And this time it’s not about spending public money on crap, increasing taxes to pay astronomic salaries to some lazy ass MPs or being generally worthless. It’s much worse!

Today Romania signed ACTA. An international agreement which is so broad in scope and so evil that makes SOPA look like a plea to save the whales.

At least I’m not the only one.The following EU countries also signed it: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Same on them too.

Unlike SOPA / PIPA, ACTA was negotiated in secret. The public was deemed “too ignorant” to be involved in the talks. For the first time in modern history, democracy was left out on a global scale. If you’re unfamiliar with ACTA, just take a look at the clip below:

In a world where technological progress should be used to improve the quality of life for everyone, ACTA enslaves us all.

Cheap medicine could be banned under ACTA in order to protect the intelectual rights of big pharmaceutical companies. Under current legislation, a government in difficulty, for example facing an epidemic, if it can’t get the required medication at a reasonable price, can break patents and produce the drugs in order to save its population without fear of retaliation. Under ACTA, this will no longer be possible.

All internet traffic will be monitored in order to detect possible breaches in copyright. All confidential medical information, all the love letters sent via email, all the chat conversations in which you’re flirting with your hot co-worker, all your bank details, everything – and I do mean everything – will be scanned and recorded by your ISP.

Open source programs could be banned. Even if you’re a M$ fanboy / fangirl that only uses Winblows™, you still have to understand that the Internet runs on Linux and open source. Popular services such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia or WordPress run on open source and the Apache web server powers 60% of all the sites on the Internet.

You might even end up in jail for posting a video from your birthday party because some copyrighted music is playing in the background.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lazy-ass socialist. I truly believe in capitalism, but I also believe that everybody should have a fair chance of making a good living by hard and honest work. If legislation like ACTA gets enacted, the world will be split in the chosen few, wealthy individuals that will use legislation to kill any newcomer in their field with patents and copyright issues, an army defending them and the rest, with

Respect to Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia for not signing ACTA today. But for the rest of us, the fight is not yet lost. All international treaties have to be ratified so we can still stop this.

If you want to help, contact your representative and tell him / her that you don’t want such legislation ratified. The MPs are there to represent you and usually they tend to give in when they see their political carers threatened. If enough people contact them, they will not ratify ACTA and risk not being voted again.

Go to protests, if there are some in your area.

Do not engage in fights with the police. Do not attempt to DoS government agencies. Hacktivism is for hackers and security experts. Downloading the LOIC doesn’t make you a hacker and flooding some government website won’t help that much. And if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’re going to get caught and thrown in jail.

I was curious whether GoDaddy will join the protest, after the recent scandal which forced them to withdraw their support for SOPA / PIPA. They had the decency to stay out, which is good.

And a short clip outlining why people should support SOPA.

- Does it compile?
- Yes, but…
- Then ship it!!! Now!

I consider code refactoring a very important step of the development process, especially when dealing with strict deadlines and short iterations. When you receive today the specs for a project and the project manager tells you that the deadline is yesterday, you don’t have the time to properly implement all the design patterns, write documentation,

Unfortunately I have seen a lot of projects where nobody bothered to refactor the code as it was deemed uneconomic – “How will we explain this to the customer? Paying twice for the same thing…” – but most of the time the customer ends up paying several times more, because the development process becomes really slow, the deliverables become extremely buggy and the number of billed hours grows exponentially.

Or I just have a lot to learn about business practices and this is the desired way of doing development Who knows? Because I’ve seen this happening way to often.

After reading a letter from another developer which tells a story about a greedy & careless (like any other) manager who jeopardizes the life of several patients by sacrificing good practices in order to hit a deadline, “Uncle Bob” comes to the conclusion that software development should be a regulated profession. And here is where things become weird.

Who can regulate software development? Who is to say that John Doe is a good developer and James Doe a bad one!? Except the market?

And further more, how will this be done? Through academic assertion? Everyone will agree that this idea is incredibly dumb, as most industry icons don’t have college education. Here are some examples:

• Steve Jobs (dropped out)
• Bill Gates (dropped out)
• Larry Ellison (dropped out twice)
• Michael Dell (dropped out)

… just to name a few. Who can say that these people can’t work in technology because they didn’t pass some lame tests?

Or let’s just have an independent body – like the WWW Consortium – which regulates the industry. Who will fund it? I for sure am not going to pay a share of my salary to keep some boring bureaucrats in office just to tell me what I can and cannot write.

And what happens with new – yet unregulated – technologies? Can we use those? If a new framework appears, do we have to wait until it gets tested and approved? That could take years, the W3C is working on the HTML5 specs since 2004…

I agree that we all should be held accountable for our actions, but there are enough regulating bodies out there. If you’re developing medical software, then it should be clinically tested like any other medical equipment or if it’s software for cars, the bodies that issue car licenses will test it. The same for software managing nuclear power-plants or airplanes. In order to say that a nuclear reactor is safe to use, the people testing it will just have to test the software also – which I’m sure happens anyway.

If it fails, the company that wrote the software gets fined, the product is banned and the people involved get sacked. And if you get canned enough times, then nobody will hire you.

Problem solved, the profession is regulated. No bureaucracy needed!

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

…scary

I’ve compiled a list with all the stuff I usually do online, presented Google’s service and the service I’m using:

As it turns out, I’m not addicted to Google! I use some of Google’s services, but the only one I couldn’t live without is the search engine. But my question is what will happen when/if Google will control most of the services on the web? I mean when 90% of the users will use Google’s alternatives, will Google become the new Microsoft? Or they will keep to their “don’t be evil” creed?

What Google services do you use and what are the alternatives?

Why should we care? Well, without MySQL, the web would be much different than it is today. Popular open source applications like WordPress and Drupal, millions of websites and applications rely on MySQL. A lot of start-up companies use MySQL in order to cut down costs and not invest in expensive, proprietary RDBMSs.

But we, the people, have the power to stop it by writing to the EC in order to block the transaction. Read what Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL’s creator, has to say on the matter: Help saying MySQL.

PS: Do you know the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God knows He’s not Ellison…

With a population of about 5 million – the same as a medium sized Chinese village – and GDP per capita above that of Germany or France, Finland can make this move quite easy. It’s already a highly industrialised country, which places great emphasis on technology. As society is relies more on the Internet, a right to an Internet connection derives from other “older” human rights. Just have a look over the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and see how many of those rights we exercise online nowadays: information, education, free speech, and so on.

Unfortunately I live in Romania, were people have more bronze age preoccupations than broadband access to the Internet. For instance, these days we have a great religious festival, the days of Saint Demeter – protector of the country or something – and people stand for days in queues that stretch for kilometres to get to kiss the saint’s earthly remains. Yes, you’ve read it right. They endure the cold for days at a time to kiss a several hundred years old corpse. The Internet is still being frown upon as a tool of the Devil in some rural areas.

I’m waiting to see with country will be next. Perhaps another country of the Nordic Council? Japan, Dubai? We’ll see…

• Starting a new project: Rammstein – Sonne
• Taking over a project originally started by a junior programmer: Nightwish – Wish I had an angel
• I’m assigned to 5 years old project that uses really old technologies and frameworks: Weird Al Yankovich – Amish paradise
• Looking over a Perl script written by somebody else: Prodigy – Voodoo people
• After a long meeting with the project manager: Zebda – Hasta siempre
• Debugging (first 30 minutes): Rammstein – Ich will
• Debugging (after 30 minutes): Prodigy – Fire starter
• Looking for security flaws: MC Hammer – Can’t touch this
• When I see a QA guy heading for my desk: Nana – He’s coming
• When the project goes online: Britney Spears – Ops, I did it again (just kidding ) I’m having a brew and listen to Irish Rovers – Star of the county down

What do you listen to while coding?