Google and other search engines are quite handy for all kind of background checks. Newsgroup postings, old home pages etc of individuals can be found easily. For companies the internet presence is not just their own site but everything coming up after searching with their name. Adding 'problems', 'bad service' or 'horrible' after company name and searching with that might bring up good amount of ranting from unhappy customers.

But there are also more interesting cases from companies. Some time ago I was looking for a job and checking company background info for my interview. By accident I found complete source code for one of their products. It was exposed due some mistakes with WebDAV setup and robots file. At least I had much better idea what that company was doing.

Today I just read from one user group mailing that O2's mms2legacy service is cached by Google. Searching with inurl:mms2legacy seems to bring a lot of pages MMS messages with photos and phone numbers. I could imagine that senders of those messages did not intend them to be available like that. Maybe O2 should add a disclaimer that they take no responsibility whatsoever of the visibility of the content.

Edit: O2 pulled the plug fast, so fast that they left navigation menu items leading to 404 pages.

Early last week I saw an interesting blog by Antoinette O'Sullivan - I think I spotted it from dzone.com. Her fresh blog is about working from home in France and to make situation even more interesting, she works in US working hours.

The blog has already some good posts, for example costs of working from home and whether remote working is suitable for someone at all.

Being location independent sounds really appealing and I am striving for it. Especially for IT jobs like software engineering it should be pretty easy to work remotely. There are plenty of existing solutions for remote working like chat, version control, issue tracking etc. Well, those are same tools as software developers use anyways. I think the biggest requirement is your own and company's mindset. How to keep everyone up to date and how to work without close supervision.

Some practices like extreme programming are emphasizing frequent stand up meetings and close collaboration with colleagues. But it seems be feasible even with remote workers - there are couple blog post about such: Agile Variations for Distribute Software Teams and The impact of the remote worker on Agile approaches.

Hmm... as a matter of fact I had this topic in my mind already two years ago. Not too much progress though - I changed country but I still work in the office.

www.flickr.com

Couple photos from previous walk.

My parents are now on pension after long years of work and running their own company. Occasionally I have been asked how is my pension going to be because my career path involves already at this point more than one country. And I have said that I don't know for sure - I'd better check it out.

In each country some of my salary has been deducted for compulsory pension payments. However, I am skeptical how successfully those institutions manage that money and whether I am able to contact them when it is time for a pension. My solution for this has been to build my own pension funds somehow.

This has some drawbacks. In many countries payments or investments to pension funds are free from income tax. My own deposits to high interest bank accounts or similar are subject to both income tax and capital income tax in the worst case. Investing to stocks is more risky and would require some studies. At the moment I know just a little bit of Finnish stock market but I have no clue e.g. UK situation.

In every country there are several private pension funds but I haven't found truly international and trustworthy pension fund. I guess national legislations create way too many hurdles for such. So called offshore investment could be an option. I was contacted by such in Budapest but their sales pitch was pretty suspicious sounding so haven't given too many thoughts for that option.

Maybe the best plan would be to gather reasonable amount in couple different currencies and relocate then to some reasonable cheap country with pleasant climate and good health care to spend pension days.

Just created flickr account with only a couple photos.

www.flickr.com

There will be more later on, selecting good shots out of hundreds is not a quick task.

Actually it has been done for some time now but I forgot to post the link here. Feel free to comment as usually.

when it is done on time and there is even empty space left.

On Saturday the whole day was spent at a wedding party. The day started at the bride's home, followed by the official part and the church ceremony. Then it was time for the party which was following Hungarian traditions. We had to leave quite early (1 am) in order to be ready and fresh for the next activity.

The three day trip to Slovakia began on Sunday and we headed to the Slovenský raj where we did some trekking. Most of the route was just usual forest path but there were some interesting climbs with ladders. On the last day we visited Slobody cave with great looking stalagmites and stalactites.

Yesterday we made a day trip to Budapest. I visited my previous work place and I chatted with people. Naturally I played couple rounds of csocsó (table football). Too bad I did not win but I don't blame you, Dani. Before evening we checked out the 'Soul and Body' exhibition at Szépművészeti Múzeum - Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition was pretty good and with our new interest towards photography it was definitely worth a visit.

The last event of the day was the rock opera - István, a király. I have seen the 1983 version and Dóra explained the story while we watched it from TV. Therefore I was able to follow it and it did not become a boring event. The only and usual problem was the loudness of the music. I assume the levels were set for culture consumers closer to 60 years old because the high sounds were disturbingly loud.

Today we have only some shopping to do and then we meet Dóra's relatives. Almost a boring day.

We spent whole Wednesday traveling to Hungary along the route: Edinburgh-Glasgow-Prestwick-Budapest-Miskolc. It took around 12 hours from door to door. Everything went pretty well except that I had a bit too heavy suitcase and Ryanair charged me for one overweight kilo which equals 12 pounds. So, if you happen to be flying with plenty of luggage it is worth of checking other options as well. For example easyJet allows 20 kg suitcases without overweight fee compared to Ryanair's 15 kilos. Also the price of extra kilo is 6 GBP compared to 12 GBP.

Yesterday we were busy with closing our Hungarian bank accounts. There were no troubles but as an interesting detail I can tell now that closing Raiffeisen account was free but at OTP you had to pay some handling fees. Then it was time to spend some left over forint notes so we did some shopping and visited dentist. Check up, cleaning and one small filling in a clean and modern private clinic in Miskolc was 55 GBP. The NHS fee for that would be 44.60 GBP but I happy that I got that tooth fixed at the early stage.

I had previous check one year ago and at that time there was something very small but not worth of fixing. I guess my lunch habits in Edinburgh are way unhealthier than in Budapest. In Edinburgh I often take a lunch offer from Boots store which includes drink, sandwich and snack. And that snack is usually Mars or Snickers bar...

Today it is raining and I don't have too much to do. Dóra is at the hairdresser because tomorrow we will visit her cousin's wedding. On Sunday we will go to Slovakia for a trekking so I'd better take partying easily.

During last couple days I have been working with iReport 3.0.0. I was creating a multipage PDF report for a customer to review data from online forms. I have to say that iReport saved plenty of nerd sweat but it also caused some headache. I did not have the printed documentation (The Definitive Guide to iReport) so I ended up searching forums and other sites.

Getting started was pretty easy but I ran into my first problem when I tried to figure out how to display numerous key-value data pairs on a single page. Creating a subreport and passing the key value to it was the solution and luckily there was a screencast explaining it. So, soon my page was filled with values and the next dilemma was ready.

Creating a multipage report was a bit awkward because it required to have a subreport for each page. And each page was using a subreport already. The trick to get this working was to pass the subreport directory from root to all subreports. After this the report expanded over 8 pages and my creative colleague was ready to modify its layout. It was rather easy for him to start using iReport even he had no previous experience with it.

But he wasn't totally happy with iReport's responsiveness and it was definitely sluggish on his workstation. It turned out that there was something wrong with the new page I created by copying existing page's .jrxml file. This caused the report preview to hang without any errors and eventually he was running several stuck preview processes at the same time. This was solved by simply restarting iReport and creating that new page from scratch.

Meanwhile I was experimenting with other features of iReport and I decided to try out it with a data set which required pivoting. Each row in the database had key-value pair with grouping time stamp. The requirement was to create a table having those keys as a column headers. The database was a bit older Oracle and it did not support pivoting as well as newer versions. The solution was to use iReport's crosstab function which turned out to be quite handy.

It will be interesting to see how iReport will evolve in the future. I have the feeling that there is some demand to improve its multipage handling among some other annoyances. But even with its current status it turned out to be a valuable tool.

I got my first flu in Edinburgh and I have been doing pretty much nothing today. It is such a shame because weather is sunny and warm outdoors. I hope I will recover fast because after couple days we will have a holiday in Hungary and Slovakia. Flying while having flu is not the most pleasant experience and actually not recommended.

I have been reading this relatively new book for couple weeks now and it seems to be a good material for Hibernate beginners. There will be a proper review but I will post it to Java User Group Scotland's site when the review is ready. But as an early comment I could recommend Harnessing Hibernate.

Yesterday night there was Scottish Firework Championships taking place at Ocean Terminal. We missed first show but there were two more to come. The cold weather and wind kept people indoors so we had good place to watch and photograph fireworks. The fence before sea also provided steady support for the camera.

Photographing fireworks is tricky and especially if you cannot use manual settings for exposure and focus. I was using my Canon IXUS 60 which is just a simple pocket camera. It was impossible to set exposure manually so I had to trick it a little bit. The camera shows exposure time on its display after focusing so I was able to try my luck and when I got right numbers on the screen I kept shooting with continuous mode. The down side of this method is that I took nearly 400 photos and selecting 20 best ones took some time.

It was time to have my first technical presentation in my current workplace. I have experience with Hibernate and the company's technical lead has interest in it. Also the first project based on Hibernate and Spring in this company went live without disasters so the topic was clear.

The Hibernate Core is rather large and going through all the features was out of question. Instead of hundreds of slides I simply explained its main features, benefits and usage with couple plain slides. And then it was time for a demo.

The presentation room's computer did not have Eclipse or other development tools installed but remote access solved that problem. I had everything ready set up on my new workstation (no longer lousy Dell XPS 210) and I could start explaining Hibernate usage with live database and bunch of JUnit tests.

Hibernate's lazy loading is much easier to understand when audience sees different SQL queries created by Hibernate in practice while stepping through the code in Eclipse's debug mode. Same applies to Hibernate Tools. I created new table in Oracle SQL Developer and new Hibernate mappings with generated POJOs were available right after a couple mouse clicks.

I have to admit that this time I was a bit lucky because I did not spend that much time testing that setup. Compared to my very first live coding presentation in my previous work place everything went super smooth without embarrassing typos or brain-locks. There was plenty of discussion afterwards and I have a feeling that I will see more projects being implemented in combination of Hibernate and Spring.

Building a social network after relocation is pretty important and takes effort. Based on my experience in Hungary I would recommend to start building local social network as soon as possible. Later on you will have already established routines and getting involved will be more difficult.

The first persons you get to know in the new location are usually your colleagues. But they tend to have their own circles already outside work and often you would prefer seeing different faces. Luckily it is rather easy to meet new people if you know where to look.

Various user groups are easy way to meet similar minded people. I have visited local Java and Mac user group meetings in Edinburgh among some other IT related events. These have been free,relaxed and fun. Some events are simple social meetings in a pub but there are also educational events with valuable information.

Edinburgh Mac User Group

Java user group for Scotland