Javia blog

Today I run, for the first time, the marathon. The marathon distance is 42.195 km. I finished it in 4:28 (i.e. a little under 4 hours and a half). Although I drank a lot of isotonic drinks and water (about 2 liters) during the course, at the end of the course I was weighting with 2.5kg less then at the start (perhaps lost water). Now my legs hurt and it’s a bit difficult to walk, but during the course I had no particular problems. Now I look forward to doing it again (with a better time?).

Today I run, for the first time, the marathon. The marathon distance is 26 miles 385 yards. I finished it in 4:28 (i.e. a little under 4 hours and a half). Although I drank a lot of isotonic drinks and water (about half a gallon) during the course, at the end of the course I was weighting with 5.5pounds less then at the start (perhaps lost water). Now my legs hurt and it’s a bit difficult to walk, but during the course I had no particular problems. Now I look forward to doing it again (with a better time?).

I’m going to participate in Warsaw’s Half-Marathon which takes place on March 25 — three weeks from now. For me this is the first time I take part in an official half-marathon. The running length is about 21km, and the time limit is 3 hours (the runners who don’t complete the course in this time have to abandon). My main target is to just run it to the end, but as a secondary goal I’d like to do it in under 2h30.

Since today I began training, which consists in running in a park which is not too far from where I live. So I have about 3 weeks for the training; I’ll post a table with the distance I run during this time.

Initially I wanted to run a full marathon (42km), but this is an ambitious goal for a sedentary developer like me. Compared to a marathon, a half-marathon is much easier (more than twice easier).

Here is the starting list where I appear under the name ‘preda’, with T-shirt number 465. It looks it will be crowded, with about 1000 runners.

Training:

I’ve been using Dreamhost for one year now, and I thought I’ll write a review, to see how the referral system works (disclaimer: I get referral fees for everybody who signs up following a link from this page).

The lowest plan costs about $10/month, and comes with about 180 GB disk space, and 1800 GB transfer/month; this is rather huge. I look on the status page for my account (that I share with two friends), and I see that together, our disk usage is at 1% of the space available, and out traffic usage never got as big as 1% (it always stays at 0%). So for practical reasons, the disk and transfer seem unlimited.

You can create up to 75 Linux user accounts, with shell (bash, ssh) access. You can host any number of domains, with any number of subdomains and mailboxes; all this free.

Dreamhost offers one-click installs of WordPress, phpBB, Joomla!, MediaWiki, activeCollab and many others.

I’ve installed and I’m using Django (Python web framework) without any problem (with FastCGI). Dreamhost also supports Ruby on Rails, although I don’t use Rails myself. For databases, DH supports MySQL (with many storage engines: MyISAM, InnoDB, BerkeleyDB, etc — InnoDB supports transactions) and of course SQLite (PostgreSQL is not offered yet, but may be added in the future if there is demand for it). Of course, you may have an unlimited number of MySQL databases. Dreamhost supports FastCGI. As web server, Apache versions 1.3 and 2.0 is available, with full .htaccess configuration (including mod_rewrite). PHP (versions 4.4.2 and 5.1.2) is of course available.

Dreamhost also offers subversion (svn) that you can use either through ssh, or access with the browser. I keep my development svn repository at DH, thus taking advantage of their data security and backup (if my laptop gets stolen, or if my hard disk explodes, I won’t lose my source code). DH also offers webdav (mod_webdav in Apache).

It is possible to compile and install at Dreamhost the applications or libraries that you need (if they are not already offered by DH) — this comes handy when developing a web application. For example, I’ve installed on my account: Python 2.5, Django (svn version), GDB, SCons, GeoIP, ImageMagick, readline, ares, and the most recent version of SQLite.

You also have low-level access to the DNS records (so you may add any DNS records on your domains: A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, TXT, etc). And the greatest thing: even though wildcard DNS is not officially supported, the DH support team was kind and, at my request, has just activated wildcard DNS on one of my domains (thanks DH, this is great!).

And Dreamhost offers a free domain name registration (com, org, net — which typically cost $9/year) with any account.

What’s more: on my Linux laptop, using FUSE and sshfs, I remotely mount my DH account directory as a mount point on my local filesystem. This way I can work with and edit all the files from DH just as if they were local on my laptop, which is very useful.

About the DH drawbacks: the DH servers do not seem as responsive as they could be. And an account doesn’t come with a dedicated IP included (you may add IPs at additional cost). Because of this, it’s not possible to do SSL (https://) on the hosted domains ‘out-of-the-box’ — you need to add a dedicated IP, which costs $4/month, for that.

In conclusion, Dreamhost offers a huge amount of liberty; it is as close to VPS (virtual private hosting) as it gets, while keeping the cost in the low shared-hosting range.

If you read thus far, don’t forget to use the promo-code WILDCARD when you sign up: it will get you the one year plan (which normally costs $119.40) down to $29, with one domain registration included (isn’t that incredible?).

Since the 1st of January, 2007, Romania (and Bulgaria) is a member of the European Union. That’s great, congratulations to Romania and Bulgaria for making it. (I’m Romanian myself, and yes this EU accession does feel good).

The open-moko phone (FIC Neo) is now scheduled for release in February 2007. I can’t wait to get one. Its release becomes even more interesting in light of the recent Apple’s IPhone annoncement, as the two phones, despite many similarities, are at the two extremes of freedom: Open-Moko comes with full open source code, while IPhone doesn’t allow instalation of third-party applications and comes with a 2-year contract.

The MIDP 3.0 (JSR 271) early draft is available for download. This draft is the best way to find out now what MIDP 3.0 will bring; it should be an interesting read for anybody involved with JavaME. The most important addition seems to be the concept of libraries (which can be shared between midlets).

For the first time, I am a participant in the Carnival of the Mobilists (edition #58), with my article JAD is Bad (which argues that the JAD concept introduces un-needed complexity).

I’ve started working with Django, which is a Python web framework. A nice thing about Django is that the source code is relativelly small and readable, so it’s easy to check the code out in order to see how it works or to fix things. (reading code is also a good way to learn a programming language). I’ve already submitted a patch regarding the append-slash redirection.

I’ve written a small Python library called Python Mobile User Agent, which analyzes the User-Agent HTTP header in order to detect whether it belongs to a mobile device (and attempts to extract the mobile’s vendor/model from the User-Agent). This is useful for server-side content adaptation, where a web application generates a different variant of a page for a mobile browser vs. a desktop browser. The library is based on Craig Manley’s perl/php MobileUserAgent library. I’ve put my library on Google code hosting (under the MIT license) in order to get a feeling of how Google code hosting works.

• PayPal finally comes to Poland! Now polish residents can receive payments through PayPal. Look at the PayPal’s list of supported countries, and you’ll see Poland is on the short list of 14 countries.
• Hans Reiser was arrested, as a suspect on his wife’s disappearance. I am very sorry for this. Hans Reiser is a sort of a hero for me. I hope he’ll soon be freed, and allowed to continue his gigantic work on the ReiserFS.
• Simens’ mobile phone division, acquired one year ago by BenQ and named BenQ-Siemens, has declared bankruptcy. Too bad, as Siemens was making some rather good and not expensive mobile phones, and was offering some quality MIDP emulators for these phones.
• On the 1st of January, 2007, Romania (and Bulgaria) will became members of the European Union. Congratulations to these two countries! I may also be among the first who will benefit from Romania’s accession to the EU. And yes, I’ll be (at last) an EU citizen, sounds good.

And a correction: it appears that it wasn’t my application Menstral which was bundled with the Chinese mobile phone mentioned in the previous post, but some other menstrual calendar application. The confusion was caused by this article at Captology Notebook, which seems to make this affirmation with no ground.

I just bought the 5 plane tickets:

1. Warsaw - Budapest
2. Bratislava - Bucharest
3. Bucharest - Bratislava
4. Budapest - Rome
5. Rome - Warsaw

Looks strange, isn’t it? In fact we only wanted to travel on this route: Warsaw - Bucharest - Rome - Warsaw.

In Europe, there are two major low-cost airlines: SkyEurope and WizzAir.
SkyEurope is a Slovakian company, and has the main hub in Bratislava. WizzAir is a Hungarian company, and has the main hub in Budapest.

Warsaw is served by both companies, but SkyEurope has only two links from Warsaw (which is very little), to Rome and Paris.

Bucharest is only served by SkyEurope (WizzAir will also service Bucharest starting from January 2007). VolareWeb also used to fly to Bucharest (mainly from Italy), but it doesn’t do it anymore. A new Romanian company, BlueAir, is flying from Bucharest; but their website is so hopelessly flawed that I really want to avoid them.

I already flew in the past with both SkyEurope and WizzAir, and I am relativelly happy with the overall experience. And their price is very attractive. For example, the set of 5 flights listed above costs 215 euro / person (all taxes included).

I have a few observations concerning their websites:

1. Uniform currency

   They have the habit of listing the price in the currency of the origin country for the flight. This can be meaningless for the pasangers who are only transiting throught that country. For example, the segment prices for my 5 flights are: 168PLN + 1589SKK + 27.5EUR + 11480HUF + 64EUR. Yet I’m the same passenger, and I paid for all the flights with a single credit card. What good does it to me to see the prices in 4 different currencies? By the way, on this line I may take offense at the fact that the flight Bucharest - Bratislava has the price in Euro instead of Romanian Leu (RON) (no, this was a joke). All this currency stuff doesn’t really make sense. A simple advice, easy to implement: if you choose to show a certain amount in a national currency, you should also always put the euro-equivalent next to it. The problem with this approach: it will likely break the nice 1990HUF, 19EUR, 49PLN, 990SKK prices they use now. I mean, the euro equivalent may not always nicely end in ‘99′. On the other side, this really is a cheap silly trick they should get rid of anyway.

2. Put the flight details on every order page

   When you make an order on the web, you are walked through a series of 5 or 6 pages. On the first page you choose the date/time of the flight, next they show you the full price, afterwards you enter your name, address, etc, etc, and on the final screen you have to enter your credit card number and complete the transaction. The funny thing is, on this final page, where you normally pause and ask yourself: this is my last chance to give up, do I *really* want to buy this? am I sure I didn’t make any mistake?, there is no display of any of your flight info: no orgin-destination, no date/time, no names of the people travelling. Hmm.. that’s stupid IMO.

3. Get rid of the silly price/taxes trick

   This is a bad habit of airline companies, to show the price split in two, in what they call price and taxes, and sometimes other fractions like processing fee, credit card processing charge, etc. The only explanation I have is that they’re doing this in order to confuse the cilent into believing that the price is less than it really is. This is a un-fair practice, trying to deceive the client. No company respecting their client should try to deceive him, or at least not in such an obvious way. What’s more, the air travellers also got used to this trick, and they know to ask for the full price before evaluating the cost of the flight, which reduces the efectiveness of the technique. So why shoudn’t the new low-cost airlines be the inovators, and first get rid of this old silly trick? By the way, what would you think if you’d go to buy apples at the supermarket, and the price would be: 1Kg golden apples (promo): 0.01euro. At the counter, they would add: delivery (to the supermaket): 0.19euro; fressness surcharge: 0.09euro, fuel surcharge (for delivery): 0.09euro, supermarket security: 0.19euro, VAT 22%, payment processing 0.39euro, etc, for a total price of … .

Theese low-cost airlines are perhaps having some fierce competition fight between them. But they should really be more focused on fighting the old-fat airlines, and they may benefit from alliances between them. For example, Wizz and SkyEurope may very well mutually benefit from a strategic alliance, oriented at better serving their costumers and thus more efficiently competing with Tarom, LOT, AirFrance, Alitalia, etc. By the way, all the old-fat airlines do have such alliances in place. An alliance between Wizz and SkyEurope would also be advantaged by the fact that these two companies generally serve complementary airports, and on different days of the week. For example, in Poland SkyEurope serves very well Cracow but almost not at all Warsaw, while Wizz has the complementary pattern, serving well Warsaw but not Cracow. And to push things more, they may even sell tickets on the web through a unified (uniform) interface. I (as a client) don’t really care whether I fly Wizz or SkyEurope. All I care is, for example, to travel from Warsaw to Bucarest, on the date/time I want, quick and cheap.

I’ll switch all my 6 domains from GoDaddy to another registrar. I’ll never pay them any money again. They accepted payment for two .eu pre-registrations, that they couldn’t register, and now 3 months later they still refuse to refund the money. That’s stealing, IMO. And their support is the archetipe of brainless drones who are paid on the number of ‘issues’ handled, so that any simple request results in 5 separate issues, 15 emails, and no effect.
I just have to find an alternative registrar.