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After the airshow we spent nice time in the harbor of North Berwick. Weather was surprisingly good and the town is lovely.
Archive for July of 2008
Airshow 25.7.2008 @ East Fortune
July 28, 2008
On Saturday we visited North Berwick and nearby national musem of flight. Some photos were taken but 55mm is really not enough for photographing flying planes. So these photos are rather cropped and bad quality.
After the airshow we spent nice time in the harbor of North Berwick. Weather was surprisingly good and the town is lovely.
After the airshow we spent nice time in the harbor of North Berwick. Weather was surprisingly good and the town is lovely.
Mistakes exposed by Google - O2's mms2legacy privacy
July 19, 2008
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.
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.
Working from home and being location independent
July 14, 2008
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.
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.
Walking around Blackford Hill, Edinburgh
July 05, 2008International pension planning for often relocating professionals
July 01, 2008
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.
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.