After spreading the idea of the TED associate membership and robbing enough seating from my neighbors, me and some friends started enjoying the TED talks through live webcast. And, as advertised, the great thing about watching the talks with other people is the conversation that gets triggered by the sessions – everyone speaks passionately during the breaks, until the very end.

The Food Revolution

TED prize winner and chef Jamie Oliver – probably the most vibrant speaker I have ever seen on stage – talked about the obesity problems in the worldUSA and how he intends to solve them. Amazing talk, which got published right away. The food topic evolved during the first day, showing how eating properly can eradicate diseases like cancer, and how food can be grown in sustainable farms.

Shooting Bugs with Freakin’ Lasers

I really loved the Austin Powers reference, and the demo on stage was really amazing – identifying mosquitoes and bringing them down using a targeted laser. I loved the idea of “pinging” each object before shooting it down; this way only female mosquitoes were shot – the ones which suck blood and spread malaria.

Fighting Disease

The progress in influenza/AIDS/HIV vaccines, new ways to storage them and the impact that proper vaccination will have on the death counts in Africa.

Nuclear power

Ban of nuclear weapons and the possibility to use them as source of nuclear power, plus a debate of weather renewable energy or nuclear power should be used in the coming years. Looking at the numbers swayed some of the attendees (me included) toward nuclear.

A New View Of Information

Microsoft Pivot and Wolfram|Alpha and how they changed our understanding of data. I like this upcoming notion of “meta” tools – starting with search engines years ago, we are starting to be concerned with about the how rather than the what. We just might hit the why stage soon!

The Scientific Method

When scientists go on stage, it’s natural that the scientific method gets its honorable mention. What I haven’t noticed before, however, is that it is used in fields that are not engineering-based – but in social sciences, too.

Some fun

The photo that I took of our group was the first one to be shown! Sadly, I wasn’t on it, but hey, our living room is :-)

What’s next?

We already applied for a translation of Jamie’s talk in Bulgarian (which, by the way, is the third language with most translations – after Spanish and Portuguese – and Portugal, you’re going down). And TEDGlobal, hopefully :-)

Now that’s a nice move – improving ECMAScript compatibility through Windows Update (namely, fixing bugs in encoding/decoding JSON). I immediately started dreaming about patching some vicious bugs in both the script and rendering engine this way…

The concept of StyleCop is wrong, because it enforces people to adhere to guidelines about the source, rather than making the source comply with their views. It’s like coding like the tool wants, rather than leaving the tool to process the code so that it adheres to certain standards.

Imagine a tool that acts like a prism, bending the source code so that people view it the way they like. All dispute like “spaces or tabs”, “there should be a space here” – resolved. And here’s the elevator pitch: if the tool is implemented like a proxy between the IDE and source control server, none of the tools will notice the difference.

The two responsibilities of the source control proxy are:

• to provide two-way transformation of the source code
• to mock the interface to the source control server (mainly by delegation of commands – only the text is transformed)

Would be neat, huh?

You cannot improve anything unless you hate the status quo.

You cannot sacrifice yourself unless you love the cause.

And if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Why should you waste your time?

Sign the software craftsmanship manifesto.

Ideas were flowing all around, and the content was stunning. A magnificent event!

My highlights (in chronological order):

• Martin Angelov presented the Kolelinia project
• Iva Boneva raised our social awareness on the case with children without parents. Takeaway: Do not donate at charity events, as it buys you the right to forget. Instead, integrate the children in society.
• Matrichka Bozhilova opened my eyes for the modern documentary movies. I’ll be watching Georgi and the Butterflies tonight.
• Simeon Dyankov, the current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Bulgaria spoke about how we could make our country remembered for its “greenness”. Was a bit annoying with the constant mentions about the previous government officials, but provided valid points. And kudos for showing up at the event, it’s great to be close to the people.
• Asen Nenov from Greon showcased the concept for a new biofuel, based on microalgae. The pessimistic view of their efficiency was so thrilling, I couldn’t think of how an optimistic outcome would look like.
• A great performance by Nasekomix. I purchased their album immediately.
• Some of the best TED videos I know of:
  • Seth Godin on tribes we lead
  • Elisabeth Gilbert on creative genius
  • Pranav Mistry’s demo on Sixth Sense
  • Janine Benyus on biomimicry in action

Special thanks to the people who organized the event – Alek, Maria, Teddy and Nia.

What I really want now is to gather friends and watch the original TED through the associate membership.

I want this year to be a year of discipline. Of personal and professional development. Here are the things that I really want to do:

1. Start an open-source project, with the best quality that I can provide.
2. Automate every task that slows me down. There is nothing more mind-killing than a repetitive task.
3. Learn about electronics. Develop something useful with Arduino.
4. Continue to travel a lot. Experiences with different cultures open my mind to new ways of thinking.
5. Wake up early and optimize my daily routine. Oversleeping has been a big problem during the past year.
6. Take better care for my health. If I have a problem, delaying a solution will only make it worse.

Consider the following JSON:

var dates = { "2009": { "4": [20, 21] } };

It can be accessed like an array, say dates[2009][4], yet it doesn’t contain some 2000 elements. Neat, huh?

This is especially useful when you have to describe a few specific values (say, the date of Easter) from a big collection (say, all dates in the 1970 – 2030 range).

Browser games are a great way to eat up a significant amount of your time without remembering it at all. While I have fallen in that trap several times, I tend to view them as an… opportunity. Opportunity to become better at understanding code, much like the Weekly Source Code series by Scott Hanselman.

Indeed, using a bot may seem really unfair to the passionate gamers that try to spend their time at becoming self-proclaimed gods in the given reality. But this is exactly my point. Most of these games are based completely on collecting numbers – either gold, points, stats or whatever. And you can’t beat an intelligent toaster at this one. And I just want to understand the toasters. I’d love to take on a challenge of creating better ones, actually. And this is partially related to game developers, too – if your game is stupid enough to be robotized, it should be.

I.e. the Text property is not rendered.

<asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="TextBox1" Text="Sample text" TextMode="Password" />

How to hack work-around it? Use the HTML value property.

<asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="TextBox1" value="Sample text" TextMode="Password" />

It’s lovely how ASP.NET looks after you.

There are rules of composition, perceived harmony, the geometry of design – so is it possible to automate the process of designing? Imagine, if you have a resource-intensive site, to just “describe” the value of the statements on the page and have a design mockup ready at the same moment. Crazy, huh?