TEDx Chisinau NXT LVL #nxtlvl

Hello friends,

Today I was attending an extraordinary event TEDx in my own town, I must say I’ve never been to a TED event before and hardly imagined what it will be like, but it was an unusual event because pretty much a lot of topics where open-ended points to discuss. We were around 400 attendees with 12 speakers, speaking in 3 languages (English, Romanian, Russian) and pretty much everyone was willing to listen, to learn and to evolve as a personality.

UPDATE: Here are some videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLADJSjJ03wMkNQI_B0ARgzqgO5NZnOtpL

 

 

Before we get started I’d like to thank everyone involved into organizing this event, and I hope we’ll get many other events related or not to IT, I think communication is the key to get to that next level we’ve kept talking about all day long. Don’t think you’re smarter than someone, but if you got an idea that’s burning you inside out, just make it happen, start by small steps and then it will lead you to some kind of lesson learning.

The bio of all the speakers is on TED^x Chisinau official site: http://www.tedxchisinau.com/speakers/ 

The photos are taken from https://www.facebook.com/TEDxChisinau photos and from Victor Buzu’s FB album.

Elena Pahomova – There will be no  future

An interesting topic for opening of the event – actually the main idea what Elena Pahomova was presenting is that today is the base for our future, we don’t need to wait until it happens with us. Future is happening now, we model it day by day, so we should live as today dreamers, changing something today, living better today, etc. Another good piece of advice for young journalists was “don’t try to chase big money, work for experience, this is why you got here in first place.”

 

 

 

Octavian Ticu – Bankrupt state with elite sport

Octavian Ticu presented a very good info about the idea of meritocracy and that it is mostly applicable to sports, because we know for sure who is the best one there, there are seconds, kilograms, kilometers, etc. He also talked about one little village in Moldova: Grimancauti, this village with a population of 4200 people, gave us (moldovan) 3 Olympic medalists and a lot of champions in box. Also he compared the years when the most progress is done, and these are the years before and after the USSR period in Moldavian history. He also expresses the idea that as a community, as a state we are not yet ready, we don’t have conditions to raise champions in team sports as football, basketball, and others, because the team is a micro community with all its strengths and flaws. This is why we fail in these types of sports. In several words a very good presentation I’d advise you to watch it on YouTube when available.

Onorica Banciu – Get out from the game

Onorica’s insights on our Moldavian budget are very interesting, she indicated several numbers, which seemed very outraged when measuring the price and the value. Getting as an example a simple Moldovan family from a village she presented some of the day-to-day problems and expressed an interesting idea: “Don’t wait until government will give you something, remember when it does, it means that government first took from someone something and than gave that to you”, so basically when you’re doing great, government is putting pressure on your business, when you’re doing bad it will give you some money so you could still be at least on the edge. So don’t get into the game of protesting without changing anything yourself - stop, innovate, create something new and the changes will come. 

Dave Erasmus – Is giving good for you ?

Dave mentioned once again that love isn’t just as simple as a resource, each time you give away love, you’re getting it back. Don’t be afraid of giving something without demanding anything in return, which is the essence of true altruism. As an example on the picture he’s talking about a mother giving everything to her 6 months daughter without getting anything material in return from her. Another idea was that if you have a cause or an idea that you support than getting the funds for that cause is not that complicated, isn’t that complex, just let the people know that you’re passionate about it. Nice talk and a profound one.

Alex Cosmescu – Do you exist ? Really ?

Alex gave the most confusing talk, at least for me. The idea is interesting but not the one that I like, so basically the idea is that life is a union of emotions, feelings, stresses, and many many other things, that we can’t control. Basically life is just happening. And this is why it is not fair to say that you have to suffer more or less than someone else, because life’s just happening want it or not, you can’t change it. Anyway I think this talk enlarged a little bit the common pattern for a TEDx speaker.

 

Eugen Boico – Remix your way into  the future

Once again I loved the presentation. For a beginning artist, designer there is this idea of being unique, that is like a trigger in their mind. But what is the easiest path to express yourself as a creative artist, the answer is simple, that is remix. With loads of data generated every minute on our planet, there is extremely low possibility that you’ve created something unique that was never created before you. But get a piece of art, a track, something that you like a lot, and improve it with your ideas and thoughts, and this way you shouldn’t invest a lot to progress in this area. Remix of course isn’t the only way, but it is the simplest and the most effective one for a beginner. Watch the presentation on YouTube when available.

Ruslan Cojocaru – Happiness 2.0

Unfortunately I just arrived after the lunch at the end of the presentation, but I got the idea of being positive in everything you do and to succeed you need two components: the passion about the project, the passion about what you do, and the other one is the team. Get the perfect team and when you got it experiment with it to do it better. I hope I’ll get more ideas from YouTube watch.

 

 

Maria Gaidar – Changing system from the inside

Maria is talking about being an opposition activist in Russia, and than suddenly things changed when she became vice-governor in the social sector of Kirov region. She talks about her problems and how she tried changing the system from the inside, not breaking it but step by step changing the attitude of the people towards politicians, by listening and making reforms where needed and possible. When asked if she thinks a single person could make the difference, she is a strong believer that a single person can do a lot of things using different tools and techniques.

 

 

 

Chad Rogers – Tweeting isn’t enough

Chad Rogers is talking about tweeter and Facebook and other social media that is used by lots of people, what he’s saying about it that you need to be active for sure, but not on social networks because sharing some link or clicking the “Like” button isn’t an action, it is just an excuse for doing nothing. He also says “Remember why everyone hates politicians ? They keep talking but they are taking no action. The same might happen to you”. The word introduced by Chad is “slacktivism” .

 

Jennifer Brush – Moldovan Youth: Bricks into  the foundation of  the peace

Jennifer Brush is Head of the OSCE in Moldova. She’s talking about the Tighina bridge that can play the key factor of Moldova’s future if opened. There’s a plan of creating a series of European roads from Kiev to Istanbul – Corridor IX and Moldova is right into the center of this road – this road means prosperity and wealth and growing economics, now the bridge is closed because of our past conflict with Transnistria. Also she notice that there’s another organization that involves multiple countries in Danube zone which is also somehow interested in developing the transport routes, and Moldova can get the benefits that comes with that. She’s asking us at least to show to the governors that we’re aware of this problem. Let’s say it straight - I didn’t know about such plans and such organizations till Jennifer told us about those. Now that we’re aware of it what will change ? She answers that at least if this would be on 5th position in the social polls that would be great, and may be our governors will do something about it.

 

Dorin Dusciac – Nuclear physics danger comes from ignorance

A hilarious guy, he’s a research engineer at the French Atomic Energy Commission near Paris. He’s talking about the formulas and the concepts with such an ease that it is truly pleasant to watch him, plus he’s always making jokes. For example he explained about Roentgen and Sievert and than he said “So now everybody knows the difference between Roentgen and Sievert? Right. The Roentgen has beard, and Sievert hasn’t”. Than he talks about the myth that the wine is protecting us from the radiation and that is not correct because wine protects us only from one element in the radiation specter. Also he talks that if we fly pretty often than that dose of 1 mSv can be achieved pretty fast. For example if you get 7 flight of 7 hours you get the dose of radiation that is already higher than the yearly limit. Thanks Dorin, for a great presentation!   

Dmitry Volosin – Live projects

A serious person with a big experience in internet portals. A lot of ideas here, ok for starters he enumerated some of the components of a successful project: obsession, enjoying the project, accepting failures/deaths of the project. He says first projects are like calf's teeth but when those fall, from these small projects can grow big projects with a base already. On the question “Is it normal to lose obsession from time to time ?”, he says that it’s normal because we aren’t robots and these periods of sadness and desperation happen from time to time, but if you lost for good you obsession than sooner or later your project will die. “You should be on fire with this idea, like Jeanne d’Arc… but that isn’t the best example” A good presentation worth watching on YouTube.

 

 

 

What I would like to say in the end… Please come to these type of events, support this type of movements. Today in parallel with TED^x Chisinau, in our city was organized “VeloHora”, a great bike event, aside with it, near Opera and Ballet Theatre was running a minifootball European championship, today I felt that our city was really alive and I hope such events will occur more and more often,

Best of wishes.

X-Share – cool tutorial for learning Symfony2 Framework

Hello,

At the moment of writing this blog post I’m working in Pentalog, which is a computer and technology services company, focusing on low cost offshore/nearshore IT engineering and software development.

Few days ago I found out, that as a result of our summer internship program some of the developers from our company created a great tutorial called X-Share. Following this tutorial you’ll create a website, that permits sharing of some objects between the members of a group. As an example it could be sharing books, sharing of the discount cards, sports equipment, etc. This tutorial is open sourced and is on SourceForge.

I hope you guys will find it useful, because one of you right now could be searching for a practical example of a  Symfony2 working application. And a little disclaimer: although I’m very proud of what my colleagues have done and achieved, I wasn’t involved in any way in creation and developing of this tutorial, so all the credits goes to them.

P.S. It is great to see how open source community evolves, and I hope X-Share become your first place to show to your new junior PHP developer for learning Symfony2 basics.

Unified Udevi Symfony2 Plugin for NetBeans 7.2

Hello,

I’ve recently created the unified Udevi Symfony2 Plugin that contains both File Templates plugin as well as Code Templates plugin. This plugin is made for new version of NetBeans - 7.2. It passed the validation today so you can install it directly from NetBeans. Go to Tools –> Plugins –> Available plugins. You might need to update plugins info, so it will contain the latest list of validated plugins.

The content of the plugin remained the same, just uniting 2 templates content. The current statistic is

In the previous table I counted number of days that this extension is published in the NetBeans Plugins Center until today. So 2.5 downloads per day isn’t so bad I would say. Probably Symfony2 and NetBeans are a good combination and a lot of people know it. But 5.5 per day is definitely better. I guess now when it is validated in Plugins Center it will sustain current number of downloads per day

I would like to give a shout to first and I hope not the last person making 5 pull requests in total for those 2 plugins:

   Smeagol07     -       Thank you very much I hope that with the input of the community I will improve the quality of the product into something much bigger, than it is today.

 

I would also like to thank NetBeans team, because their 7.2 version has a higher performance than the previous version and made my plugin run much faster without lots of time for processing.

I’d also like to hear from you what else would you like to improve in your day to day job with Symfony2 and NetBeans and who knows may be I will be able to fulfill your expectations.

the bad part

While File templates are working fine, the code templates are not completely working, the only code templates that are working are for php editor, example action template, and others. First the code templates for Twig editor don’t work, I’ll see what I can do with it. Second the code completions for with doctrine annotations are not working, probably because for now I set them as a php documentor templates, may be I’ll need to set them as a php code templates.

The code source is here: https://github.com/Monomachus/UdeviSymfonyPlugin

If you have any questions or suggestions please share them in comments, it will be great to know what you’re thinking about it.

Support my feature request for WebMatrix: Possibility to add new file templates

Hello guys,

I used several time WebMatrix for the development using ASP.NET Web Pages, a lot lighter web technology than ASP.NET MVC. Recently I wanted to use WebMatrix 2 to learn Node.js development. Now there is a view engine in Node.js that is called JsHtml. JsHtml is a Razor-like view-engine that can be used with node.js or Express (node.js based Sinatra-like framework). Now back to the point: I saw that files with *.jshtml extension get no highlighting, though it should be similar with *.cshtml or *.vbhtml. I thought that may be I can create an extension for WebMatrix which will somehow call the highlighting engine. Another point would be creating specific JsHTML file template.
But it isn't restricted only to that. It creates and extension point in a free Microsoft product which is used by beginner devs or someone who wants to start playing with NodeJS a little bit.

Actually why I am telling you all these, I created a feature request at WebMatrix UserVoice: Possibility to add new file templates and I voted for it. You can maximum give 3 votes to a feature. Please vote for this feature too, it is important. I would really like these features to get in the top of requested features and than implemented in the final version of WebMatrix 2.

Plus I think these feature can be useful also for .NET devs and I hope you will support this feature request. Thank you.

Hibernate : Repeated column in mapping for entity error

Well I guess I need to explain this error so when I’ll get it one more time I’ll at least have a place to see where the problem was.

So I was having this problem because I’ve got an entity and also I’ve got a composed primary key entity that was embedded in the first one.

So let’s imagine I’ve had some GridPreferences entity, that had the GridPreferencesPK composed entity as a primary key which contained userId, and gridId.

GridPreferences.java

@Entity
@Table(name = "GRID_PREFERENCES")
public class GridPreferences extends BaseEntity{
    
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 6521799809955099787L;

    @EmbeddedId
    private GridPreferencesPK id;
    
    @Column(name = "GRPR_GRID_ROWS_PER_PAGE", nullable = false)
    private int rowsPerPage;

}

GridPreferencesPK.java

@Embeddable
public class GridPreferencesPK extends BaseEntity {
    
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 2499336910059865064L;

    @Column(name = "GRPR_USER_ID", nullable = false, precision = 8)
    private String userId;
    
    @Column(name = "GRPR_GRID_ID", nullable = false, precision = 250)
    private String gridId;
    
    @ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
    @JoinColumn(name = "GRPR_USER_ID", insertable = false, updatable = false)
    private User user;
}

Now I got this error  org.hibernate.MappingException: Repeated column in mapping for entity. Which isn’t exactly self-explanatory. But this time Hibernate got it right.

Basically it is an embedded primary key, so it would be logical that all the fields that are in the PK are the fields of the table itself, not the relation tables.

And the solution is to move the connections to other entities into base entity, in our example GridPreference. Doing that will solve the problem.

Hope this will help someone else too.