Yesterday night there was Scottish Firework Championships taking place at Ocean Terminal. We missed first show but there were two more to come. The cold weather and wind kept people indoors so we had good place to watch and photograph fireworks. The fence before sea also provided steady support for the camera.

Photographing fireworks is tricky and especially if you cannot use manual settings for exposure and focus. I was using my Canon IXUS 60 which is just a simple pocket camera. It was impossible to set exposure manually so I had to trick it a little bit. The camera shows exposure time on its display after focusing so I was able to try my luck and when I got right numbers on the screen I kept shooting with continuous mode. The down side of this method is that I took nearly 400 photos and selecting 20 best ones took some time.

It was time to have my first technical presentation in my current workplace. I have experience with Hibernate and the company's technical lead has interest in it. Also the first project based on Hibernate and Spring in this company went live without disasters so the topic was clear.

The Hibernate Core is rather large and going through all the features was out of question. Instead of hundreds of slides I simply explained its main features, benefits and usage with couple plain slides. And then it was time for a demo.

The presentation room's computer did not have Eclipse or other development tools installed but remote access solved that problem. I had everything ready set up on my new workstation (no longer lousy Dell XPS 210) and I could start explaining Hibernate usage with live database and bunch of JUnit tests.

Hibernate's lazy loading is much easier to understand when audience sees different SQL queries created by Hibernate in practice while stepping through the code in Eclipse's debug mode. Same applies to Hibernate Tools. I created new table in Oracle SQL Developer and new Hibernate mappings with generated POJOs were available right after a couple mouse clicks.

I have to admit that this time I was a bit lucky because I did not spend that much time testing that setup. Compared to my very first live coding presentation in my previous work place everything went super smooth without embarrassing typos or brain-locks. There was plenty of discussion afterwards and I have a feeling that I will see more projects being implemented in combination of Hibernate and Spring.

Building a social network after relocation is pretty important and takes effort. Based on my experience in Hungary I would recommend to start building local social network as soon as possible. Later on you will have already established routines and getting involved will be more difficult.

The first persons you get to know in the new location are usually your colleagues. But they tend to have their own circles already outside work and often you would prefer seeing different faces. Luckily it is rather easy to meet new people if you know where to look.

Various user groups are easy way to meet similar minded people. I have visited local Java and Mac user group meetings in Edinburgh among some other IT related events. These have been free,relaxed and fun. Some events are simple social meetings in a pub but there are also educational events with valuable information.

Edinburgh Mac User Group

Java user group for Scotland

The washing machine was fixed and also something unexpected happened. Weather changed and there were several really warm and sunny days. It was such a luxury to have lunch outdoor in the park. Too bad the lunch here is usually just a sandwich or similar which is pretty much nonsense compared to proper two course lunches I got used to in Budapest.

Nice weather also took us to Portobello beach to check activities there. For our surprise there were some people swimming in the sea. We decided to stay dry and just walk along the beach.

Just couple weeks ago I had a leaking radiator valve which was fixed. Today I was checking the washing machine while it was working and I noticed it leaked water out on the floor. The washing machine is part of the kitchen furnishing and it has covering panels so I cannot see where the leak is or how big it is - just some water coming through while the machine was running. Luckily the leak was not flooding the whole floor but any leak near wooden floor is bad.

So I had to call my landlady again and now she is trying to organize repairs for it...

Actually I do not understand why washing machine is in the kitchen so often in this country. In Finland and Hungary the machine was placed in the bathroom where water leaks from the washing machine are not that dramatical. I guess it has something to do with peculiar electricity standards here in the UK.

I was running Ubuntu 7.10 inside VMware player and Ubunu's updater offered update to 8.04. I checked Ubuntu website and everything seemed to be fine so I proceeded with update. But after update I noticed that shared folders were not visible for the guest OS anymore and also other features were not working properly.

Reinstalling VMware Tools did not help because installation failed. After some searching I found a good blog entry by Peter Cooper. Despite the topic the described steps work very well also on VMware Player.