarm, people, the rest of those 150 people actually died of other unrelated stuff. So the WHO site was right after all, maybe it having to do with the fact that they work with data, not viewer rates. Hmm.

The moral of the story? My decision to stop watching TV is a good one. Get the real genuine source of information and "feed" from it. I am now subscribed to the new disease outbreaks feed and the earthquake feed and I feel quite content in that particular regard.

That doesn't mean the "Swine" flu is something to be taken lightly. As of today, there are almost 1000 cases of infection world wide and, even if the flu development has reached a descendant curve, this might change. The 1918 epidemic actually had four outbreaks, two consecutive years, in the spring and autumn.

On a more personal note, my wife has (and probably myself, too) something called toxoplasmosis, a disease that you take from a cat. I only heard about it two times, one from a colleague and one from Trainspotting. It a strange disease, one that is mostly asymptomatic, doesn't have a real cure, causes behavioral changes in mice and has been linked to a certain type of schizophrenia. Wikiing it, I got that there are about 30% to 65% of the world population that have it and that the drug used to treat it is actually a malaria drug. Is toxoplasmosis the malaria of the developed world? A lot of us have it, but we bear with it?

Stuff like that shows how fragile is both our understanding of as well as our defense from the microscopic world. Could it be that, with all the medical advances from the last century, we are still in the Dark Ages?

I went to this presentation of a new Microsoft concept called Windows Azure. Well, it is not so much as a new concept, more like them entering the distributed computing competition. Like Google, IBM and - most notably - Amazon before it, Microsoft is using large computer centers to provide storage and computing as services. So, instead of having to worry about buying a zillion computers for your web farm, manage the failed components, the backups, etc. you just rent the storage and computing and create an application using the Windows Azure SDK.

As explained to me, it makes sense to use a large quantity of computers, especially structured for this cloud task, having centralized cooling, automated update, backup and recovery management, etc, rather than buying your own components. More than that. since the computers run the tasks of all customers, there is a more efficient use of CPU time and storage/memory use.

You may pay some extra money for the service, but it will closely follow the curve of your needs, rather than the ragged staircase that is usually a self managed system. You see, you would have to buy all the hardware resources for the maximum amount of use you expect from your application. Instead, with Azure, you just rent what you need and, more importantly, you can unrent when the usage goes down a bit. What you need to understand is that Azure is not a hosting service, nor a web farm proxy. It is what they call cloud computing, the separation of software from hardware.

Ok, ok, what does one install and how does one code against Azure? There are some SDKs. Included is a mock host for one machine and all the tools needed to build an application that can use the Azure model.

What is the Azure model? You have your resources split into storage and computing workers. You cannot access the storage directly and you have no visual interface for the computing workers. All the interaction between them or with you is done via REST requests, http in other words. You don't connect to SQL Servers, you use SQL Services, and so on and so on.



Moving a normal application to Azure may prove difficult, but I guess they will work something out. As with any new technology, people will find novell problems and the solutions for them.

I am myself unsure of what is the minimum size of an application where it becomes more effective to use Azure rather than your own servers, but I have to say that I like at least the model of software development. One can think of the SDK model (again, using only REST requests to communicate with the Azure host) as applicable to any service that would implement the Azure protocols. I can imagine building an application that would take a number of computers in one's home, office, datacenter, etc and transforming them into an Azure host clone. It wouldn't be the same, but assuming that many of your applications are working on Azure or something similar, maybe even a bit of the operating system, why not, then one can finally use all those computers gathering dust while sitting with 5% CPU usage or not even turned on to do real work. I certainly look forward to that! Or, that would be really cool, a peer to peer cloud computing network, free to use by anyone entering the cloud.

A new (and old) buzzword: to reinvent. It is always a good thing to reinvent yourself, they say, with the effect of relieving boredom and living a "new" life. You may discard bad or useless things in favor of good things. It is also good to reinvent something somebody else did, like a movie. You take the idea, you remove the bad things, you add good things. But, as in the case of the benevolent tyrant, the definition of good and bad is always fuzzy.

Was it good to reinvent BattleStar Galactica? I say YES! It was (and still is, despite screenwriters efforts) the best sci-fi series out there. Of course, that is my opinion. Was it good to reinvent Terminator, incarnated into a teenage girl looking machine? Ahem. But I still watch it. Was it good to reinvent Superman as a troubled teenager? Puh-lease! Come... on! Nah-uh! (See, I address the younger demographic here).

Because, you see, the people that decide what is good and bad in movies are actually the money people. They look at superficial statistics that only show... money! They make abhorent remakes of decent films (like Indiana Jones 4 - The Rape of Indiana) or they turn every hero into man/woman/teenager/animated-character/doll versions that bring nothing new.

In the case of Star Trek, they made the first low budget series than achieved cult level regardless of bad production values and some ridiculous scripts, then they made a sequel (at that time reinvention was not invented yet) where Patrick Stewart redefined the space captain as a cerebral science oriented man, but with lots of guts, then they started the old routine: make the captain black, make him a woman, replace the ship with a station, then with another ship, but in some other place, etc. They even made a prequel, which, for almost a full season, was decent in both interpretation and scenarios. What was missing, of course, was a teenage Star Trek captain. Well, no more!

"Star Trek", the 2009 movie in the making (and no doubt, with a series looming if money are made), features a young Kirk and (what a fallacy) a young Spock! The director is none other than my least favourite person in the world: J.J.Abrams, the maker of such abismal stupidities (but well received by the general audience) like Alias, Lost and Fringe. The writers are Abramses old team, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the brilliant creators of such idiocies like Alias, Fringe and Xena/Hercules!

I am trying to keep an open mind here, but I would venture to guess that the new Star Trek will have big booming sounds whenever something strange happends, will be filled with inexplicable things that will never be explained, except maybe in the movie (but I doubt it, they have to plant the hook for a series) and will have people calling the others by name obsessively, regardless if the need for it arises. So, it may be cool, but I expect to be baktag!

Oh, I know you probably have heard of Augmented Reality, but you have never experienced it in a way that is trully easy to use and that really feels... real. Here is a small demo from Total Immersion, a company that uses image recognition software to add computer generated interactive objects to real time videos.

As far as I understand it, they plot some points on the image, they store its contents and the software can recognize it even skewed or warped or even partially visible. In the video you will see how this applies to a classic green-screen-like board that the demonstrator can actually move around, then how it applies to an image on a t-shirt and then, finally, an interaction between computer generated and real objects.

And still, pigs are not yet flying! Here is the news article:
history.forward()

Bottom line: IIS is being optimized for PHP, PHP is being optimized for Sql Server and, by becoming a sponsor of Apache, Microsoft probably gets a say in their development.

What a typical corporate move that is. But what would be the effect of such a move only time will tell. Will ASP.Net start working habitually on Apache?

It was great! Not only the setting was nice (the four star Smart hotel is exactly what I had expected a hotel should be, except the restaurant, maybe), but the weather was cool, the presentation helpful, the tutor (Aurelian Popa) was above expectations and the people pleasant. Not to mention a week away from boring stuff. ;) I feel it would be pointless to detail what we did there, since it was either my own personal life or the actual workshop (which involves work), so I will give you some impressions of the technology and point you towards the resources that would allow you to go through the same learning process.

The whole thing was about WPF and SilverLight and I can tell you two conclusions right now:
WPF/XAML/SilverLight are a great technology and I expect a lot of .Net applications to migrate towards it in the next 6 to 12 months.
The complexity of this technology is likely to put a lot of people off, therefore the tools like Expression Blend and the Visul Studio interface become completely indispensable and must evolve to have great ease of use and become more intuitive.

The entire presentation model allows one to use any graphical transformation available, including 3D, on any part of the interface. The controls are now without appearance. They come with a default appearance that can be totally replaced with your own. A weird example is to use a 3D cube with video running on each side as a button. Of course, the whole thing is still work in progress and some stuff is yet difficult to do. Besides, you know Microsoft: a lot of complicated things are easy to do, while some of the simplest are next to impossible.

You can taste the Microsoft confidence on this by watching them release an entire design oriented suite (Expression) and working on making Silverlight available on all platforms and browsers. Just the fact that Silverlight can access directly the browser DOM is enough to make me remove all those patchy javascript scripts and replace them with nice Silverlight C# code.

Enough of this. Go learn for yourself!

Tools:
Silverlight is at version 2 beta 2. That is painfully obvious when new bugs are introduced and beta 1 applications break. The Expression Blend tool is at version 2.5 June 2008 CTP and it has also a long walk ahead towards becoming useful. Visual Studio 2008 performs rather well when faced with XAML and WPF stuff, but the Resharper 4.0 addon helps it out a lot. You need the Visual Studio 2008 Silverlight Tools, too. After this compulsory tool kit you could also look at Snoop, Blender and Expression Deep Zoom Composer.

Learning material:
Simplest thing to do is to go to Silverlight Hands-on Labs or download the WPF Hand-on labs and download them all and run through the documentation script that is included with each one. There are video tutorials about how to use the tools, too. Here is one for Blend. Of course, all blogs and materials available online at the search of a Google are helpful, as well.

Community:
As any community, it depends on your desired locality and interests. You can look for local .Net / WPF groups or browse for blogs half way around the globe from you. From my limited googling during the workshop I can see that there are people talking about their issues with WPF and SL, but not nearly enough: the technology still needs to mature. I haven't really searched for it, but I've stumbled upon this site: WindowsClient.NET that seems to centralize WPF, Windows Forms and a bit of Silverlight information.

I am not usually one to talk politics, especially since I don't really think there are essential differences between people participating in this game. Yes, I do see it as a game, with rules that you need to follow to get the prize. But this year's mayor election proved that some of the rules are more subtle than just spending the biggest amount of money in promotional ads and having the biggest party support you. Well, pretending to be "one of the people" seems to always help, though. :)

What happened? Internal struggles within the main opposition party led to them choosing their candidate for the city hall not the man with the most popular votes (as resulting from opinion poles), but the man with the most connections in the party. Therefore the other guy decided to candidate independently. He spent almost nothing on campaign ads, while the leading party candidate spent about 600000 euros just for the first part of the elections and God knows how much for the final part.

Conclusion? Sorin Oprescu, the independent candidate, has won the elections. The leading party candidate lost, with all his ad money, while no one even noticed the candidate from the oposition party. Apparently, a great victory for the people in Bucharest. I have no idea if the guy will be any good as a mayor, and I think that is the major flaw in Romanian elections, but the arrogant belief that party support and lots of money can just land you in a popular position has failed once more in Bucharest today.

But my theory is that Oprescu didn't win just by charisma or by the total lack of charisma of his opponent, Blaga, but from the ugly and cheap attacks against him and other candidates from the main party. With slogans like "Let's get rid of the garbage in sector 5, dump Vanghelie" and images of a bulldog and a snake with glasses (Blaga looks like a big ugly dog, while Oprescu wears glasses) they pushed people away. I guess that the fact that the snake is a symbol of wisdom in many cultures past them by completely.

Anyway, my conclusion is that arrogance is the worst thing a Romanian politician can do right now. They can be stupid, corrupt, pathetic, but NOT arrogant. It is traditional in Romania to dream to become powerful, rich, above all others, and it is even more traditional, since most people never do get rich or famous, to totally despise and hate the people that do or behave like they do. Today was a lesson in humility for the political class.

No, it's not one of the The World Sucks rants, it's actually very serious. I was terribly annoyed that after installing Windows XP SP3 my Internet Explorer 7 browser would (sometimes) freeze when closing tabs. I could replicate the bug easily enough by folowwing these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Go to https://siderite.dev
3. Scrollwheel click on Sign in, thus opening it in another tab
4. Wait until the title of the second tab changes to Redirecting (because I have the cookie from a previous login)
5. Press F5 (Refresh) in the first tab
6. Click on the second tab and close it while the first tab is refreshing

At this time Internet Explorer would freeze with no error message. Waiting for a few seconds I could access the context menu on the taskbar button and choose Close or click on the X Close button, but everything inside the Internet Explorer window would be inactive. If I would switch tasks back and forth, the IE window would appear completely blank inside.

Now, whenever you look for the solution for this you get three answers:

• Check the Warn me when closing multiple tabs option in the Internet Explorer tabs settings.
• Run IExplore.exe with the -extoff command line parameter which will disable all add-ons and this will tell you if the addons are causing this
• Check for spyware/malware

I did all this and nothing changed! I've reinstalled all addons. I've reinstalled IE7. I've switched to IE8 beta! Nothing worked. Then I proceeded in uninstalling all addons, see what happends. Finally, it wouldn't cause any issues. It was just after I've uninstalled Google Toolbar! I suspect the cause for the bug is coming from the popup blocker which interprets tabs as popups and tries to close them. Then there is the setting in GT that is trying to preserve any software from modifying its settings. Maybe that is why -extoff doesn't affect it!

Just to be sure I installed it again and tested the bug and I could replicate it. Something in Windows XP Service Pack 3 messes Google Toolbar up!

Bottom line: uninstall Google Toolbar until I can find out which part of it actually causes the bug.

As I was writing in the previous post, because of that law suit they are in, Google is starting to take measures to protect the copyright of videos on YouTube. The result is that all the blogs and sites that embedded video content that is supposed to be copyrighted now have beautiful flash players with a play button in them, but then the nasty surprise of seeing "video not available" when pressing play. At least display the damn message from the beginning instead of forcing me to play every video on my blog to see if there are still available!

But I did that anyway, for music videos for now, and switched to (currently) unaffected French video content site DailyMotion. Of course, lots of YouTube clones are on the net and even YouTube leecher sites. I mean sites showing a wonderful error when trying to play videos that now are removed from YouTube.

So, please folks, if you find some post with missing videos or pictures or anything wrong, really, please comment on it and I will fix it. Thank you and damn all lawyers to hell!

I really like Korn, they are heavy, melodic and the lead singer is pretty unique. I haven't posted anything by them yet because I was a teenager when I was listening to them. I remembered loving the video for Falling Away from Me and wanted to share it with my bloggies :).

Petru Jucovschi was nice enough to invite me to a software development training organised by Microsoft and partly presented by him. The first of the two days of training was about the theory behind software development practices like agile development and CMMI, part presented by Victor Mihail from Trilex. The second was about the Team System Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition integrating for a better software development practice.

Well, I am working on remembering everything that was said and done and I will make some longer posts that will describe at length what was presented.
As a short summary, I was familiar with a lot of the concepts from the first part, since I've done a little research into agile development in order to pass it on to my managers. The theory and principles behind Agile were detailed, then the major Agile methodologies were described, including eXtreme Programming, Scrum and (very shortly) MSF. Also concepts of Test Driven Development.
The second part was also partly known to me as I have seen another similar presentation at the previous RONUA meeting, but this time it lasted for 8 hours, so I had the opportunity to ask questions and see things done step by step. Basically, TFS is the tool that combines project management, business analysis, architecture, development, debugging and testing into a single useful bunch. The issue tracking is linked to reporting, integrated with Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel and concepts like Continuous Integration are directly available along a better source control solution than Visual Source Safe. Bottom line, I can barely wait to start work in a rational, managed way.

Stay tuned for the details.

The level of satisfaction one gets from anything is inversely proportional with the level of expectation they have. I knew that in the RONUA meeting on the 9th there will be only two presentations, with subjects I can't use right now and with speakers I didn't exactly feel compelled to listen to. So, of course, I liked it!

But there was something more. Both speakers seemed more mature, more anchored on the subject than usual. It's not that Aurelian Popa did not seem overly arrogant or that the ever helpful Petru Jucovschi didn't have a lot more information than was humanly possible to present in the alloted time and resources, but their performance seemed way better than I was used to.

The subjects were pretty clear: WPF and VS TFS. If you are scared by acronyms you probably shouldn't be reading this :), but I did provide tooltips for them, so move the mouse over them.

The first presentation showed an ObservableCollection (new stuff from .Net 3.0 which allows notification on changing elements) containing SolarSystemItems, objects that encapsulated an image, a diameter, a name, an orbit and a temperature. It started from a simple listbox then, by changing only the presentation (Style) and the way data is presented (DataTemplate) in the XAML file, it gradually changed to a picture+details listbox, a combobox also with picture and everything, then with a details box next to it showing the current selected object, with filtering, sorting, grouping, etc. The grand finale was making the same listbox look like a solar system image, with selectable planets and the details on tooltip, with orbits and everything. The demo can be downloaded and seen at Beatriz Costa's blog.

The second presentation I was more interested in, since our company plans to use Visual Studio TFS to manage our work. Since that would mean a shift from the current Excel+Email+Messenger, I was glad to learn that the TFS learning curve is steep and usage can also start from source control only, moving ever so slightly towards a comprehensive development strategy, with testing, reporting, configurable XML files that describe any process (with out of the box or downloadable versions for MSF, Scrum, XP, CMMI) , etc.

I was surprised to see that not only the session was free, but we also received some gifts from Microsoft for attending. That included the MSDN subscription that I won, the WPF book that my colleague won, a kit with all kinds of goodies that I can't remember won by our boss and 40% discount for some Microsoft products for each. We cleaned house! No free food though :)

My conclusion was that the RONUA meetings are (as far as I have seen) the most techie, interesting and to the point Microsoft events. The MSDN briefings are nice, too, with more budget allocated to them and so on and so on, but they will never be able to replicate the sort of "gang of IT people" feel of the RONUA's meetings. And with people that are ever more implicated and interested in presenting, it can only get better.

Reading the BBC News today I've stumbled upon a fascinating article called "Great tits cope well with warming". Let me quote a little so you can understand what it is about: The research uses a long record of great tits in a breeding site at Wytham Woods near Oxford, where observations began in 1947. "We think it’s the longest running population study of wild animals anywhere in the world where animals are marked (ringed),"

So, warming doesn't negatively affect great tits! You can warm them yourselves or get someone else to do it. Isn't that wonderful? =))

Update 9 Sep 2009: Great tits found hunting bats for food

Coma is one of my favourite bands if not THE favourite. They are Romanians, I know them, they're cool guys. Recently they organised an unpluggish concert called Coma Light. This is one of the songs there, although I do encourage you to look at them all (YouTube links gracefully provided by Imig/Smallex under the video). Great job, guys! Most of the songs you played deserve an album of their own. Here is the video for Culori, high quality from MetalHead TV. from YouTube.



Links to all the songs in the concert:
Stai
Mai presus de cuvinte
Bizz
Culori
In mine in soapta
Hectic
Un loc sa ajung
Daddy
Morphine
Coboara-ma-n rai
Cine iubeste si lasa
Canta-mi povestea