I arrived to Finland in the late evening of 26th and I have been pretty busy. My parents had bought a new computer and I was setting it up and helping them with it. I also visited some of my friends and relatives. So, I haven't had any problems spending these couple days. On Sunday I will fly back to Budapest.

I am now spending my Christmas in Miskolc. Here is no snow and weather is not too cold. Also I haven't seen Santa Claus anywhere yet. I will go to Finland for couple days on 26th and I hope there I will see some signs of snow.

I went out this morning with Dóra to buy some ingredients for x-mas meals. We bought several milk products but we did not buy them from a supermarket. Instead we went to a special milk shop which sold only milk related products. Funny, one could never find such shop from Finland.

Today I had a short presentation about unix command line tools. It had four use cases how to combine simple tools like grep and find in order to do some log mining. Even though I prepared everything the Demo Effect was very much present.

I had company's MacBook Pro connected to the projector. And it froze just before presentation when I was checking my slides. Not just an ordinary program crash but something strange. I was able to move mouse pointer but I couldn't click or type anything. Command+Option+Escape did not work either which was even more strange. So, I rebooted the machine which happens to be first revision MacBook Pro...

Then the terminal was causing headache. As the laptop had german keyboard layout it also has ¨ key next to return key. If I pressed that umlaut key accidentally with return it did not show any extra character but my line had an error. And when I checked the line from history it had some garbage in the end.

As I had done my preparations well I had all those scripts on the paper. The idea was to have live presentation using terminal and connection to some test server. It worked well but those scripts had typos. I was checking them before hand but still some problems occurred. Luckily nothing unsolvable, I had some friendly people in the audience who pointed them out when I was scratching my head.

Anyways, it was fun to have a presentation. It has been a while since I had last one. Now I just have to come up an idea for the next.

"J2EE is more than EJB.
EJB is less than J2EE"

Yes, I am reading Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. So far I have done one fifth and it seems to be really good book. More about this later.

The currency of Hungary is reaching its one year high but there is still some way to go. Government is planning to sell more bonds next week and most likely this will make forint again stronger but I wonder whether it will be allowed to go much further. But the competing countries like Poland, Slovakia and Czech have also their currency getting stronger so I guess Forint will follow. The situation in case of foreign product prices is still better for ordinary hungarian than it was in summer and autumn.

Ambrosia Software has published a new shareware ($19) game. SketchFighter is a traditional two dimensional cave flying shoot-em-up. But instead of traditional graphics it has very different approach. Everything happens on a school graph paper and it looks like it has been drawn by pencils and markers.

Basically the game contains all the normal elements, like hidden items, power ups and boss monsters. But it is very well made and runs smoothly on my 12" PowerBook G4 1.5GHz. In addition of single player mode it has Internet and shared keyboard 2-player mode. I tested briefly 4 minute match with someone from USA and despite high ping there was no noticeable lags or stutters.

When thinking about working abroad you have to think about opening a bank account. Transferring money between two countries is both time and money consuming so local account is usually smart choice. Of course this depend whether you work with local work contract or contract made in home country. If you are working only short time in a country which currency is volatile it might be wise to try to get at least of the salary in different currency, preferably in your home currency. This way you can reduce your risk of loss (or win) in case of exchange rates change rapidly.

But back to choosing a bank. I came up a short list:

• 1. Is their WWW-site is in language you understand?
• 2. Can rates and costs be found from WWW-site?
• 3. If that bank has their own ATMs, check how common they are and how much you have to pay if you use competitors ATM.
• 4. Take a look at their online banking, check if they have demo or try-out login.
• 5. Do they use simple login/password authentication, password lists or more sophisticated way?
• 6. Is there a local branch nearby you?
• 7. Visit that branch and figure out whether staff is able to communicate with you.
• 8. Ask second opinion from local people.

As every Java developer has noticed Sun has released Java 1.6 yesterday. It seems to be a nice upgrade as it doesn't change syntax or introduce any new language enhancements like 1.5 did. So, it promises only good things like better performance, reliability and user interfaces without breaking anything. We'll see...

Now I am wondering when Apple releases their version of Java 1.6. Usually it takes some time for Apple to do this and as usually they do not give any exact release date. At the moment they only offer Java SE 6 Release 1 which is based on JDK 1.6.0_b88 on their developer site. Another question is also whether they release it both OS X 10.4 and upcoming 10.5 Leopard or only for later. Most likely they will release it for both because Leopard is promised for the spring 2007.

In Hungary tons of food products have been repacked and their dates have been changed for selling them again. Among those were jam, muesli, chocolate, dairy products and several others.

MTI news page

Sort of disgusting news for me.

2 Chicken breasts
Some feta, thick cream
Frozen tomato
Curry, black pepper, salt, oregano
Rice

Fry meat.
Add some feta on the pan, mix with meat.
Add salt, curry, pepper
Peel frozen tomato with hot water and chop it in to pieces.
Add of the tomato pieces on the frying pan.
Add oregano and some cream.

Let it boil and serve with cooked rice.

I am not a great fan of game consoles like Playstation or Xbox. But apparently some people take games seriously. Check this site about damages caused by Nintendo Wii controller.

This day is big day for both Finland and Hungary. For Finland it is 89th independence day and in Hungary it is the day when Mikulás (Santa) brings candies and such to kids. For those who are interested how politicians and other celebrity people look like in Finland I recommend to check independence party photo gallery from president's palace.

After experiencing some issues with sound output on SUSE Linux and my work station I started to wonder when was the last time I had some problematic issue with my home computer, 12" Powerbook with OS X 10.4 Tiger. I have had this small laptop since March 2005 so it is already a little bit outdated. It has only 1.5 GHz G4 processor and 768Mb RAM memory.

Recently I received a brand new battery through exchange program so it is hard to say about battery related things but I get over four hours while surfing, chatting and listening podcasts over WLAN. I have had no data loss and I haven't reinstalled operating system. Updating software has been trouble free through Software Update. Also other non-Apple programs have behaved well without strange crashes or such.

I don't have any special carrying carrying case for this laptop but I have a Tucano Second Skin which protects it from scratches in my back bag. The aluminum case is anyways pretty durable and does not show signs of wear easily. But the metal surface is also a source of annoyance. When computer is plugged to ungrounded socket it leaks some electricity to the surface. Even though it is not strong or lethal but it gives tickling sensation if one happens to touch ground while touching laptop's metal skin at the same time.

As weather was rather okay today we decided to have a walk. First we went to Moszka tér where we took a bus 21 to Normafa. It is something like 15 minutes drive outwards from city center. On the way uphill one can spot some nice houses belonging to wealthier people of Budapest.

At Normafa we were not alone as there were families and friends enjoying fresh air. We were prepared with hot tea in my thermos can so cold weather was not able to put us down. So we walked around in the forest and visited also some sights there. Definitely it was a good decision to go there.

It is already early December and it is hardly cold in Budapest. I haven't had any reason to wear my winter cap or gloves. Also in southern Finland there is hardly any snow. It is easy to check using the road camera service.

There has been constant discussion about global warming and such. But last winter was much more snowy in Finland at X-mas time. Has it just changed in one year? Well, it remains to be seen but I want to have snow when I go there soon!