Strainu onLine

The Foundation announced yesterday that the new CTO is Danese Cooper. For those of you who were at eLiberatica in 2009, she was the one hosting the „lightning talks” session, which was a huge success. For the others, she is a FLOSS evangelist which worked for SUN, Intel and the less-known REvolution Computing.

What struck me in this choice is the change in profile from the previous CTO, Brion Vibber. Brion was the main code maintainer and submitter for Media Wiki for years. Without being totally sure, I think Danese is not very familiar with web programming, so she will likely be more of a supervisor and a coordinator than an active participant. This is somewhat normal and marks an evolution to a more organized, enterprise-like foundation.

This also means that most probably, the main code maintainer will continue to be Tim Starling, which hold the job since Brion left, last October. Good luck to both of them!

După mai bine de jumătate de an de probleme, Planeta comunităţii româneşti Wikimedia este în sfârşit disponibilă. Puteţi citi despre Wikipedia la http://ro.planet.wikimedia.org/ şi puteţi cere ca blogul vostru să fie adăugat punând un tichet aici la meta. Nu uitaţi să precizaţi adresa blogului şi a feedului ce conţine articoele despre Wikipedia.

After the Bucharest Stock Exchage Module for Finance::Quote, I made another module, to retrieve the values of the Romanian Mutual Funds. The data is extracted from the Kmarket website which prooved to be a useful resource.

Here is how you can add this package to your own system:

1. Install Perl. If you’re using Linux, you probably already have it. Write perl -v to find out the version you have. If you’re using Windows, ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl should do the trick.
2. Install Finance::Quote. GNUCash offers an automated program to do that.
   1. Make sure GNUCash is not running.
   2. In Linux, open a root shell and write update-finance-quote. In Windows, go to the start menu and you will find a shortcut to a BAT file called „Install Online Price Retreival”.
3. For now, the script is not yet included in Finance::Quote and must be installed separately.
   1. Download the provided archive and extract it along with the rest of the Perl scripts for Finance::Quote (you will see the download path during the installation). Make sure the Finance folder overwrites the current folder.
   2. In the Finance folder you will find 2 files named Quotes.pm and Quotes.pm.patch. You can apply the patch by using the command patch Quotes.pm Quotes.pm.patch On Windows, just open the Quotes.pm file in Notepad, search for a line that begins with @modules = and add ROFunds to the list of modules.
4. Start GNUCash and go the the Tools->Security Editor menu. You will see a window similar to the one on the left side of Fig. 1.
5. Click on the Add button. A new window, just like the one on the right side of Fig. 1 will appear. Let’s say that you want to get the stock price for BT Index (a fund from Banca Transilvania Asset Management). You add the following information in that window:
   1. Full Name: BT Index
      
   2. Symbol: BT Index (this is very important, as this is the search criteria – you need to put the full name of the fund, without diacritics, as there are no symbols)
   3. Type: Funds (or whatever you want)
   4. Check the Get Online Quotes checkbox. Three new options will be activated.

   5. 

      Fig.2: Automatic price retreival

      Choose Type of quote source: Unknown

   6. From the drop-down choose rofunds.
   7. Click OK twice and you’re ready to test it.
6. Go to the Tools->Price Editor menu. You will see the dialog in Fig. 2. Click the Get Quotes button and you should see a new price appearing. You can notice the source is „Finance::Quote” and the price is the correct one for that date. If you wish, you can check it on the K-market website.

Varianta în română o găsiţi aici.

On November the 12th, Novell and the openSUSE community will launch openSUSE 11.2. This calls, of course, for a celebration. Actually, there will be 2 celebrations in Bucharest:

• On November 12th, 20:00 EET, there will be a gathering at Trattoria di Bugsy, Bd. Iuliu Maniu 59, Bucharest – Map
• On November 14th, starting from 14:00 EET, we will have some presentations together with the guys from Fedora and Firefox in UPB, Room EG301 – Map

We’re waiting for as many of you as possible!

Dacă folosiţi Firefox, Flock sau Thunderbird, puteţi acum contribui la dezvoltarea dicţionarelor româneşti de la Firefox sau OpenOffice.org.

Pentru asta, trebuie să descărcaţi extensia Submit Word şi să adăugaţi cuvintele noi în dicţionarul personal (vezi imaginea de mai jos). Submit Word va încărca pe situl i18n.ro toate cuvintele pe care le adăugaţi în dicționarul dvs. personal. Dacă mai multe persoane vor sugera acelaşi cuvânt, el va fi adăugat în dicționarele româneşti.

Extensia e activată de optiunea "Adaugă în dicţionar"

All the Wikimedia wikis are now available for Amazon users. The team took the decision to push the data monthly in order to allow for scholars an inexpensive way to analyze the huge amount of data that Wikipedia has to offer. Is anyone from Romania interested? Neah, didn’t think so either…

You can find more details on the AWS Blog or the Wikimedia Techblog.

Versiunea română aici.

The road
Map

The quality of the roads are very different. Until Braşov the DN1 or DN1A are pretty good. So is the road from Braşov until Sfântu Gheorghe, although this portion has an unusually noisy overcoat. After that, there are plenty of potholes and the average speed is very low. The trip takes 4-5 hours by car.

By train, the trip takes 4.5-6 hours. There are a few direct trains from Bucharest, but most of the trains getting to Tuşnad leave from Braşov.

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Accommodation

There are plenty of private homes that offer accomodation, both in Băile Tuşnad and in neighboring villages. Most of them offer mediocre quality, but there are some good places to stay. There are also a few hotels left from the communist era for the most picky clients.

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What to see

There are a number of tourist trails from Tuşnad and the neighboring villages. You can go to the Sfânta Ana Lake by foot (3.5-4h) or to a sightseeing tower (15-30min.) from where you can see the whole Olt valley. There is also a cross you can visit, but the trail is pretty steep, so make sure you’re fit before going there.

In the city you have the Tuşnad sources, famous for their healing capacity and the Ciucaş Lake, which is little more than a poorly-maintained park with a pond in the middle.

(Pictures made by Cathy and used with permission)

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Alternatives

• Sighişoara is a little further, but better known than Tuşnad.
• In the same area, you can visit any number of hungarian towns or Târgu Mureş

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Links

• www.bailetusnad.ro
• Băile Tuşnad on Wikipedia (ro)

Azi pe la 4 sună telefonul:

– Alo?

– Bună ziua, sunt de la firma …, v-am găsit CVul pe internet, nu doriți să veniți la un interviu?

– Pentru ce poziție?

– Emmm… nu știu, mie mi s-a spus doar să vă sun.

– Când aflați, puteți reveni cu un telefon…

Ok, eu înțeleg că e criză și angajatorul e în poziție de forță, bla bla bla… dar chiar să nu știi de ce-l chemi pe om n-am mai pomenit. 🙂

Compurats Logo by Nicubunu & Strainu

I did it 😀 Last weekend I finished the team contest at the Tuşnad Half Marathon. CompuRats (that is, Cati, Claudia and me) finished the race in 2:33:05. That’s not great, but at least we were not the last team and we did not cheat like some other teams 😛

To get across the finish line is a great feeling, but what really made all the effort worth it were the encouragements and the amazed looks of the people in cars. 🙂 I especially liked one guy who got ot of the back of a car and shouted as hard as he could: „Come on, you’re first!!!” No idea if he was mocking me or not, but I loved it. 😀

If I’ll still be able to run, the next challenge will be the Sfântu Gheorghe Half Marathon.

A while ago I submitted a patch to the New User Message extension of MediaWiki. The code was submitted in r51297, so I guess you could say I’m now a MediaWiki Contributor 😛

Hopefully, pretty soon this extension will be activated on the Romanian Wikipedia.