Respect

I catch a train to Sydney CBD where I work. I notice a big difference between my morning and evening commute.

Morning commute is usually a very pleasant ride. I catch a CityRail train that starts its trip at my station, therefore I get a seat anywhere I like. This is an all-stops train that usually waits for the express one. I really do not understand the human nature! My station is very close to the city (10km to be exact). Nevertheless, people chose to ride on an old fully packed express train, rather than all-stops brand new Millennium train, which by the way comes only five minutes after the express one.

That makes me think. Why would anybody choose to stand on the train, squashed between other people for 15 minutes rather than spend 20 minutes seated in comfort and doing something useful or enjoyable, like reading a book or magazine?

And if I happen to miss my all-stops than seven minutes later I can catch another express train which is a brand new one and with plenty vacant seats this time.

I love my morning rides! They are quite. I guess most of the people are still half asleep or simply have nothing to talk about.

Evening rides are a whole different story. I rarely pick the train that is new - maybe I should find out what time such leave and then try to make it to the station on time. But I cannot be bothered.

Anyway, in the evenings people seem to chat a lot. Just yesterday I boarded the train and along my side there was an Indian guy (no race discrimination here, all people are same) already on his mobile phone. Talking non-stop! (Luckily) there is no mobile coverage in the tunnel under the city so he was cut off when we left the station. As soon as we emerged back on the surface, he re-dialed and continued to talk for next 25 minutes until I arrived at my station. He probably continued talking until he reached his destination.

How annoying is that! I do not need to listen to other people's conversations. When I was in Japan I admired they culture. One of the things I'd appreciate here in Australia is that in Japan people do not use mobiles on the trains. It is simply impolite. They even switch the ringing to vibration mode.

I am annoyed by loud people who selfishly created noise that other passengers must tolerate.

It's time to fight back!

As mentioned at Much Madness::Or divinest sense? website:

Coudal Partners published a PDF of business card-sized printable handouts designed to be given to people when they are annoying you.

I wish I had some of these SHHH cards that I could simply pass to these folks.

To Vista or Not To Vista?

Sysadmin in our company posted a message regarding Vista installations. I found it very funny and quote him here with his permission:

On a related note now that Vista has been officially released, and inspired by some helpful pages that others have produced I thought I'd preempt the inevitable requests for installation and come up with the following decision-tree to see if you qualify for an upgrade:

It's all crystal clear now :-)

Don't hurt my files!

I have been using IntelliJ IDEA since I started working on JIRA at Atlassian. I finally upgraded to IDEA 6.0.2 last week. The first impressions are good.

I was re-arranging the dependencies of projects and libraries and needed to remove one. What made me feel really good was this pop-up:

I am so happy with IDEA's pacifist approach to my files. I am against the violence on the files!

Quotes that made me laugh today

A funny quote that came out of Web Directions conference.

The web isn’t a power drill! - Andy Clarke
It’s a series of tubes! - John Allsopp

Debug This!

Whilst in Korea, my cousin Ladislav Babinec took this shot. Both, he and I have a bit of electrical engineering background (he works for a T-Com originally Slovak Telecom). So we were amazed how an electrician would go about fixing this mess. Or maybe they hire only the elecricians with special puzzle solving skills. After this photo had been taken I noticed similar electric poles in many places throughout Seoul. Simply amazing! I wonder what tools do those electricians use for debugging.

Good Design

I am back from the wonderful trip to South Korea, where my wife comes from. We spent some time sightseeing Seoul and some time meeting with Miae's relatives. I am already looking forward the next time we visit Korea and will travel around the country.

Before one of the meetings we had, I had to go to a restroom. It was in a very luxurious 5-star hotel. As I was sitting there and doing my business I noticed a little white box mounted on the wall. This little device had a display and many buttons. As I can read Korean script (Hangul), but have no idea what I read, I had absolutely no clue what this magic white-box is for. Naturally, I knew there was a connection with the human waste disposal unit I was sitting on.

What was even worse was the fact the the most common button - FLUSH - was nowhere to be found. I checked the usual spots around the toilet, but I found absolutely nothing. So I decided (as a citizen of a developed country and an educated man) that I have to have a crack on this thing and must be able to flush using basic logic and common sense.

Koreans are probably laughing at me right now, but I failed miserably. I pressed few this-must-work buttons, but could not make that damn thing to flush. So I left with shame, leaving a surprise present for the lucky person who would come after me. Luckily, no one was waiting so I got away with it without too much embarrassment.

This whole story reminds me of an excellent book I read long time ago. The design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman talks about the good and bad design of things we use everyday. He says that if things are designed well, no manuals, no labels, no description text is necessary. You simply grab the thing and use it in a right way. How many times you tried to push the door that was meant to be pulled just because the door handle was easier to grab and push? How many times you pushed the wrong light switch because the switches were not in logical order?

Well, I don't know if it was me this time or a bad design. Why do we need so many buttons for the toilet anyway?

Korean Coca-Cola Zero

My "coffee" - I am happy that I can find what I need on my trip in Korea :-)

Kkokka-Kkolla Jero

Southpark - how would you look like if you were there?

This is Miae and me in Southpark - well, the way we see ourselves.

This image was generated using the Planearium and paintbrush.

Pair Programming just got better

Today I got a new monitor. I had a 20" widescreen monitor before and the things just got better. After I had unwrapped and assembled my new 24" monitor, I sat in front of it and felt like in the cinema. The old 20" monitor (on the left) now looks like a dwarf...

Pair Programming is a lot easier on a big screen.

Windows Noises

I was looking for some cool sound effects for my new phone and I came across this webpage that features a soundtrack that was entirely made by Sound Recorder (sndrec32.exe) that comes with MS Windows.

I was impressed! Simple and cool! Check it out!

Helpdesk Form Letters

If anybody from helpdesk needs good template letters for replies to customers try some of those that Daniel B. Markham posted as What to fix.

I found them quite funny. And as I will be doing tech support for next two weeks I might use them :-)

Real Life Super Mario

I remember the days when I used to play Super Mario, but I would have never thought of this! That's bonza!

Good, bad and funny names

A read Calvin Austin's blog Java: What's in a name today and follwed few links from there. It truly made my day! We all know that guys at Sun use codenames for Java projects. Most of us know by now that Java 5.0 is Tiger and that the next version 6.0 is called Mustang. It seems that last couple of releases (including the future release) were chosen as purely animal names. Sometimes I wonder how these guys choose the names. I know it's hard. I choose the titles for my posts on this blog and it isn't easy.

Anyway, what really made me laugh was the link that lead me to the best, worst and weirdest car names chosen in automotive industry. This page, to my disappointment, missed my favourite worst car name - Mitsubishi Pajero. Majero was sold in Europe under name Montero because pajero is slang for wanker in Spanish. This car is mentioned on Grant's Auto Rant plus a lot more. Just to name a few: Chevy Nova ("It won't go" in Spanish), Opel Ascona ("female genitalia" in Northern Spain and parts of Portugal), Buick LaCrosse ("masturbating teenagers" in French-speaking Quebec), Mazda LaPuta (as the less-offensive "whore") or Bongo, Isuzu GIGA 20 Light Dump, and the list goes on.

This is not related to Java or programming in anyway, but it shows that choosing a name for car or software share the same difficulty. So how did you go about naming your software?

Is Yahoo spamming itself?

I have a Yahoo account. I had it since forever. It was very convenient at the time as I could access my mail from anywhere at any time. I used it for everything and put it onto lots of websites that required to log in or to register in order to access the content. Now I receive a lot of spam to it. And I don't use it anymore, except for registering for "free stuff".

One of the reasons I stopped using Yahoo as my primary e-mail account was their commercialization. Yahoo disabled free access to POP service. There are some cool utilities (free and commercial) that will let you access Yahoo, Hotmail and other webmail clients. The one I use is MrPostman.

MrPostman is a java program that allows you to access Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and other webmail services directly from your favorite mail client. It converts the web pages of your favorite webmail provider to e-mails and provides the standard POP3 interface to your mail client (e.g. Outlook Express, Netscape or Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird, Pegasus).

As Yahoo also has a whole deal of useful websites interlinked I also have my contacts and appointments online. Some appointments or reccuring events can be set with reminder. And when it is due, Yahoo automatically sends an e-mail to you.

Recently I had one reminder that was due. I looked into my Inbox and the reminder was not there. It was in the Bulk folder, which is Yahoo's I-think-this-is-a-spam-email folder. For some reason Yahoo's own reminders are being recognized as spam.

I understand that these days the spam filters have to be really smart, but hey guys, didn't you go too far this time? Just a thought...