Check out this interesting piece of code:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void(0);

Pasted into the address bar of browsers like IE6, IE7, FF2 (haven't tested on others, but I think it should work on most) it allows the editing of HTML directly on the page. You can expand and shrink HTML elements, you can edit text, etc.

While on Internet Explorer the changes are not saved if you save the page, on FireFox you get spell checking while editing (with red underlines for unrecognized words) and you can save the changes with save page.

It's really weird, check it out.

I just finished watching a very cool documentary, called The Human Behavior Experiments, that I highly recommend seeing. It describes some of the mechanisms of the human mind that make us behave inhumainely, or iresponsibly and the experiments to expose them. I found very interesting the information on Wikipedia about these experiments and I will post a list of links below.
Doing the research, I've stumbled upon sites that describe (or plainly show the pictures) of the Abu Ghraib tortures. Those links I will not publish, but you can easily use Google to find them yourselves. It is incredible that after those things got published, people still support any war or detention center at all. The movie I was telling you about explains how things like blind obedience or difussion of responsibility function in most of us, ordinary people.

Links:
The Human Behavior Experiments
The Milgram Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Das Experiment
Abu Ghraib abuses
The Bystander Effect
Asch conformity experiments
Depersonalisation
Responsibility diffusion

Telemarketing is already embedded in the western popular culture, but in Romania, we didn't have it until recently, and only very rarely. Usually they didn't want to sell stuff, but to poll opinion. So I was immediately annoyed when a authoritative male voice started to talk to me about increasing the money I get from my insurance. That annoyance increased when the voice continued "if you want to... bla bla bla, press 1". They didn't even bother to put a human to give the phone calls, it was all automated. Swearing at a machine would have been ridiculous, so they took away the only possible emotional outlet. They have denied my anger!

So of course I resorted to THE BLOG [lots of echo here] to shout my frustration! But since I have worked with telephony in my days, I thought "wait a minute, there is a solution". I could strike back. First of all, I would install an answering system that requests the user to press a key. "If you are a telemarketer, fuck off, if you are a human being, press 9". Then add the tone of the key "1" and repeat the message. But then again, why would I bother, for one lousy telemarketer? Because they took away my outlet! I want it back, damn it!

One of the issues that largely remains unsolved in AJAX applications is the ability to bookmark (say, add to the Favourites) the page with all the AJAX added info on it. This very cool javascript library allows one to save the state of the page using the window.location.hash variable, which holds the string after the # character, also called a hash.
Javascript can modify and read this value with no refresh of the page. Also, if you have anchors in your page, like... <a name="hash" Javascript code like

window.location.hash='hash';

will scroll the page there.

I have this Web User Control that has a simple function of displaying a customised grid and fill it with data. Since I had to email the rendered HTML I've added a static method to the Web User Control that would render itself based on some parameters. However, in Net 2.0 one cannot dynamically use the types declared in the codebehind of a user control or page inside another control or page, only types declared in App_Code. In pages this gets solved as in the link above, but what do you do when you want to use the type inside a class in App_Code or, like I needed to, in a web service (where register directives are not allowed)?

In my case, there were two solutions. One is to create a page that loads the user control and nothing else, then read its html. That solves the problems of using the code, but adds security issues. I have to either add a security mechanism to the page or allow anyone to render the UserControl. The second solution, the one that I ended up implementing, is to use reflection.

Let's recap. I have the web user control, let's call it Wuc, and I have the static method Wuc.GetHtml(int i) that I must access from a Web Service. If I write
string s=Wuc.GetHtml(i); it doesn't get to compile, returning the error "The name 'Wuc' does not exist in the current context".

So I do something like this:

and I get the object I need to get the type of. Then I should get a reference to the method I want so I try:



which should work, but it doesn't!

Why not? Because the type of the object is not Wuc is wuc_ascx and it's the dynamically generated ASP.NET type. I get all the methods of Wuc, but not the static ones! So, the (really ugly) solution is to make the method not static and use this code:



which finally works.

Update
Scott Gu was nice enough to respond to my request on how to do this. He has this blog entry that explains how to render a control in NET 2.0 within an ASP.NET Ajax environment, but what really connects with my blog entry is this archive and the ViewManager object. Scott uses here the Page.LoadControl method (here is why) to load the control and Server.Execute instead of RenderControl.

I've just remembered that I had to write a long overdue blog entry about the dogs of Bucharest. Bucharest is an old European city, meaning that it grew with the needs of the people, starting from a little village and becoming Romania's capital. A lot of things happened here, like the world wars. During the war a lot of pets were left homeless and ownerless and became street mutts. That created in time a large population of dogs, living in packs, having their own territory and so on and so on.

Now, fast forward to the Basescu era. This guy was so frustrated that Bucharest was not looking like most western European capitals, that he focused on transforming Bucharest, starting with what he probably saw while he was abroad. That meant getting rid of dogs and boutiques and street merchants, amongst other things. Well, I went for a small tour of Europe a while ago, and I didn't like it. All the cities were barren, like lifeless stone deserts, where you could only pay a lot of money for the smallest amount of food or walk aimlessly looking at old buildings. Basescu wanted to turn Bucharest into this.

A lot of people were for this getting rid of dogs business, while in the mean time, animal lovers were crying against it. In order to truly make a decision, one must know what the dogs of Bucharest are like. Most of them are very friendly, they let people pet them, while begging for food or attention. They are not wild animals, but liberated pets, and they act more like pets that way. Some of them, organised in packs, tend to become very territorial, defending their turf with loud barks and sometimes (when the human doesn't get it) with bites. Because of this kind of behaviour, most Bucharest dwellers agreed with the dog removal. But most dogs were having a very adapted life to the city. They had families, ways to get food that included being nice to humans as well as hunting and eating rats and, don't laugh, a culture of their own. I do say that because I have watched them behave and along with their natural instinctive behaviour and the stuff they learned during their life, they also exhibited learning and teaching abilities. I have seen mother dogs showing their pups how to grovel or how to cross the street and avoid cars.

But what does this say about us? That we want to destroy what we fear and don't understand. Even the more aggressive dog packs would not attack a human that doesn't provoke them and that faces them. A simple trick like walking backwards (and not trying to show the human superiority by kicking dogs or by throwing stones at them) would have left even a 20 dog strong pack barking, but not biting. And this kind of aggressive dog behaviour can be immediately fixed in each particular case. No, instead we chose to "nuke" the dogs, making us worse than the most bite happy mutt pack out there.

No dogs means also no life on the streets, no puppies except the ones in pet shops (the expensive ones that you have to buy because they have a pedigree and that get sick really easy), more rats. In some of the western countries that people like Basescu so blindly admire, dogs are being used in anger management programs in prisons. Taking care of an animal, just looking at a friendly, uncomplicated creature that craves your attention, gives us something that fights off anger and rage. We have enough rage in Bucharest, alright, but the dogs may soon be gone.

I am not a media person, so I usually don't use pictures or videos, but this is really cool. Check out how you can map a picture to a 3D model and then change the attributes to suit your needs.

It appears NASA has used the metric system extensively since 1990, but now they've decided to not use anything else. NASA finally goes metric, so what a good oportunity to rant this is.

How about the funding? In 2002 the entire NASA funding was less than 15 billion, in 2006 it reached 16.5 billion. The total cost of the war in Iraq is 350 billion and climbing, with an estimated 600 billion in 2010. The International Space Station seems lost in bureaucracy limbo, and this site suggests the highly inflated figure of its cost reaches 100 billion. So what does that mean? That we could have skipped the Iraq war altogether and build six space stations instead? I am sure this is not the case. Because actually building six stations instead of one would have used only once the cost of design, aproximately the same people and each part would have been built cheaper than the ones before. Critics say that the cost of the ISS goes well above the first cost estimations and compare it to MIR, which has cost only 4.3billion. Well, that may be true, but doesn't that mean that we could have skipped the war in Iraq altogether (well, actually not all of it, Kuweit still had to be liberated) and build over 100 MIR stations?! Or finance 30 years of NASA budgets!

Well, had to be done. I feel much better now. Thank you, I will pay for the damages.

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself some ear plugs, the kind that you stick into your ears, they expand like a sponge, and filter all but the loudest or low frequency sounds. At the time I was half ashamed of my reasons for buying it; first of all I planned to use them in bed, when I wanted to read and my wife wanted to browse the TV channels; second of all I wanted to filter out chit-chatting women and teensters from the tramway or buses. Yeah, I know, I sound like a grumpy old man, and that was the reason I was half ashamed of doing this.

However, now, after testing this new gadget and finding new applications every day, I am happy I made the purchase. I can read on my way to work in total silence, even with people talking and laughing as hard as they can in order for others to notice them, or people listening to music so loud on their headphones that you can't escape the sound even if moving further away. These babies even filter out the manele ring tones, spat out loudly by the latest model of cell phone.

Today I was especially glad I had my plugs on, since I boarded a bus that had the radio on. Pop music, silly monotone dance rhythms, loud and useless commercials that are even more spammy than spam email for the single reason you can't close your ears... they all went away. I now have that smug feeling of superiority about my ear plugs as I have about TV after getting Internet broadband and only downloading what I want and refusing to gulp all the idiotic programming the popular stations feed us.

Ear plugs rock!

I have always been fascinated by the concepts of Artificial Intelligence. I truly think that computerised brains are the next step of evolution, as biology (hindered by outdated morals, also) will never develop or evolve quickly enough. But enough of that.

I was thinking the other day of artificial neural networks, the electronic analogy to a brain, and the fact that for N neurons, you get to have N*M connections, where M is the average number of connections a neuron makes, which are in fact the important parts.

Click for details

Let's assume that we can simulate exactly a human neuron on a computer. We would have to have 100 billion of these simulated neurons to simulate a brain. Each neuron would have to be connected to at least 10000 others. That means one million billion connections. Imagine you could put the entire information of a neuronal link on a single byte and you would still need 1000 TB of storage. Multiply this value with the real number of bytes necessary to encode the information of a neural link. But it doesn't stop here. You would need to update this entire huge quantity of data in real time, as the brain itself is a parallel processor, not a sequential one.

Now, this is only an idea, Haven't thought it through, but if history is anything to go by, I will quickly forget it, so I'll just write it up. What if we could use a discreet interval for describing neural connections? Kind of like when paying money. You make thousands of payments every day, but you use only a finite number of coin and banknote values. Assume you want to operate a change on a neural link. You want to weaken it and make it twice less important or you want to make it twice as strong. Imagine the link is a money value, like 1$. Then you would weaken it to 50 cents or make it a strong 2$. But there is no two dollar bill, so you create another one dollar link.

The advantages of this, as far as I thought of it, are that you would have 10000 or more connections for each neuron, but only 6 or 10 types of them. So instead of operating 10000 operations, you would use only one operation per type. It also allows for different link operations, not only multiplications (as neural weights normally are used for). Maybe type 1 through 5 performs multiplications, but type 6 makes a logarithmic operation or something.

So the main advantage is that the entire structure can be scaled better. The only thing I can compare this with is a supermarket chain. You have thousands of customers and millions of transactions, but you have only three loyalty card types and only ten demographic groups that you compute your strategy on.

Now, of course, I will have to figure out the math of it, which I was never particularly good at, and the first problem I see is that each neuron will have to have its own neural neighbourhood lists and that might prove trickier than just making a note of each connection. However, since connections can only be of a certain type, compression of neural data is much easier, operations faster, as each list functions as an information index in a database.

Maybe all this is something trivial for a neural network scientist or I am just full of useless thoughts, but I'll note them nonetheless.

I've created a small section of posts from my favourite blogs. Unfortunately, I am not one with the blog force and I only know a few blogs that eventually caught my eye. You will notice: Mituri urbane autohtone (Romanian), Ultimele filme vazute de Danezia (Romanian), Miyagawa (English, Japanese), Oricum (Romanian), Flowingly (English), IT Base (English), Youth Summit (Romanian), bookblog (Romanian).

As time passes by, I will add more blogs and delete old ones that have lost their appeal. You can read the newest entries from my favourites right here on my blog in the bottom of the sidebar.

Learn how to multiply any two numbers (preferably with small digits) by drawing lines on paper.

Also check this out: Another Graphical Multiplication Trick

It's easy! Write a lot of bullshit about how to get rich quickly using simple steps and with no effort. Explain in an 8 part article that says absolutely nothing how putting AdSense in your blog can increase your income. Tell everyone about it, making sure they know they will earn a huge amount of money just by reading your blog entry about getting rich. Explain how people earn lots more money than your six digit figure from blogging, but they don't share their secret for success, only you do. Then just enable AdSense in your blogspot account and see money pouring in! It's easy, simple steps, no effort... bla bla bla

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