Pondělí únor 02, 2009

Good Bye Sun!

— II 02 2009, 11:52:05 odp. CET Permalink Comments [1]

Středa prosinec 17, 2008

Respond to OpenSolaris Survey and Win T-Shirt

— XII 17 2008, 09:28:58 dop. CET Permalink

Úterý listopad 18, 2008

Fly to Brussels for 100 EUR

As I have to cancel my short trip to Brussels due to sickness, I have a spare return flight ticket for 2 adults that you might want to use instead of me:

Prague > Brussels, Wed, Nov 19, 3pm
Brussels > Prague, Thu, Nov 20, 5pm

SkyEurope charges 100 € for a name change per passenger. The flight tickets can be changed up to 2 hours before the flight, so you have almost 24 hours to decide. :-)

— XI 18 2008, 01:45:21 odp. CET Permalink

Pondělí listopad 03, 2008

My First Business Trip

I spent my last weekend on the Polish OpenSolaris Conference 2008 in Szczecin, Poland, which was my first official business trip ever. I enjoyed it, particularly because our presentation about Translation of OpenSolaris went well and the demo of our Community Translation Interface (CTI) worked fine.

But the trip would be a bit boring if I weren't accompanied by my colleagues. Lukas, our Entertainment Secretary, did a fantastic job of finding out the places with the highest concentration of young Polish girls historical monuments. The Saturday night was full of nice surprises: the Polish youth speaks English, recommends good restaurants and organizes free Saturday night live music events. We weren't far from singing karaoke during the event, which appeared to be some youth festival.

On the way back to Prague we stopped at Police, ~20 km north of Szczecin, to see the former synthetic fuel factory operated during the Nazi times by the prisoners of the German concentration camp Pölitz. The remains of the factory, which survived the bombing of Allied armies, reminded us of the despair felt by millions of WW II victims. Although the place is now all covered by grass, the tall factory walls, the railway station and the ruins of the barb wire fence are still there and I realized that anybody who survived cannot erase the horrible lively image of the place from their memories.

Want more?

• Translation of OpenSolaris slides in PDF
• My photos from Szczecin
• Photos from Polish OpenSolaris Conference by osconfszc08

— XI 03 2008, 04:17:15 odp. CET Permalink

Úterý říjen 21, 2008

NetBeans Celebrates 10th Birthday

— X 21 2008, 07:12:34 odp. CEST Permalink

Sobota říjen 18, 2008

WoW. Gorgeous Game and Smart Business Model.

World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the most popular multi-player on-line role playing games (MMORPG), was on my radar for a long time, but I somehow waited until it was too much for my curiosity to resist and I had to find out how it looks like.

Bloodelves. A wallpaper from World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade.

It was the 10-day free trial advertisement which caught my eye as I knew the on-line game is accessible on a pre-paid basis only. You can subscribe to unlimited access to the game world for around €14.99/month. Yes, it's not a small amount. And it's actually a very good business, as you can't overcome the protection as it's possible with off-line games released on CD/DVD. You simply must pay in order to pay. Moreover, you pay even if you don't play, because Blizzard, the French company that's behind WoW and many other bestselling games such as the off-line Warcraft or Diablo, charges you for a monthly subscription and won't reimburse you if you don't play during the period. This is a much better business model than the off-line games which I'm sure will get old-fashioned soon.

But hold on and give it a chance. I did. And totally fell in love with the game. It's the most beautiful on-line game I have ever seen (I haven't played Oblivion or Diablo III, though). The gameplay is very well balanced, as the game world is very complex but the game interface is very easy to use and it's so simple to start playing. I didn't need to read a handful of instructions to be able to play.

You know how it ended with me. I first started playing with a Male Night Elf Hunter in a normal realm and then tried a Female Human Warlock in a role playing realm. When my trial ended I couldn't wait to pay for upgrading my account to a full access. It's such a addictive entertainment. :-)

I love the game and you will love it too. Just try it out! It's free!*

^{* For a 10-days limited access trial. ;-)}

— X 18 2008, 03:25:34 dop. CEST Permalink

Úterý říjen 14, 2008

OpenOffice.org Can't Meet Demand

— X 14 2008, 12:09:33 odp. CEST Permalink

Pondělí září 22, 2008

A Month with iPhone 3G

I fell victim to the iPhone mania. As the iPhone officially arrived to the Czech Republic on Friday, August 22, 2008, I was standing in the queue in front of the T-mobile shop on Narodni street at midnight. T-mobile started to sell iPhone by launching a short party where the first owners of iPhone could meet Roland Mahler, T-mobile CEO, in person. Although I was not so fortunate as the one lucky winner of a free iPhone draw, I was lucky enough to get my contract prolonged to buy iPhone for a subsidied price of 2468 Kc ($150), which is exactly what I was dreaming about, because a usual price of 8GB version of iPhone 3G is 12000 Kc ($730). I was very excited to buy the new iPhone for such a good price that I didn't mind getting to bed late, as I left the shop as the last customer at 2 am.

I wrote the first paragraph just a day after I bought the iPhone and wrote it solely on my new iPhone. It was a pleasant experience, as the automatic spell-checker does a good job of correcting your typos. But there's a hitch in it (as there are many others related to almost any feature of the iPhone): you don't like to write in anything else than English. As you can see, writing a Czech text message gets sometimes really painful. It's a good example of many limitations that I was discovering in the past month. I will sum them up to make a picture of what you will miss (for many users of high-end mobile phones this can get very entertaining):

• you can't send MMS
• you can't switch off automatic spell-checker which corrects your mistakes (painful)
• there is no file manager: you can't download/upload files on the web or use WiFi/Blutetooth to exchange files (you sync only via iTunes SW on Windows/MacOS)
• you can't listen to audio via Bluetooth (I miss this very much!)
• you can't send a contact via sms
• there's no copy&paste

Now -- do you know what's the best thing about iPhone? The iPhone is so cool, that you don't care about any limitation whatsoever. :-) I mean it. It's the best mobile phone/mp3 phone/toy I have ever had and I still love it!

— IX 22 2008, 07:51:55 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Pátek srpen 08, 2008

Fall Flying Cheap

SkyEurope is offerring 88,000 tickets to all of their destinations in Europe for a bargain price of 188 Kc ($12) until Moday, August 11, 9am. All flights depart October 1 or later.

BTW the number of tickets available and the price include number eight, which is a happy number for Chinese, who are officially launching the XXIX. Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in less than two hours (the exact date and time is 08/08/08 08:08pm GMT+8).

Use the time before the Olympics start and reserve some cheap tickets when the offer lasts!

— VIII 08 2008, 12:23:50 odp. CEST Permalink

Sobota červenec 19, 2008

Why is Sun Missing in Top 500?

Financial Times, the leading British business newspaper, has published a chart of the world's 500 largest companies called FT Global 500. The most valuable company is Exxon Mobil, with PetroChina in the second place pushing General Electric to the bronze position.

All major competitors of Sun Microsystems took their positions in the chart (IBM #27, HP #48, Dell #183), but Sun is missing. To answer the question "Why is that?" you must first understand what's the methodology behind.

You don't need to be an economist to know it must be pretty tough to tell if a company deserves to be in the top 500 or not. However, the editors of Financial Times found a very easy and objective way to do so: they sorted the companies according to their market capitalization as of March 31, 2008. Market capitalization is the share price multiplied by the number of shares. All numbers were converted to the dollar by using the exchange rate of March 31, 2008.

Market value is therefore the actual price of the whole company. But the share price doesn't value the company at some point of time, it also includes the expectations of the investors, because they expect Sun to execute on its promises in the future. Accounters call this the principle of going concern.

To compare Sun with other companies (and to see why Sun is not in the list of top 500), we must calculate the market capitalization as of March 31, 2008. The share price (NASDAQ:JAVA) closed at $15.53 that day, while the number of shares is 781,784,000 (taken from the latest annual report). By multiplying these two numbers, we calculate that Sun's market capitalization was $12,141 million on March 31, 2008.

If Sun's value was only $12M, does it mean that it's worse than the top 500 companies? Well, I don't think so. Let me give you an example: is Mercedes worse than Ferrari just because it's cheaper? No, it's not. We can say that it's a different class.

And that's exactly the difference between Sun and it's competitors. IBM, which ranked 27th in the FT Global 500, has 11 times more employees than Sun and had 7 times bigger turnover (amount of products and services sold) in the last fiscal year. That's a big gap which describes the size of the organization and it's another factor included in the share price.

As the amount of outstanding shares does not change often, the only dynamic part of the market cap is the share price. Henkel, the German household goods producer, was the 500th on the list with $19,331.2M market cap. Sun's share price would have to be at least $24.72 to get the last place in the list.

— VII 19 2008, 12:23:30 dop. CEST Permalink

Pátek červenec 11, 2008

SkyEurope's Promo Offers Pretty Cheap Tickets

SkyEurope, the European low-cost airline, is currently offering tickets to almost all of their destinations starting at 24 Kc ($1.63). The offer lasts until Sunday. When I saw the promotion, I immediately bought 20 tickets. No kidding. It cost me only 480 Kc ($32.6). To keep the costs as low as possible, I have chosen not to take any luggage. I'm also planning to stay at the destination for one night only to pay only one-night stay at the hotel and to arrive home quickly where our dog would be waiting.

See the table for the list of destinations I'm going to visit with my wife from November 2008 to March 2009.

Update: I've bought one more flight to London on March 10, 2009, to show the nice city to my mother since she has no one to go with.

— VII 11 2008, 08:22:56 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [2]

Pondělí červen 30, 2008

My First Conference Presentation

The yesterday's weekend was a very rewarding one. I spent all of my time relaxing in the swimming pool as I was enjoying the end of the OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008, where me, Robert Malovec and Ales Cernosek presented about Translation of OpenSolaris.

It was my first conference presentation and even though I got very nervous a few hours before the start, I felt much better while I was on stage. My presentation took about 20 minutes, Robert then went on with the demo of the proposed community translation model. I was very happy to see the demo going smooth, because we all were afraid of it not working at all. But Lukas Machacek did a good job of making it all work that day.

When Robert immediately translated part of the cal command-line application, the audience was apparently impressed. The number of questions asked at the end was overwhelming and we had to admit that some questions were hard to answer, esp. those about the future of the Community Translation Interface (CTI) pilot ("If this is just an experiment, when will we see the final version?") and the acceptance of the OpenSolaris community ("Do you think the community will accept this solution?"). There were also other questions related to the current translations available in Linux ("Why don't you get the existing Linux translations and reuse them in OpenSolaris?") and the current state of OpenSolaris internationalization ("How will you localize the many applications with no internationalization support in OpenSolaris?"). I have realized that we had concentrated on making the demo working but didn't think about the project as a whole. But since this really was just a proof of concept, now it would be the good time to resolve all other issues.

For those of you who didn't make it to the conference, here are some useful links:

• Translation of OpenSolaris Presentation
  The presentation has 28 slides in PDF format.

• OSDevCon 2008 Pictures by Jim Grisanzio
  Thanks to Jim Grisanzio for taking 120 wonderful pictures with his Canon EOS 30D.

• Community Translation Interface
  This is the experimental version of the on-line translation editor used for the community translation model.

• Pootle
  The current translation model utilizes Pootle, an open-source multi-platform web application written in Python.

— VI 30 2008, 07:09:31 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Středa červen 04, 2008

Contribute to OpenSolaris and Win $1,000,000

Sun sponsors the Community Innovation Award, which recognizes and rewards innovative uses of OpenSolaris, with 1 million USD. You don't need to be a programmer to contribute to OpenSolaris and win a prize. Just look at the Community Innovations Award Program and choose, which of the six open-source communities you can to contribute to. If it is OpenSolaris, see the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program for more information, including description of the prizes, FAQ, official rules and so on. And remember: the deadline for joining the contest is June 14, 2008. Only 10 days to go!

— VI 04 2008, 05:22:18 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý červen 03, 2008

First Open-Source Portal Server Release

— VI 03 2008, 07:56:36 odp. CEST Permalink

Čtvrtek duben 17, 2008

Addicted to Coffee

I turned 28 yesterday. My feelings? The 30. mark is so close! I should hurry to do anything the 30-years-old guys can't do (let me know if you have any suggestion).

Tonino Lamborghini (by photographi.esc [outa here])

And I got a huge present, something I really didn't expect: Dé Longhi Magnifica espresso coffee maker. It uses coffee grains to make a fresh espresso automatically, you just push a button. I also got a 1kg pack of the famous Tonino Lamborghini coffee and I am sure I will become a coffee addict very soon. Well, maybe I already am addicted, but I haven't realized it yet.

One other present which made me very happy was a book titled 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which is a collection of a short movie reviews written by various critics worldwide. It starts with A Trip to the Moon (1902) and ends with Volver (2006). The reviews often contain not very well-know facts and trivia about the movie and the accompanying pictures often give a good insight {such as the photos from Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)}. The book has almost 1000 pages, so I'm sure it will take a while to read it (not mentioning seeing all the 1001 movies).

— IV 17 2008, 07:03:29 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]