dexonline is the online Romanian dictionary. I launched the project in August 2001 and, with the help of an amazing team of volunteers, it grew to 400,000 definitions. It runs exclusively on free software and its database is freely available under the GNU General Public License. The entire page and links are in Romanian only.

Civvic.ro aims to offer a free, searchable, versioned archive of Romanian laws, bills, decrees and government ordinances. One particular interest is to allow the user to browse all the versions of a legal act, including all its ammendments, and to highlight the differences between consecutive versions. Civvic.ro is in its infancy, but we are beginning to pick up speed. The entire page is in Romanian.

Nilatac is a suicide chess engine I wrote back when "free time" had a meaning. It is active 24/7 on FICS, where it is one of the better suicide programs, and its opening book is available online. Suicide chess, despite its morbid name, is a fascinating game; some say it rivals classical chess in complexity. It is played on a standard chess board, but the aim is to lose all your pieces (and captures are mandatory). I haven't worked on Nilatac for a while, save for minor opening research. But I dream of the day when I will. Nilatac is free software.

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.

These are random things that I've worked on.

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:

That is where I'm from. I'm glad to have seen the world, but I'm even gladder whenever I go back there. Romania is a 22,000,000-people country in Eastern Europe, bordering the Black Sea, slightly smaller than the UK. Pope John Paul II once called it Garden of Virgin Mary. We love soccer, alcohol and good jokes and we know the meaning of dolce far niente better than most. But we've been known to work occasionally and accomplished many good things. There are many superb corners in this country; the following links are to places that I happen to love.

I'm a proud MIT nerd. Before that, I was a mediocre student at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, where I failed five classes in three years. I decided that I would rather transfer to MIT and leave the country than retake those exams. Before that, I went to the High-School of Computer Science in Bucharest, during some of its best years. I also taught there for one year, which I greatly enjoyed.

To put it plainly, none of my computer science work could exist without free software. My main accomplishments so far, DEX online and Nilatac, rely completely on free software. Even this web page is created and served using dozens of free programs. I have profited a lot from free software and I tried to give something back. I believe that software should be free and that our understanding of copyright and software patents should change. So, like, bow down to free software, or something.