The Power of Smileys

My latest article has just been published in the diGIT IT magazine. It's called The Power of Smileys and contains interesting details about smileys, but also quick ways of typing them.

Here is a list of all my articles. Will be posting about interesting ones in the future too =] If you're an IT user or even professional and you'd like to see a certain subject treated in one of my articles, feel free to drop me a line - will be making some time for article writing in the next period as i'm looking for themes that are possibly related to my master research direction =]

Chrome extensions available

A quick note: Chrome (browser) extensions have been launched. You can find a list of my extensions here. My most popular extension is by far the Clock. I seems that i'm good at making time tools on various platforms :)

Why i support Mircea Geoană

This post is for Romanians abroad (and not only :) who i know are reading my blog. I'm not a person who usually popularizes political preferences, but i fear the situation has become dramatic so here are some of my opinions. Unlike established democratic systems like the UK or the US, Romania is still a young democracy. State resources are being used in favor of a certain candidate. The government is not legitimate, because the entire parliamentary majority is now in the opposition, which was never before seen. This majority proposed an independent prime-minister of German origin named Klaus Werner Iohannis, but the president refuses to name him citing the Constitution in a way that the majority claims to be wrong. The president (the other candidate) says the majority is not working in the interest of the people, but in my opinion this is not for one man to decide. The parliament is the supreme institution in our state, populated by vote just like the presidency. I could go on and say a lot more bad things, but i will only say that it culminated with this video. I do not want a man hitting children in public as my president. Fanatic supporters claim it's fake, and there are quite a lot of them. This is what we have to deal with, this is the current situation.

I'm not saying Mircea Geoană (left, in the banner, and left-wing in politics), the candidate i support, is perfect - far from it. However, Crin Antonescu (right, in the banner, and right-wing in politics), the other opposition leader, is now supporting him in an alliance which consists of all the parliamentary parties except the presidential one. The future prime-minister, if Mircea Geoană is elected, will be Klaus Iohannis, in a construction that will be created for the first time: a political government with an independent prime-minister. If you want to know more about their common project, please click the banner.

I'm not only giving a negative vote for the current president here, i'm also appreciating some qualities in Mircea Geoană's resume: ambassador to the United States, External Affairs minister and the best quality in my opinion, quality that made me support him from the very beginning: he can speak English without making a fool of himself. I truly believe this will propel Romania forward in international relations. You know me by my online presence, you know the values i stand for - i wouldn't express my support for someone if i wouldn't believe it's very important.

Lastly, many believe there will be fraud during this election. Putting aside my preference for Mircea Geoană, if you're a Romanian living abroad, please vote on this Sunday, so the next president, whoever he is, will have the highest legitimacy possible. Thank you.

Election in Romania

Although i have a clear option as to who i will vote for, i won't say anything in this post. I'm just expressing the opinion that international media and organizations should monitor what happens here until the campaign is over. There are more and more cases where freedom of speech is limited through various ways. People died 20 years ago in the Revolution and we should honor their memory by defending democracy every way we can.

P.S. Don't want to sound dramatic, although the situation will soon be. Just expressing my sincere opinion.

Ad for cloning?

I know about cloning pets or 'engineering' babies, but are we seriously at the point in time where there's an ad for cloning ourselves? I just saw this ad next to a YouTube video and i made a screen capture:

P.S. I'm against cloning, so not enthusiastic about this stuff at all, on the contrary.

Google Wave is the new wave

Recently i dived into 2 emerging worlds: Chrome extensions and Wave robots. Today i'll talk about the Wave thing =] You probably already know what Wave is, so i'll only link to the robots i've built:

Search-y (search linking robot)

News-y (news linking robot)

CodeBot (code formatting robot)

Btw, i've got 3 Wave invites for the first 3 people who comment on this post. If you have any suggestions for robots you may find useful, please tell me. See you later!

Thoughts on climate change

The only clear thing to me about this is that climate is changing. I don't know if it's getting warmer or colder - temperature-wise i've found all the years i've lived to be similar. And because i can't formulate an opinion i'll just write some random thoughts about climate change that came to me over time:

• I don't think there should be any 'democracy' in establishing what should be done about this in the sense that opinions of ordinary people shouldn't matter where science should. They should establish once and for all whether climate change exists, if and how it affects us, what are the causes and what, if anything, should we do about it.
• In my opinion, at least a small part of 'global warming' is pushed on all media to 'excuse' the adoption of alternate technologies that aren't based on oil. Even though this is profit driven, i would excuse it because it at least reduces pollution and really is more efficient.
• In the Dune saga, they control climate through special satellites - Frank Herbert made it sound so easy i can't help wonder (not if we have it already but if we should - then again they had all these planets; until we have just one, maybe we should pass on that :D).
• Wildfires are incredibly annoying because every year i see them on TV, but i don't see any measures being taken so we can be one step ahead. I know something more can be done, we can't just be fixing the effects every single year.

This post is part of Blog Action Day 2009.

Wireless Bombardment - We Need To Define Green Wireless

When i go into an eatery, it's cool to have a hotspot. Or at the mall, or places like that. Or maybe when you go to your university, school, etc. What happens though with the buildings we live in?

It's a stampede of wireless networks, all set to maximum speed, maximum power, non-stop, with no regard to power consumption or health risks. This is only the beginning, and lack of standards and research in the 'green' part of these things will lead to something bad. I'm not a hardware expert, but i know enough about these things to have the opinion that it isn't effect-free.

I've switched back to hard lines, having more than one laptop (i don't use desktops anymore :), so one is for strictly personal use. Yes i know the phone emits too, but at least i know of a few standards there that keep me calmer. I'm more concerned with the 24/7, full blast usage of wireless routers some practice - while we sleep, they function - some even leave them turned on when they go on vacation. Wtf is that? When we become aware of the fact that commerce has a great impact on how wireless devices are sold, used, designed and preset for maximum performance in the eyes of the buyer, but not always the person, we can impose future standards ourselves by acting accordingly and with common sense.

P.S. I've said stuff like this before, but wireless fans just dismissed it as crazy talk. I'm not against wireless; i'm just saying that before there is some perceivable health standardization of wireless development, expansion and even power consumption, i reserve the right to be skeptical about widespread and untamed adoption.

P.P.S. Here is an optimization i discovered in the past and which you can apply to your laptop's wireless adapter transmit power.

Fast evolution of the social web

You might have noticed that i'm not blogging as often i used to. The thing is, Twitter is to blame. Sure, Twitter is growing like nothing else - but what does this mean for other things, like for example Blogger (which recently turned 10 years old i think). Is micro-blogging stealing buzz away from normal blogging a general trend? What's obvious for me is that thoughts that are normally too 'unimportant' for you to find the way to the blogging interface find their way to Twitter a lot easier, especially with an explosion of various Twitter clients. This also taps into the power of mobile, since you'd think (and you'd probably be right) that it's easier to tweet on a phone than to blog on a phone.

Another evolution (or involution) i'm seeing is Digg disappearing. Where is the avalanche of Digg links that once used to flood your chat window? A lot of this is now 'stolen' by Facebook and by Google Reader, which implemented cool 'Like' and sharing features. These 2 also attempt to 'digg' into Twitter, by emphasizing a big text box in which you can write your 'status'. Sometimes the plethora of features is bothering though, since you can almost touch their desire to imitate what's working for the competitors, but lack of simplicity works against a lot of things...

From my point of view, it's easy to deduce what will happen. As with all things designed to be competitors, services will have to rely mainly on intrinsically added value or they'll fail. Google will always be the best in search, just as Bing is a joke. Microsoft will always be the best in offline operating systems (Windows 7 is a gem btw), just as Google will tap into the online system area, which isn't seriously implemented by anyone at this point, and will become the best. Twitter will prosper and introduce ads, Facebook will become the only truly international social network and Google Reader will follow its trend to become the top feed reader, but it's actually the sharing platform that will make it big. Of course, at one point, one of these companies will be bought by another. My bet is Twitter will be bought first :) When that happens i'll surely post my thoughts, which will be longer than the 140 character limit imposed for every tweet.

Until then, here's a question. What symbols would an alien see carved on the walls of every cave?