My old blog at Atozed

The Wall Street Journal talked about it (archived here): http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/Press/WallStreetJournal/RomanianArticle/default.asp

Some don't like it: http://blogs.salon.com/0001820/2003/09/11.html

Some are very enthusiastic when it comes to romanian programmers: http://www.dmreview.com/whitepaper/WID578.pdf

But like it or not, the romanians are here, and yes, they *will* take your jobs without hesitating, should the opportunity arise.

It's been some time already since people first heard about romanian programmers. Not long ago everyone would wonder if Romania is some kind of salad (some still do), but with the western world looking for cheaper software development solutions my country became more known for it's cheap and skilled workers (and for the gypsies and thieves, but that's another story).

To me this has been a fantastic opportunity to avoid emigrating. Lots of my friends and people I knew just decided that they can have a better life by moving to a richer country, took their families, kids, pets and socks and left. I'm happy for them, since they fulfilled their dream, but I don't want to do it too. I have had my chances to leave the country and leave it for good, but have chosen not to. Since companies started thinking seriously about offshore development in Romania, finding a well-paid job here wasn't suddenly too difficult.

Everybody has probably heard about the various scandals and protests and offensive articles about foreign workers taking our jobs. I must add this disclaimer: I never ever took anybody's job. It's a free market, and I'm cheaper for a comparable quality. We didn't invent the free market, we just apply its principles:)

I felt like writing about this after I noticed that one of the guys at Falafel Software has a romanian name. I am not sure he's a romanian, but the name suggests it.

I know romanians working at Microsoft - last time they counted themselves they were about one hundred and a half. I know romanians at Real Networks (or Music Net how it's called nowadays). In the past days I've encounterd a reference to a romanian on this article on Anders Ohlsson's blog, Ovi Crisan of 2rss.com. There are countless others spread throughout the world in the most inimaginable places. If you know about any romanian in any software company, I'd be thrilled to count them.

Of course, Atozed has its share of romanians - me and Gabriel. My girlfriend, Christina, used to work for Atozed too but moved to a danish company.

There are a lot of references anyway about romanian programmers and outsourcing to Romania: http://www.google.com/search?q=romanian+programmers

Who's this FoxPro and what does he want from us anyway?

While we're worried about modern technologies, about creating web applications, integrating with .NET and the like, my brother, who's 20 and a second year student at a university in Romania is learning.... FoxPro.

I guess that's what the university staff imagines it's today's trend in modern databases and SQL. And he's not even using FoxPro as a mean to understand database concepts, they're actually asking them to know the intimates of the language that this Fox thing uses.

But as much as I dislike it, looking around I can see lots of old PCs, probably worth 10 euros each, running FoxPro applications under DOS. Cheap and effective.

Guess we're stuck with that blueish flashy DOS application screen forever. We're doomed.

I usually don't care too much where I work, or what noises I hear or if there's night or day, but there are some things that can distract me from doing my job. Not many, but the city hall just managed to bring one of them next to my window.

A pneumatic hammer!

Apparently the workers hammering the road want to change the asphalt, and the first step is to remove the old one. They also have a power saw which makes an unbearable high pitched noise. Closing the windows doesn't help much, as the noise is too loud and the vibrations make the whole building shake.

To make things worse there's a lot of dust raising from the tortured road.

Bugs will have to wait a bit. Everything I work on will have to wait a bit until those maniacs cease hammering. My head spins already. The only thing I wish for now is a wireless connection on the beach.. I could be there in the early afternoon, away from the hammer!!!

Aaaaaaarrrghhhhh......

After years of programming and interacting with all categories of users, from technical types to clueless secretaries, I'm still amazed by the "creativity" of some people.

I have been working on various types of software, from development tools to accounting software, but for every piece of software I've been working on there had to be one guy (or more) that discovered an absolutely unbelievable and improbable way to crash the program.

Last bug I worked came with a rather large sample of code I really had trouble understanding. After fixing the bug I still wonder why that guy wanted to do that?? He was right, and not in the "user is always right" manner but really really right, yet still... why did he do *that* ??

And more, what drives those people to make such tests? I don't imagine anyone stumbles across such a thing by chance, you have to search them thoroughly. Or maybe just be lucky?

The best I remember was when a guy who had a grid in his program complained about an odd behaviour when clicking precisely on the one-pixel line between the grid header and the grid contents. I have had trouble reproducing it with my dirty mouse! How did he manage to click there in the first place?

No wonder sometimes I feel like writing creative code too:

      [01:20] patric: but TIWListBox32.ItemIndex is always -1 :)
      [01:20] Hadi: that's a bug I would think :)
      [01:21] patric: I have a quick fix and a long fix
      [01:21] patric: long fix is what you think
      [01:21] patric: quick fix is to put ItemIndex := Random(Count)
      [01:21] patric: make your choice

(for those worried: it was fixed the right way :) )

While Borland's business is growing everywhere, the software business doesn't seem to catch for them in Romania. Following their customer satisfaction policy they decided to open a convenience store.

Here are some pictures from the local Borland office in Bucharest, Romania. "SRL" is the romanian equivalent of "Ltd.".

The building with the local representative (notice the cool Borland products in the refrigerators outside):

Detail of the company sign:

They even sell batteries!!!

P.S. Don't forget to check a real cool Borland picture here: http://homepages.borland.com/aohlsson/blog_beta/archive/2004_06_06_archive#108682226651141563

It's incredible what some people will do for money. You'd probably heard of disgusting stuff like urine therapy, but would you have thought someone is actually putting this into cans??

And to make things even funnier, there's a premium version of the same... oh, well, crap:

Explanation: you can find this all over Romania. "Crap" is the name for the carp fish. The cans contain fish eggs.

Ever heard of John Romero? If you didn't it means you're a very serious or busy person and never play games. The guy is one of the creators of Doom, the game that really changed the gaming world. Also behind some cool and innovative games, as Wolfenstein 3-D, Heretic and Quake. A legend, in short.

Browsing the web I've found that Romero has now a romanian girlfriend - see for yourself here: http://rome.ro. Apparently romanians don't only spread their programmmers around the world, but also their females, in an attempt to control the next generation of programmers:))

Nice....

Some people don't realize life is too short to be too serious. I like having fun, as everybody else I guess (except maybe psychopats). In most of the workplaces I've been at I noticed that productivity is increasing if people are having fun at work - having fun not meaning that they dress in costumes and drink all day, but that they are allowed to act according to their own definition of fun, should this be making loud jokes, listening to music or stopping for smoking breaks or coffee.

I don't think I could ever work in a place with desks aligned like in school with a supervisor in front of the desk rows. Perfect silence, broken only when individuals die of boredom and fall on the floor. Hands on the keyboard. Eyes glued to the monitor. Braindead. Anyone remember Office Space ?

Just my thoughts after a funny conversation:

    patric: Do you know anything about a guy named TIdStreamVCLDotNet ?
    Bas: i met him once or twice
    Bas: is he sick? lol
    patric: pretty sick, yes :) and it's contagious, I'm getting sick of it too :))
    Bas: LOL :)

I was so nervous about that class that had an error! And everything went away after a rather silly joke.
Wonderful!

Now back to debugging.

And since I'm still in the mood for jokes, here's the link to some computer Haiku.

My favourite:

    The Web site you seek
   cannot be located but
   endless others exist

For some reasons we have been unable to find plane tickets from Bucharest to Amsterdam on the first day of Tech*Ed, so we came one day earlier.

On the plane nothing special happend, except that KLM seems determined to keep all passengers hungry, we got one "launch box" containing approximately 20 grams of salad, one biscuit and a cake... just enough to make an adult really really hungry. Apparently the flight attendants were hungry too, as one announced that we're going to land and all passangers are required to "fold the tables and fold the foot-rests... which we don't have".... probably out of hunger she forgot what plane she's flying.

At Schipol we noticed that Tech*Ed buses were already there for the participants. Announcements of Tech*Ed are to be found around the city, we noticed maps and ads in a lot of places. Curiously though the Intraweb and FinalBuilder ads were not in sight, I have to get a paint spray and paint a few around.

In Amsterdam we took a tram to the hotel, got off it at the right station just to discover Christina forgot one of her bags in the tram... so we took the next tram to chase the lost bag, and manage to see a lot of the city by tram this way. We have found it so it was worth the effort. At least the pople in the tram didn't destroy it by thinking it's a bomb (wow, I can imagine the news we'd made, "Crazy romanian programmers try to bomb trams in Amsterdam").

Since the hotel has outrageous prices for Internet access, we tried to access other wireless networks and have found one which runs bad, it's slow, but it seems free, until somebody discovers what we're doing and cuts the access.

Tomorrow is the exhibit start, we'll install the booth and see what's next. I'm a bit nervous nervous about it, we'll be surrounded by ASP.NET, will be quite a job to convice people to even take a look at Intraweb.

Fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Monday was the "pre-conference" day. This means a lot of garbage, people moving around with big crates and undefined machinery and luggage, garbage, garbage and some more garbage.

We met Olaf today, in real life... hope we didn't scare him. Installed the booth, which proved to be an easy task (I was imagining that installing the booth requires a Ph.D., hammer, nails, screwdrivers and a couple of vodka bottles but I was wrong), then waited for a long time until Christina and Olaf read their mail. Boy, do this people get a lot of mail or what? :))

Not having a laptop and nothing being installed on Christina's I can't fix anything or work on any bugs, so I'm out of work almost completely. I'll probably try to do newsgroups support in idle time. Nothing really exciting. The hotel is placed in a no-chocolate zone, fact which made me very unhappy - after walking around for a while hoping to find an open store that would sell some real chocolates I had to settle with some M&Ms from a vending machine. Some people live on coffee, I live on Coca Cola and chocolate. As a side note we don't have chocolates at the booth, but a chewing gum distributor that apparently works with coins. I guess that half of the people trying that gum won't survive, as it looks like plastic, but who knows? We might trade the antidote for Intraweb licenses.Pictures of the booth and the gum distributor to come soon, as soon as I copy them from the camera, resize and upload.

Ah, and our network access is working quite fine. Don't know whose network it is, but as long as it accepted us...

Exhibition starting tomorrow!!!!

Exhibition started. We were out looking for customers. It's quite funny, during the conferences the exhibition is quite empty, while during breaks there's a lot of people passing by. Most of those asking about Intraweb were intrigued by the cow and the dolphin on the presentation. They came asking "what it is that you are doing??".

We met Patrice Raucq, he came with his laptop to show us he's not crazy with his DBGrid bug :). He's not, it's a bug alright. We also met Stephane Grobety - quite an interesting guy, he taught us a bit about random number generators and we spoke about Intraweb security.

The exhibit is very well organized, everything works perfectly, there's free food and there are drinks for everyone participating, lots of small contests (hey, some guys next to our booth even offer a remote controlled helicopter as a prize!!!!), nice people, the Internet connexion working perfectly, in short it's top quality.

We offer free licenses for Microsoft's MVPs and MCTs, but they are difficult to catch - those guys seem to be very busy, running around all the time. When they stopped by they seemed pretty interested in Intraweb.

It's been a very very busy day, the exhibition lasted for nine hours, with people coming and going. The last two hours were a lot of fun, as beer was offered in large quantities to everyone and we have had some fun customers. Beer seems to cheer up everyone :)) Especially when you can't feel your feet anymore after a day of standing beer works miracles!

Some pictures from our booth are available here: http://www.atozed.com/shows/teched2004/. More to come soon.

What an exciting day that was!! First of all, the exhibition didn't last that much as yesterday, so we didn't end up with our feet hurting anymore. Lots of people walking around, some stopping by to our booth. We managed to talk to some MVPs and MCTs and got them to watch our demos and find out a bit about Intraweb. Some seemed interested, I really hope they find some time to test it out.

Answering a question from one reader I can confirm that yes, the free offering of licenses for MCTs and MVPs does not apply for Tech*Ed only, and we are actually giving away free licenses for the use of those certified as MCT or MVP. The only thing we require is a signed agreement that they keep it for their personal use.

Not a boring day at all. Some guys from Portugal dropped by, MCTs actually, and when I tried to explain them a bit what Intraweb is they stopped me and told me they already knew, as they have been using it with Delphi.

An hour later I just said "Hi" to the guy next booth, and within a few minutes I learned that the application they were showing at the exhibition had the web part made with Intraweb. Going beyond the fun of the situation, this contact might prove quite useful as their application was created to perform load tests among other stuff, and they said it's working fine with Intraweb. Details to follow soon on the corporate website.

After the exhibition was over we went to meet a dutch user group called "Foundation DotNed": www.dotned.nl (it's not a typo, the "ned" part actually stands for "Nederlands"), and what we have found was a neat group of very technical persons. The meeting was having as guests three Microsoft guys, from the Visual Basic and C# product teams, who were very responsive to users' question and did their best to answer properly even to the weirdest ones. This is, as much as I understood, part of a tour Microsoft organizes to get closer to developers and find out their needs and complaints, suggestions and wishes. It's been an enriching experience, having contact with a totally different community style. It turned out to be an interesting manner of getting in touch with people.

Who else? The guy who introduced us to that group, Roland Guijt, really seemed to have enjoyed my crap pictures :) I was quite surprised to learn who's reading these postings. Pictures with Roland, Jeroen and the user group meeting to come soon.

Oh, and the catering was excellent. Olaf has had the mushroom soup, and even if this is Holland and I bet those were psychedelic mushrooms, he says he didn't get high. The pictures will be carefully examined and will reveal the truth.

As the end of the show approaches, customers seem to be more difficult to find, and people are more tired and less willing to learn anything about new products. As exhibitors grew bored, they started to come out to ask what we actually do. In this way we discovered two rather interesting products that might turn out to work fine with Intraweb. We have yet to test to know if they do and how, but here's what the products are anyway:

1. Compuware (http://www.compuware.com) has a test suite that does load testing and stress testing that might work with Intraweb. It's on the list to get tested, and if all goes well you'll hear more about these guys.

2. IVIS (http://www.ivis.com) offers a product that takes the output from web application and applies templates transparently, so the programmers don't have to bother thinking about templates and anything similar. If this works fine with Intraweb it might provide an alternate way to apply templates to Intraweb programs. Also to be tested.

Bored people do weird things. The ladies in the booth across from ours were juggling with small dolls and throwing them to passers-by. The guys from Bindview (http://www.bindview.com) were playing with frisbees, while those from IVIS (see the paragraph above) were trying to get their remote control helicopter up and flying. They don't seem to know how though, all they managed was hitting one customer with the eratically-flying helicopter.

When the sessions were in progress and visitors scarce, Olaf and I sneaked to the Microsoft booths to take a look of what they are out with. Got a preview of SQL Express and of Visual Studio 2005, can't wait to see what they are doing. SQL Express won't apparently have a real embedded version, what they did was creating an install-on-demand version, so the server it's going to be installed when the user first tries to use it.

One big difference from the MSDE is that the SQL Express pack comes with an administration console, which is quite a lot compared to the big nothing MSDE came with. By the end of the day, after many presentations and a lot of talking to the people we packed our stuff and headed to the party. It's too much to tell about, so it's going to be in a separate post.

I don't think there a font large enough to spell the word 'PARTY' here, so I'll just try to describe the feeling.

Codezone (http://www.codezone.info/) offered a party for everybody attending Tech*Ed in Amsterdam this year. Of course, we couldn't miss it so after the exhibition was over we packed our stuff and went to see what it's like.

It's like... WOW! Astonishing! Amazing! Crazy! Huge!

I don't think I know enough superlatives in english to describe it. We have had a glimpse on in on the corridors when a huge mass of people was slowly advancing, shoulder by shoulder, in small steps towards the party room. We thought it's just crowded corridors, but in the end we found out it was a lot of people. A big lot of people.

Imagine a room (actually it's called room but it could as well have been called hangar) about one hundred meters or more by fourty or more. You could easily park serveral planes there. Now imagine a lot of people inside, barely having place to move around. I estimated at least two thousand people in there. It's crazy, but this is what it was. I haven't seen so many people together since the communism days in Romania, when large popular meetings were held for propaganda shows.

To make things more interesting, half of the place was converted to a stadium, with one huge projector screen on one end (something like fourteen meters by ten), and the organizers started small games involving people in the seats until the football (or soccer for americans) game started.

As neither me, nor Christina or Olaf were really interested in the game, we moved on just to find out the other party surprises. In the middle of the place there was a vodka bar (actually the full text was "Microsoft Sharepoint, Vodka Bar". I found out on this occasion what Microsoft Sharepoint was). Scattered around there were several console games. On the sides there were plenty of small bars, serving beer, all sodas, water, wine and of course food, all for free. I don't know how they were handling so many people but they did.

Getting out of the main room we found a karaoke bar, where we enjoyed listening to the nice and pleasant singing of some Microsoft employees :)) I think the canto lessons must be part of the customer care program :))

After we listened to all the bad singing we could handle we moved towards the exit, but entered to see a movie... Yes!! There were two cinema theaters, one showing "The Matrix", the other one "Big Fish". So we stopped and watched "Big Fish". Nice movie, funny and warm.

There is, however, a drawback to this large masses of people. As Olaf noticed, "Welcome to the Matrix" :) For some reason I imagined a Microsoft party is like the ants party in the animation movie “Antz" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120587/). For those who haven't seen the movie.... well, go see it. It's difficult to describe....

So much about the party. A really impressive event. Definitely worth seeing. Pictures to come soon!

Friday was the last day of Tech*Ed 2004 Europe. The exhibition started at eleven and ended at three in the afternoon. Not much happend, people seemed hurried to go home, last sessions were in progress, so we mostly guarded the booth and wandered around, looking for freebies.

Gabi managed to show up, so Olaf and him spent a lot of time chatting about the website, work and life in general. With a team so scattered around the world as ours (Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, Spain, Holland, Australia) it's difficult to meet everybody, so chances to do it are not to be missed.

Some fun moments happened when the booths were packed, and everybody who had anything to give away just opened the boxes and let people pick whatever was in them. I saw (and participated in) a fight for T-shirts from Microsoft, with a "Staff" sign on them, people carrying around the most incredible and useless things, but nothng was so shocking as Gabriel showing with a box of plastic cups :)). He said it was easier to grab the whole box than to pick a few.. I wonder what does he do with so many cups :))

While our applications might be nicely built with Intraweb, Olaf's car certainly didn't look pretty after all the stuff we had in the booth was packed there. You can see a nice picture of it here.

So much for Tech*Ed this year in Amsterdam. It was a fantastic conference with unbelivable good organizers, with all the details considered and taken care of and with nice and technical people roaming around. Many thanks to everybody who took the time to visit our booth and hope to see you all at the next conference!!!

Christina used to program with C++ a couple of years ago. Not only she knew the language very well, but also knew a lot of tricks for using it and was very proud of it. We used to talk about languages and she knew all the arguments for C++, demonstrating how simple, pure and easy you could do this and that, how nice and slim and powerful the language was.

Back then, she didn't know anything about Delphi and wasn't familiar at all with the VCL. She started to work with Delphi after a while, and slowly moved all development to it. Although she had C#, VB.NET and Java projects she now is quite good with Delphi.

This evening she had to go back a bit at C++ programming. She's sitting next to me and all I have heard for the past half an hour is a selection of bad words, offensive comments and less than appreciative opinions on the language. A few quotes:

Who the &*%$ invented this crap?
^&&% (expletive deleted, many times)
Stone age! Welcome to stone age programming!
&*$@, my thread just blew up
Piece of shit
Don't laugh!

It's good too see another convert :))

Reading Slashdot today I found that PC Magazine has an online comparison of today's popular browsers here. They seem to like Firefox, but have this incredible comment on it:

"The browser isn't perfect, however. Firefox does not render nonstandard DHTML properly, nor does the Mozilla Organization have any intention of releasing a browser that does."

Now this is the kind of comment that makes one's hair turn gray. Or fall, whichever is easier. The W3C standards are complicated enough. Microsoft has done its best to push new extensions and features into the standards, but failed. You'd think that stopped them? Nooooo... they just made our beloved Internet Exploder recognize them, and coded their HTML-enabled tools to output HTML code using these extensions. Try exporting a Word document to HTML to see what I talk about.

Should other browsers support their extensions? I'd vote against it on any given opportunity. I know first hand the trouble of coding separate HTML for Internet Explorer just because Microsoft's opinion on the standard is different than W3C's.

Will this lack of support for non-standard extensions disable a lot of 'You have to use Internet Explorer to view this site' sites as Firefox and Opera become more popular? I hope so. At least one effect will be the dissapearance of 'HTML programmer' and 'I program using Frontpage' entries on resumes. And our life will be easier.

Following a link on Slashdot I ended up on the site "Naenara".

It's the official site of North Korea. Better late than never I guess. All was fine until I started reading the news on the site. The horror! This kind of language was called "wooden tongue" back in Ceausescu's days in Romania, and to me reading the official north korean news is a time travel back to those days when our news looked the same.

This site is definitely worth taking a loot at, especially if one ever had any doubts about the futility of communism.

"By Our Nation Itself".... HA ! Go read some, it's five minutes well spent:))

Intraweb is made with Delphi. Compiled with Delphi 8 for .NET. Installed into Visual Studio 2003 for .NET. But that's only where the fun starts.

We just created the first custom component for Intraweb using... C#. Entirely in C#, a fully-featured Intraweb component to run in Intraweb applications.

This gives the opportunity for Visual Studio users to create the components they need. For third-party vendors to switch the language if they want. It's .NET at its best, with full interoperability across development languages.

The component is soon to be included in the documentation and a Visual Basic for .NET brother is on its way too. Then I'll be waiting for the first Intraweb comopnent written using COBOL.NET :))

If you're not into betas and nightly builds don't try this.

I've learned that Firefox is now able to act as a RSS reader (well, as a very basic one, but still good). Using "live bookmarks", or livemarks, you can just bookmark the RSS feed into the browser. The link will expand when clicked to the list of entries in the feed, which is kind of cool.

You can get the latest Firefox build here.

It is not a reader replacement, but it's pretty neat to have the news titles as menu items, and all within the browser, without having to install anything else.

Anders Hejlsberg is doing it again. This time he's working on data manipulation and concurrency with this language called Cω (OK, C# 3.0 with a nicer name).

Intraweb for Cω? Most unlikely, as Cω is announced to be a "research language". Concepts from this language will, however, make it in future versions of C# or whatever is next, otherwise what would the research be good for?

The language definition is available, and although the data manipulation explanation didn't impress me much (OK, I must confess, it left me numb, unable to move, drolling on the keyboard and babbling something meaningless as I don't understand most of the XML slang and I barely remember what a tuple is), the concurrency support the language offers is quite impressive, it's that kind of feature that's not too easy to understand, but once understood makes you jump "I could have used that!!!

Read more about the language on the Microsoft's Cω page.

During Tech*Ed we offered free Intraweb licenses for Microsoft Certified Trainers and Most Valued Professionals.

The good news is that this offer is not limited to Tech*Ed!!! If you're a MVP or a MCT you can apply for your free Intraweb license here.

Get the word out!!! It's not time-limited, but it's a pity to struggle with page-centric technologies when such a beautiful framework exists.

So this is where the TurboPower guys went? I stumbled over Component Science. Looked at the management team.

They programmers (well, part of them ) went to Component Science, while the products went open source, and straight to SourceForge. Good products survive.

Cool!!!

I read today the story of this former Microsoft employee, who got fired for posting "sensitive" information to his blog. Well, sensitive to his pointy hairy boss, as to a normal person there's nothing sensitive in a pile of Apple computers.

This came in right in time, after reading (well, watching pictures mostly) the posts on this weblog which left me with a very strong "Big Brother is watching you" feeling. For those too lazy to check the link it's the blog of a guy who has too much time on his hands and started mining peer-to-peer networks for interesting stuff. What he found is beyond interesting, it's sometimes national security (his nation, not mine).

New media requires new communication skills, I understand this. But I fail to see why people won't use their common sense in determining what to share and what to conceal.

This makes me wonder what I am actually sharing :))

Kirt (kirthatesspam@acsplus.com) writes on borland.public.off-topic:

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, whose beans pass through the intestinal tract of an Indonesian civet before being roasted and savoured. But the elusive blend looks unlikely to be copied any time soon.

The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature.

To which Jeff (jefferio.remove.this@hotmail.com), a true programmer, without any doubt, responds:

My one question is how does the Asian palm civet afford them!

ROTFL

This year's Delphi Informant Magazine Reader's Choice awards: Atozed wins three categories!!!

Intraweb is the Best Web Development Tool: http://www.delphizine.com/Portal/Category.asp?CatID=49
FinalBuilder is the Best Build Tool: http://www.delphizine.com/Portal/Category.asp?CatID=27
Indy Plus is the Best Communications Tool: http://www.delphizine.com/Portal/Category.asp?CatID=29

This is the third year in a row for Intraweb!!!

Straight from Olaf's announcement on atozed.intraweb.announcements (on news.atozed.com):

Intraweb has been voted as second best commercial set of components at the biggest french developers forum Developpez.com

http://delphi.developpez.com/freewares/elections2004/

Intraweb got a favourable review from an ASP.NET developer in the asp.netPRO magazine. You can read it here: http://www.aspnetpro.com/productreviews/2004/08/asp200408mr_p/asp200408mr_p.asp.

Mike Riley, the author, says:
It's definitely easier for traditional Windows Forms-based programmers to learn and write applications with Intraweb than it is for veteran ASP.NET developers. As such, it's not a framework that everyone will want to use. Large enterprises that already have blackbelt ASP.NET developers may find the paradigm shift too disruptive and initially constraining. But even those diehards may consider it at least for rapid prototyping needs after they see how few lines of code were required for the dynamic image map product demo.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I just found out that the sun is soon to be owned by somebody. This guy, Virgiliu Pop, who by the name seems to be a romanian (which makes me proud I must say) claimed ownership of the sun.

Here's the claim. Here's the article about this intriguing fact.

Do not be fooled. The guy wants to demonstrate the absurdity of the etraterrestrial property agencies (you know, those guys who offer to sell you pieces of land on the moon and such). Yet, if he owns the sun he might start to like the power :)

I think I must get as much tan as possible before he starts charging for it.

John Kaster has a BDN article on DiamondBack: "Come to BorCon 2004 (US) to see the next Delphi release!". The first demonstration will be made at Borcon this year assorted with a lot of sessions about the new features.

So go to Borcon, "where you can see Diamondback, learn everything about the new Delphi release, save money on Delphi, and meet directly with the engineers who build Delphi".

While you're there don't forget to visit the Atozed booth! We're at no. 208, come and see what's new at Atozed!

I was reading the first Usenet posts on Google's Usenet archive. This stuff is awesome, it's living Internet history!!!

Posts are selected and range from technology events (first Microsoft Windows, first Linux, first TCP/IP draft, first worm) to social life. I've particularly enjoyed this comment on Star Wars:

"azure!randals" writes on 1982-06-08 :I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.

Ha! If he only knew....

Meet.... the rain!

It rained in Romania for the past weeks, although I don't know if rain is the proper word to describe what happened. Flood may be the appropiate one. It was so much water that a lot of villages all over the country are underwater (well, water is over half a meter in general, just enough to destroy homes, crops, kill animals and make a mess out of everything).

While I didn't suffer from a direct contact with the water, my Internet connection did. It just died yesterday afternoon, and so did the phone. It took me a while to find out what happend: one cable broke (apparently due to the water, or so the telephone company explained; this may be true as I suspected in a long time that their cables are made of sugar) and the whole thing went down in the neighbourhood, this meaning no phones or anything related.

I don't know how drug addicts feel when not having their drug, but I don't think it's worse than what I've felt without my beloved Internet connection. To make things worse, the telephone company told me that replacing the cable takes anything between an hour and a couple of days, so what I can do is just sit and wait.

What can be worse than the rain here? Perhaps the snow, which insists on falling every winter taking the politicians by surprise. Maybe you smile, but this is happening here every single year: snow falls blocking traffic and causing power surges, then some politician appears on TV claiming that "the snow has taken us by surprise".. yeah sure, like they were preparing themselves for a beach party in december at minus ten celsius....

Courtesy of Dan Balan, who watched the flooding from a balcony, here are two pictures of one of the most crowded crossroads in Bucharest. Underwater.

Today is August 23rd. Back in 1944, during the second world war, Romania changed sides, from fighting against the allies to fighting against the germans.

This was a rather nasty thing to do, and I can imagine the confusion of the soldiers in the barracks: "Sorry Fritz, you cooked for us yesterday evening but look, orders are orders and now I have to shoot you".

The good news is that the russian army liberated Romania several times on the occasion, taking all the possible valuables, from gold reserves to old cooking pots. They liked Romania so much in fact that they left an army here and installed a communist regime that lasted for 45 years.

Since before the russians the communist party was a little (and illegal) one, they had no special event to celebrate, so august 23rd was claimed to be "the day the communist party organized the insurrection".

Today we celebrate 23rd august again, for the first time since we got rid of the communists. This time it's not insurrection day, but the day "Romania woke up". Truth is just a matter of point of view, ain't it?

The Ansari X Prize site is a bit outdated. The last article they have is ROMANIAN TEAM PLANS SEPTEMBER 8 TEST LAUNCH.

Well, 8th september just passed and the test was a real success! The rocket test took place at Capul Midia, which is a small village on the Black Sea Coast, on the beach. The rocket took off perfectly, reached 1300 meters and everything went as planned (whatever as planned means, I'm no rocket scientist!).

It's the first important project in Romania in the past half of century, as far as I know, that's living completely from private money and sponsorships and it has a scientific purpose, and not a commercial one.

Congratulations to ARCA, and I hope they win this race and bring the X Prize to Romania.

Continuing the trend of portnig .NET to improbable devices, here's the homepage of a recent project of the Potsdam University of porting .NET to Lego Mindstorms.

I guess it's not going to take long until we'll see the first Intraweb interface for those robots :)

Reading news I stumbled over this gem. The article it's pretty long and talks about scientific discoveries, but what's funny is this phrase:

" The Black Sea is unique in that its water contains no oxygen, which helps preserve everything on the sea floor. "

I grew up by the Black Sea coast. Now to find out what I was swimming in......

No oxygen! Do they teach chemistry all over the world? :))

For the past weeks I had to run alot outside my office (which happens to be my home too), and often spent half a day without Internet access. To make things worse my ISP was bought by a bigger one a couple of months ago and ever since I have connection problems, ranging from quick modem disconnections to hours without any network connection or with a non-functional network.

I have heard that Internet is addictive, and it was quite logical that I'm an addict as well, but I've never given it any serious though until recently. Losing the connection made me really nervous and having to drive a lot through the city made me look at the prices for WAP access. The idea of reading email on the mobile phone didn't seem stupid anymore.

I've been using the Internet more or less since the beginning of the network in Romania. While progress here wasn't as fast as in other countries, we've always had access to the latest technologies and the Internet access caught pretty fast. Local networks developed over time, local exchange appeared, speed is getting better and better, prices are going down slowly, but steady.

Feeling deprived of my drug I started to think what I miss most and found out some outrageous figures:

I have around two hundred contacts in my contact list on Trillian. With most of them I talk daily. With all of them I talk quite frequently. What's to worry? I have perhaps ten friends in real life. I meet once a month, if the weather conditions are fine and all the other prerequisites are met.
I receive about three hundred mail messages a day, in a slow day. I'm not subscribed to many distribution lists. I am not counting junk mail - my junk filter takes care of that. That's not much mail by many standards, but it takes a lot of time to read, understand where needed, answer. What I found weird is that I can't remember when I last wrote a letter. You know, with a pen, on a piece of paper. I can remember, though, when I last sent a package: it was a long time ago. Postcards? Who needs them anyway?! I don't even make much use of the phone...
I normally read about three papers everyday. Online. I read a lot of blogs. Slashdot news. All kind of gossip, fun articles, jokes, serious opinions on less serious matters, movie reviews, everything online. I even look for recipes online. For city maps, reservations, food orders. I found it odd to use the phone to place an order, I prefer doing it online. Call me antisocial, but I prefer the keyboard instead of the operator voice. Last time I bought a newspaper? Happens to be some three weeks ago, but it's the only one in half an year. I didn't have anything to read while waiting for somebody outdoors so...
Did I mention RSS feeds? I don't watch T.V., though. Neither do I listen to the radio, except while driving, and even then just if there's music of some kind. I don't listen to people talking on the radio. But I get newsfeeds via RSS.
The sensitive part: I make friends over the Internet. I met one of my best friends on the Internet (if you're looking for a really talented web designer I can send you her email address, she's a net addict too). I met girls on the Internet - every geek's dream - and also met interesting people I still talk to. I am always trying to meet everybody in real life, even though it's sometimes difficult. Friends made on the Internet to friends made in real life ratio for the past twelve years? I guess that would be one to one, on a rough count. That's pretty scary I'd say.

I can go on for a while with this. I search lyrics on the Internet. I use Google extensively for searching. I know other search engines for the case Google can't find what I look for, be it a general search, a dictionary definition or a conversion. I hear news on the Internet. I practically live on the Internet. I'd stuck an UTP connector directly in my brain if the router would recognize the communication protocol. No luck yet, but I hope for the best.

I think I'm an addict. I like it. Did anyone die so far for being an Internet addict? Don't know, but I know I want at least ISDN in my coffin when I die.

Declared to be about 5.8 on the Richter scale, it happend yesterday at 23:34 (that's Romania time, GMT + 2) and boy, it was strong. I didn't think walls can shake so bad. I live on the fifth floor and the building was dancing. That's a terrifying feeling, hope it does not happen again anytime soon.

This is the most serious earthquake we had for the past fourteen years. I remember a strong one happening back in 1990, but there was silence ever since. Not perfect silence, still nothing as dangerous as the big one that struck Romania in 1977, causing more than a thousand deaths and destroying a lot of buildings.

The funniest thing is that seconds before the earthquake I was thinking "if I were to die now, I'd die happy". I'll be more careful what I wish for!

I know this will sound weird but I am a developer, really, and I just felt like writing a technical article :). Here's a short example on how to write a custom Intraweb component using C#.

Interesting stuff I'd say. Intraweb is quite powerful when it comes to extensibility.

Full article here.

By far one of the most popular questions is "how do I get rid of the yellow error page".

You can see how to do this step-by-step in this article

The smart idea

I use Trillian for instant messaging. The message window is divided in two parts, on the top one there's a message history and the text is read only. If you select text from there using the mouse it's automatically placed in the clipboard. Why do I consider it a good idea? Well, in 99% of the cases if you select read only text you do so because you want to copy to to the clipboard. In the remaining 1% of the cases you select it because you suffer from a rare text-selection disorder and you just can't help selecting text when you see it.

The bad idea

In the same situation Trillian doesn't offer any standard "copy" option. You cannot press Ctrl-C with the text selected. You cannot use Ctrl-Ins. Can't right click and select "Copy" from the menu. There's no visual indication the text has already been copied to the clipboard. You just have to know it. Of course there's no need for the copy function as the text is where it should already, but old habits die hard.

What's the result of this? I convinced a friend to use Trillian. The feedback I got was like this:

- How do I copy text from the history? I can't find a copy option. Ctrl-C doesn't work!
- You just select it.
- I did so, but I can't copy it! There's no menu, the keyboard shortcut doesn't work!
- No, you just have to select it and it goes to the clipboard!
- F&*^!

I had the same reaction the first time it happend to me.

For the past weeks I did a lot of customer support on our newsgroups. I have noticed a few things that are interesting and worth thinking of. These are not intended to be newsgroup guidelines, only random observations from my daily technical support activity.

We're not super heroes

While all of our customers are of the same importance, we can't multiply ourselves. Customers present their issues and expect us to solve them here and now. Please keep in mind that we get a lot of technical issues to examine in a single day, and what is for you the problem for us is a new thing we need to understand, analyze and solve. This takes time, and it's not easy to jump from a problem to other several times a day. Try to change your project every twenty minutes and see what I'm talking about.

We're not slaves

No private emails unless requested. This had been an advice for Usenet posters since the very beginning but some people still ignore it. In the particular case of our support forums sending private mail to a developer instead of using a regular posting is not only annoying for that developer (hey, want my home phone too? :) ) but it also restrains the possibilities of getting a fast solution. Think about it, if you post it on the forum you might get an answer from other posters and all of the development team is reading it. If you send private mail you only reach one person.

We're not perfect

We are humans, we also have weeknesses and we often mistake. Using rude language in a newsgroup or being irritated doesn't help much, even if you're right! It's like walking into a bar of athletic blondes and yelling "Blondes are stupid!". Best thing that can happen is to be ignored, worst is to get slapped, but it surely won't get your problem solved. Just be polite and don't use any words or tone you wouldn't want to receive in a message for you.

We're not mind readers

Often enough people don't take time to state their problems. They just ask vague questions about some problem of theirs and want a solution. This is a waste of time on both sides. Take time to read your message before sending. Imagine you have to answer it: this is usually the best test and you'll spot any unclarity right away.

We need customers' help

We surely like to hear a solution we provided worked, so take some time to drop a note on the groups. We surely like to know about any problems with our products, so don't be shy, ask away, there are not wrong questions. We definitely want customer feedback, be it good or bad.

My mishaps with what could be the worst Internet service provider in Romania... read the story here: http://blogs.atozed.com/patric/articles/517.aspx.

"The Space Frontier Foundation Saturday bestowed two prestigious awards on Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites Tier One Team, creators of SpaceShipOne, and the Ansari X Prize Foundation, for their recent dramatic contributions in opening the space frontier."

Bummer. The romanian team didn't win the prize. But this is only the beginning.... manned space flights funded privately, not a bad thing, right?

Let's start with this simple fact: once I ordered chinese food from an online ordering system. Food was good.

Try to google for my name.. and find out what I ate! Not only they allowed Google to index the order details, but also the address I ordered to and the phone number!!!

I'd say let's start a security experts shooting contest. I offer a free chinese meal per head. You don't have to stuff them, just make sure they don't counsel people on building secure systems anymore.

Nick Hodges wrote this very nice article "On Being a Valuable Newsgroup Contributor" at http://www.codefez.com/Default.aspx?TabID=79&newsType=ArticleView&articleId=39

I like his style. Some things I would have said in time to our users, but I can't do that.

While at it make sure to check the other articles on CodeFez. Nice site with interesting content written by great people.

Part one - 3 p.m.

Not so long ago I blogged about the worst possible service provider in Romania. To cut a long story short there's this company named RDS which is supposedly the biggest Internet service provider in Romania and undoubtably the worst. They just happen to buy the company I used for Internet access and ever since my connection works awfully.

Today I had my modem disconnected at three o'clock. It's been two hours since and not only I'm still disconnected but I can't get at all to their technical support. Their phone line is continuosly busy. I have nothing to do but to wait.

I have asked Gabriel to check if there's any information on their site and he can't reach the website. I wonder if they just turned everything off and went home!? This is crazy!

Part two - 8 p.m.

Half an hour ago I managed to talk to the technical support. I have asked the voice at the other end why didn't they answer for five hours. Well, because their Internet connection was down, and the technical support telephones run on VoIP. Stupid.

"Should be working by now" they said. I waited patiently for half an hour and now it works. I hate this provider.

Today our neighbours, the hungarians, vote on a referendum to decide whether ethnic hungarians living outside Hungary should receive hungarian citizenship or not.

A little background on this: while there are a lot of hungarians living in Romania for centuries, the animosities between romanians and hungarians have been greatly exagerrated and exploited by the nationalistic politicians on both countries. This issues have been not only once turned into a false problem to distract people from more serious things.

Why hypocrisy? While regular citizens have more or less peaceful opinions on this issue, both in Romania and Hungary, the politicians in Romania (and as far as I know in Hungary too) have turned this dual citizenship right into a trampoline for their ambitions. Pick any romanian off the street, or any hungarian and ask them about the matter: you'll get a short answer illustrating their opinion. Pick any romanian or hungarian politician and ask them the same thing: you'll hear a long rhetoric filled with nationalistic aspirations and with hate.

Today the hungarians decide. Their politicians are quite scared. Ours are scared too. No matter how the result turns it's not good for them. Grant hungarian citizenship to hungarians in Romania and a lot of them will go to live and work in the richer Hungary, and that's bad for Hungary as it may be too big of a challenge for the social security system and for the job market. Don't grant them the hungarian citizenship and, as a politician, you're done for - nobody will ever believe again the nationalistic bullshit you're throwing at people. On the romanian side things are quite similar: having dual citizenship may lose voters and decrease population in some areas, not having dual citizenship puts a bigger pressure on the authorities regarding the rights of ethnic minorities. And there are a lot of hungarians in Romania, quite a lot.

I'm waiting to see the result. And I'm glad some politicians in Hungary were smart enough to organize this referendum. Hope it turns out fine for the hungarians living in Romania in the end.

A nice article about this issue here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4065095.stm.

I've been a devoted user of Netscape mail and news since the first day I've touched a graphical e-mail client. After many years of using it for both mail and newsgroups I've been convinced by Hadi to drop it in favour of The Bat!

The Bat! proved to be a good choice overall, but somehow it never was exactly what I wanted. It has an unpolished interface, ugly graphics and an uninspired choice of menu organization, shortcuts, options etc. First thing that struck me was the lack of a nice threaded view in the messages list.

I lived with The Bat! for over an year. Mail gathered in the folders and the program became more and more unresponsive, so I decided to make the change and start using Thunderbird.

I've been using various betas of Thunderbird as newsreaders only, but since the final release received so many good opinions on various forums and blogs I started moving mail to it.

Importing mail was not an easy task, and here's how it was done, in case somebody wants to move data from The Bat! to Thunderbird:

go to the folder you wish to export in The Bat!
select all messages
select Tools | Export messages | UNIX mailbox...
go to the Thunderbird mail folder
create a subfolder named as the folder you export and with the extension .sbd
save the data in a file with the same name as the subfolder but without extension, and in the same place
repeat for all folders you want to import

It's a tedious process but it works perfectly. After a while you'll have all your data into Thudnerbird without any loss.

Thunderbird looks pretty impressive. It's small: fully loaded with data, newsgroups set, mail accounts, blog accounts and it still eats less memory than The Bat!. It's true that "less memory" still accounts for some thirty megs, but I've got a gigabtye of RAM so no worries here. Speed is also remarkable, it's fast and very responsive. It's loaded with features, from junk mail control to visual themes. It has the capability of displaying HTML messages, this being a major problem in The Bat! for me.

And yes, it has a RSS reader. Gets feed data and displays it like regular message. Neat.

Blogs, newsgroups and mail in one place. I love this thing!

The junk mail detection in Thunderbird is simply amazing!!! In the first hours it still marked some good mail as junk, but after clicking several times on the "Not junk" button it learnt, and it did it so fast that I'm astounded.

I used to have a junk filter in The Bat!, a bayesian filter, but this one is ages ahead the old one.

Should have changed to Thunderbird a lot earlier. Would have saved me some trouble caused by mail improperly marked as junk :)

I just had the most incredible idea for what could become the most popular game ever: Pacman 3D!!!

Imagine playing a Pacman that ressembles Quake. Except that you can't kill your opponents, you can only run. If you run into them, you're toast. And you can't tell where they are, as the game will be a first person view.

Of course, such a game would be completely stupid, but I've seen worse. I thnk I'll gather a development team....

Why can't I kill the "System Idle Process" I see in the Task Manager? It's eating 99% of my processor's time, no wonder this machine is slow.

And while at it I want the 16K of RAM it uses back too :))

Behold the first Bene Gesserit Firefox extension: I must not fear!. Can't stop laughing.

Of course, if you haven't read anything of the "Dune" series it's not funny.... go ahead and read something, those books are great!

Nick Hodges has an article at this address http://www.codefez.com/Default.aspx?tabid=79&newsType=ArticleView&articleId=79 in which he suggests a new model for Borland to sell its products. Funny enough this is the same model Atozed uses for selling Intraweb :))

Working with people all over the globe belonging to various cultures and speaking different languages is a challenging thing. Discovering the differences and similarities between cultures is interesting and broadens any individuals horizons. But there's a fun part to this too.. I'm listing below a few things I stumbled upon to illustrate the fun part :)

Christina used to work for a romanian company that makes antivirus software. Their product is called "BitDefender". That's a nice name to have unless you try to sell your product in France, where the name would roughly translate as "Penis defender".

The next one may have been a spoof but it's still extremely funny. The story says that a company called "Powergen" opened a subsidiary in Italy. The resulting domain name was.. PowergenItalia. The site is here still but marked as being under construction: http://www.powergenitalia.com/. I have also found this article: "Powergen denies ties with powergenitalia" so I guess it wasn't a true story after all. Funny nevertheless.

I remember I once got this link from a friend, it's the "Arkansas Democrat Gazette". I am sure it is a respectable publication but the domain name is a delight to any native romanian speaker: http://www.ardemgaz.com/. "Ardemgaz" can be split into "Ardem gaz" which translates as "we burn gas" and it's a common expression meaning "we waste time" (writing this post instead of working makes me "burn gas" too).

Now this one is a radio I'd like to listen to: "Radio Pula" (http://www.hrt.hr/hr/hrpula/). Pula is a city in Croatia. Romanian readers may be already rolling on the floor laughing since "pula" is a very rough word for "penis" in romanian.

You used to think Batman lives in Gotham City? Guess again, he lives in a city called Batman: http://www.greatestcities.com/Middle_East/Turkey/Batman_Iluh_city.html!!! This is a real city in Turkey. Don't know if connected to the cartoon character in any way :)

Of course, romanian names can also be fun for foreigners: I once was told in Turkey not to call my girlfriend by her name (her name was Dana) since it meant "veal". Mooooooo!!!! I have also had a post last year with a nice romanian product: canned crap! Check it here: http://blogs.atozed.com/patric/archive/2004/06/15/314.aspx.

I'll end this post here.. but not before telling you the fun I had when I read on a street in Italy "Curva pericolosa" which means in italian "dangerous curve".. but any romanian will translate it as "dangerous whore". And sure enough it was written on a street full of prostitutes!!

I can't tell what's the situation in other countries but today I have had a shock in my supposedly civilized country.

For those who can't show Romania on the map: we have free public schools, any kid can go there and learn for free, they just have to go. It may not be the best education in the world but it'll teach them at least to read and write. It doesn't require the parents to pay anything, to be tax-payers, to have social security, nothing: literaly any child can go to a school, register himself there and learn.

It may seem incredible but a lot of people still prefer to keep the children at home to work instead of sending them to school. The result is an incredible percent of illiteracy: 11%. This figure comes out from foreigners doing researches in Romania.. the romanian authorities have a bigger one: 16%.

Of course this whole illiteracy phenomenon is elusive unless someone's directly confronted with it, as it happened to me today. While at the local post office I was asked by a guy aged around thirty to help him with a form. I thought the form was perhaps a complicated one (romanian bureaucracy produces mind-boggling forms sometimes) but looking over it I was surprised to see it was asking for name.. address.. and other common stuff. I gave the form back to the guy saying "it's quite simple, see, it's your name here, address here" when he interrupted me blushing "..but I can't read...".

Yes he was a gipsy. Yes we have many of those. School's free for them too. Their parents won't let them go. How irresponsible has one to be to deny to his child the chance for a better future? That guy was unable to write down his own name! And there are others like him, and not just a few!

I'm shocked. We try to make a better life for us, for our kids. We aim to join the European Union. We explain to anyone who's willing to listen how great the romanians are. We proudly display our two thousand something years of documented history and we still have adults who can't read or write.

I am so ashamed of my country now...