Well, guess what? Animal Politico, one of our bold projects, made it to the WordPress Publisher Blog.

Behind the scenes of this political newspaper are things like: custom user profiles, Facebook connect, custom taxonomies, MailChimp integration and many others.

The detailed article here.

I love small teams, hard work, cool projects and people with the sense of humor. I am lucky enough to be a part of a company which turned out to have small pieces of all the above. Yes, I’m bragging.

2011 is a big year for us, marking our 3rd year anniversary. It makes us look further, wanting to achieve more and become better. It also makes us analyze the past year, which was pretty exciting. We got to work on some really nice projects and collaborate with cool people. 2010 also marked the beginning of some personal projects that hopefully you will hear more about this year.

We wanted to start this new year with a new look. This meant rethinking our website design and content structure, in order to highlight our main services and abilities. Simply put, our new website is out and ready to shine. Check it out and tell us what you think about it in the comment section below.

Let’s hope 2011 will allow us all to run our engines at full power once again. Fingers crossed.

You can download it here via the official WordPress repository.

Acum câteva zile am constatat că avem nevoie de un bbPress în limba română, şi că traducerea încă nu există, aşa că ne-am apucat să o facem noi, şi cu ocazia asta o punem şi la dispoziţia dumneavoastră.

Traducerea e realizată pe baza fişierului POT oficial pentru versiunea 1.0.2. Pentru alte traduceri de bbPress, căutaţi pe forumurile oficiale bbPress.

Instrucţiuni de instalare a traducerii

Creaţi un director my-languages în rădăcina instalării bbPress.

Descărcaţi fişierul bb102.zip.

Despachetaţi şi încărcaţi fişierul ro_RO.mo în directorul proaspăt creat my-languages.

Deschideţi fişierul bb-config.php din rădăcina instalării bbPress, căutaţi linia:

define( 'BB_LANG', '' );

şi schimbaţi-o în:

define( 'BB_LANG', 'ro_RO' );

Pentru aducerea de modificări la traducere

Dacă se doreşte modificarea traducerii, puteţi folosi fişierul ro_RO.po din arhiva descărcată anterior şi îl puteţi edita cu un editor cum ar fi Poedit.

This gave me the chance to play around with PHP GD, and I must say I’m quite impressed. It seems to be a really powerful image processing tool. Here is the script I came up with, and here it is in action.

Before

After

Pretty neat, huh? Here’s the script so you can see it without having to download the zip file.

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// $url: the URL of the image you want to be processed. It can also be a local filename.
// $type: 0 for brightness, anything else for darkness.
// $mode: 0 for theoretical mode, anything else for Photoshop mode.
 
function transparent($url, $type=1, $mode=1){
// Create the old image
$old_image = imagecreatefromstring(file_get_contents($url));
 
// Create the new image of the same size as the old one
list($x_size, $y_size) = getimagesize($url);
$new_image = imagecreatetruecolor($x_size, $y_size);
 
// Turn off alpha blending and set alpha flag for our new image
imagealphablending($new_image, false);
imagesavealpha($new_image, true);
 
// Do the following for each pixel
for($y=0; $y<$y_size; $y++){
	for($x=0; $x<$x_size; $x++){
		// get it's color
		$rgb = imagecolorat($old_image, $x, $y);
		// and get the R, G and B components of the color
		$old_color = imagecolorsforindex($old_image, $rgb);
		$r = $old_color['red'];
		$g = $old_color['green'];
		$b = $old_color['blue'];
 
		// Define brightness:
		if ($mode) $brightness = max($r, $g, $b); // photoshop mode OR
		else $brightness = (max($r, $g, $b) + min($r, $g, $b)) / 2; // theoretical mode
 
		// Define darkness:
		$darkness = (255 - $brightness);
 
		// Generate transparence:
		if($type) $alpha = $darkness / 2; // for darkness OR
		else $alpha = $brightness / 2; // for brightness
 
		// Define the new color, same as the old one, but with alpha transparency
		$new_color = imagecolorallocatealpha($new_image, $r, $g, $b, $alpha);
		// Set that color to the pixel in the new image
		imagesetpixel($new_image, $x, $y, $new_color);
	}
}
 
// Output image to browser
header('Content-Type: image/png');
imagepng($new_image);
 
// Destroy all images in the end
imagedestroy($old_image);
imagedestroy($new_image);
}

Update: There’s also a Photoshop plugin for doing something similar, but it costs 27 euros.

• Cuvintele theme, template şi style nu mai sunt toate traduse prin şablon, ci theme este acum temă, template a rămas şablon, iar style este stil.
• Version nu mai este tradus ca şi Traducere realizată de CNET.ro | Versiunea, ci acum este doar Versiunea.

Traducerile sunt realizate pe baza fişierelor POT oficiale. Pentru alte traduceri ale WordPress-ului vizitaţi pagina oficială WordPress in Your Language.

Instrucţiuni de instalare a traducerii

Descărcaţi fişierul de traducere pentru versiunea dumneavoastră de WordPress:

• WordPress 2.8 — wp28.zip
• WordPress 2.8.1 — wp281.zip
• WordPress 2.8.2 — wp282.zip
• WordPress 2.8.3 — wp283.zip
• WordPress 2.8.4 — wp284.zip
• WordPress 2.8.5 — wp285.zip

WordPress MU (doar pentru cei care ştiu despre ce e vorba):

• WordPress MU 2.8.1 — wpmu281.zip
• WordPress MU 2.8.2 — wpmu282.zip
• WordPress MU 2.8.3 — wpmu283.zip
• WordPress MU 2.8.4 — wpmu284.zip
• WordPress MU 2.8.4a — wpmu284a.zip

Despachetaţi şi încărcaţi fişierul ro_RO.mo în directorul dumneavoastră de WordPress wp-content/languages. Dacă directorul nu există, va trebui să îl creaţi.

Deschideţi fişierul wp-config.php, căutaţi linia:

define ('WPLANG', '');

şi schimbaţi-o în:

define ('WPLANG', 'ro_RO');

Pentru aducerea de modificări la traduceri

Dacă se doreşte modificarea traducerilor, puteţi folosi fişierul ro_RO.po din arhiva descărcată anterior şi îl puteţi edita cu un editor cum ar fi Poedit. Mai multe informaţii despre traducerea WordPress-ului se pot găsi pe pagina Translating WordPress a Codexului.

The project was founded by the Romanian Association for Electronic and Software Industry in collaboration with Timisoara’s Software Business Incubator.

The primary purpose of the project was to inform the local small business owners about the ways they could use software and web applications in order to increase productivity and support automation.

The project also facilitated the contact between local software firms and SMEs from towns situated in Caras-Severin and Timis counties, in order to contribute to the economic development of the area.

I had the chance to speak to a lot of wonderful people. I’ve noticed that each community has a bunch of representative individuals, that really understand the problems of their community and that can give you the best inputs in order to build up the best solution.

They were really opened to the solutions provided by our company, eager to learn more about online presence, web applications and software that could improve their business. It was a great experience because we could actually talk on real cases, and provide practical solutions.

After the conference we visited some of the most important touristic attractions, which got us to actually feel the historic pulse of that region.

Among them are: The Old Theatre – “Mihai Eminescu” from Oravita, the oldest Romanian casino (many people say it’s the first European casino) as well as some of the agrotouristic pensions situated on the shore of the Danube River.

Thanks again to all the people involved in this project. It really was an enriching experience!

It uses SoundManager 2 for playing sounds using JavaScript, by wrapping and extending Flash 8′s sound API.

You can grab it at the official WordPress plugin repository.

You have the following sequence of terms:
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11
21
1211
111221
312211
13112221

What is the algorithm? What is the next term?

— Spoiler warning. Continue at your own risk. —

The next term is 1113213211.
And the one after that, 31131211131221.

This is called the Look-and-say sequence. Wikipedia says that:

To generate a member of the sequence from the previous member, read off the digits of the previous member, counting the number of digits in groups of the same digit. For example:

• 1 is read off as “one 1″ or 11.
• 11 is read off as “two 1′s” or 21.
• 21 is read off as “one 2, then one 1″ or 1211.
• 1211 is read off as “one 1, then one 2, then two 1′s” or 111221.
• 111221 is read off as “three 1, then two 2, then one 1″ or 312211.

Apparently it was extensively studied in the 80′s by a certain mathematician dude called John Conway. He discovered quite a few interesting properties for this sequence, especially the fact that certain patterns emerge that are somehow similar to chemical elements.

Surprisingly enough, my friend Irina knew about this puzzle from a romanian book called Cireşarii, by Constantin Chiriţă, which was written in the 50′s.

A bit of Wikipedia research (aka procrastination) revealed that this John Conway guy is also responsible for only the most amazing cellular automaton (man, I love the sound of it) in the world, Conway’s Game of Life.

But let’s return to our Look and Say Sequence. I think I might have discovered a new property. Let me first define the concept of “average digit” for a term. It’s the sum of digits divided by the number of digits.

The interesting thing about this “average digit” is that it converges to a certain value. See this table, and this graph.

I’d really like to know how to get that exact value. Perhaps it’s the root of a polynomial or something. I asked some math people, but I didn’t get much help.

In addition to that, Cristian, my friend here at work suggested that I should try and see if there is a pattern in the spectral density, in other words, the percentage of one’s two’s and three’s.

As expected, and as can be seen here, these percentages also converge to certain values (about 50% for one’s, 30% for two’s and 20% for three’s).

Last but not least, I’d like to show you a great way of representing a Look and Say term, it looks a bit fractal-like. Check it out here.