It has been around two years since last dentist visit. In Finland it is rather easy and cheap for university students but now I am in Hungary and working. Based on my previous troublesome experiences with public health care I decided to try out private sector. I have a some kind of health fund from my work place and I have not used it too much previously so paying it myself was not an issue.

I checked some links from my health fund's website and I picked one. They have English speaking dentist and they returned to my contact inquiry swiftly. So, today I had my appointment and it went quite smooth. The place was clean and staff was friendly. Luckily I did not have any serious problems - at least they did not find any - and the only operation was cleaning after inspection.

How much? 12 000 HUF / around 50 EUR. But it goes from my health fund which is otherwise tricky to utilize so I do not mind. With right kind of paper from a doctor one could buy various things like sun glasses or monthly cards for sports facilities. I guess I have to do another visit to public doctor one day.

I just had some troubles setting local MySQL, phpMyAdmin and XOOPS. The problem was that neither application was able connect MySQL even though it was up and running. I got an error:

#2002 - The server is not responding (or local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)

After some serious searching it turned out to be mismatch of the socket setting.

Here is the solution - from the macosxhints forums:

Modify /etc/my.cnf to have following entries - the file can also be empty:

[mysqld]
change
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
to
socket =/var/mysql/mysql.sock

[client]
change
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
to
socket =/var/mysql/mysql.sock

As feature rich internet applications are becoming more popular every day there are also more and more frameworks to develop such. There are various AJAX frameworks but if you want to build your client application to take advantage of Flash's features you do not that many choices. Adobe Flex is one but it is not free but OpenLaszlo is. It supports Flash and now with brand new version 4 it also has support for DHTML.

I have been playing around with it and it seems to be quite easy to get started with even though I have very little experience with Flash development. OpenLaszlo has an active community around it and documentation is mostly good. Their site has also numerous examples how to use it.

If you think it needs Flash plugin and nobody has it you should know that plugin is available over 95% percent of browsers. That makes it better than Java Applets in sense of availability. Now I only need an idea for my killer application...

Among other fixes and improvements this update includes iChat support for USB Video Class webcams. This is good news for me as my 12" PowerBook does not have built-in camera and I do not have DV camera with Firewire connection or iSight as previous versions required.

The problem now is that there is no proper list of suitable webcams available anywhere. But with some searching I found some discussions about this issue with some hints:

Apple support discussion forum

List of Logitech webcams - those with UVC support should work. There are two versions of same model in some cases so pay attention on serial numbers.

And finally - I have read from various sources that Microsoft Xbox Live Vision Xbox 360 camera works as well. Widely available this might be a decent solution if you do not have great angst against Microsoft.

Last weekend we were in Prague. Instead of flying or using a train we went there by bus. It took seven and half hours but that was bearable as the quality of the bus was pretty good and tickets were relatively cheap. You can check their website - www.cseh-busz.hu to see other destinations and current prices.

Everything went really well in Prague. We had nice accommodation with a good location and weather was sunny most of the time. Even though it was only early March the city was full of tourists. I don't want to think how crammed streets of the old town are during summer time.

Now we are in Miskolc. Today is a national holiday and basically everything is closed also tomorrow as people take Friday off. The unpleasant side of this particular day is the rioting. Budapest is preparing to meet a lot of protesters from opposition and separate groups. As previously, some of these protests are expected to turn violent clashes with police.

Today a light bulb went off from the ceiling lamp. Instead of normal peaceful passing out this particular light bulb decided to explode violently. In addition of causing nasty mess in sense of shattered glass it also tripped a switch from the circuit table.

Strangely, after digging out the remains of past light bulb and replacing it with the new one lights did not work. And there was no electricity in the toilet. Even the oven was cold despite well working cooker just above it.

After some playing with the circuit table's switches without any success I decided to go downstairs to check if the building's electric main room with all those electric meters would provide any clues. Well, there was a red light on the meter of this flat. This flat has three mains coming from basement and each one has its own trip switch. The nasty light bulb managed to trip also one of the main switches off as its last deed.

During the very first days in Budapest I saw Kontroll. It is a movie about Budapest public transport ticket inspectors. But as it is fictional movie I think it is ok to list my own real life experiences.

Personally I haven't had problems with them but I have been witnessing interesting cases. I have the feeling that they concentrate on easy target such as yellow metro line and Deak tér especially during the tourist season. As tourists do not know or they are too ignorant to read instructions they often end up traveling without a valid ticket.

I use daily tram lines 4 or 6 as they are identical for my travel to work. There seems to be ticket inspections two or three times in a month. Currently monthly pass is 7650 HUF and punishment for traveling without ticket is 2500 HUF if paid on spot in cash - otherwise the fine is 7500. So basically simply keeping 2500 HUF ready in my wallet I could save 1650 HUF monthly even if I would be caught twice. But my employer pays my monthly ticket so I have no interest for such experiment.

But back to inspectors and especially to people traveling without ticket. There seems to be three categories. First one is the nice people who obey the rules but do not use tickets. Instead they trust their luck or they have done some statistics. If they are see inspector they usually exit the tram or if caught they pay the fine without big fuss.

Then there are people who simply refuse to communicate with inspector. These usually young people do not show ticket or their ID and because inspector has no rights of a police or even a security guard he cannot do much unless they are teamed up with police or guards. If they are about to be caught in a metro station they simply walk past controllers as they cannot physically grab them.

Finally, the most interesting people are tourists and foreigners. As they do not how Hungarian and inspectors usually have only very limited language skills it is somewhat awkward situation. For some it is just some play as they understand very well that single ticket has to be punched in the validation machine in the tram. But it is also rather easy to miss ticket validation machine in complex Deak tér station unless you know that place and system already. And that is why inspectors are there.