I have been subscribing some podcasts for some time. The idea of a podcast is nothing new anymore but finding good ones takes some time. So, here is my current list:

Some YLE (Finnish national broadcasting company) radio programs like A-Plus. These are usually well made as they are also broadcasted over national radio channels. And naturally it is good to hear Finnish.

BusinessWeek has also interesting program about their each weekly cover story. Quality is good and the content is also well done. However, sometimes the story is very strongly based on US economy and therefore it does not give me much.

Naturally I have some Apple related podcasts on my subscription list. Finnish Snadicast covers Macintosh and Apple news. In this show there are usually one or more visiting guests. The other one is much more technical podcast as it is about Cocoa programming. Late Night Cocoa covers various parts of Cocoa programming environment and despite complex topics it is rather easy to listen.

Actually the birthday of this blog would be during next week but I don't mind. At least I have suitable moment now. Charlie's Angels is going on the tv but I got bored to watch Cameron Diaz's booty shaking.

So, about the blog. I started it almost two years ago when it became evident that I am about to move to Hungary. I was finalizing my Master's thesis and looking for a job from Budapest. It turned out to go well. I got a job and I found a place to live. I still have the same job and the same flat. Hungary or Budapest has not repelled me. Though I today we had walk around some rougher areas of VIII district and it was enough of that area for me.

It is is so clear how Budapest has different sides. From clean and even posh downtown with Vaci utca to barely standing buildings of 8. district. Political field is divided to two and also whole nation is divided in similar fashion. One cannot find such from Finland. It will be interesting to observe how mid-March will turn out as opposition and extreme right parties have planned to have some action.

Or direct link to YouTube

to Darwinism after watching television for some time. German RTL was showing those home videos where people injure themselves with stupid sound effects. Based on what I saw I think human race should be extinct by now.

Funny, last year around this time I had already bought flight tickets to Finland for summer holiday. But now I know my schedule only till beginning of May. Before May my parents will visit and I will make a trip to Prague with Dóra. Well, next 2-3 months are going to be rather exiting time as the following one year will be defined by decisions made before May...

After browsing through some plugins for Nucleus CMS I found simple spam blocker. Hopefully it will be effective enough to block most of the spam. The downside is new extra question for commenter but it should not be too complicated.

I have been working and suffering with complex business logic which basically handling dates based on various rules. As those rules come from law they should be implemented 1:1. Unfortunately law does not tell how to implement database schema and business logic for it. Here are couple tips:

• Decide whether starting and ending times are needed to be inclusive or exclusive as soon as possible.
• What is the needed resolution for date/time? Day, milliseconds or nanoseconds?
• java.sql.Timestamp and java.util.Date are not the best friends - just check compareTo method on both. Sorting a List filled with a mix of those cannot be sorted with java.util.Collection.sort(List mixedList) as it fails with ClassCastException.
• Joda-Time might be worth a look.
• Write good amount of unit test cases, time and date handling is prone to errors. Running a test case is much faster than redeploying and clicking around.