One world, multiple perspectives

Dan : Monday - 21 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:31:23 PDT

Hi there, I'm out of a long weekend, "interrupted" by a work day. Here, in Germany, Thursdays May 17Th was a bank day, Friday a "work break" and then back in weekend.

On Thursday, I went with my family on a bike-ride to BergTierpark, on a very nice route. The park was beautiful, full of parents with their kids,with lots of playgrounds, toys and different activities for children. My daughter was very happy and had alot of fun playing there. I recommend this place, not only if you have kids. It's really nice, with a very beautiful view of the Alps and a good beer garden. The picture below is to convince you :)

In weekend we were, again biking around the city, this time we picked the north east side. After around 1 hour we arrived at the Riem neighborhood, next to the Munich Expo (Messestadt Ost). Beautiful place, modern town houses and I guess is one of the newest parts of the city. Everything is built in the American way: grid street structure, geometrical shape forests, and a dedicated (artificial - I think) lake. We stopped there, and relaxed our feet in the cold water, enjoyed the view, before continuing our bike-trip.

Also during this relaxing weekend, I revived and older idea of mine. A game idea and to be more precise a MMORTS type of game. The difference from the old approach is the backend itself. Inspired by the general Erlang approach, I redesign it completely, converting it to a live / multi-process type.

Just to give you a small insight into it, I can say the following: being a strategy game, and having a map where stuff will happen, the map will have tiles. In this case each tile will be a process, that will handle all the messages that he receives from the game and each player. So a tile will handle its content and will trigger events and receive messages from whoever tries to use it. Also, by having this approach, of each tile being a "live" entity, I removed completely the database layer. Each tile loads itself from a file and is save only if there are changes on it and at a predefined time interval. As results I can tell you that I handled over 50.000 tiles with a load of 3.4 on my laptop. Once I have a more active way and I can simulate actions (by developing the "Army engine" and the "Player engine"), I will try with million scale numbers.

All the best until the next time.

Dan: Wednesday - 16 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:07:29 PDT

Hi there my non-existing readers. Today I will tell you a little about one of my projects that I working on in my free time. It's based on Erlang and it represents a simulation of a neural network. I will not bore you with programming details or specifics, but I will try to describe the whole idea, concept and what observations I have on this topic.

So what I am building?

I am building what is called a neural network. This represents a set of entities, that store one "memory" and are linked between them. The system has one entry point from which the memory chain starts. All the memories are connected between them based on the "last action" principle. So a "memory" will link to another memory that followed on the time line. All the memories are unique, so data will not be duplicated. To be sure this is happening, there is a process of searching a memory before it is created as a new one and linked to the chain. So this could generate self references or closed chains of memories.

How do I search, without infinite loops?

Initially I had this problem: when searching for a memory I was getting into a endless loop. "Why?" you would ask. So let me tell you how searching works. The entry point neuron is asked if he contains the searched memory. If not, he will ask the next linked neurons. These neurons will check their content and ask each individually their connections, until the neuron that contains the data is found, and send a message back to the "requester". All the other search chains dies if the end neurons of the chain has no connections. But, in some cases the search can go in circles for ever. So at first I added a TTL or Time To Live mechanism, which counted how many levels will be sent in the neuronal structure. When each neuron passed the information to the next neurons it decreased the TTL with one. So after a number of steps, the search will die, and the searcher after a defined timeout will consider that the search has failed and create a new memory.

After some tests, I realized that I could optimize this process. So I added to the message sent for the search, a list of neuron nodes, that this message had passed through. This way, if a neuron find itself in this list, it means that the search had already passed through him once, and it will close this search chain. In some cases some neurons could close several search chains, depending on how the data is stored and linked. Because a node can be referenced by multiple other nodes and can be part of several neuronal circles.

At this moment this is my state of the project. But what will be done next?

Create a receiver. This will be an element, that will have a fixed type of input that will create memories, that will be passed to the neuronal network. Just to understand what this is, it might be a light detector that sends 1 or 0 if light is on or off, or a news parser that reads news or texts from a webpage and so on..
Create a trunk. This will be an element that will condense memories from several receiver if needed. For example having multiple light detectors, this trunk will condense them in one list of values, or like a small image. This is very helpful when you might want to simulate an eye or the tactile sense of a finger.
Create a processor. This will be an element, that will try to abstract memories, and will try to see if memories are alike, similar and set a grade for this comparison. This will offer the possibility to look for similar memories.
Tandem memories. I will have to figure it out, how I can store multiple memories that happens in the same time, but from different receivers. This will be a very critical step, because most of the human behavior is developed around this.

Let's talk a little about Tandem Memories. I don't know if you ever try to analyze your own brain functions. If you, for example look at a tree and it starts moving from left to right, you brain will react by telling you that the wind is blowing and you might have a preemptive feeling that the wind will arrive any moment. This is done by associating the image / set of images with the wind feeling on your skin, event that happened since you were born. Same effect can be observed with music and events. I used to listen a specific band every time I was riding my bike. Now if listen to that band, I will remember parts of images that I've seen during my biking. This also can apply vice-versa, if I bike, in similar conditions that I did in the past, parts of songs or lyrics will come to my mind.

Stay tuned. To be continued ...

Dan: Tuesday - 15 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:21:00 PDT

This morning, while I was travelling by S-Bahn, on my way to work, I realized that there is no S-Bahn train with the number S5. There are from S1 to S4 and from S6 to S8. Then with a little brain power, I realized that there is none, because the S5 might look like SS which is a Nazi symbol. People here have a serious mental problem, and a huge guilt. I don't say that that is not deserved or that they did something good in the past, but it's way too much, which transforms into an obsession.

I personally think that this is a imposed guilt and motivated by the Americans or whoever started this pointing fingers. I never heard of another nation having a similar huge guilt of massacre on other nations, and here I will give you some documented examples:

Around 50 million orthodox people were massacred in the Easter Europe by Ottoman Empire and other
1.5 Million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Empire
The millions killed by Spanish conquistadors (Civilizations completely destroyed)
Millions American Indians killed by the British colonists.

The list can continue. The whole humanity is characterized by the desire to mass kill your enemy, without any reason. The whole human nation should bare a guilt and feel responsible, not blaming one nation, and judging everybody, based on their history. We need to evolve and look behind all the pain generated by our ancestors and learn that all united can become more than all separate.

I would be very surprised how the whole left or right wing groups will react if humanity would meet another civilization, or even get in a conflict with that. Will they transcend race variation and unite against a xenoc? Most of existing humans, view their universe from such a closed and limited view. Now I realize that the whole current capitalist economy is a nice approach to control the masses, but giving them the perspective of liberty and freedom. It enslaves your mind and keeps you occupied by providing so many options to choose from and to fight for.

Dan: Monday - 14 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:19:38 PDT

Today I quote a person from my G+ circles which wrote a very interesting piece, that made me think...

"Freedom is a strange thing. There are many who feel they should be free to take what they want. There are others who feel trapped because they can’t express themselves because of prejudice.

Democracy leads to the freedoms of the few being curtailed by the opinions of the many. In some ways that can be a good thing, but in others it can be bad. I sometimes wonder whether an empathic dictator is not a better form of government that mob rule by the fear-driven masses, but the problem is, an empathic person wouldn’t be interested in rule; they would be too busy trying to help to help themselves to a throne.

I wonder, sometimes, as to how free I truly am, and how many of the chains that bind me are of my own creation.

I know I’m free to do many things, but I also know that I’m chained more so by my own morality than by the laws of the land. I think the ultimate way I know I’m free, is when the laws of the land and the chains of my own morality are not in conflict with each other. If I feel no moral objection to something, then I should not be prohibited from doing it.

Of course, there are criminals who feel no morality whatsoever, but then, some people should not be free."

Dan: Weekend - 12 & 13 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Mon, 14 May 2012 01:03:38 PDT

The weekend that had past was interesting and quite active. Starting from Friday afternoon when I mowed the lawn with my first gasoline based mower, I realized that living in a house with garden is a "little" bit more difficult than any other situation. It took me around half an hour to drive the "big monster" around all the edges and trees and to create in the end, the perfect lawn (or almost :) ). During that time my daughter Karla played in the garden with a bucket (child size) with water. Everything was happening on the concrete stairs in front of the entrance. At some point I stopped and admired her, how she played and took some pictures. Some years in the future, the pictures made will be a very good childhood reminder. Friday was finalized with a very nice barbecue, where the main attraction were the "Franken Sausages" which were brought by the girlfriend of our house owner. We all ate , laughed and spoke German, which in the end I realized that was a nice accomplishment. Also I would like to mention that our daughter as little as she is, manage to go by herself with a 3 wheel roller. We were all amazed on how fast she learned how to do it.

On Saturday, me and my wife did an overall house cleaning. A hard working process that took as almost a full day. It was nice that we all contributed, and made the whole thing to happen faster and with better results. It was an exhausting work to : arrange things in the house, vacuum, clean the dust, clean all the windows and furniture glass / mirrors, wash and sanitize all the sandstone in the kitchen and bathroom, wash and sanitize the complete bathroom and kitchen.

On Sunday morning we went for 4 hours biking and about 35 km distance. As always I was impressed by the bike tracks near the roads, and their availability and conditions. We went from where we live (suburbs) to city center and back on a different route. The weather was optimal, and partially windy. All the trees were green and most of them had very nice flowers. It was a perfect relaxation process and not too tiring. In the afternoon, together with my wife, we digged a new vegetable garden, where we planted some tomatoes, paprika and strawberries. It was extremely hard, and now my body hurts in all the places, but the end result was satisfactory.

Dan: Friday - 11 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:15:22 PDT

Starting from today, my wife will also contribute to this blog, so I made some basic changes that will bring even more content to the "not existing" public :).

Yesterday I made a very big decision of my life and future. I hope that all will work well and provide a better future. Nothing is sure, but as it is said "the hope is the last one that dies".

This morning during the coffee and breakfast, I was remembering together with my wife, some of our first memories in Munich. It is surprisingly how fast a human can adapt to better life conditions. I remember the first time when we were walking around the city and were amazed by the civilization and beauty of it. Now all seems in place and as expected. "We are transforming" and slowly loosing the grasp on what we were and where are we coming from.

To keep my motivation that brought me here, everyday I try to admire and enjoy the beauty of the surrounding places. Yes all cities have bad people, bad areas or dirty ones. "But some forest have more sick trees than other". By this occasion I would like to say a thank you to the city of Munich and congratulate myself for working hard to get where I am now.

Even my memory patterns changed since I moved here. All the songs / albums / bands that I listen have local Munich memories and visual pictures attached to them. The perception of the world around is changing and I give more attention to my diet, environment, physical exercise and mind relaxation. As a cause to all of this, is the lack of worries for the day of tomorrow. I don't know how many of you ever lived in that kind of environment (and I don't refer here to Romanians). Now the life for me is simpler and I can focus my attention to other "less relevant" things.

Time to continue with some not so attractive and boring work...

Dan: Thursday - 10 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:54:06 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Manage to keep my productivity with a huge head pain
Linked my blogger account with analytics and with feed burner and with webmaster tool

Likes

The quote "A true leader does not create followers... It creates more leaders" - J. Sakiya Sandifer

A true leader inspires and helps you evolve, not enslaves you

The view of Alps from the S-Bahn every morning when I go to work

Ideas

I tried to comprehend the world capitalist economy by minimizing it. I realized that something is broken or my logic is a total fail. Let's take this example:

A business has 10 employees and produces per month 20 products of type A
Each employee is payed 5 coins
The cost of running the business is 50 coins per month
So the company to sustain itself must sell the 20 products with 50 coins + at least 1 coin to have some profit. For round number sake let's make the total sell value of 20 products to be 60 coins
The price of a product will be 3 coins
Each employee by simplification will need at least 2 products of type A per month for his life.
But as you can calculate it can afford only one per month, and once two months 2 products.
And all if explodes based, on the fact that the business needs to have a profit, so the owner will earn without producing.
So the unbalance and insufficiency in the world is generated by the unproductive employees, or management.
Hmm....

Dan: Wednesday - 09 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:54:15 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Moved my wordpress blog to the blogger of google. Pretty impress

Likes

Blogger as a blog platform
Clean, fast and slim web interfaces

Ideas

Build some ergonomic furniture
I guess will quit skype soon

Dan: Tuesday - 08 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:55:54 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Got a full grasp on the new ExtJS Architect
Added a predictor module to the Erlang Neural Network project

Likes

http://www.skyjackergame.com/ a nice SCI-FI flight game

Ideas

My creativity is idle today

Dan: Monday - 07 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:01 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Got back in force into ExtJS
Created the page for my Erlang project on this website

Likes

Nothing to like today

Ideas

Create a public neuronal network, that people could interrogate and contribute to (and it's not Google :) )

Dan: Friday - 04 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:06 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

My brain is compatible with Erlang ideology and structure
Started and built version 0.1 of a neural network in Erlang

Likes

I started to like wearing shirts
http://www.game2112.com - a nice futuristic game

Ideas

Build a neural network in Erlang

Dan: Thursday - 03 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:11 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Started to learn Erlang

Likes

https://www.jinx.com/LEGOminecraft - The new lego package for Minecraft
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seanpollman/kinetic-void - A nice game project, hope they get the financing
https://www.getfractal.com/ - a Web tool for validating email templates in multiple email clients, nice job.

Ideas

Build a distributed backend for any mmo / single universe games

Dan: Wednesday - 02 May 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:17 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Nothing special so far and no challenges

Likes

https://cubify.com/index.aspx - yet another 3D printer, funky
http://www.prometheus-movie.com/ - a very nice sci-fi movie.

Ideas

Buy a house :)

Dan: Friday - 27 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:22 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

When create a date object in Javascript the month starts from 0 .. WTF?!
Changed my Wordpress to support G+ schema when posting an article
In PHP you could use empty function to check inside deep arrays like if(!empty($arr['one']['level2']['level2'])) without worrying about keys or exceptions.

Likes

http://www.tinkerforge.com/ a nice website for buying electronic brick. Also have Wi-Fi mash connectivity brick.

Ideas

To build space launch platforms but in steps of altitude, that could hover earth at several heights, and be reachable with helicopters, or planes or autonomous drones. Less fuel consumed and more accessible for commercial space

Dan: Thursday - 26 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:41 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Nothing awesome

Likes

Google Drive
http://www.solidoodle.com - a price efficient 3D printer for any home user

Ideas

Making a delivery system using quadrocopters and automated processes.
I could use a 3D printer to create parts for my robotics ideas

Dan: Wednesday - 25 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:45 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Estimated work of 2 days done in half a day

Likes

The ProsiebenSat1 offices

Ideas

No inspiration today

Dan: Tuesday - 24 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:50 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Just an usual day

Likes

http://www.stratocam.com a closer view on maps
http://www.spacevidcast.com/ the future of space
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ about logics, nice work

Ideas

Today I lack inspiration (maybe because of the rainy weather)

Dan: Monday - 23 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:54 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

In JS for better document handling instead of document.write() to append a script should be used DOM approach document.createElement("script")
Add the statement: debugger; anywhere in your code. Firebug will stop code execution at that line(debugger;), allowing you to inspect variables and step through your code line-by-line.

Likes

How alps are visible from where I live

Ideas

Create a commercial backend in Erlang for game companies

Dan: Friday - 20 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:56:59 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Migrated a full bacbone.js app to use requireJS in 5 hours

Likes

http://www.googlestore.com/ the Google store with funky stuff
More "love" for the backbone.js
Weekend is coming

Ideas

Empty today :)

Dan: Thursday - 19 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:06 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Used Zend_Locale to normalize a number between DE and EN and viceversa

Likes

http://store.thecorpora.com/index.php/home - A very nice open source robot based on Linux
Found out that Munich is on place 10 out of 400 in the list of cities with best quality of life in the world.

Ideas

No ideas today

Dan: Wednesday - 18 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:11 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Nothing relevant today

Likes

Nothing interesting to like

Ideas

A nice web layout for the shopping list module for my project

Dan: Tuesday - 17 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:32 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Learned how to setup a git repo

Likes

Unterföhring

Ideas

A small app, that will store and provide IOU for the masses, just enter a short code or bump to phones, and keep your friends IOU tabs
A nice modular, club idea, with face recognition at entry and high tech settings

Dan: Monday - 16 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:36 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Learned more BackboneJS

Likes

Paramore - Music band
BackboneJS - Making JS frontend programming life, way more easy

Ideas

Build a game as a combination of Lego and Transport Tycoon

Dan: Friday - 13 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:46 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Changed this blog theme and fix some layout issues
When using Zend response to set headers and have layouts disabled be sure that the return data is packed into the response and not echoed from any object / action

Likes

http://www.rdio.com - nice online music library with nice features
http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google_gravity/ Nice gravity like page made in HTML 5 , I guess

Ideas

To learn Erlang and find out more about parallel programming

Dan: Thursday - 12 April 2012

harabagiu.dan@gmail.com (Dan Harabagiu) — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:57:51 PDT

Achievements / Knowledge

Zend_Session::rememberMe() resets the Session ID

Likes

the new Google+ look and redesign. It's beautiful but can be improved.
http://www.walkme.com nice idea, and functionality
http://www.blb.info/ good travel information for the Bechtesgaden region

Ideas

Making above any / every parking lot a electric solar panel, to charge the resting vehicle, or cumulative in community power grid