Moving out

Welcome... and good bye! I've moved my blog to my own server. Click below to go to the new blog.

Dan Dascalescu's blog.

Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8 deleted all my files!

Now how lame of a title is that?

Unfortunately, that's what happened. I've been having problems with Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8 for a while and decided today to uninstall it from my desktop PC, delete the partnership with my PDA, and install ActiveSync 4.1, which is available but not published yet by Micro$oft.

This is exatly what I did:
Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs
Click on Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8
Click on Change/Remove
Click Yes at the prompt
Click NO at the prompt about deleting synchronized files

... and IsUninst.exe started to methodically and silently erase every single file and folder on my C: drive, except for those that were in use (the TrueCrypt drive, thankfully).

I was reading some stuff while (I had hoped) ActiveSunk hauled itself out of my Windows, until I realized that some icons disappeared off the desktop (it had wiped out %HOMEPATH%\Desktop). I refreshed the desktop and all but the standard icons (My Computer, Recycle Bin etc.) had disappeared. A quick check of the free space on C: revealed that 150 GIGABYTES OF DATA WERE GONE, and the free disk space increased continuously.

I quickly killed the IsUninst.exe task and the deletion stopped. The files were actually deleted, not moved to the Recycle Bin.

After a few minutes of absorbing the shock and internalizing the bare fact that 150Gb of my files were trashed, I pulled the plug on the desktop PC (best thing to do so as not to write anything on the affected disk) and moved to the laptop, which is now the hard-disk-crash-recovery lifeboat.

Now I'm left with an almost "empty" 216Gb hard drive partition, NTFS formatted and chock-full of files I need recovered. And it's 4am.

Life, is picking up speed

This post was moved to Dan Dascalescu's new blog.

Communist Childhood

The following is my English translation of an excellent Romanian here about the childhood of Generation X (those born between the 60's and the 80's). Although the reality described is specific to Romania, I believe that if you are a GenX'er, you can find some resemblances with your golden childhood, from wherever you lived.

How could we possibly have we survived our childhood?

If you were a child in the '60s, '70s or at the beginning of the 80's, how did you manage to survive?

1. Since we were kids, we rode in cars and buses that had no safety belts or airbags
   
   
2. A ride in the back of an open pick-up truck was a very special trip and a memory of a lifetime
   
   
3. Our cradles were vividly painted and all the paint was lead-based
   
   
4. There were no safety caps for drug bottles, no safely locks for medical cabinets
   
   
5. We rode our bicycles without helmets, knee pads or elbow pads
   
   
6. We didn't throw away the candy that we accidentally dropped on the ground
   
   
7. We didn't wash our hands three times with disinfectant after playing with all the dogs and cats in the neighborhood
   
   
8. We drank water from the well in the garden, not from a bottle of purified mineral water
   
   
9. We spent days building go-carts from scraps of metal, and launched ourselves downhill without breaks
   
   
10. We went out to play with only one condition: be back home before dark
    
    
11. We went to school in the morning, dropped by home to eat, then went out to play. We didn't have pagers or cell phones, so nobody knew where we were...
    
    
12. We broke bones, cut ourselves or lost teeth, but we never looked for someone to blame or sue. It was our fault.
    
    
13. We ate biscuits, bread and butter, drank juices with sugar, fat and additives and has no extra weight because we were out playing all day
    
    
14. We shared one bottle of juice among 4 friends and nobody got an infection from that
    
    
15. We didn't page, text, SMS or call ourselves to go out. We whistled from outside the house
    
    
16. Out there, in a world without guardians, we had team games, soccer, hide-and-seek, and not everyone got selected or won, but nobody got upset
    
    
17. Not all of use were brilliant pupils and when one failed the year, they just repeated it. Nobody went to the shrink, nobody had dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, or hyperactivity. They just took a second chance and repeated the year.
    
    
18. We didn't have Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox, video games, 999 cable TV channels, dolby surround, personal mobile phones, computers, Internet chat, but... WE HAD FRIENDS
    
    
19. We had freedom, failures, joy, responsibilities... and we learned to manage them.
    

The big question is: how did we manage to survive and especially, to become the adults we are today?

Do you belong to this generation?

If so, send this message to everyone you know from the same generation, or to younger folks, so they learn what we were like before "safety" became the most important value.

They'll most probably say we were boring...

But oh, how happy we were!

Nonsense spam backfires amusingly

You know all those spam messages you get that abound in nonsensical phrases?

mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. Their plans were improved with the best advice. So the time came to mid summer eve, Elrond knew all about runes of every kind.

They're composed that way to fool Bayesian filters, but sometimes what comes out is a better filter in itself:

"shame of sex? we can change it"

Sort of Darwin Awards for spam.

A World without Romania?

I've just stumbled upon a very good movie about my native country:



The movie has to keep a good commercial appeal and not become scientifically boring. It succeeds at that, and it does Romania a good, but not excellent, justice. The movie doesn't mention anything about the stellar poet Mihai Eminescu, the playwright Eugen Ionescu, the composer George Enescu, or the founder of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara. More surprisingly, it doesn't mention the famous tennis players Ilie Nastase, #1 at the 1972 US Open and at the 1973 French Open, and Ion Tiriac (#1 with Ilie Nastase at men's doubles at the 1970 French Open).

The list of inventors misses some big names as well:

• Hermann Oberth, the precursor of rocketry
  
• Victor Babes, who published the first treaty of microbiology in the world, and was one of the forefathers of serum therapy
  
• Anastase Dragomir, who basically invented the ejection seat in planes (I didn't know this one myself!)
  

There are many other Romanians who left their mark on the world; some you might have heard about are listed on Wikipedia or here.

The Da Vinci Code Quest: Final Challenge - Solved in 5 minutes

I've just solved in ~5 minutes the Final Challenge on Google's Da Vinci Code Quest. You can view a video of my solution below, at Google Video or on YouTube.



The movie is not accelerated and was shot using Camtasia Studio.

Did I cheat?

Where is the limit between cheating and not cheating? Some have apparently reverse engineered the Flash code behind the puzzles to basically tell the Sony servers that the puzzle was completed ("this.onPuzzleCompleted();"). Others actually took the time to solve the chess challenge instead of brute-forcing it.

If you want to win, you have to cheat somehow. Assuming that reverse engineering the code would disqualify you, the only method left is to employ some sort of automation tool (unless you have a savant acquaintance) to solve the puzzles. This in turn requires an extra finalist account to test your tool, unless you want to risk sending multiple solutions from your real account. I'd like to thank Aaron Froehlich for promptly delivering the credentials for his finalist account.

Once you have a dummy account, you can play with it however you want and take each puzzle as many times as you need. You'll quickly observe that out of the 5 puzzles, the first 4 always start with the same configuration, so you can use some software to record mouse movement and clicks, input your solution then play back the recorded sequence automatically, at high speed, on the real account.

I used Macro Express and quickly noticed that there's a limitation as to how fast you can have the mouse move around and click. The puzzles make use of some fancy animation that may delay things.

Let's see how automating works for the 4 puzzles.

Sudoku: if you drag away a Sudoku symbol from the roster to the table, it will take more than 1 second for the same piece to show up in the vacated spot in the roster. The best solution I found was to maximize the period between dragging the same symbol twice to the table. I dragged, in sequence, each of the 9 different symbols to their location on the table, then restarted the sequence. This worked rather well, but the symbols are distributed a bit unevenly:

• only 3 chalices
  
• 4 fleurs-de-lis
  
• 5 or 6 of the others
  

This is why at the end of the Sudoku puzzle you'll see that I had to lower the playback speed to only about twice "real-time".

Painting restoration: from numerous trials, it turned out that there needed to be a 180ms or longer pause before and after clicking a paint splotch, in order for the puzzle to recognize it was clicked. Then there is some animation when you click the second splotch, and until that animation is over, you can't click the newly formed splotch.

Curator challenge (arrange paintings): pretty straightforward if you don't over-accelerate playback.

Chess challenge: no real need for mouse automation on this one; you just have to click 2, 2, and 4, and the animation is much slower than a normal human would move a healthy mouse :)

Now the jigsaw puzzle, that's a totally different business. Different each time, that is. Recording macros won't help here. There are still a few things that I found:

• if you drop a puzzle piece over its proper location, it will remain stuck there. This means you can bruteforce the positions of each puzzle piece
  
• naturally, you start with the pieces in the corners and edges. The right edge has a nice property: you can't drag a piece with your mouse beyond that edge. This means you have less pinpointing to do when guessing a puzzle piece's place.
  
• if you use the dummy account to watch the shifting images on the pieces for sufficient time, you'll create mental pictures of the target puzzle.
  

After watching my solution movie, I saw that I missed some obvious piece matches, so I'm confident someone out there does have a better time than mine (5 minutes).

I don't mind not winning. I was not a fan of the book and didn't become one after seing the movie. But for shaking Christianity's beliefs and for exposing the fears of some fundamentalist groups, I appreciate Dan Brown's work.

A quote by Robert Pirsig comes to mind:

People are never fanatic about what everyone is sure of. They're fanatic about matters that are in doubt.