I work for Twitter now

I work for Twitter now.

"Why?"

Twitter is an amazing company that provides an amazing service to the humankind. I see it as a fundamental new modus of communication that's quickly becoming part of the global human culture. Whether the earthquake in Haiti or the post-election uprising in Iran, Twitter has proven to be a reliable and prompt medium for getting the latest news on what's happening in the world, directly from the people most involved in the events. (While simultaneously still allowing you to to tell your friends what you had for breakfast, of course.) I appreciate its singular focus on doing one thing right, and that it managed to remain simple to use. Twitter is experiencing a 16% month-over-month (that's exponential!) traffic increase, and I'm very excited at the prospect of throwing my weight behind making it able to cope with this welcome challenge. The company is chock full of extremely bright people that I will no doubt be a delight to work with, and maybe some of their awesome will rub on to me too...

I want to change the world for the better and make a positive influence on people's lives. Often, the most significant changes are the ones people don't even notice, because they make Things Work As They Are Supposed To. How big a change? I have no idea yet, but it could be vital. If it makes the difference between a smooth operation and a Fail Whale for someone caught in the next civil unrest who's using a momentarily available internet connection to let his family know he's okay, it can mean the world to them.

I appreciate Twitter's open-source fostering culture. Today, the barrier to entry for influencing lots of people's lives is actually pretty low. It's called Open Source Software, and it's easy to participate and create serious value. I count that for every hour I spent on my OSS projects, I saved in thousands of man hours to my users, a number that will keep growing until the last of my code goes out of use (will be a while...). The value leverage is just insane. I just never figured out how to make it pay the bills, so I can't devote myself 100% to it. Twitter plays great in the OSS ecosystem, so I hope that I'll be able to create value in two streams: improving Twitter through the OSS it relies on, and as a consequence, improving the said OSS.

"So are you moving to Bay Area?"

Yes. We're working on my visa, and once that's approved (hopefully around October), I'll move with my wife and children to San Francisco to join the company in person. Until then, I'm working remotely from home in Hungary. I'm absolutely thrilled at the prospect of living there, and I'm very much looking forward to this new adventure.

November moment

Oh, the sudden urgency in the people’s steps in the street as the raindrops start hitting the pavement. I don’t have an umbrella, so I’m drawing close to the buildings on the way home for some little shelter their walls and balconies can provide. I thought these buildings familiar, but either because I’m passing so close to them, or because of the rain, they smell different. It’s surprising, but pleasant and triggers some previously deeply buried childhood memories.

"Mixed Language Environments" interview

in case you're interested, the video interview where Kresten Krab Thorup interviewed Charlie Nutter, Erik Meijer, and myself about mixed language environments on virtual machines is now online. This was shot at the JAOO conference last September.

Interview about Rhino

Floyd Marinescu interviewed me about Rhino at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark last September. You can watch the interview here. Yes, I know I said "scratch to itch" :-)

I actually stepped down from the Rhino maintainer role since this interview was shot, although I do remain with the project as a committer.

Reap What You Sow

You won't catch me writing about politics too often, but I need to express my view on the declaration of independence in Kosovo. Actually, I'll mostly bother you with some of my family history, but the two are, for better or worse, somewhat intertwined.

As you might or might not know, I grew up on the territory of former Yugoslavia, in a small village in northeast Croatia, bordering on Serbia. My family lived in Croatia, but we had relatives in Serbia as well. My family's roots are from the Serbian Vojvodina province, which belonged to Hungary under name Vajdaság until it was annexed into the Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom (forerunner of Yugoslavia) as part of the breakup operation of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I. (In a way, Serbia then gained a province in north not unlike to how these days it lost one in south.) As such, Vajdaság has a high (alas, dwindling) Hungarian population, and I come from this ethnicity.

I never felt any drawback growing up a non-croatian in Croatia. Nobody in Croatia ever as much as made a remark about me being ethnic minority. Not so in Serbia. Whenever I visited my grandmother in Novi Sad (Serbia) during summer vacation, I experienced strange things. She'd hush me to not speak Hungarian on the street or on the bus. She did neither. The name plate on her door had her name spelt in Serbian (serbian "Jelisaveta" instead of hungarian "Erzsébet" for "Elizabeth"). It was clear you can get into trouble for being different. My whole experience of Serbia was - as far as I can remember - that people there are highly xenophobic and intolerant of their ethnic minorities.

Then came 1991 and the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Croatian region I lived in was overrun by serbian paramilitary troops with full backing by Milosevic's serbian state army. They ruthlessly drove away or slaughtered nonserbian population from the territories they occupied. My family fled with one car trunk worth of belongings when these thugs were approaching. We lived next to an improvised Croatian police station, and we later learned we were targetted as "Croatian collaborators" by paramilitaries because we were on cordial terms with the police officers. They broke into our home on a night after they occupied the region. I have no doubts as to our fate if they found us there.

Mind you, at the time police officers with handguns were the only armed force the just-born Croatian Republic could stack against the Serbian-controlled "People's Army of Yugoslavia", the biggest and most heavily armed force in Balkans in 1991. They had all the chance of a snowflake in hell to defend our homes against the occupators.

While Serbia was significant territorial influence in the breakup of Yugoslavia, it clamped down even harder on its own ethnic minorities, trying to prevent further loss of grip on its remaining territories with the oppression in both Vajdaság and Kosovo growing year after year under Milosevic regime. It culminated when Serbia attempted to eradicate the Albanian minority (minority when viewed against overall population of Serbia, but a 95% majority in Kosovo) in 1999 using its military. This led to the well known NATO intervention when Serbia was bombed by US and its allies until its warlords lost the backing of the population and were overthrown in a revolution.

But the damage has been done. The Serbian state consistently over several decades mistreated and oppressed its ethnic minorities. After what they experienced under Serbian regime for decades, ethnic Albanians of Kosovo wouldn't trust'em as far as they can throw'em. The Serbian state is reaping what they sow now.

It's ironic, but I do actually believe that the recently elected Serbian government might actually be a modern european democratic government that would treat its minorities as a modern european democracy should. (Provided they don't assassinate their prime minister again for being too European...)

But it's simply too late.

There was a huge demonstration this evening in Belgrade. There were atrocities. Embassies and banks were burned. The prime minister spoke to the crowd, fueling it, and the police didn't stop the hooligans. It's sad how they still lay the blame everyone for the situation except themselves, and their decades of hostile politics. I have no illusions this will change soon. I have no doubts that the long oppressed Albanian people of Kosovo are better off in an independent state. They finally will have the chance to bring prosperity to the long neglected region. The region will finally have a government that feels it belongs to the land. As far as I remember, Kosovo was always extremely poor. Serbians have strong emotional ties to the region because Kosovo is the historical site of birth of Serbian state and church, but aside from that, Serbia was a very lousy custodian of the region, not bothering developing it, or helping it develop, or even just not actively hindering any economic progress in it in recent history.

My father packed his two children and wife into his car on 20th August of 1991, and pressed the pedal to the metal until we crossed the border to escape certain death from Serbian paramilitary thugs. Dad spent the rest of his life in exile. Even after our former Croatian homeland was liberated, the six years of Serbian rule set it back economically, infrastructurally, and most importantly socially for decades - it still didn't recover as most young people, including me, departed the region and didn't go back, decimating the society's renewal potential. There was simply no place to go back to, as that land was no more the same land we left. So Dad didn't return either although I know his heart ached for an alternate reality where all of this didn't happen, the peaceful continuation of days of old, something that is not ours to experience in our lifetimes, taken away from us by force by aggressive neighbors' selfish geopolitical interests. I wish Dad was still alive to witness how those same aggressive neighbors are now in pain too; while it doesn't cure our wounds, he would certainly find some poetic justice in it.

Schadenfreude? Damn well yes, we're entitled to it.

Oh, the irony

I'm reading Vernon Vinge's "Rainbow's End". At one point, he describes a day of an old man who's been cured from Alzheimer's in near future. Everyone is using wearable ubiquitous, always connected devices to access any data anywhere, and he's given a foldable electronic paper like device (rudimentary compared to what young kids are using) to access the web:

He wandered around the house, found some of his old books in cardboard boxes in the basement. Those were the only books in the entire house. This family was effectively illiterate. Sure, Miri bragged that many books were visible any time you wanted to see them, but that was a half truth. The browser paper that Reed had given him could be used to find books online, but reading them on that single piece of foolscap was a tedious desecration.

The irony? Rainbow's End is available for free here legally, and I'm tediously desecrating it in my web browser :-)

As a matter of fact, I don't like ithe medium. It's not the first novel I read on my computer, and probably not the last (I read few Cory Doctorow novels this way, bought them all in book form since), but I much prefer holding a deadtree book in my hand for my night reading. Especially when I spent the entire day anyway in front of the said computer. (But have been few time in a situation when I wished for Command+F to quickly go back to something while reading a deadtree...)

OTOH, Tor books started a free ebook program "Watch the skies" recently (non-DRMed PDFs); Jon Scalzi's Old Man's War is coming out soon on it. Karl Schroeder's Ventus is also available for free. Neil Gaiman's American Gods will also be e-published for free availability soon. I sense a trend here.

Tom Lantos died today

Tom Lantos died today. One less great Hungarian and one less great American in this world; I was a serious admirer of him and his work. Even if not always agreeing with all his views, I do believe he made the world a better place through most of the things he did. I remember being amazed by quite a lot of things he did, but I won't rehash them here - Wikipedia is as good source as any for this. I distinctly remember him from two years ago when I saw in the news that the (then) 78-year old member of the Congress (elected 14 times, no less) was arrested for civil disobedience while protesting in front of the sudanese embassy in Washington against violence in Darfur. I was proud. I'm sorry though that even his influence and chairing of House Foreign Affairs Committee was not enough to move US into ending the Darfur conflict. Maybe if he was given a bit more time...

Isten nyugasztalja békében, Tamás!

Laptops at risk at US ports of entry

This keeps resurfacing in media every few months. This time, it's a Washington Post article about US Customs and Border Protection officers confiscating travelers' laptops (for indefinite time - some people didn't get theirs back for more than a year, despite being promised they'll get them in 10 to 15 days), or making copies of data on them, and/or forcing the people in possession of them to reveal their logon passwords. Also, people objecting to the procedures are denied entry to US.

Well, one more reason not to travel to US. At least, not with a laptop. Although, regardless of whether you have a laptop, they'll take all your ten fingers' prints when you enter, and that's also a rather strong cause not to. Over here, they take your fingerprints when you're taken in custody as a crime suspect. So depending on your cultural conditioning, having your fingerprints taken can be quite a humiliating experience. (I had my two thumbprints taken already on my previous US visits, and I detest the practice very much.)

Back to laptops and data.

As you might have seen from a previous weblog entry, I use FileVault on my laptop. Back when I used Windows, I used E4M for a similar purpose (although today I'd probably use TrueCrypt instead). FileVault is a 128 or 256-bit AES encrypted disk image for your home directory on Mac OS X. I even use encryption on my swap files.

I have very good reasons to keep all of this encrypted, reasons of both private and professional nature, that I do not wish to elaborate on further. If I were faced with the choice of handing over that data or being denied entry to US, I'd choose to not enter. Owners of some of the data that I keep on my laptop would certainly agree. (Yes, I keep data that doesn't belong to me but I'm trusted with it. If you work for a company in any significant position, chances are, you keep such data too).

Alternatively, in the near future, I can burn a BluRay disc with the contents of my home folder (encrypted), send it to my temporary US address in mail, and travel with laptop erased (or quickly erasable). Which still doesn't save me from the prospect of having my laptop confiscated at the border just because they can.

I'm lucky, 'cause I can mostly avoid going to USA if I don't want to. Some people on the other hand return home there; they don't have much choice aside from not leaving the country. Ugh.

Bedtime

So, just as Christmas passes on December 26, I suddenly fall sick. Perfect. I haven't logged a single sick day for more than over a year, maybe even two years, and now that I'd have few spare days to spend on things I'd like to do, I'm more-or-less tied to bed. Don't worry, nothing too serious, just stuffed nose, terrible coughs, and enough fever and chills to keep me not wanting (or, in fact, being too able) to move anywhere outside of the bed. The usual "season's greetings", you might say.

I'm reading though. I read some wicked good books in the past months, including Charlie Stross' Glasshouse, as well as an überweird Cory Doctorow piece (Somebody Comes To Town, Somebody Leaves Town) as well as few Karl Schroeder novels. I'm through most of them by now and am tasting some Vernon Vinge momentarily, which isn't as good as the more contemporary guys (Stross and Schroeder) are, but is still much better than Iain M. Banks is.

Or even better, I listen to wife reading Mr. Pratchett's The Bromeliad Trilogy to kids (and me!). I picked up Truckers in a book store about a month ago without knowing it is targeted for children, but after reading it I realized it'd be great fun to read it to kids in the evenings. Usually it is me doing the reading, but with sore throat... So, we finished Truckers today (second reading for me), and started on the Diggers (which, along with the closing volume of the trilogy, Wings, I picked up today at the same bookstore. I have a habit of buying only the first novel in a series and making subsequent purchases based on whether I'm still interested in it after the first book ends. For me, Iain M. Bank's first Culture novel didn't hit the bar, so I'm avoiding it for now).

Anyway, my Mom was over for holidays, and listened in to our reading of Truckers. As a result, I gave her one of Discworld novels (Mort) to read on her way home. I'm pleased to say that Mr. Pratchett has obtained yet another (in this case, 58 year old) fan :-)

Anyway, days are a bit bleak. I'm usually not well enough to hack or even to play much with kids, or anything of the sort. Getting to a store to shop for groceries to get us through New Year's Eve was quite an effort and I felt much worse afterwards.

Oh, I also picked up Half Life 2 retail box three weeks ago on an impulse while shopping for Christmas presents. Tried to install it this morning (lacking better pastime since I couldn't sleep from my cough rush), and it claims the CD key is invalid. Swell. Valve support didn't answer within a workday. Knowing me, if I don't get to try playing it during the holidays, I probably won't find time for it anytime soon, so it's as good as money thrown out of the window if they don't resolve this quickly. Way to go, selling people unusable DVDs.

I also managed to drop my photo camera from a waist height on a hard stone floor during Christmas - I was trying to take pictures of kids while they were having fun with Sparklers. In response to the drop, the camera's objective developed a very ugly skew. Not entirely surprisingly, it doesn't work anymore... Closest Canon service (and the only one in the country) is of course, where else, in Budapest, 200km away. Buying a new one might be a more viable option.

Oh well. I guess I'm going back to bed. Sorry everyone for a bad-mood rant...

JAOO

Just a heads up that, following what seems to become an established previous tradition, I'll be attending the JAOO conference this year as well. See ya in Aarhus next week!

Liquids on planes in Europe will be allowed again!

Frequent air travelers rejoice!

Apparently, Norwegian Ministry of Transportation asked the European Parliament to move to lift the liquid ban on airplanes. They say it is "annoying for the travellers", and a "large cost for society".

And apparently, the European Parliament agrees!

Sorry if I'm sounding euphoric about this, but this mindless fake security measure did cause me lot of headache in the past. Sometimes literally - there are those situations when I need to catch a transfer and the itinerary is so tight I barely can run from one gate to the other and I don't have time to grab an (overpriced) bottle of water at the airport, so I get a headache of dehydration by the end of the trip. small glasses of water and orange juice served at the airplane are not the same thing. Actually, lately I switched to carrying apples with me for liquid replenishment.

In the meantime, I need to find an (a) aerosol deodorant not exceeding 100ml and (b) shaving foam container not exceeding 100ml for my next week's trip to JAOO in Aarhus (I'm flying with hand baggage only). I figure I can just use the hotel bathroom soap in dire need instead of the shaving foam though. Oh man, can't wait for this madness to end.

Brief report from a Neil Gaiman signing event

I'm officially crazy in lots of ways. A particular kind of crazy I am is the one I demonstrated yesterday, when I went to a Neil Gaiman signing event in Budapest.

What's crazy about it? Well, probably nothing if you actually live in Budapest. I don't, so for one thing, it's crazy driving 2 hours to Budapest in pouring rain with near zero visibility. Then it's mildly crazy standing in a queue for two hours (part of it in rain outside the bookshop that was the signing venue. No umbrella). The final crazy (although strictly necessary after the first one) is driving home after the event in pouring rain with near zero visibility after dark. Of course, I'm really crazy because I still feel that spending six hours and about forty litres of fuel is a good investment in return for getting seven of my Gaiman books dedicated, and am totally happy about it.

Y'know, in my environment, barely anyone knows who this guy is (now that I think of it, this says something about people surrounding me. I also cannot lend my copies of his books to many folks around here to spread the culture 'cause they're all in English - I don't need no Hungarian translations, most of my friends however can't read the English originals). So I was fairly surprised when I arrived at the bookstore to find a queue extending into the street. The event itself wasn't even too formal - Neil announced it on his blog few days earlier citing as the reason lots of e-mails from local fans (yours truly included) who asked if he could please arrange a signing during his two-week stay in Hungary, seeing how he's otherwise not really often present in this corner of the world.

As for the venue itself, it was the Sárkánytűz ("Dragon Fire"), a bookstore specializing in fantasy books, card games, etc. I really couldn't help feeling that the signing was organized in a wrong location. I look with disdain at most of the contemporary fantasy literature. Most of it is just bad pulp fiction, its authors unable to free themselves from the cliché dominated by elves, trolls, halflings, dragons and knights. Ironically, a genre called "fantasy" really lacks authors that would have any real imagination. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand creates completely original stories, with completely original creatures, and the worlds he paints in his books intersect with our reality. Nothing could be further from the Tolkien-imitating cliché of elves and dragons permeating most of what the bookstore had to offer.

There's apparently a funny phenomenon associated with people queueing in the street in Budapest. Namely, it raises curiosity in strangers. While I was still standing in the part of the queue that extended out in the street, I was approached twice - once by a nicely dressed lady in her fifties, once by a guy resembling a hobo who tries to disguise it. They both inquired about the nature of the event, the wording of their questions implying they were hoping for some sort of a sale. When I told them it was a signing, the guy who looked like a hobo in disguise quickly lost interest. The lady asked who is signing, and when she didn't recognize the name, she asked (seeing how it's a fantasy bookstore) if it is "some sort of fantasy" to which I replied that it definitely isn't. "Then it is sci-fi, right?". This instantly reminded me of "we have both kinds of music" line. I replied patiently that no, it isn't sci-fi either. Then what it is? Well, how do you summarize Neil Gaiman in a single sentence? You don't. I tried to explain to her that she could think of him as maybe a modern day equivalent to Edgar Alan Poe (which I know you might disagree with, as it's both oversimplification and also plain incorrect, but that was the best I could come up with quickly at the spot :-) ) Anyway, she did leave after this...

So, after two hours of queueing I finally got in front of the man himself, got to shake the hand that wrote all those stories and look into the eyes behind them all those same stories were born. Yes, why, I was impressed, even though Neil is really a very friendly and approachable guy (well, approachable through standing in a long queue, but that's barely his fault. I mean, it's really my fault for not reading more obscure authors). Driving up on the highway I had plenty of time to imagine all kinds of witty dialogue I might get into with him, but the cruel reality was that there were still lots of fans waiting for their turn, so it would've been rude to hold them up for inappropriately long time, so we only did a bit of a politeness chat, and I handed over all the seven books I brought for dedication. It'd really be foolish to expect anything more from a signing event, really. I got a drawing of a cracked heart in my copy of Fragile Things - very appropriate. Also, the original printed dedication for Anansi Boys is actually made for easy personalization, which he totally exploited. I can almost see how Neil came up with it after signing his books for years, and felt very smart about it when he wrote it. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, just buy a copy of Anansi Boys and read the dedication. Of course, you can also read the rest of the book if you're so inclined, but that won't help you in better understanding what I just said. But it might be worth your time for unrelated reasons, though.)

I also asked whether he has (or at least has a promise to get) a book of Hungarian folklore tales, to which he replied that he actually got one last week and is halfway through it already. If he didn't, I'd have offered to send him one, which was an idea I got while reading The Monarch of the Glen novella from Fragile Things, seeing how it incorporated a motive from Norwegian folklore (namely, a huldra), and Hungarian folk tales definitely have their share of marvels waiting to be incorporated into contemporary literature (I certainly know, I read lots of those to my kids). Anyway, getting Neil to read some of those tales is already been taken care of, hooray. We'll be waiting for the results :-)

A very nice touch at the signing was Neil's daughter Maddy, who was handing out cookies to people standing in the line and later also offering sandwiches at the signing desk. I really needed a bit of refreshments before hitting the road home, so I was really grateful for those as well. I asked Maddy when will she give back her Dad's blog to him, and she said it was her last day as his guest blogger, but she lamented that she can not write the entry because she's here at the signing. I remarked that she could use an exotic technique known as "pen and paper" and later type it up in front of a computer; I have no idea if she took the suggestion, however her goodbye entry was up at 10:01 PM, which I don't actually understand as I can't imagine the signing was over by then and even less that they could reach their hotel room by then - I left at about 9:15, and the queue of waiting fans still extended through the bookstore to the door (nobody waiting on the street anymore though).

Barcelona

So, Kriszti and me have been to Barcelona last week. Nominally, I went to speak at the TSSJS Europe, realistically I attended the conference just long enough to deliver my talk. That's what you get for taking your wife with you, who insists you spend the time going around the city and seeing places, instead of attending, say, Gregor Hohpe's talk about event driven programming (that one I really would've wanted to hear, but alas, I was stuck sightseeing Sagrada Familia instead; woe is me).

Barcelona must be one of the most joyful places I've ever been. The atmosphere of the whole city is amazing, the buildings, the people, everything is vibrant and alive. Architecturally, they have wide main streets with a very wide pedestrian area (usually with greens, benches, and fountains) in the middle, and lanes for cars surrounding it. Drivers are very mindful of the pedestrians and will wait for them to cross the street even when they (the cars) have the green light. Patiently.

Then there's Sagrada Familia. I don't think I've ever been as impressed by a cathedral as I was by it, especially since this is the first one that I can't view purely as a historical monument, main reason being it's still being built. You step into it, and it's full of construction workers. Cathedrals are always monuments to ages in which they were built, and this one is a monument to our age instead of some long gone one, making it even more easier to feel like it you have a personal connection to it. Y'know, like when you visit a cathedral and they tell you "... the XY cathedral has been built for 300 years..."; well, this one is still in its first 100 or so years :-)

Architecturally, it is also quite amazing, and departs from "traditional" cathedrals in quite a lot of places. Pillar structure is such that pillars branch at the top, giving the illusion of trees, further emphasized by the ceiling that also tries (quite successfully) to look like foliage.

Then there are various other Gaudi projects in the city: Casa_Milà, Parc Güell, and so on, all definitely worth several hours of one's time.

We also went to see an evening flamenco show with a dinner (courtesy Klaasjan) which turned out really great, both the flamenco performers and the dinner were terrific. And on the previous evening, we hung out at the hotel's "bierstube" (which is to say, a spanish attempt at emulating a german beer place). A funny moment was when the staff kicked out Kirk and Cliff because they attempted to come in with two boxes of externally acquired pizza. The attitude of the staff was especially rude considering we were otherwise on a table with few hundreds of euros on the tab anyway, so what does it matter if two pizzas are eaten without generating a profit for the venue? Anyway, the guys ended up eating their pizzas from their boxes on the street. Kriszti and myself joined in for a bite (no photos of this overly casual event, regretfully :-) ).

On saturday, wife and me also had the pleasure of meeting with Jon Revusky and his wife Nuria (they're long time Barcelona residents) for lunch. (We were treated to really copious amounts of really great tapas in Cervezeria Catalana.) Jon and me are collaborating on FreeMarker for about five, six, or even more years now, and this was the first time we actually met personally.

The only dark side of the trip was airline luggage handling. Needless to say, they (Lufthansa + Newco, their ground services provider in Barcelona) lost our luggage between our connecting flights. That in itself isn't that bad, but they didn't deliver it until the day of our flight back! So we went out to the airport on sunday, got our boarding passes (from a really helpful lady at the Lufthansa ticketing desk), then went through security into the transit area, found the baggage room, stood in the line at the Lost+Found office, finally got to the front of the queue, been taken to a back room with hundreds of suitcases, found our own, went out from baggage room, back to departures to drop off the suitcase for the trip home, then again through security into the transit area. Simple, huh?

When we arrived home to Budapest, we went to the Lufthansa office at the airport to file a claim for luggage delay. The ladies working there said they don't deal with it as they don't have sufficient capacity to handle all such claims (I can believe that. They certainly gave the impression they have no capacity for anything whatsoever) and they told us to contact their office in the city, for which they can only give us e-mail address and fax number. The lady at the desk then proceeded to jot down the e-mail address on a piece of paper: fly@lufthansa.de. I respectfully noted that it seems unlikely that this'd be the e-mail address of the city office in Budapest, but she was insistent that it indeed is. I was too tired to argue. I spoke to Kirk on the phone today, and he said Lufthansa office at the Budapest airport is the "most useless place on the planet". I tend to agree.

All in all, the Barcelona trip was great. Got to see a marvelous city, met some new folks and met again some already known ones, eaten lots of good local food, drank some sangria and local wine, did one talk, watched flamenco dancers, seen a great sunset by the sea. What more to expect? (Well, on-time baggage delivery, maybe.)

My current open-source TODOs

I'll admit that I feel a bit thin-spread lately regarding my open source activities. There's just too much stuff going on that I'd need to attend to one way or the other. Of course, this is all competing for whatever leftover bits of my time after paid work ("urgent/important"), family, an attempt to reinstantiate a regular workout habit (both "not urgent/important") and the also inevitable everyday interruptions ("urgent/not important"). Just to make it clear, OSS work is to me in the same "not urgent/important" quadrant where family and workout take place.

In no particular order my current OSS activity goals are:

• Implement support for invoking Java vararg methods from FreeMarker (this actually goes off the list, as I completed it on the quiet sunday afternoon while kids were at a birthday party)
• Implement support for JSP 2.0 SimpleTag interface in FreeMarker's JSP taglib runtime
  
• Fix the JSP taglib lookup mechanism in FreeMarker's JSP taglib runtime
• Make the overloaded method invocation + varargs into a reusable library so I can support vararg methods in Rhino and also have other open-source dynalang communities leverage it
• Support vararg methods in Rhino
• Cleanup the LiveConnect implementation in Rhino (primitive booleans not coerced automatically, and in general overloaded method resolution could be better, and it doesn't use JavaBeans bean info, and...)
• Just generally try to attend to bug reports in Rhino
• Attempt to refactor Rhino-in-Spring to reuse Spring WebFlow as much as possible, 'cause having two webflow implementations on the same base code would really help it emerge into a flexible foundation worth submitting as a "Java Web Flow" JSR

There you go - I actually feel a bit better having written down all of this. If you wonder why I haven't answered a Rhino question for a week or so, it might be because I was busy working on a FreeMarker issue, or vice versa. Or just there were no birthdays lately, so I didn't have a quiet sunday afternoon at my disposal for some immersive hacking. But rest assured, I'm going forward with all this stuff, just not exactly on "Internet time" speed :-)

1 << 5

Today's the day when my life duration has doubled for the fifth time, relative to the last such event, (counting my first birthday as the 0th). (With bit of a luck, I'm in for yet another such event down the road.)

For those less math nerd folks out there: I turned 32 today.

I don't usually care too much about arbitrary milestones in the flow of time, my own birthday not really being an exception, yet last night I couldn't help thinking about it (not being able to fall asleep for about two hours after going to bed - I turned from good sleeper to quite erratic sleeper lately). When trying to assess what happened since the last birthday, it always seems life only brings gradual changes (the previous year carries a rather big exception, hopefully I'll be able to write about it sometime soon). However, on such a round number occasion (both %100000 and 0x20), it made me wonder about everything that happened or changed since I was half this age.

And I have to say, it's a hell of a lots of things. My 16-year old self was a quite blissfully unaware gymnasium student in Croatia whose biggest problem was how to skip history classes to go hack on the Apple-II machines in the school computer lab, as well as to write games and fractal generators for Commodore 64 or later for Atari ST. And girls. Were a problem too, that is.

Shortly thereafter, I endured one war and one exodus that completely uprooted me and my family, had to settle in a new country. A bit later found true love, then attended university, and over the passing years grew into several different roles, including that of a husband (for more than eight years now), of a father (for more than seven years now when my son Ákos was born, redoubled the role two years later with Zsuzsi), and of a (well, what at least feels like) reasonably respected IT industry professional. I'd really like to elaborate a bit on all of this here and now, but there are two big driving forces against it: (a) not wanting to bore you to death, and (b) the aforementioned three roles unfortunately don't leave me with much time at present to write sentimental weblog entries about myself.

All in all, the previous 16 years were probably the most dynamic period of my life, past and future. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the next 32 years; stay tuned for the "1 << 6"

JAOO

Just a heads up that I'll be attending JAOO again this year. If you too are around and feel like meeting me, look for a guy that looks something like this, only with his hair given 4 more months to grow by October :-)

Life's important questions, 5 year old's edition

My kids like to ask me questions after I've tucked them in for the night - a good technique to delay the sleeping a bit longer. They know I love explaining the world to them, so it's a quite sure thing. Last evening, my 5 year old daughter suddenly asked "Dad, how is plastic made?". I had to give it a bit of a thought and then proceeded to try to explain her the process as I could, hoping I could tell it adapted to the level of a bright, but nevertheless five-year old kid.

Halfway through my exposition, she impatiently interrupts me with "Okay, okay, but how does it end up being blue and shaped as a pony?". Ah, so that's the actual burningly important question :-)

Blown up car, cornfield, midnight

Here's what I was doing last midnight.

I'm standing beside my car in a middle of a dirt road that's cutting through a cornfield. I don't dare go further as my car has sporty, quite low-suspension and I'm afraid one of the holes in the bumpy dirt track ahead of me will prove too deep for it. My wife is trying to figure out how could I safely turn the car back. What are we doing in the middle of the nowhere at this hour anyway? Why aren't we at least on some regular road, if not safely tucked away in bed?

The problem is, few minutes earlier we came across a wreck of a blown-up car blocking the normal road, lying on its roof (or what remained of it), surrounded by one fire truck, several police cars, and a slew of firemen and policemen, impossible to drive past it. On advice of one of the by-standing villagers, we tried to get around it on a "back road", which turned out to be the aforementioned dirt track through a corn field. When it proved unpassable for my Mazda, we scrambled back to the road, to wait for the firemen to eventually clean up the wreck from the road.

My biggest problem though is that when we came upon this roadblock, we were only ten short kilometers away from our beds at my parents' house, after I spent my last thirteen hours behind the wheel (only stopping for gas), covering nine hundred kilometers. I'm exhausted beyond belief. I can't actually believe this is happening to me.

(Not too relevant to the story: the car blew up because its fuel tank was leaky. The kid driving it, his driving license only four days old, miraculously survived it with only burns to his legs, as bystanders told me.)

I was royally pissed off after all other things that happened to us earlier that day leading up to this. You might have noticed it took me thirteen hours to cover nine hundred kilometers. It's a very bad average speed, considering I drove most of it on highways. Short explanation for it is two words.

Italian highways.

We spent our vacation this year near Rimini in Italy. The people were kind, the sea warm, the food great. Everything was perfect, except for italian highways. We run into a congestion because of an accident, both ways. Took us more than an hour each time to get out of it, driving in lockstep. You'd say it's no fault of the highway system itself - accidents happen. That's true. However, there's also one 100% predictable, huge congestion that's coded into the system - the tollbooths near Venice. The idea is that you pay as you leave the section of the highway built and operated by one particular company. They do however have a throughput problem, which manifests itself in a nine kilometers long queue of cars before it. Yes, nine kilometers. In rows of three. Unfortunately, their business model completely defeats the function of the highway. The function, to me at least, being efficient road transportation. It took us an hour and a half of driving in lockstep from reaching the end of the queue to clearing the tollbooth. Together with the one-hour accident-caused congestion between Rimini and Bologna, this resulted in four and a half hours to cover the first two hundred and seventy kilometers of our trip back home. On a highway. Do the math.

By the time we reached the tollbooth, both me and my wife (and our seven-year old son, too) were red with fury. The poor clerk at the booth got on its receiving end. It isn't his fault, but he was the closest human representative of the company that operated the highway, the company we by that time hated fiercely for operating a highway where you stand in a queue by design with thousands of other cars for an hour and a half, or more if you're unlucky enough to run into an accident. And then you pay fourteen euros for the privilege. We told the clerk how this isn't a highway, this is an inhumane joke, a horror, not something belonging to western civilization, how even Balkans are better, and we know because we were to Balkans earlier. He had a look telling us he hears this kind of testimony of customer satisfaction regularly.

So, I won't make any service to that highway, as it didn't really do me any service either: I'm telling anyone reading this that if you can avoid using higways going through Venice-Mestre tollbooths, avoid them. You can't go any worse on secondary roads - they're free, and you'll probably have a far, and I mean far-far better average speed and fuel economy. You certainly won't get two and a half hours behind your travel schedule. And this isn't an isolated event - I drove on that highway five years ago, and it was the very same experience back then as well.

Those +150 minutes then led to me standing with my car in the middle of the night in a cornfield, exhausted, ten kilometers away from a bed I should've instead been in at that time.

Update: To be completely honest, we did acquire some more delay after we left Italy, while driving through Slovenia, due to one case of bad signage (in Maribor), a blindingly pouring rain, one case of detour (near Murska Sobota), and a general disagreement between our road atlas and the physical reality regarding existence of certain roads. The exploded car wreck and the cornfield were really just the finishing touches in that day's demonstration of God's sense of humour.

A grab-bag of two-week memories

This is really just a quick grab-bag about various things that happened with me in the last two weeks.

Been to Croatia a week ago. Went on workdays - thursday and friday (and saturday). Kids were at wife's relatives, wife was working on these days, so my absence had minimal impact on family :-) It also had minimal impact on work, as I took my laptop with me and stayed at a friend who could provide me with internet connection, so I worked during the day and visited friends in evenings. I even called into the work-related conference calls during these days, although calling US numbers from a Hungarian cellphone while romaing in Croatia earned me a call from T-Mobile customer relations next monday asking whether there's a chance my phone was used unauthorized as they registered calls worth 300$ in a single day on it. Whoops, here comes my record phone bill. Anyway, it was really great to visit childhood friends and go for swimming at sunset in the same lake I swam in every day of every summer of my childhood. This was my very first return to that lake in fifteen years - since I had to leave the region because of the then-war. Yes, I'm being sentimental. A bit.

I desacrated my MacBook Pro by installing Windows XP on a small 8GB partition on it few days ago. I guess I just couldn't watch my copy of Far Cry gather dust on the shelf anymore knowing that I didn't complete the game before I switched to the Mac. I have to report that all is peachy with it. It even takes advantage of the two CPUs reasonably well (i.e. it runs with over 50% CPU utilization). After few hours of installing XP, Far Cry, and all patches for Far Cry, I even got a chance to play with it for about an hour :-) Far Cry BTW is one hidden gem of a first-person shooter - it brought the same graphical excellence and gameplay experience to the market as Half-Life 2 did, only Far Cry hit the market about 9 months earlier than Half-Life 2 did. It is somewhat underappreciated compared to HL 2 though, unfortunately.

Been re-watching Futurama Season 1 lately as work-unwinding. It stuns me as a bit boring and predictable - well, maybe because I already saw it once, but still. I don't have the same feeling when rewatching The Simpsons. Pausing it a lot though to spot various not uncommon easter eggs that are visible for only a second or so. Speaking of work-unwinding, I'm trying to cram in at least half an hour of cycling or running lately in the evenings. I noticed that a bit of a physical activity after an all-day sitting in front of a computer really refreshes me for an evening of Uno with kids :-)

Been listening to "Kite" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" much lately. Not going to explain it - if you're a close friend, you understand anyway.

Oh, and here's your movie recommendation: make sure you watch "Hoodwinked!". It's an indie CG animation feature "loosely based" on Red Riding Hood. Better said, it turns it a bit upside down and is absolutely hilarious. It being indie shows at the CG models and animation, which are few years behind the big-budget Holywood state-of-the-art, but believe me it wouldn't diminish the experience at all - the lovable and zany characters, the twisty story and the jokes, provide for over an hour of fully immersive fun. My wife generally doesn't like animation, but even she said this was a cool one.

On professional side, few things are moving. Just asked Norris Boyd today to pack up the current Rhino CVS HEAD and release it as Rhino 1.6R3 - last release was over nine months ago, so it's about time we give people a bunch of bugfixes in an officially blessed release state. Watch the Rhino download page to see when 1.6R3 pops up for download. Shouldn't be more than a day.

I'm still trying to find myself a bit of a time to learn a new programming language. No specific reason, just trying not to narrow my view too much on Java and try a language that forces me to adopt/discover new ways of thinking about software architecture. The only problem is, there are too many candidates. LUA, Haskell, Ruby, to name just a few. There's one particularly interesting new language that seems to get lots of publicity lately: Scala. A fully OO (every value is an object, no primitive/object types dualism as in Java) and at the same time fully functional language, that also natively compiles to either CLR or JVM bytecode, allowing it to be used within a .Net or Java system seamlessly. This is quite an advantage since it makes it possible to use any Java library with it, something that I can maybe readily and easily introduce into daily work if need be. I sometimes find myself in a situation where an otherwise elegant idea takes quite a verbose and/or awkward code to be expressed in Java, and think that a language that is more friendly toward designing internal domain-specific languages (Ruby, as Martin Fowler demonstrated it nicely during his presentation at JAOO last year), or even comes standard with macro preprocessor of some description (yes, I know C macros are evil, but I don't generally use them in evil ways) would really help reduce clutter. Maybe Scala? Don't know yet. I did download its full documentation - something to print out and then read on my vacation in Italy next week. Wife is going to kill me for it, though :-)

First penguin to climb Mt. Everest

Few days ago, while spending our vacation in a camping near the Hajdúszoboszló Aquapark, in the evening sitting on a bench in front of our trailer home, my son Ákos asked with a fully serious face: "Dad, what was the name of the first penguin to climb Mount Everest?".

I just adore my big seven year old son.

We tried to discuss it briefly, and he suggested that some alpinist could actually tie up a penguin and take it with him to the Top O' The World, but I told him that the animal rights activists would have a word or two about it, so it's highly unlikely. On the other hand, we speculated that as a rule, humans only climb Mt. Everest during summer and maybe penguins visit it in the winter, that sort of weather certainly suiting them better, when no human can observe them. We envisioned a crowd of penguins in full alpinistic equipment gathering at the foot of the mountain, looking enthusiastically to the challenges that await them. We rolled with laugther.

He then went on to invent a story about a penguin who left South Pole as he wished to see the world, climbed Mt. Everest, crossed the Kalahari desert where he found a small town, settled in it, then went on to earn a living first by being a street musician (we recently watched "Cars", and they show One Man Band before it, maybe that's where the idea came from) and later by building a power plant and wiring the houses and selling electricity to the city. There was also a wish-granting magic stick involved in the story that the penguin used to wish all his penguin friends he left behind are with him, but it backfired as they quickly died of dehydration in the desert (when I asked why our hero, also a penguin, didn't die as well, he explained that he travelled in a special aquarium car that kept him wet). Fortunately, for undisclosed reasons, the magic stick only transferred third of his friends, so he presumably got few more left back home.

I remember sitting on a chair placed to face opposite the bench, rendered too unwilling to move by the slight fever accompanying my bronchitis (ideal development for a vacation, huh? Right, I thought so too.) and not very willing to talk either due to a sore throat, and just listening to him fascinated as he tirelessly spun his story further and further for at least an hour. It finally ended when I told him we'd have to head for showers and then for bed soon lest we be totally consumed by mosquitos. By that time the penguin (who remained nameless, or at least, unnamed) was providing electricity for the whole world, but in the end got homesick, went back to South Pole (yes, I know strictly speaking they don't live at the Pole proper, but that's how he told the tale), and divided the wealth he accumulated during his electricity tycoon and street musician times among its (remaining two-third of) friends.

Few days later, on a similar evening while sitting on a bench and eating cherries he asked me whether there's a limit to one person's creativity.

Guess what I answered him.