Yesterday I hosted Java User Group Scotland - JUGS meeting at my workplace for the second time. This meeting was about JBoss Seam and there was a presentation by Ashish Kulkarni. It was pretty useful as I did not know much about Seam before.

I was also looking forward to receive a review copy of GWT in Practice by Robert T. Cooper and Charlie E. Collins. I have been using GWT for a couple months and it is definitely a fascinating piece of software. It will be interesting to see how this book brings up some new approaches or tricks. Eventually the review will be online under JUGS website's book review section.

Actually, GWT is not the only new technology I have been lucky enough to use at work. We are using agile approach in a new project and therefore our database schemas are under constant change. H2 is a Java database engine written by Thomas Mueller and it allows us to have disposable in-memory database which gets populated by a migration process fed by a legacy database. The H2 project is also very active and bugs are fixed pretty quickly.

Couple days ago we received a delivery containing 20" 2.4 GHz iMac, printer and iPod Nano. Nice difference compared to old 12" 1.5 GHz PowerBook. But the nicest thing was the higher education student discount and special promotions for the printer and iPod - sweet.

Finding a decent flat is matter of luck or good preparation. Unfortunately, there are dodgy landlords, horrible flats and difficult neighbours. I listed couple advices for UK flat hunting:

Reserve time for flat hunting. Prepare to stay in B&B for a week or two instead of rushing to sign contract for the first flat you happen to visit.

Get a clear idea how much you can pay and what you should get with that. Some areas are cheaper but there are usually reasons for that. Remember to check the council tax for the flat.

Visit several flats. Do not worry about wasting agencies' time, they get paid for that. Ask questions but be prepared to meet totally clueless agents.

Check the background of the rental agency. Ask your colleagues and check Internet forums.

Consider private landlords instead of agencies. Generally, private landlords might offer lower rent.

Get everything written. Lease contract, meter readings, inventory list and receipt of the deposit. Take photos of the flat and make sure you capture existing damages.

Ask about current gas and electricity suppliers. A flat without previous utility bills should be avoided. Opening a new supply takes a lot of time and it isn't recommend for people with weak heart.

Older flats have single glazing and carpets everywhere - even in the bathroom. This means higher gas bill during colder months. Carpets can cause problems for allergic people.

Holiday is gone now and the first week in Kirkcaldy is almost over. Commuting to Edinburgh has been quite smooth and the walking distance to stations is not too long. The downside of living in Kirkcaldy is the cost of the season ticket.

The two weeks in Finland were great. We spent most of the time in my parent's summer cottage without any schedule. The trip back to civilization was the name giving ceremony for my new nephew and godson. Walking in the forest was relaxing and I managed to hunt a rabbit without a dog. Unfortunately birds were way too fast so there was no chance to bring any to kitchen.

Returning back to working seven hours a day after two weeks took some time. I even managed to forget maven command line mantra for deploying one of my main projects. But tweaking some last minute changes in to a live project and a client meeting brought me back to reality fast.

We survived. I was a bit nervous about driving in the UK but it went pretty well. Dóra did very well as a navigator and she had to tell me to drive on left side instead of right side only once. No accidents caused and close calls do not matter.

Moving itself was nothing special, just a matter of elbow grease. It was pretty straightforward this time as we moved between furnished flats in the same country. No overweight fees nor pulling suitcases through the city happened this time.

On the way back we drove along Fife coastal path (road A921) which took us through many small towns like Kinghorn and Burntisland. The downside was that the road was rather narrow and there was usually just a stone wall or thick bushes next to the road shoulder. For some reason the car rental upgraded the van from small VW Caddy to bigger Ford Transit for free. This was nice but it caused me more headache on those tight bends on the narrow road. But that is just matter of practice.

Tomorrow we will load a small van with our belongings and drive to Kirkcaldy. Yep, it is time to move again. I will keep working in Edinburgh but Dóra's studies start in Dundee so this location is a bit more reasonable. We'll see how life in Kirkcaldy looks like...

I ended up on the website of Expat Software and my first thought was how come they managed to hide from me this far. They have some cool applications like twiddla but the main point is that these guys are location independent. They seem to be doing fine having a branch at Chamonix for example. That sounds much better than a cubicle, right?

This is not the first company being location independent but this one is distributed over continents. Previously I have blogged about Artlogic but in their case they seem to be located just all over North America. Both companies have in common that they employ senior level developers only. They also utilize collaboration software to keep people on the map.

But what remains somewhat unclear is how these two companies find their customers. Artlogic has most likely achieved strong reputation among its customers and that will keep them busy. At least they have bunch of big names as their references. On the blog of Expat Software they mention high value of meeting people in real life instead of online resources. My own experience is that having a beer with right people might lead to a job interview so I could imagine that works with customers as well.

Last couple weeks I have been working in a project which utilizes Google Web Toolkit for the user interface. The development has been quite straightforward but testing has caused some headaches.

We are using GWT 1.5 RC 2 and one of the new features compared to 1.4 is the debug id. It allows to set a specific id for most of the elements by calling onEnsureDebugId method. This addition in UIObject helps Selenium testing because elements can be referred with their id instead of xpath.

But the first problem came up with Tree and TreeItem. Expanding tree with Selenium RC test case was tricky. Clicking those plus and minus images was quite impossible because I did not manage to set an id for them. After several attempts I decided to use double clicking to expand a tree item. This was also easy on the test side as Selenium has doubleClick command and the tree item itself can have a debug id.

The second problem was with GWT's RichTextArea. I wanted to type text in the area but Selenium IDE did not recognize or record my typing. The problem here was the iframe used by the editor. Some searching revealed that most WYSIWYG editors have the same testing issue. The solution was to select the right frame with Selenium's selectFrame, type text to //body/html and finally select the top frame again.

Oversold performances, problems with ticket printing, suspended telephone and counter sales. The reason for such was an epic failure with new software called Liquid Box Office from Pivotal Integration. The system failed right away in June and had to be replaced with other system. However, the ticket printing was dependent on Liquid Box Office so sales were blocked because of lack of tickets. Eventually the printing issue was solved somehow and tickets were posted on very last moment.

Naturally such problems damage image of Edinburgh Fringe and people are pretty angry about the situation. There are competing festivals and I can imagine someone missing favorite act because of software problem will think twice next year.

Too bad I don't know anybody working for Pivotal Integration. I am rather curious to know how the project was managed, whether it followed waterfall process and how communications were with the customer.

Hmm... actually the company's name sounds really familiar. Let's do a search...

Oh my, I actually applied for some Java developer position in Pivotal Integration. I sent an application email when I was looking for a job in Scotland. I never heard anything from them afterwards - until this. Lucky me not getting that job.

www.edfringe.com: Box Office FAQs

Scotsman: Good news: Fringe box office to reopen... Bad news: It’s got no tickets
Scotsman: Fringe was warned months ago of box office fiasco

The Register: Edinburgh Fringe ticketing chaos continues
The Register: Edinburgh Fringe ticket site dead as a par
The Register: Edinburgh Fringe box office system goes titsup

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.

www.flickr.com

After the airshow we spent nice time in the harbor of North Berwick. Weather was surprisingly good and the town is lovely.

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.

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.

www.flickr.com

Couple photos from previous walk.

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.

Just created flickr account with only a couple photos.

www.flickr.com

There will be more later on, selecting good shots out of hundreds is not a quick task.