Projects on Ligiu Uiorean

Wireless links in the field (2006)

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In December 2006 I was the IT lead on the Romanian Motorway Project, working out of the camp at Săvădisla. The construction ran along kilometres of alignment through the hills west of Cluj, and the sites that needed data were exactly the ones with no cable to them and no realistic way to get one. So I built the links out of the air, using cheap consumer routers and a set of antennas, and I wrote up how I did it. This is a short retrospective on that work, with the field photos from the original guide.

CREC (2003)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the early 2000s, a small research group in the Computer Science Department of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca set out to answer an unusual question: instead of writing software to fit a fixed processor, what if you generated the processor to fit the software? The result was CREC, a low-cost, general-purpose reconfigurable computer whose hardware architecture was synthesised, application by application, through a hardware/software co-design process. The project’s name traces back to its lead researcher, Octavian Creț.

SpamTUNNEL (2003)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recall that over New Year’s break 2002-2003 I got interested in spam and statistical filtering, so I wrote SpamTUNNEL, which I released as freeware. It got way more attention than I anticipated, getting me contacts from the MIT Media Lab and getting cited in several papers.

The timing was not an accident. Paul Graham had published “A Plan for Spam” in August 2002, and the idea that you could beat spam with simple word-frequency statistics rather than hand-written rules was suddenly everywhere. I wanted to try it myself, and I wanted it to work with whatever mail client I happened to be using, without a plugin. So instead of writing a filter for one program, I wrote a small proxy that would sit between any mail client and the mail servers and filter everything passing through.

The x86 Assembler guide (2000-2001)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Around 2000 I got familiar enough with x86 assembly language to write a tutorial about it. It ran as a monthly series in an online newsletter under the title “Assembler by example” (in Romanian, “Assambler prin exemple”), from September 2000 through March 2001. It proved more popular than I expected, mostly because the later installments took apart the inner workings of a real DOS virus.

The whole series targeted 16-bit DOS on the x86, starting from the crudest tool available (debug) and working up to TASM, with every example built as a tiny .com program. Below is the full course, reproduced as it was originally published in Romanian. The separate source listings for the example programs have been lost to time, so where an installment linked out to one I have just noted that.

Springfree trampoline S113

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My boy and his cousins love trampolines. Our original one was a cheap Lidl model, and it did its job for a while, but I wanted something safer and built to last.

I ordered a Springfree S113 on March 22, 2026, from Germany. The delivery turned out to be painful and took a lot of follow up. It was finally dropped off on Friday, April 24, 2026.

The installation#

Installation was extremely painful. The guide says two people, but in practice it probably needs two people much stronger than my dad and me. Even with strength, fitting the 60+ rods leaves you with lingering palm pain.