It has been hot for me lately, over 30 every day. But today weather was colder and windy. Cool. Great. Actually it does not matter that much as I am sitting in the air conditioned office. But it is nicer to travel in tram when smelly people do not smell that much.

Oh yea, I just read all available kiroileva siili cartoons. They rock!

There happens to be a national railway company in Hungary called MÁV. As one could guess, it takes care of the passenger railway traffic in Hungary. But in addition it has ability to provide some added value to its customers. I have been using its services almost every month during these two years. So, let me share some of the highlights.

I start with the quality of the tracks. Not only some of the tracks are wobbly and therefore prevent trains using their full speed, but the power lines have also some issues. On Friday there was a black out after Hatvan so we had to change train. The second train had a diesel engine and we were able to continue traveling towards Miskolc. I was lucky as I used normal fast train because afterwards I was told that the next Inter City train was stuck for more than an hour and the conductor was not able to inform customers at all.

Last year I had similar experience while traveling towards Budapest in the late evening. I don't know whether train's engine broke down or was it a problem with power lines. In this case people were sitting in the pitch black train around half an hour until they decided to take a bus. I had no clue how far we were from Budapest but finally I ended up to my flat. In these both cases I received information from fellow passengers who were able to speak English or German - thank you once again. There is no announcements in the train at all in such cases.

But there is at least one thing which is taken care by MÁV. Heating works very well in train cars. No matter whether it is sunny summer day or cold winter - heating works. In some cars there is also air conditioning but the heating is still happily warming freezing people. Because of this heating dilemma windows are all the time open and naturally this causes train cars are very noisy. Ear plugs recommended.

Then once I had a problem getting out from train. But this problem was not because of MÁV. There was a man blocking a doorway with his drunken and passed out body. The sliding door was simply stuck and I had to push and kick that door with some serious effort. So, if you happen to be Hungarian alcoholic who has habit to pass out in train - now you know how come you received those bruises.

But instead of just suffering one can experience heroic moments, too. On the way to Miskolc I was waiting at the doorway and there is a toilet next to the exit. A man went in to that toilet and after some time I started to hear banging. First I though that poor sob has had too spicy food lately but then I saw the real reason as the handle of the toilet fell on the floor. I took the handle and I opened the toilet's door. Poor guy could not get out and he was really happy when I let him out.

This book got my attention at the book shop immediately. Immigration is interesting topic and raises plenty of opinions. I am sort of an immigrant myself as I relocated to another country to work, this was rather a must to buy book.

Author tries to take an objective view point when he explains reasons, history and consequences of immigration. As the topic suggests, he is telling how benefits of immigration outdo disadvantages in long run. Most of his proofs are economical data and research. This gives credibility to his claims but on the other hand some pages were boring when filled with financial data.

The book covers many aspects of immigration. Brain drain, decline of wages, illegal immigration, border control, cultural conflicts etc. As the book was published in 2007 it also covers recent events in the UK and elsewhere. Despite of the conflicts he remains to keep his optimistic viewpoint. But we can read from news that there are open issues for which he does not provide instant solution.

Naturally, he emphasizes the importance of integrating immigrants to the society. But, interestingly, he also recommends that countries should make it easier for immigrants to come and leave. Because in many cases immigrants cannot return easily if they return to their home country, they are sort of forced to stay. And if they are not able to integrate in to the society, there will be problems. If not caused by them, then by their children who become rootless and they wont find their place.

One of the countries he uses as an example is Canada. This came to me as a surprise because I have not heard any immigration related news from Canada. From USA we hear about border control and new laws, Sweden has its own ghetto cities and France with its burning cars. But somehow Canada has managed to absorb good number of immigrants without having such problems. Another successful example was Israel as they suddenly received huge number of jews from ex-Soviet Union.

If I take a look in the Finnish news and public opinion about immigration the picture is somewhat mixed. Most of the people are welcoming immigrants if they are hard working and behave nicer than finns. But any other kind of immigrants or even worse - asylum seekers - are not seen anyhow useful. Actually, I do not know for sure whether it is possible for refugees to work in Finland. But Finland is not really attractive place for immigrants either. Difficult language, cold weather and culture are typical factors repelling skilled professionals.

I found this book interesting despite having sometimes a lot of numerical data. The book is clearly supporting less stricter immigration laws and immigration itself. The author has optimistic but realistic approach to this topic and he is not trying to make everybody happy. I can recommend this to people who want to see one more view point.

I just finished following WWDC 2007 keynote from web live text coverage. Even though I get my living from developing J2EE applications, it was curious to see what Steve Jobs would announce. One of the surprises was Safari 3. New Safari version was expected to ship with Leopard but Apple decided to pull rabbit out from the hat. They announced that Safari 3 beta will be available right away both OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

So, the browser market got a new turn. But how does it differ from previous Safari version? I downloaded the Safari 3 beta on my trusty PowerBook 12" (1.5Ghz G4, 768 RAM) and restarted as installer demanded it. Apple's website claims it to be faster than before and it seem to be true - at least now. Usually the old Safari became faster just by killing it and starting up again. It will remain to be seen if this new version also becomes sluggish after couple days usage.

The user interface is pretty much same as it used to be. But there are some nice new features. As I use Firefox 2 at work I was more than pleased to see inline find. It works pretty much like you would expect it to work. The difference to Firefox is that it highlights current found item with small animation.

There are also other additions. Tabs can be moved around or torn away from parent window. It is now possible to mail contents or the URL of the page. It also looks like that bookmark and history handling has received some new features.

So far I have seen only one web page rendering wrong (http://www.taloussanomat.fi/) and I have not managed to crash Safari 3 beta. There is also strange new feature which allows to resize input text areas. But I am not happy for this as Apple was describing Safari to be the development platform for iPhone and Safari 3 beta does not have iPhone emulator... How could I develop my killer app for iPhone now?

Why on earth anybody calling himself Java programmer can leave this kind of code in an application:

catch (NullPointerException npe) {}

or

catch (Exception e) {}

or

catch (Throwable t) {
// find some rope and a tree branch
}

No logging - nothing. Not even a TODO or a FIXME. Just swallowing silently like in a bad porn movie. If you ever have to take over existing code you will do a great service for yourself by running the code through PMD or similar tool.

Exceptions can be misused in so many ways. Swallowing is just one of them. You can also overuse checked exceptions, re-throw them through numerous layers, catch a generic exception and discard stack trace... It seems that people are really creative when it comes to misuse.

Further reading:

Lesson: Exceptions

Beware the dangers of generic Exceptions

Exception-Handling Antipatterns

I used to have my blog on adgridwork but I did not find it really useful. Today I got email from them as they announced their new service. It is basically about trading reviews between websites, blogs etc. I added this blog there to see how it works in practice as I am little bit skeptical. Is the idea to write only pretty reviews with sugar on top? What if some poor blogger wants me to review his "get rich instantly" website? I can not promise to be nice...

I just visited Apple's website to check upgraded MacBook Pros but actually my attention was taken by iPhone advertisements. Those three ads show in a very concrete way how iPhone works. Compared to Nokia, Motorola etc adverts these seem to be different. Instead of feelings they concentrate on examples how iPhone could benefit its user.

First two ads are nothing special after all, just showing common functionality which can be found from numerous phones. But the third add showed nicely how search and location services could be integrated. I wonder how well those services then function on real life.

This PowerBook 12" 1.5 GHz had became slower and sluggish lately. HD was not totally full and OS X is not supposed to suffer from similar rotting as Windows. So I thought that internal HD is about to break down. That was rather worrying as it is difficult to replace and laptop should last more than two years.

I have an external HD which had enough empty space so I made an image out of internal HD. Then after I verified that image actually works I used Disk Utility to format HD. For my surprise there was no option for surface check - I guess the last time I was doing HD format was in Windows at some previous work place.

After that I took OS X install DVD and performed almost normal installation. The difference was that I excluded most language files and installed X11. Reboot, installing all updates through Software Update and couple more reboots. Then I installed Developer Tools, copied /Applications, some Application Support files from /Library, and naturally my personal files from /Users. One more reboot, repairing permissions and checking that everything works.

My PowerBook became faster and more responsive. The interesting fact is that I gained something like 8 Gb more space compared to starting situation. What was sucking up that space? I did not reinstall GarageBand and also some other Applications were left behind. The previous installation was the factory installation with 10.3.x which I updated 10.4 as soon as it was delivered to me.

This operation took plenty of time with all backups, reinstalling and copying. But at least now it seems to be working faster so I think time was well spent. Too bad this broke the myth that one has never reinstall Mac OS X.