Radu Luchianov`s
Home Page [archived] News
More recent news are to be found in the News stickie, at the top of every site page.
Here I have older news 
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Radu, 23May2020: Another seven years with only a few hours spent on Monade... Had to edit my website, it was not very well visible on smart devices with small screens, so I found time to adjust the CSS and templates. Accessibility still needs work and I want to get rid of tables. These past years I never stopped learning, an enormous amount of IT this time. I keep seeing web frameworks fly by, some trying to simplify coding and the organization of large projects, but in the process adding more and more stuff to learn in order to do so. They`re supposed to be black boxes, but you still have to go in to dig for bugs; fueled by open source contributions, they move fast, with newer versions often leaving older implementation projects in the dust. They add layers after layers of software in the process... the hardware industry`s explosion with SOCs the size of a fingernail containing mind-blowing capacity and speed, rendered the good old data-size- and process-time- optimization all but forgotten, even for embedded code. The latest Monade prototype is running only JavaScript, on the server-side with node.js.
Radu, 21Nov2013: Five years, wow. Time for an update. A couple of months ago I resigned my full-time job and went back to spending most of my time (outside of job-hunting) working on the web: wrapping up one of my first web projects, kchuka.net. Recovering and organizing the data is proving to be a bit of a challenge, but we are making progress. Contract work may provide extra freedom, but it is temporary, so I am also looking for a full-time job and brushing up on the changes that CSS3 and HTML5 have brought to the online webscape. Playing with my son`s homework tools was fun for a while. Incorporating the more cross-browser supported new features into this site is also something I am evaluating.
Radu, 08Dec2008: After dealing temporarily with finding a new night-time employer and learning the new job, I had a bit of capacity (read: time) for more programming, so of course I had to work on other people`s projects.
. The last three-four months I learned about Ajax and JSON, and in the process made two new versions of the image rendering for photodocumentary.ca (including a slide show), as well as a stock-watching tool. Then I worked on a wiki version of officiant-music.ca; then on a wiki version of mindtools.net, and last, a database for a friend. Now it`s high time I worked seriously on Monade rather than keep doing design for it in my head while bicycling to work every night.
Radu, 30Apr2008: While waiting for DNS records to propagate so I can check the monicsoft and photodocumentary pages on the new servers, I worked a bit on the templating aspect of the home page area script. Which is why the home page has a different look compared to the other pages. I have not finished the design yet, not to mention checking the new template in all browsers, but I have to go sleep so... don`t throw pillows at me yet if the site breaks on your favorite browser.
Radu, 29Apr2008: Good-bye Canadawebhosting, Hello Canadian Webhosting! Another hosting service provider change. Will I ever find a constant one? One that doesn`t fold, doesn`t pass accounts to other companies with less support and crummier interfaces? Rethorical question, of course. When the medium is changing and the economy is changing, why would I expect hosting services to stay at the same level from year to year! I just hope I won`t regret paying for two years of hosting with the same company. The good news is that the cPanel interface the new host is using is clean, understandable and surprisingly Monade-like, and better yet, the first service ticket I placed was resolved within an hour after I put it in. The bad news is that their tech support is miles behind in friendliness from their sales agents, and the ticket was resolved without implementing everything I asked for. I smell trouble. I hope that smell is just because of the quickly-changing Calgary weather
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Radu, 16Feb2008: Between playing with neopets, reading sci-fi for me and the kid and watching sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV series, I manage to sneak in bits and pieces of working on a DHTML-only Monade. Let`s see how fast THAT goes
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Radu, 18Sep2007: Calgary`s fun. What I could see of it. Got a survival job that`s pretty much like a gym and allows me to spend daytime with the kid or design contracts. And it`s paid way better than the job in Ottawa, which I took in order to do some participatory study and try to test the results of implementing a more complete knowledge management tool... HP people didn`t think that was a good idea, what with them investing bundles in their current tools - in which feedback from actual knowledge base users seems to have been but an afterthought.
Got my bike stolen yesterday - and had to buy another one pronto from Walmart so I can go to work last night...
Kid just got his first Grade 2 mark, a 9/10 in spelling. Ahem. Got to work on that a bit.
I still didn`t get to properly clean and arrange the apartment - there are always more important things I just *must* do.
Been to interviews and done some on the phone, and it leaves me with the impression that hiring people have no idea of what is actually needed for particular jobs. Had to decline a few web design and support jobs because a) they were either taking too much time (as usual for those kinds of gigs), and b) the kid`s school has a plethora of PD days. That`s Professional Development. Wow, they must have some very developed teachers in Alberta :)
Looks like I`ll stick to working on my web site and on contracts I may find here and here which don`t require full-time or overtime.
`nuff for now.
Radu, 11Sep2007: I notice that I never explained my choices in the design of my web pages. The description page says what and how I did, but not why.
* Lots of the design choices I made had to do with having dynamic documents on heterogenous platforms - my first goal was to have the pages visible and functional on as many platforms and browsers as I could.
* The text is flowing, not herded in a fixed column width because I am still thinking about how to address that aspect in code. I don`t want it fixed to a predefined width, because that would require me to design for a specific screen resolution. I don`t want to force people who like low resolutions to scroll around. And I don`t want to leave big swathes of screen area unused. On the other hand, I do know that reading very long lines is sometimes difficult for our print-trained eyes. I`ll deal with that issue when I finish proper and flexible templating in the page generator code.
*The color scheme is currently a pastel blue-green set; I like green, my kid likes blue...
Radu, 23Aug2007: The move to Calgary went through just fine. Now off to find an apartment and a day job :)
Radu, 27Mar2007: Sigh. Some bad news. Today I received the divorce order. For a few years now we tried to make it work, but we unfortunately could not. I hope Irena finds her place in life, and that she`ll eventually see that money is not everything. As for me, I have to be less critical of me and those around me. Oh well...
Radu, 06Nov2003: Well, all I managed to do is piece together (and update in places), the content of the web site out of the many versions on several computers. I really need an implementation of the version tracking aspects of Monade...
Radu, 28Oct2003: Again almost a year of no great change to my web site. In the meantime I was working on the CreeTalk project and since the summer I started practicing video editing. I was working more on my wife`s site than on mine. And attempted changes keep piling up in text files and in the work directories. Not to mention that the addition of a new computer (and 4 new hard disks) made my archiving life much more difficult. So for my birthday tomorrow, I`m making myself a present of some time to work on these pages. Hopefully I`ll have something nice to place on the news sticky tomorrow.
Radu, 13Feb2003: Finally I get to work a little more on the HomePageScript. It`s almost a year since I last worked on this piece of javaScript coding. It still stinks, mainly because nobody wrote to me about them, so they plummeted to the bottom of my ToDo list. The stuff that needs updating keeps piling up, but my available time is scarce. I`m happy that I get a chance now to work on the server-side version of the MonDoc engine and it only makes sense that my own web pages will get a little attention. As such, during the coming week, I`ll be applying plenty of changes to the cogs and wheels that make up the client-side dynamic page generator that you`re using right now :)
Radu, 16Jul2002: Today I sent out a message to all the people on my Friends email list, with two purposes: (1) to let them know that I still exist and (2) because I may experience mail trouble.
Here`s a bit of background info on the second point: when I joined Carleton University, they gave me this cookie-cut account name (mrluchia) and told me I can`t change it to radu or raduluc, though no account with that name was on the same server. So I kept using my old zdnet free account, and set my university account to forward there any incoming email. But then ZDNet went commercial and though I paid, sent both my web site and my email account to limbo. So I subscribed to DomainDirect, a company of TuCows, who gave me a domain name and web mail. I had that service for a year and it had lots of glitches, one period of which almost got me fired from my TAship at the university. Now I`m in the process of moving my web site out to www.linuxmotor.ca (because it grew over the 5M allowed to my university account), and I get a webmail box for me and one for my wife. At least pricewise, linuxmotor is great, and their customer service is excellent.
Radu, 10Jun2002: I`m currently in the process of adding skinning abilities to my HomePageScripts so please bear with me as I go through the early testing phases
The only skin available at this point is not very formal but I hope you find it good looking
Radu, 16May2002: These pages, my HomeArea on the Web, are designed for use with Internet Explorer 5.5, on a PC, on a monitor with resolution of 640x480 or higher, at 16bit color depth. One can try to use Netscape or Opera with considerable loss of quality. I`m also hoping to cover v.6 of NS and IE, but I don`t have them installed on the testing machine because of their many bugs (and installation footprint). If you`d like to help me debug, click here.
Note: if the window size is too small, some large pop-up notes may flicker. If that happens, keep the mouse still while reading that note.
Radu, 28Jan2002: My web area is intended as a holding place for information about me and my ideas. In some places the text may wander or stray from the topic of the page, or the page itself may not seem to have a topic or structure, but that`s how ideas are born: unstructured and rough. With time, I shall polish arguments, structure the presentation and add examples.
Radu, 09Apr2001: The area you`re browsing now is the seventh iteration of my Home Area.
I`ve been thinking about the new look for more than a year now, since I came over to Canada and the waters of my life began to clear. School and the joys of parenthood have kept me from the task and tonight, bug-eyed and everything I managed to get the code ready. I hope it`s worth it. I know that most of you are busy people, but if you get the chance, tell me what you think of the new look. Email me at radu- (at)-monicsoft.net