Unpacking my new T400

Today my new notebook finally arrived:

I bought it at lapstars.de, a small online shop in Germany which offers discounts for students.

Inside the outer box was the original Lenovo box, the receipt and surprisingly a small package of gummi bears! I order electronics from various online stores pretty often but I've never seen this kind of customer care ;-)



The notebook itself is really great. It's always exiting to have a new piece of hardware in your hands.


The first thing I had to do was to wipe the hard drive clean and install a sane operating system. But I will write about it in one of my next posts.

The next step is removing the vista-sticker in the lower left corner. It's not that easy because it's more stable than the operating system itself and I don't want to scratch my new notebook with some tools.

PHP - from bad to worse

Everyone who has ever programmed something in PHP knows that it a) is easy to learn in the beginning and b) will produce totally unmaintainable code in the end. The problem with PHP is that it encourages bad programming patterns. Mixing logic and HTML code is a common practice among many web developers. The lack of debugging and testing tools in combination with constructs such as $$var, global variables and arrays of arrays of arrays make bugfixing extremely painful.

Unfortunately these "features" are also the reason why PHP is so popular among beginners. They might be useful for tools and scripts but they are deadly for larger applications.

The PHP folks decided to add yet another feature that makes coding easier and maintaining harder: the GOTO statement! The evil keyword has finally arrived!

Chain of Lights in Vienna

The results of recent elections in Austria were very disappointing. More and more people are lured by the dark side. Right wing populists are gaining more power using fear and hate as their main weapons. It's always someone else's fault. Blaming the foreigners, homosexuals and the EU for unemployment, crime and the "decline of the society" has worked pretty well in the past few decades in Austria.

Fortunately the situation is not as bad as it might seem. There are still many people who want to live in a tolerant society who appreciate diversity. Even though the right wing populists are supported by about 25% of the voters the number of people who would never ever vote for them in an election is still bigger and is expected to grow after the recent events in the Austrian politics.

Last night there was a demonstration at the parliament building in Vienna. Thousands protested against current developments in Austria. Many think that the right wing extremists overstepped the line.

VirtualBox supports SMP

I've been using VirtualBox for quiet a while now. It's really nice virtualisation software if you occasionally need Windows inside your Linux box but don't want to reboot. It has one big advantage when compared to VMWare Workstation, it's free (either free as in "free beer" or free as in "free speach" depending on the version you choose).

The only drawback of using VirtualBox is that it doesn't support multiple CPUs inside the guest system. That has changed now. The new Beta of VirtualBox 3.0 supports SMP in guest systems.

There are still a few issues. The biggest one is that it doesn't work. At least my existing XP virtual machine is unstable when if I configure it to use more than one CPU. And there are some performance problems.

I really hope Sun will fix these problem in the stable release of 3.0.

MuseumsQuartier protests

In my last post I asked myself whether Facebook activism does make any difference in the real world. Obviously it does!

About two weeks ago the MuseumsQuartier, a complex of museums and other cultural institutions in Vienna, changed its "security policy". This place is very popular among young people who come here to chat, have a beer, make some music or just hang around in this amazing centre of modern culture. According to the new policy I was forbidden to bring your own beer or other alcohol.

Within few days a protest group with over 10.000 people was formed on Facebook. After several other online protests and a "real" demonstration last Saturday the ban of alcohol was more or less lifted.

Mobilising people and organising protests online obviously does make a difference, at least when it comes to drinking.

Facebook activism - does it really work?

Everyone who has a Facebook profile has been invited to one of those activists groups who are trying to make our planet a better place to live. Stop polluting the air, fight racism, legalise marijuana... etc., there are groups of people who want to achieve some (more or less) moral goal.

Most of these groups are pretty naive and look like they're never going to achieve anything. How can few hundred people connected through the internet stop whale hunting? Why should anyone even bother and join one of these groups? It doesn't make any difference anyway... or does it?

YAUT (yet another ugly toolkit)

During my computer science studies at the Technical University of Vienna I have come across many software development tools and platforms. Some of them were quiet clever and useful. And some of them were not.

This week I had to develop a small application using the Globus Toolkit. It is a platform designed for grid computing - applications that require a lot of resources are ran on a grid of powerful computers. It uses something called web service resource framework (WSRF). It's an attempt to create stateful web services. During each call to the web service you not only specify the function you want to execute and its parameters but also some resources (stored on the server) that should be used during the execution of the function. The idea seems pretty nice, unfortunately the implementation is just terrible.

The specification, the API and the configuration seem to be designed by someone who hasn't written a line of code for many years. In an ideal software development platform you can write simple application easily while still allowing the user to create complex and scalable applications. Unfortunately with Globus Toolkit this is not the case. The tutorial which explains how to create a small grid-calculator (allowing addition and subtraction of integers) takes few hours. If you actually manage to get it running at all thanks to the configuration hell.

Globus Toolkit might be good when it comes to complex grid applications. But from developer's perspective it is a complete failure. I can't imagine that some would voluntarily start to create applications with Globus Toolkit, just for fun. And that's all that matters. If nobody wants to develop using your tools you're bust.

Tetris - 25th anniversary

This legendary game celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. If you feel nostalgic there are many free implementations of this marvelous game. For example you can try KBlocks from the new KDE4.

New wave of censorship in China

I haven't made any new posts in the last few weeks. I could make up some good excuses for stopping blogging but the truth is I was probably just lazy.

So why did I decide to give my blog a second try? Well one reason is that there is always something to write about. Writing down your thoughts and sharing your experiences makes your head feel lighter.

But the main reason for reactivating my blog is that I want to celebrate the fact that I am free to actually have an uncensored blog. It might not be the most interesting thing to read but to me it is important that I free to express myself through my blog and other people are free to read it.

Many people on this planet are not so fortunate. In preparation of the 20th anniversary of nothing happening at the Tiananmen Square the chinese government decided to block the access to Twitter, Flick, bing.com, YouTube and many more.

The communist regime is obviously afraid of revolution 2.0.