Strainu onLine

Versiunea română aici.

The Road
Map

Ploieşti is just 60 km away from Bucureşti on DN1 (E60). The road is excellent. Depending on how crowded the road is, the trip should take between 45 minutes and an hour. If you choose to go by train, there are regular services (about half an hour to an hour apart). The trip takes 35 minutes with Rapid.

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Food

There are many restaurants in the city, each one has it’s specific food, but none of them stands out with something special.

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Sightseeing

There was one museum in particular that I remembered well – the Clock Museum which I had visited in a field trip with my primary school. My guide (which happened to be one of my colleagues) made me discover The County Museum and Halele (the old market), as well as the North Station, a railway station and historic monument.

I apologize for the quality of the photos, the light was fading and I lack a tripod.

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Alternatives

If you don’t like Ploieşti or you finished visiting too early, you can try Vălenii de Munte or Târgovişte. They’re very close to each other and to Bucharest, so you don’t have to worry about transportation.

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Links

• http://www.ploiesti.ro/turism.php
• http://www.jurnaldevacanta.ro/ploiesti.php

The Romanian Wikipedia now has about 100.000 articles. In September 2007 (the last time the statistics were generated) it had about 16 million words in 88000 articles. That means, if you make some suppositions that you can find here (in Romanian), that it would take 11 written volumes in a library. It may not seem much, as Britannica takes 32 volumes, but it’s still not bad considering we’re about 60-100 people compared with the several thousands of the English version.

Also, you should not compare the number of volumes in the Romanian version with the ones in other languages, as I used a different method. If I had used the same (flawed, in my opinion) method as the others, the result would have been about 50% greater – 16 volumes.

QuickTemplate is a JavaScript script that can be used by Wikipedia users to add several new links under the edit window, so you can quickly add useful templates. The script allows the user to configure different parameters. You can show the following templates:

• image copyrights;
• maintenance templates;
• delete templates;
• disputes;
• messages.

Continue reading…

I was just browsing around Energreen a little earlier, when I noticed something strange: in the bottom left corner of the banner, there were some arrows. When I clicked on them, the ads changed. In all, there were 12 ads. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is this an experiment or it’s already mainstream? Any info would be welcomed.

Din respect pentru MYLRo.ro şi nu numai:

Chestia sta astfel: un membru al comunitatii Linux are nevoie de ajutorul vostru. Il stiu pe Abibula Aygun de pe vremea cand lucram la MyC. A scris destule articole Linux si am discutat destul de mult cu el ca sa ajung sa il cunosc ca om. Zilele trecute imi spunea ca se interneaza. Acum a venit si diagnosticul: Cardiomiopatie Hipertrofica Obstructiva de gradul II. Exista o solutie, iar aceasta consta in implantarea unui ICD (Internal Cardio Defibrilator) aproape de inima, dispozitiv care sa previna riscul fibrilatiilor. Mi-as dori sa fie gluma, spam sau tzeapa, dar din pacate treaba e serioasa – omul are nevoie de minim 7.500 Euro (cat costa cel mai ieftin implant) si maxim 11.000 de Euro (implant mediu care face si pace-ing)
A fost pus pe lista de asteptare, citez: „se hotareste ca pacientul sa beneficieze de un implant de cardiodefibrilator (pentru care a primit si indicatie) in scop profilactic pentru moartea subita datorita aritmiei maligne care poate sa apara in cazul bolii si va fi trecut pe lista de asteptare pentru implant ICD” dar cu totii stim cum sta treaba in Romania cu listele de asteptare in sistemul medical…
Aygun e din Constanta, e casatorit de un an si cateva luni si are o fetita de 4 luni si jumatate iar pe mine – personal – m-a ajutat de foarte multe ori. Si nu doar cand era vorba de Linux, cu toate ca nu ne-am intalnit face-to-face niciodata.
Oameni buni, e vorba de donatii. Oricine poate contribui cu orisicat, va rog dati un mail la Abibula.Aygun@euro.ro. Iar daca lucrati in Linux si aveti un site/forum/blog, va rog sa va consumati cinci minute din viata si sa dati paste la acest anunt.
Din acest moment, acceptam reclama pe MYLRo.org. Toti banii vor fi donati in contul lui Aygun.
Cu respect, Cypress

This semester I’m a TA in the Local Networks course at my faculty. The classes are held in a lab paid for by IXIA Romania. This last Friday I was at a friend’s lab when we had a surprise visit from Errol Ginsberg, the President and CEO of IXIA. He talked a little with the students and answered some of their questions. Here are some of the things that he talked about.

IXIA started in a small office in LA in may 1997. Mr. Ginsberg’s goal was to build a company with 30 employees, but now he has 800.

IXIA was lauched when the internet switching market had just started. The first testing system was built from nothing in just 1 year. In June 1998 Cisco became their first major client. In those days, ATM was still the big thing, and betting on the Ethernet like IXIA did was a big gamble. Fortunately, he was right, and the companies that were in ATM are not here anymore.

IXIA have an important office in Romania. They make software and test their devices and are trying to start some hardware design here, but for now the hardware is made in California. The other major development center is in India.

One of the TA’s asked him how old he was when he started and what do you need when starting a company. Mr. Ginsberg first said „I was 10 years younger than I am now” :D, and then admitted he was 41 in 1997. By that time, he had 17 years of experience and had already failed with another start-up because he hadn’t managed to get the right people in his company. He started IXIA because he saw a gap in the market. The first switch testers was the SmartBits line from Netcom Systems. There was an opportunity for another competitor in that space, because clients want competition. Netcom fixed the prices and were not responsive to the client’s problems.

He finished his speech by saying that nowadays it’s hard to start a networking company, but there is plenty of room for Internet companies, if you have the right financing and the right people to work for you.

About a week after Google, some folks from Cisco came to tell us about the jobs thez offered to graduates. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to tell you about it until now.

It was quite different from Google. They talked to us about their technology a little, then they went directly to the subject: they wanted us for their „extraordinary” Amsterdam school. 😀 They only have a selling department in Romania, so they needed us to become experts in selling Cisco crap stuff. To get there, you have to be one of the 3 people (out of 500 applicants) selected for a year’s training in Amsterdam.

To good news was that you get to pass all their certificates (including the very rare CCIE) for free in this period. The bad news was that you had to work almost non-stop. 🙂 One of the guys there became amusing when he tried to tell us that you have to work from 9am to 6pm and then to work again at home, but you’ll still find it extraordinary. I personally don’t think you have much time to think after work, most probably you’ll just crash in the bed until the next morning.

Anyway, if it sounds appealing to you, try uploading your CV here.

It’s not really my thing to write about social problems. But what’s happening in Bucharest from the fall is quickly turning into a disaster. Everybody knew that traffic would turn back to being an inferno and the short relief that summer had brought would not last. But nobody expected the metro to get as crowded as it is.

And it’s not just me, everybody is noticing that even on low times, the trains are full. Some say it’s because of the new trains, other say it’s because of the problems Metrorex had with Alstom, the company which repairs the trains. I haven’t noticed any significant slowdown in the traffic, but obviously the current time between 2 trains (8-12 minutes during non-peak periods) needs to be reduced.

To prove I’m not writing just to pass time, here are two pictures taken by a friend today at Piata Unirii. She said she felt trapped and who can blame her… In the second picture, you can see a passageway that used to be completely empty.

The City hall and the Ministry of Transportation have to realize that urgent investments are needed in the metro systemso it can cope with all the people that use it every day in the hope they will escape the craziness from the streets above.

UPDATE: Monday morning rush hour at the metro.

Pagerename.py is a small Python script that integrates in the pywikipedia framework. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the main tool used by robots on Wikipedia. I wrote the script a good while ago, when I needed to quickly rename several hundred pages on the Romanian Wikipedia. The script was designed to make the same modification on all the titles from a series of pages. You can remove parts of the title or add a new text at the beginning and/or and of the title.

In the mean time the guys at pywikipedia wrote movepages.py, a somewhat similar script. Nevertheless, in September I decided to propose my script for inclusion in pywikipedia. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it, however it was included in the project’s encyclopedia, at http://botwiki.sno.cc/wiki/Python:Pagerename.py. I’d love to hear your opinion about the script. Please leave any comments you might have below.

The most common way to make a server in Java is to create a thread pool and associate each request with a thread. Java5 offers a special class called Executor that can help you with the task. However, if you ever needed to make a server which can handle thousands of connections, you know this solution doesn’t scale very well. Most processors can’t handle more than a few hundreds of threads.
The solution is to use non-blocking sockets, a feature introduced in java 1.4 (the java.nio package). However, this has an important drawback: you can’t use the getInputStream(), getOutputStream() functions from the Socket class to serialize objects. The reason is simple: with non-blocking sockets, there is no way the system can guarantee that the whole object has been sent/received.
You can however „trick” the virtual machine by using explicit Streams. You have a simple example below. We try to send an object with the Message type.

• The sending end
  
Message outgoingMessage;
SocketChannel socketChannel;
//we open the channel and connect
ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ObjectOutputStream objectOutputStream = new ObjectOutputStream(byteArrayOutputStream);
objectOutputStream.writeObject(outgoingMessage);
objectOutputStream.flush();
socketChannel.write(ByteBuffer.wrap(byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray()));

• The receiving end
  
SocketChannel socketChannel;
ByteBuffer data;
//we open the channel and connect
socketChannel.read(data);
ByteArrayInputStream byteArrayInputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(data.array());
ObjectInputStream objectInputStream = new ObjectInputStream(byteArrayInputStream);
Message message = (Message)objectInputStream.readObject();


The code works if you receive the whole object or more than one object (the readObject() function reads exactly one object). However, I had some issues with reconstructing the object if it arrived in multiple pieces. Any suggestions on that part would be useful.
Here are some resources that I found useful: a discussion at forum.java.sun.com and another discution about the subject.