Referendum in November in Romania - a fair analysis

Yes, is another post on politics, sorry to those expecting a technical one. I'll come back to those, as soon as I get back to such activities :-) .

For Romanians which want a clearer picture of the referendum about to happen in Romania on the same day as the Presidential elections, which are the theoretical and practical implications of the referendum, take a look at this short and clear analysis:

http://packardb.blogspot.com/2009/10/referendum-noiembrie-2009.html

Remus Cernea - First! :-)

I didn't htought I'd post this soon again, but...



Remus Cernea's site is first on the trafic.ro statistics, which is great!

Mircea Badea - I'd vote Remus Cernea

Mircea Badea at Sinteza Zilei (minute 56:50): "If Remus Cernea enters the second tour I will vote him"

I other news Remus Cernea will be invited to the following shows at televisions in Cluj:

• today, 28th of October at 20:00 at One TV from Cluj for about 90 minutes and can be followed online
• again today from 22:00 to 24.00 will be invited at „Direcţia opusă”, a show by Bogdan Eduard at Klub TV
• tomorrow, 29th of October, will be invited at TVR Cluj between 20:00 and 20:50

Remus Cernea invited at Realitatea

Remus Cernea was invited at Realitatea TV and the attempt to ridicule his and Mr. Potârcă's (a counter roma/tzigane candidate) candidacies was obvious. The show was supposed to start at 23:00 and started 15 minutes later, all of that after a huge chunk of air time for a candidate from a big party.

In spite of that and the little time he spoke, Remus managed to avoid being trapped and managed to send his message accross.


For undecided Romanians, here are the recodings of the show:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C02T-e2Gt28&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSqRPBkA2GE&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dACUQnjM85Y&feature=channel

Microblogging, let's try it...

I have figured that I might try to use some microblogging service, so I decided to use identi.ca because is a free platform, as opposed to twitter.

I will probably post really occasionally, but since I have a client for ideni.ca on my phone I expect to update more often than the full blog:

Follow me at: http://identi.ca/eddyp

OpenStreetMap, Debian competes with it

There is no secret that many Debian contributors share their time between various projects, while Debian is one of those projects.

I am no exception: Debian has been competing lately with OpenStreetMap (along with other projects) over my time and, sadly for Debian and fortunately for OSM, OSM has been winning a lot in the last year, since I bought my Nokia E71 phone which has a built-in GPS.

Still, this work on OSM has its own satisfactions, such as managing to map alone (not completely) my home town, Caracal, managing to import municipality data for the entire country, participating in the first mapping party in Romania, exactly one month ago.



Recently I received several invitations to publicly present or advocate these open projects I am involved in and this is really exciting and a huge reward for me.

Is really great to see things moving without me trying to push them, for a change!

One of the very few shows where...

Remus Cernea was invited and was allowed to say his point of view and his ideas.

Watch here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cEIpiDiLdc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxBah8m7cQA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjnpa3nA5g4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luxRYyKNIaY


Oh, and one more thing, it seems Remus is very popular on the Internets:

http://www.petitieonline.ro/sondaj-s06930049.html

Converting flac to mp3 - Soundconverter

Why would I want that? Not because mp3 is in any way superior, is just my phone doesn't support playing FLAC and its audio capabilities are no match for flac.

If you want to convert FLAC to mp3, say to listen to your music on your phone or mp3 player, and you use GNU/Linux I recommend soundconverter.

This is already packaged in Debian and available in etch, lenny, squeeze and sid. It is probably available on Ubuntu and all other major distros out there, so, enjoy.


(This is also a reminder for me. I used soundconverter before, but I was unable to remember which was the application.)

This makes the hair on my back raise

I want the ones reading this and watching this to understand I respect peaceful people and people respecting secularism. This is not hate speech.

On the other hand, I personally checked the quotes and I invite you to check yourselves, don't take my word for it:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=216_1207467783


This has the potential and explains a lot of what we're seeing today.

Remus Cernea invited at Doru Braia's Talk Șoc

Tuesday, on the 29th of September Remus Cernea participated at Doru Braia's Talk Șoc.

They discussed about Romania's current situation, the need for an alternative to the current political class, Remus' book „Manifest împotriva becalizării României” - (roughly traslated: Manifest against Romania's "becalisation" - Becali is a very controversal figure in Romania, an ex-shepard that got rich after speculating on the real estate market), Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului (roughly translated: People's Salvation Cathedral), free thinking, religious freedom and tolerance, the posibility of prostition becoming legal in Romania, drug consumption, education, the young generation

You can see the recording here.

Some Debian work in a long time

I finally managed to do some Debian work in a long time, I managed to package Wormux 0.8.5 for Debian Sid (aka Unstable).

This new version delivers one new binary package, wormux-servers, which contains the stand alone (aka headless) game server and the index server. Unfortunately, the information on setting these up resumes to have a couple of configuration files which are placed in /usr/share/wormux/examples/ .

Also, there's a bug that affects network games when using the construction tool, but fortunately, upstream already has some fixes, including one for this bug, and as soon as 1:0.8.5-1 enters squeeze, I'll prepare a patched version (including some other fixes present in upstream).

Until then, please enjoy Wormux.