Apparently today is one of those days where everybody is out of his mind. Could it possibly have anything to do with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) ?

Some would say “YES”. An argument to that could be my IM list of friend, filled with LHC related statuses.Of all, I found 2 very interesting ones.

The first on is a live video feed from the LHC, from Adi. Although it is supposed to be very serious, scientific-like, at one moment there was some guy picking his nose! Should I start to get scared?

The second is a picture, from Flaviu, available below ( direct link )

Yesterday was the last and most expected examination of my life as a student, i.e. the presentation of the Bachelor Thesis project. Although I planned to write a post about it, especially because it is a pretty interesting research project, well … I’ll do that in the future.

In a nutshell, the project is called ArhiNET, it is an integrated system for the development and processing of distributed, semantically enhanced archivistic e-content and was coordinated by Prof. Ioan Salomie and Assoc. Prof. Mihaela Dinsoreanu. If you are familiar with the Semantic Web vision and related fields, you probably realized that it was a large project, actually we’ve only started, and by “we” I mean a large staff of professors, research assistants and students. But as I said, more about this later…

Back to the presentation, I have to say that I was nervous that day as my last exam was back in February, this being the second time with verbal examination and I was worried of forgetting important aspects. But it went very well and the professors were quite interested in the analysis and development stages of the project. Additionally, the demo went even better and made a big impression.

Due to this fact, we were invited present the project (today) at the Faculty Student Symposium for Best Thesis Projects. From the orginal team consisting of Calina Zaharia, Flaviu Zapca, Ioana Iacob, Grigore Vlad, and myself, only the last 3 were able to present it, but we managed to cover pretty much everything. At the end, we were surprised to see that a large percentage of the audience (consisting of professors, students and engineers) was seriously interested in the project, more exactly in specific areas of implementation.

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You probably heard by now that several Microsoft products were updated to the “2008″ version a couple of weeks/months ago, and 1 is still pending. The launch campaign was called Heroes happen {here} worldwide, “Magicienii prind viata {aici}” or “Magicians come to life {here}” in Romania, for the pros community and “Ideile prind viata {aici}” or “Ideas come to life {here}” in the academic sector.

The launch started in Bucharest, hosted by a team of MVPs and MS employees, shortly followed by the “student version” in Unibuc. I say “student version” because it was hosted for the students by the students, that is by fellow MSP colleagues. Of course, events like this soon took place in every major university in Romania, hosted by local members.

Along with Adi Muresan, Cornel Rat, Ioan Lazarciuc aka ‘Cretz’ and Mihai Hudea, I had the opportunity to be part of one of these teams. Actually we were more than lucky because we got to be present in 3 other major universities in Sibiu, Brasov and Tg-Mures, we were invited by the UBB team to do a joint operation at their CS faculty and also in our home university, UTCN.

Agenda

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The antivirus is one of the most important software that should be on installed on any computer. I doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows XP, Vista or Linux. “Fences” like the UAC or sudo aren’t that strong because they’ll just ask if you want to allow a program to run in privileged mode, they won’t tell you what that program will do.

For the last 5-6 years, I’ve been a fan of Kaspersky Antivirus and I recommended it to everybody. Many friends replied that it uses to many resources and the PC runs slow, but the trick was to set the scanning to “performance” (low). That meant a faster system, with insignificantly less security due to the excellent algorithm. It also had some optimizations, like scanning only the modified files (not all) before running them.

But since the last revision, I noticed that it started to leave a heavier footprint on my system, especially on the web and mail scanning. It takes 30 seconds to 5-6 minutes to load a youtube video or the LinkedIn page. Even with the web scanning turned off, it still takes significantly more than with the program turned off.

Jeff Atwood, from CodingHorror.com realised this several months ahead and provides performance data from the quoted study:
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According to The Independent, a recent study led by a renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Vini Khurana, strongly demonstrates that prolonged exposure to mobile phone radiation will result in brain cancer and neighboring tissue damage:

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long. […]

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. […]

After a quick search on the web, I managed to find the study on the Brain Surgery Research site . The key facts are:
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