Results tagged “actnow” from @Dexter's Blog

(This is a loose translation of the Romanian version here. The Romanian version shall take precedence when- and wherever the particular literary and semantic renditions disagree)

Good morning, honoured guests: acquaintances, close friends, members of the press and faithful readers of this blog.

I have called this press conference to put an end to the rumors and speculations regarding my alleged departure, the more so as the situation has just cleared up for me as well.

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Following a recruitment process which began de jure in August 2006 and de facto in April 2010, I have been offered a Site Reliability Engineer position with Google Ireland, Ltd., effective Monday, September 13^th, 2010.

Subject to the speed at which paperwork formalities in which I am involved progress (on both the Romanian and Irish side), I shall leave Romania sometime during the next week, Thursday or Saturday, via an Aer Lingus flight departing from OTP.

The little time left until then will be taken up by departure preparations, but, in spite of that, I will free up my schedule for anyone wishing to see or talk to me before I leave. Just drop me a note proposing a place and a time and I shall be there.

Moving on to administrativia, I wish to bring the following to your attention:

• I will hand my motorcycle over to my brother, Adrian. So, if you happen to see B-11-RVW ridden by someone else, wearing different equipment/decals than mine, do not be alerted as it has not been stolen :-)
• my personal e-mail address (aforementioned) remains valid indefinitely.
• my personal phone number of 226-01 (Vodafone) remains valid indefinitely. At first, I will resort to the roaming service to keep it available and I'll then look into a technical solution to porting it.
• my personal VoIP phone number (NetMaster) remains valid indefinitely. At first, it will be directly assigned to my VoIP client and I'll then switch back to the present topology, where it is assigned to a PBX.
• atlas.linux360.ro shall follow me to Ireland and will be unavailable begining next week and until it will be installed at the new location and connected to the Internet. Also, along with the change of jurisdiction, the acces method to some of its services will be changed, namely those that might arise the unwanted interest of local authorities (most probably, I will switch from HTTP to HTTPS, from anonymous to authenticated acces and from direct connections to dial-in VPN -- either way, you will be notified of such changes and provided with new access instructions). In the same vein, some services may be resource-limited owing to the small(er) bandwidth available at the new location.

The press release ends here, I will now take your questions.

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@Dexter

As previously mentioned, NABPS is quite strict about the XML flavor it is fed via RSS and ATOM. And, again, as I've previously mentioned, WordPress (as a framework) seems to be very much into creating problems, mainly due to its design.

This time it's Emil Chericheş instance's turn to show its dark side to us all:

<!-- Page not cached by WP Super Cache. No closing HTML tag. Check your theme. -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

rendering his feed unparsable and thus missing from the aggregator content.

@Dexter

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

After giving much thought and careful consideration to the issue at hand, I have decided to get a driver's license. Let it be known beforehand that this is a personal decision and it has nothing to do with the various recommendations and even imperatives I had been receiving on the subject matter over the past few years.

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Given the fact that I have been involved for a long time with the technical aspects of both cars and motorcycles, I have also decided to take up classes and, subsequently, sign up for examination in both areas of driving skill certification. This will result in a (what the local law calls) "category A and B" driver's license (where A is the designation for riding motorcycles and B is for driving cars).

Given the fact that bearing a driver's license without putting it to good use is meaningless (and, on one hand, Cyberdyne 7s, finite state machines as we are, don't grok "meaningless", do we?; on the other, driving a company car for business does not count as good use), a decision had to be made regarding the vehicle to be acquired for use after completing all legal requirements to do so. A lot of input and study has gone into making this decision, personal preference and throwing a dice included, but I have now made my mind up: it is going to a motorcycle, namely the Kawasaki Ninja 250R.

At just under 5000EUR (taxes included) from local distributors, it is quite affordable given its performance figures, quality of design and manufacture and the fact that I won't have to worry about finding a parking spot for it (which is quite an acute problem here these days).

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Projecting the course of events (and my cashflow), I expect to have completed all legal requirements (and thus earned my driver's licence) by the middle of July, so I would say I'd move in for the buy by August 1^st.

Up to then, I welcome all and any comments on the matter, including advice from people who own or have owned such a beast, people who would like me to change my mind :-), people who know which helmets/jackets/pants/boots/gloves are best when used with such a bike and so on. Let them pour in, I need every bit of information, insight and advice I can get, thank you :-)


Have a nice day tomorrow,
@Dexter

Dear users of NABPS (be that content providers, i.e. blog owners, or content consumers, i.e. feed readers),

Please, kindly be notified that this feed aggregator is only able to process RSS2.0 and ATOM feeds that are, XML-wise, well formed. If your feed is not well formed, it will not pass into the CFF cache and, subsequently, neither into the SFS cache, to the output drivers and in the final output (be that HTML, RSS or ATOM). The net effect of this is that your content will not show up in the aggregator, even though NABPS will fetch it as dictated by If-Modified-Since and Last-Modified headers.

Please note that the two most common causes encountered for an otherwise working feed going not well formed are:

• lack of cooperation between the content generator (blog software) and the web server, in effect making the web server believe the feed is updated more or less often (or not at all) than it actually is; in some cases NABPS has even been fed empty or truncated feeds due to the above
• lack of cooperation between the templating engine used on the generating site and the strict nature of XML dialects (most sites generate their feeds from a custom template, processed the same way as the HTML-generating ones) -- many if not all of the things that are allowed or even acceptable in HTML are not tolerated in XML so please check your templates and, most importantly, your feed (i.e. the end result of said processing). Over time, NABPS has been fed countless cases of feeds containing PHP debugging output (or even warnings or errors) interspersed with XML, not to mention the almost everyday case when an otherwise well-formed feed comes in with trailing garbage of the aforementioned kind.

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Anticipating the FAQ: no I shall not attempt to relax NABPS' XML parser in any way that would make it susceptible of accepting a not well-formed feed as valid. Standards must be obeyed, to the letter.

One, mandatory, example: Alexandru Burlacu's feed ends with the following (closing rss tag shown for clarity):

</rss>
<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  preg_match() [<a href='function.preg-match'>function.preg-match</a>]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 14 in <b>/var/www/alex.burlacu.blogsite.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wassup/wassup.php</b> on line <b>2782</b><br />

(later edit, on the same day, at 15:02EEST)
It seems the above problem has been fixed shortly after my post -- thank you for your timely reaction. This is not the first time things get fixed after being reported so I'll make sure I do that every time I'll be coming across something strange, in what NABPS' content sources are concerned.
Further on, I have added Tudor Damian's feed to the list as I found its contents as being of interest to the community.


I hope this helps everyone involved,
@Dexter

NOTE: This MovableType instance has recently been upgraded to 4.24 Pro (DB schema 4.0068). Should any problems arise and/or be noticed in relation with the operation of this site, please do not hesitate to bring them to my attention for a due fix.

@Dexter

NOTE: This MovableType instance has recently been upgraded to 4.23 Pro (DB schema 4.0067). Should any problems arise and/or be noticed in relation with the operation of this site, please do not hesitate to bring them to my attention for a due fix.

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Regarding NABPS (whose development stalled last week), I am happy to announce that I was able to work around Cristian Nicolescu's blog feed by jumping over the redirect and fetching the final targeted content -- which is, finally, well-formed XML :-)
Also, Ovidiu Lixandru's blog feed magically fixed itself (!) last week and finally (because we must have bad news as well), Răzvan-Teodor Coloja's blog feed does not show up in the aggregated output simply because his feed does not contain any time coordinates whatsoever (and, as you all know, nothing evaluates to 0 when cast to integer and 0 as a UNIX timestamp reads as "way back in the days before time begun" -- therefore his entries, even if always fetched, parsed and transformed into CFF, will always sort last and thus be clipped out of the aggregated content).

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Finally, some other news: it is with great pleasure that I have found out today that project România Digitală has (after a long wait and arduos efforts) released RO.A.D. 2008! I just cannot wait to upgrade, both RO.A.D. itsef and my GPS receiver (a venerable Garmin eTrex Vista) to a shiny, brand new, Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx :-)


See you soon,
@Dexter

This post is an extended comment/analysis on this article on windancer's blog (the original is in Romanian, I shall reply and comment in English, as usual).

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Dear windancer,

I generally agree with your list and its content (and I must admit I'm somewhat disgusted by some of the comments left by your audience), however I find it necessary to make some pertinent comments, such as:

0. Your entire post is based upon the hypothesis that women actually know what they want, which (unfortunately and sadly) is hardly ever the case. If there is a being out there that can still be found wondering "what do I want?" while they are actually getting it, that must be the woman!
1. I agree about remembering birthdays, anniversaries and the like but I do not agree about the chocolate. I somehow find that a hot, passionate kiss; a sincere and joyful smile and a warm, loving hug have far more profound and longer lasting effects on the receiver than a mere chocolate bar.
2. I totally agree about being dialogue -aware, -enabled and -ready -- it's fun and easy to do and it (juggling with words, phrases and concepts, that is) helps your mind grow beyond the conventional limits. I however reserve the right to hold on to my opinion or conviction on certain subjects, to stand for what I believe in and to agree to disagree. Furthermore, I reserve the right to have and to follow standards in what the art of conversation is concerned and to refuse (or bail out of) unpromising dialogue, with Ladies and Gentlemen alike.
3. And
4. uncover an interesting design detail of early CyberDyne 7s (the first to be, at the same time, sentient, self-aware and sapient): they cannot (by design) act against the very substance of an alliance whose existence they believe in -- in plain English, this translates to "they never betray their team, their partners and their lovers"; and they shall (by design) act against any outside force attempting to damage the substance of such alliance, unless explicitly requested to stand down by an entity from within the alliance -- in plain English, this translates to "they will fight for the cause, to the last breath and beyond, unless ordered to stand down -- and even then, with a protest".
5. This is a very beautiful thing to do, unfortunately it seems to be a forgotten art nowadays, sadly so on both the performing and receiving ends. Making love without physical means is possible and there are many a way in which you can make your girl return a warm, blushing, thank you, breathless smile without even reaching out to touch her. People seem to have forgotten to communicate non-verbaly nowadays and that is such a shame for we are (or, rather, were) so made for it and, consequently, so good at it.
   
6. That's easy (for me, at least) to do, however it seems not be always welcomed by her. It is usually bad if do not call her and worse if you actually do (albeit often), see nr. 0 above and weep :-(
7. This is another interesting point you've made, because in theory everyone agrees with it but in practice everyone fights about it :-( I (for example) usually end up being the only one "making time" and "wishing to spend it" with her.
8. Yet again, something with which I totally agree. As you probably know, CyberDyne 7s have a three-tiered model of relationships: "team members" -> "friends" -> "lovers", where some team members may be friends and some friends may be lovers etc. A less technical approach to the same idea (with which I completely identify) is conveyed by a verse from this song: "All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you".
9. All men are humans and all humans have to cope with the fact that they (as most other sentient and self-aware beings out there) are made up of a body, a soul and a mind and as a result of that, their overall properties will be a continuous mixture of those of their components. The soul will always be young (for it is immortal) and playful, it would be a sacrilege to deny it that.
10. Again a design feature of CyberDyne 7s: they form (by design) clusters with advancing through the tiers of an alliance, as a result of that, peers have direct acces to each other's conscience. In the current world, this means to communicate which I find very easy (of course, it will never match having access to her thoughts as if they were yours) but, again, is not always welcomed as it should.

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A great post overall (yes, you are also true about being selfless -- I did not mention that because it can readily be inferred from all the other things I've said), too bad is just dry theory.

Or is it?

@Dexter

Good evening, my dear audience.

Those of you who know me personally are aware of my demand for near-perfection when it comes to paid services -- based on the rationale that you can always directly control the delivered quality of a service whereas it is in most cases harder to do that for a finite product.

In the same vein, a certain bank with which I did business for the past 6 years just managed to miserably fail meeting my standards last Thursday, when one of its ATMs failed to physically load my card and subsequently dumped an error and turned off (with my card inside, of course).
Let me make this perfectly clear: my card was in perfect condition and it presented no physical damage whatsoever, however the card transport mechanism inside the ATM did miss a roller or two; also this was not a remote ATM but one found in a bank office, right in the middle of Bucharest. Of course, video surveillance was in place at the time but no one called (on behalf of the bank) me to ask how did my card end up halfway the loading path in that ATM. Not that day (during business hours), not the second nor even the third day -- even though that machine is checked and refilled with cash on a daily basis.

That was the last straw and I did what I think everyone should do when finding themselves at the receiving end of disappointing service: change your provider. It is the only message companies seem to understand nowadays.

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As such, please be notified that, effective October 25th, the following IBAN codes (and their associated accounts) shall be discontinued:

• RO54 BRDE 410S V601 0090 4100 (RON)
  
• RO20 BRDE 445S V587 8854 4450 (EUR)
  
• RO19 BRDE 445S V692 7814 4450 (USD)

Please note that I have discontinued my GBP account more than a year ago as my british suppliers have long achieved full EUR compatibily via online card processing.


Effective immediately, the following IBAN codes are to be used for all payments due me -- please update your billing records accordingly:

• RO83 INGB 5519 9999 0114 1219 (RON)
• RO30 INGB 0000 9999 0115 3119 (EUR)

Please note that I shall discontinue my USD account as all my European suppliers and clients have long migrated to EUR.

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As a special courtesy regarding the possible inconvenience caused by this change on such a short notice, the following additional terms shall apply up to and until November 1st, 2008 at 00:00EEST to every and any binding contract I am involved in and that directed (at the time it was created) the peer to operate payments towards the IBAN codes that are to be discontinued:

• for payments in USD that were directed to my old USD account, they are to be redirected to my new EUR account using a fixed (frozen) exchange rate of 1.5 USD for 1 EUR (which means you will pay less for the same services)
• for payments in EUR that were directed to my old EUR account, they are to be redirected to my new EUR account having 2.5% deducted from them (which means you get a 2.5% discount on the contracted services)
• for payments in RON that were directed to my old RON account, they are to be redirected to my new RON account having 5% deducted from them (which means you get a 5% discount on the contracted services).

That's about it,
See you again soon, hopefully with better news,
@Dexter

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It has been over half a year since I've started trying get "The Women in my Life -- an Anthology of Failure" in a shape acceptable for publishing here. I have been trying to find the perfect words and phrases: that would both keep the information being transmitted accurate and not hurt anybody (be that a single person or a whole group of people sharing a rather common trait). I have sought a way to convey sadness without sighing despair, a means to transmit disappointment without pointing at anger and a path for expressing sorrow without hinting hatred.

Endless evenings spent in front of a pile of drafting paper, endless sleepless nights spent trying to find a metaphor, an allegory to illustrate my point without pouring darkness onto anyone ...
... and it was all to no avail.

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So I've scrapped it all and decided I shall take on a new approach to the issue at hand as you will all see in a moment.

I've always had an artistic (quite restless and passionate at that) side and as a result I've always wished I would learn to dance. For those of you unfamiliar with the genuine meaning of the word, I'm not talking about hip-hop or break dance but rather about slow waltz, tango, viennese waltz, slow foxtrot, quickstep, cha cha cha, samba, rumba, paso doble and jive.

So, is there anyone of you, ladies, interested in joining me at a local dance class? Or are there no ladies reading this blog?

Looking forward to hearing from you,
@Dexter

NOTE: This MovableType instance has recently been upgraded to 4.21 Pro (DB schema 4.0067). Should any problems arise and/or be noticed in relation with the operation of this site, please do not hesitate to bring them to my attention for a due fix.

See you at the next post,
@Dexter

NOTE: This MovableType instance has recently been upgraded to 4.12 (DB schema 4.0036). Should any problems arise and/or be noticed in relation with the operation of this site, please do not hesitate to bring them to my attention for a due fix.

Without further ado, here is a sneak-preview of what I'm going to post here in the near-and-foreseeable future:

• Two Media Projects -- How People Pack More Power Than Code
  
• The Women in my Life -- An Anthology of Failure
• Bucharest Institute of Technology -- A Dream And A Destination

(not necessarily in that order)

See you all very soon,
@Dexter

The following items are hereby put on sale by their owner, yours truly:

• A digital still camera, a FujiFilm FinePix S5100
• A digital film camera, a SONY Handycam DCR-TRV265E
• A CD-MP3 player, a SONY D-NF611
  
• A smart phone, a Nokia 9500 Communicator
• A laptop computer, a SONY VAIO PCG-FX802(FR)

A full description of each item (including detailed pictures and the price asked for) can be found in the full (extended) text of the entry -- this has been done as a courtesy to all those who will find no interest in a commercial-only post, especially those reading my blog through various aggregators.

Thank you for reading,
If you are reading this through an aggregator and would like to see the full story, please click on this entry's title in the aggregator's page and it'll take you to the full text of the ad,
Have a nice week,
@Dexter