Scalable Internet Architectures
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
About four weeks ago, I have started reading and didn’t let it off my hands (i.e. eyes, I’ve read it online) until I was done with Theo Schlossnagle’s book - Scalable Internet Architectures. I did not write about this before, but the internship[ro] I’ve followed this summer brought some light into my fuzzy thoughts about what I want and what I would most like to do from a programmer’s point of view. And this is building scalable and distributed applications. The only problem with it is that I have somewhere near to no experience in this field. Thus, I have [...] Read more
Clickjacking - The Next Internet Threat
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
The days of SQL injections, XSS, XSRF and all of those browsing security threats will be made obsolete as soon as a new flaw in all major browser will be disclosed. Apparently, this is a very concerning issue. The flaw was to be revealed on Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Conference this end of September, but at the request of major vendors it was delayed. Little details is currently given by what this flaw truly means, but it is known to the public that: it’s not JavaScript related, so turning it off won’t help at all both Microsoft and Mozilla admitted that this [...] Read more
Stanford Online Courses
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
About two weeks ago, I’ve found out about Stanford new initiative of offering free online courses in engineering. The new project is called Stanford Engineering Everywhere and it currently offers 10 online courses, spread in three categories: Introduction to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Linear Systems and Optimization. I’m particularly interested in the first category and I’ve started watching the videos from these classes. At first, I thought I’ll be going through all of them, but then I’ve found out some are way basic stuff. However, I [...] Read more
Ubiquity - Mozilla’s way to make it easier
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
About 2 weeks ago Mozilla’s labs launched a new Firefox extension which brings us - the users - a lot of power and faster web browsing. In my personal opinion - after it hits a stable version - should be made a must-have extension or, why not, including it in the out-of-the-box code. I’m using it since it’s launch and I can honestly say it’s GREAT. Though it still has many bugs (like crashing when you want to translate all the page) - do not forget it’s a development version, not a stable one - you can try it and use it to boost up your speed in using the [...] Read more
Google Chrome - the new buzz
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
I’m writing a bit late about Google’s new Chrome browser because I first wanted to see people’s opinion about it, about it’s marketing strategy and about it’s technical details and then present a short discussion about all. First things first - technical details. I don’t want to recreate all posts that have been written about Chrome’s features, but I would like to emphasis one of them - separate processes for every tab you open. This a great thing and I, as a computer user, I’m ready to pay extra (resource-wise) for having this feature, so [...] Read more
Watch where you’re heading - Beyond Java
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
Thanks to my current employer, we have on-line access to one great tech library - the one from Safari (O’Reilly). So, between two tasks at my job, I started reading Bruce Tate’s excellent book Beyond Java. Up to the 5th or 6th chapter, there is a presentation of Java’s history, how come it became so popular over the years, where it succeeds, but most important where it miserable fails. The next chapters (or so I’ve read, I’m not quite there yet) presents most pertinent alternatives to it and why they’re better. I will shortly present the first chapters as [...] Read more
Python - String Interpolation
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
As I stated in my previous article, I’ve started a new Internship where the scripting language of choice is Python. The learning curve for this scripting language is very lean if you have in background at least one dynamic typed language (as Perl, PHP, etc.) and if not, you will be amazed how fast things can be done in one of these languages. Everything can be done very easy in Python, but I have to admit that the string interpolation part can suffer minor modification in order to improve it: Currently, you can either do string interpolation like in printf family style: name = [...] Read more
About me
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Me, Mixed, Projects
My professional life is listed in the following CV [...] Read more
Lenovo (former-former-former-IBM) - or why they should be ashame
Posted by Alexandru Palade | Filed under Tech
As I have started my internship last week I have received a brand new Lenovo notebook. We all know how great IBM’s and Lenovo notebooks are. At least until now, because with the lunch of their new IdeaPad Series they managed to blow it - big time. I personally own a ThinkPad T61 and you can not even compare with the new IdeaPad Series. I know that the series differ from their target users - but still, there is a big difference. For example, why the heck they’ve chosen to put the Home and End buttons (two keys most used by programmers) as a function key - i.e. you need to press [...] Read more