Dignitas
Dignitas is a collaborative fact-checking site for political statements. Volunteers can add statements and analyze them. As they do so, they gain reputation and administrative privileges.
dexonline
dexonline is the online Romanian dictionary. Volunteers can help digitize printed dictionaries. I launched the project in 2001 and as of 2021 it learned 980,000 definitions. It runs on home-brewed free software and its database is freely available.
- dexonline.ro
- blog (Romanian), for random non-technical rants about the project's evolution
- DEX for Android
Nilatac
Nilatac is an antichess engine I wrote back when "free time" had a meaning. It is active 24/7 on Lichess and its opening book is available online. Antichess, is played with a standard chess board and pieces, but the goal is to lose all your pieces (and captures are mandatory).
- Nilatac on Lichess
- info page
- opening book explorer
- Colibri, a rewrite of Nilatac with browsable 5-men endgame tables
Music
In my spare time I typeset some Romanian choral scores. I used Lilypond, the music notation software. All the resulting scores are free for you to copy, modify and/or redistribute. They include Christmas carols, folklore, and a complete score for the Orthodox liturgy in Romanian.
Toy Projects
Random things that I've worked on.
- Civvic.ro (Romanian), a free, searchable, versioned archive of Romanian laws, bills, decrees and government ordinances.
Family
Naturally, I have more family members than these (in fact I have a large and vivid family), but here are the ones with web pages:
Academics
I'm a proud MIT nerd (MEng 2002). Before that I was a mediocre student at the Politehnica University of Bucharest and before that I went to the High-School of Computer Science in Bucharest (nowadays Tudor Vianu College). I also taught there for one year, which I greatly enjoyed.
- MIT; classes I took there
- Politehnica University of Bucharest; classes I took there (and didn't fail horribly)
- Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science
- an optional course in algorithms and data structures (Romanian) for high-school students that I taught between 2012 and 2015
- a mailing list on programming problems (Romanian) that I started in 1998
- seventh place at the 2001 ACM finals
- silver medal at the 1996 IOI
- the funny side of MIT: IHTFP Hack Gallery (well, every side of MIT is very funny)
Free software
I am an adept of the free software philosophy.
- the Free Software Foundation
- the GNU Operating System (you might know it by the name Linux)
- Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the FSF
- Copyright and globalization, a fascinating talk by Stallman
- Courtney Love does the math, an article about RIAA's practices
- DeCSS: it is illegal to write free software to read encrypted DVDs
- DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), Section 1201 (a)