Středa duben 09, 2008

I've Killed a Deer

Maybe it wasn't a deer. I think it was a roe deer. I haven't seen any antlers anyway...

A roe deer (by Marek Szczepanek)

Well, it was an easy ride to our winter holiday in Bormio, Italy. Our friends departed a few hours earlier and were already expecting us at the destination. According to the GPS, we were supposed to arrive at 11pm. Once we entered Switzerland, the ride became a little adventurous. On a straight road surrounded by grassland, I've spotted a pair of young fawns on the right side of the road. I hit a break and fortunately they didn't enter the road. But all our luggage flew over our heads right on the front desk, because one of the rear seats was not locked properly and let the yogurts, sweets and cooking recipes cover us like an avalanche of snow. But that was still fine, because all I had to do is grab the stuff, put it back to the boot and, of course, fix the seats. A more horrible part of the night was still ahead.

Just 13 km before reaching Bormio, we were unable to continue the way the GPS was telling us as the road was closed. The receptionist at a nearby hotel told us we should have known that the road is closed in winter. Ok, I will check my TomTom software for updates next time. We were happy to find out that the correct way is through the tunnel to Livigno, the well known duty free zone. Once we arrived to the tunnel gate, we found out it has just closed, as it is open only till midnight and opens at 8am next day. Tunnel being closed? I thought that was a joke when our friends told us that on our meeting before the departure. But now it was real. So I used the opportunity to relax and went to the toilet. I quickly realized that it's -15 C out there and hastily returned back to the car. But I enjoyed the silence of the Swiss Alps in a height of 2000 m.

The only two options were:

• sleep in the car until the tunnel opens again
• ride another 150 km around the tunnel to get to Bormio from the south and arrive at 4am

Even though we were exhausted, I decided to continue driving the car as I didn't want to spend a night in the freezing mountains. I had only a quarter of the gas tank full, so I hoped to find a gas station in the nearest town of Zernez, which was only 10 km away. And on the way to Zernez, I hit a deer.

The road was curvy, so I wasn't going fast, but it too fast to break and avoid the contact. All I did was just hold the wheel firmly and hit the break pedal when I saw the deer jump from the left side of the road right in front of the car. It seemed like it all happened in a second. There was a steep hill on the left and that's why I couldn't see it in advance. When I stopped the car, I only saw her lying and looking at me surprisingly. She was trying to stand up but clearly couldn't as the bones were broken. I set the car away not to block the road and I was glad I don't have to see the animal die.

I went out of the car to check the damage. The front of our Renault Laguna was fairly bumped, headlights were still working but shining in the wrong direction. It looked like the car is ok and we can continue. After a long while of making calls to the insurance company, I tried to continue. My first impression was good, as the car was going well and everything looked fine. But after nearly 30 km, just before entering St. Moritz, we had to stop because the engine was overheated. It didn't took very long to let it cool down, as it was still cold enough out there (around -5 C). Unfortunately, we soon realized that not only the cooler, but also the heating is out of order. We obviously couldn't sleep in the car with no heating. We had to take the car to a car service, but nobody would fix the car immediately on early Sunday morning. Our insurance covered a free assistance service which would take the car to the nearest authorized car service. So we could let the car get repaired, but what about us?

It was silent, cold night in St. Moritz and it suddenly started snowing. We saw people taking taxi to return home from the local music club. Everyone seemed to be enjoying it. Except for us, sitting in the cold car and wearing winter jackets, waiting for the engine to cool down to be able to continue in desperate search for a free room in any hotel. They were all fully booked. Oh yes, it was Easter. Maybe it was fortune, we have finally found one free room in the Hotel Crystal****. You can imagine the price offer in the four-star hotel. I was given a 20 EUR sale because it was late night. So we paid only 270 EUR. I wasn't expecting anything cheaper in St. Moritz, and actually we hadn't many options to choose from. But it was a very nice hotel, indeed.

The view of Bormio 3000 (more photos)

Waking up at 9.30am after 3.5 hours of sleep was painful. I wasn't able to eat the breakfast. The free Wifi connection proved to be good opportunity to contact our families via Skype and then we had to leave, because the check-out time was 11am. I will have good memories of the room and service at Hotel Crystal, though. Particularly because we stayed in the lobby for a long time that day to wait for our friends to come from Bormio to pick us up. Finally, it all ended well. We had a wonderful time in Bormio, perfect skiing conditions and the Airport Garage Geronimi car service met the Saturday deadline and did all the necessary repairs (1862.5 SFr) for us to drive home safely.

My recommendations to all car drivers going abroad:

• Check your car insurance. Make sure you get a free assistance service and that your insurance company would pay any necessary repairs abroad. Write down the telephone number to the insurance hot line.
• Check your GPS whether you can see which roads get closed in winter and check if you can see the nearest hotel and car repair on the map.
• Buy a map in case you GPS will be out of order in the cold conditions.
• Avoid traveling in the night. If you travel in the night and you are alone on the road, go slowly and watch out.
• If it's getting late and you are exhausted, it's better to stop early and get a sleep when your car is working and has enough fuel. Don't wait until it gets worse.
• When you spot an animal, it's better to hold the wheel firmly, hit the break pedal and go straight. Don't try avoiding the contact, you can easily get out of the road and bump it into a tree or worse than that, fall down the steep mountain.

— IV 09 2008, 08:33:32 odp. CEST Permalink

Pátek srpen 31, 2007

Getting Married Tomorrow!

— VIII 31 2007, 03:09:30 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Úterý červenec 03, 2007

Running Solaris 10 in Windows Vista

I have a new computer running Windows Vista Home Premium at my home office. I used to connect to work remotely via Sun's Open Work tools but that appears to be forbidden on Windows Vista for now. I thought about one of the alternative ways of running Solaris on my new computer: install Solaris in a virtual machine.

I used VMWare Workstation 6 evaluation download to test it. The latest version is compatible with Vista and works fine. I createad a virtual machine and installed Solaris 10 manually. All went fine, but I ended up quite disappointed, because I couldn't connect to my home network. Maybe it's the Marvell Gigabit Ethernet NIC integrated on my ASUS MR32-MVP motherboard that is not compatible with Solaris drivers. Or maybe it's just my network settings.

But I can confirm the VMWare Workstation works well with my network card, because after installing their sample virtual machine with preconfigured Ubuntu Linux and a preinstalled Firefox browser, everything works as expected.

After my evaluation licence expires, I will try another alternative: install Solaris on a separate partition. But I am afraid of what will partitioning do with my Vista installation, esp. on my 500GB RAID 1+0 array.

— VII 03 2007, 05:13:15 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Středa červen 27, 2007

Sun is Making Computer Games

— VI 27 2007, 04:12:03 odp. CEST Permalink

Download Sun Studio 12 for Free!

— VI 27 2007, 03:55:25 odp. CEST Permalink

Pondělí červen 04, 2007

Aug 21: Deadline for My Master Thesis about Business Intelligence

I would like hereby to commit to finalise my master thesis by August 21, 2007. My previous attempt to finish it by May 5 didn't work. I think it was mainly because I haven't had any time schedule. Now I have it. :-) Here it is:

The red line marks today's date. And the blue lines are the start and the end of the timeline. Each row in the time shcedule is a task. Mostly it's a name of the chapter I need to get done, but the tasks of the tesis reviewers are included as well.

— VI 04 2007, 06:34:38 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Pondělí květen 14, 2007

EGC's Java ES Team Started Blogging

— V 14 2007, 09:19:10 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý únor 27, 2007

Oracle Business Intelligence for Windows Only?

While browsing the documentation for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, I became curious why all the examples are used on the Windows platform. So I finally checked the System Requirements for Oracle BI Suite EE and found out that it is available for Windows only!

You can imagine how surprised I was, because I have already installed Oracle BI Suite on Solaris. And what is the reason? It is because what I have installed is Standard Edition and what the documentation (and other on-line resources such as Oracle BI Blog) is referring to is Enterprise Edition. Fine, I have installed SE on Solaris, but I need EE, which is for Windows only.

Shouldn't Oracle and Sun be partners?

— II 27 2007, 03:07:11 dop. CET Permalink Comments [1]

Pondělí únor 12, 2007

Business Intelligence and Metrics in the Process of Software Globalization Testing

The title is equal to the title of my master thesis that I have officially begun writing in the summer of 2006. Maybe the title does not tell you much. But it contains the keywords that describe all the story behind it:

• Business Intelligence.

  It is the modern approach to corporate data analysis. I have studied a BI course in the school a year ago.

• Metrics.

  Metrics are used to form Key Performance Indicators that managers look at every day to see how their teams perform. The Globalization department I work at is trying to improve the metrics and I volunteered to join the Engineering Metrics team to work on the metrics that cover the engineering work we do in Globalization.

• Software Globalization Testing.

  Testing of the quality of software globalization (or software internationalization and localization) is the core process of our team.

I am writing the thesis under the leadership of doc. Ing. Jan Pour, CSc. for the University of Economics, Prague. The goal is to create an OLAP application that can be used to create metrics of our team's performance. My manager, Tomas Vesely, is supposed to be the opponent.

Although I have learned how to use the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services to use it for BI, I am working with Oracle 10g Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (for obvious reasons). I have succesfully installed it and now I am doing the first steps to learn how to use it. It is not as easy as I expected. Even though Oracle provides extensive resources on-line, it is hard to make them out.

I will probably look for a book at Amazon that covers this topic. Your recommendations for both on-line and off-line resources is welcome.

— II 12 2007, 11:15:19 odp. CET Permalink Comments [3]

Pondělí říjen 09, 2006

First Press Conference in Second Life

Do you play Second Life? If yes, let me know your avatar's name and we can meet in the virtual Sun Pavilion tomorrow at 7 pm CET when chief researcher John Gage, and Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, will speak during Sun's press conference. My avatar is Fox North.

If you don't play Second Life, you can try it for free at http://www.secondlife.com. Clients run on Win2k/XP, Mac OS X and Linux.

See also:

• Screenshots from Second Life

— X 09 2006, 05:17:41 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Pondělí říjen 02, 2006

The Engagement

It happened quickly, smoothly and -- as it is with everything unplanned -- it was a wonderful experience. I am talking about me being engaged with Veronika.

Although I was planning to propose to her for at least half a year, it wasn't easy to plan the engagement as a surprise. And finally it was no surprise, because Veronika knows me very well and already knew what the surprise might be and she made everything to get it out from me. So I had to reveal my plan and eventually I was happy to see that she would like to come with me and select the engagement ring together. And she insisted not to follow the traditional process and let me propose to her at the very near restaurant just after we bought the ring. As I said, it was quick, smooth and even very funny. I can recommend this way of engagement to those of you who are not sure if your girl would appreciate a surprise or if your girl is not from a traditionalistic family.

Now some practical info for those of you who are going to buy an engagement ring for the first time:

• One stone only. A true engagement ring has only one stone, preferably a diamond (but you may choose a syntetic diamnod, such as zircon). The stone is mounted so that it rises from the band.
• Look at the wedding ring. Some traditions favor wearing both engagement and wedding rings at the same time, so plan wisely if you think your wife would like to wear both rings together.
• Don't buy yourself a ring. Men can wear an engagement ring as well, but they don't buy the ring themselves. It is expected that the bride-to-be would buy the engagement ring for you while she gets engaged.
• Giving an engagement ring indicates the engagement to be married, so it IS the marriage proposal.

So now we have a year to plan the wedding, because we have agreed we want the wedding to be in summer. And our dream is to have it on a beach, ideally on the first island we spent our holiday on together: Lefkada (GR). And I have already found a good way of spending our honneymoon: a transatlantic cruise to New York (or other great destination in the US). Or, if we suddenly become very rich, a all-over-the-world cruise on Cunard's Queen Marry 2. It takes 110 days and you visit nearly all ports in the world!

— X 02 2006, 02:16:14 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Sobota srpen 12, 2006

I Won in Monte Carlo

Now I can say: "Veni, vidi, vici."

After returning from the five day (too short!) holiday from Côte d'Azur in southern France, I am still full of happiness and joy remembering the night spent in Casino Monte Carlo, Monaco. It was a delightful experience, mostly because I have seen for the first time how the rich people of Monte Carlo, France and Italy spend their time in the evening.

To retain my memory on the Casino entertainment I exchanged €50 and played hard not to lose it in a minute. I chose rulette (actually there was no other option, see below) and I was lucky, and eventually more than doubled the bet to leave the Casino with €125 in my pocket. I have more than anything else wanted to go down the red carpet with just a little bit more cash than I had when I first entered, and yes, it was a nice feeling. But even if I would have lost, I would say the visit was worth the €10 ticket.

The Casino is a luxurious place in every meaning of this word, including the smell of expensive cigars and ladies in black leather corsets. I would give you a picture to illustrate the unique atmosphere, but cameras are forbidden in the game room.

And here is a short list of things to remember before you visit the Casino for the first time:

Me and Veronica in front of the Casino Monte Carlo

• prepare €10 in cash per person
• prepare at least €50 in cash to exchange for credit if you want to play
• the minimum credit is €5, but higher bank notes are preferred
• you can exchange any €5 credit back for cash
• you don't need to wear a suit, waistcoat nor a tie, but luxury dress is preferred (anything which looks expensive is okay)
• mobile phones and cameras are forbidden in the game room (GSM signal is interrupted)
• French or Italian language is required to speak with the croupier
• prepare to play roulette only if you don't have much cash (minimum bet for Black Jack is €25, but usually only €500 or €200 Black Jack desks are open)
• there is a restaurant and a bar near the game room (water is €4.5, fresh juice €7)

And if you don't want to play in the Casino, the streets of Monte Carlo are full of luxury shops such as YvesSaintLaurent, Cartier, LVMH and many many others. Okay, there is a beautiful sea view as well... ;-)

— VIII 12 2006, 04:09:11 dop. CEST Permalink

Středa červenec 26, 2006

Sun Powers the Fastest Supercomputer of Asia

The Tokyo Institue of Technology, Japan, runs the fastest supercomputer of Asia and the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world as is listed in the TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites as of June 2006. The supercomputer, called TSUBAME by the swallow in the crest of Tokyo Tech., is run by Sun Fire x64 Grid Cluster, which consists of 10,480 AMD Opteron 2.4/2.6 GHz cores.

Sun has finally entered the Top 10 Supercomputing Sites chart, which is often published in the technology and business press.

— VII 26 2006, 10:40:37 dop. CEST Permalink

Úterý červenec 25, 2006

Siga Siga

I spent the last two weeks of June on the Island of Crete and it was a wonderful holiday. I have seen Greece again (last time on Lefkada), and I'm sure I will remember it for a long time as I do with our first summer holiday on Lefkada two years ago.

Veronica on the rocks of Agios Pavlos beach in the time of sunset.

See all photos from Crete

We stayed in the city of Rethymno, northern Crete, and made everyday trips to the south of Crete to see the beautiful small beaches with limpid water. Here is the list of things I will remember and gladly recommend to see:

• Harri's

  The best pancakes in town (and the best I have ever had). It is a must to order waffle with strawberries and whipped cream. I haven't seen so much fresh strawberries and such a thick cream on a huge, tasty waffle.

• Pita Gyros with Tzatziki and Greek Salad

  I had the Greek Salad almost every day and Pita Gyros is probably the best dinner I can imagine. I tried many traditional Greek dishes, all are great, but Pita Gyros will remain my favourite. You must order it on the corner of a small fast-food in the old town to get it, since it is not available in the taverna.

• Loukoumades

  If you fly to Heraklion, make sure you get in the centre and find a small, hidden cafe to get a fresh start with this traditional Greek dessert, accompanied with a Greek coffee or frappe, of course.

• Playing beach volleyball in the beach club

  There is a beach club near Rethymno which offers quality beach volleyball courts, a swimming pool and a music bar playing a selection of summer chillout.

• Making friends

  Lukas, brother of my girlfriend, lived in Rethymno for half a year and introduced us to his friends. Some were local Greeks, some were his fellow students in the University of Crete, but all of them are great people, very friendly and happy to meet us to play beach volleyball or drink in the evening while watching the World Cup. I will esp. remember the horrible ride on 400ccm motorbike going at least 120 kmph, thank you Tassos! ;-)

And what's in the headline? Siga siga means something like "slowly slowly" and is a typical Greek saying which describes the way they enjoy the life. I must admit that I completely identify with this approach and desperately miss it here in Prague. Well, sometimes. ;-)

— VII 25 2006, 09:09:18 odp. CEST Permalink

Sobota květen 27, 2006

Thousands Killed on Java

More than 2,500 people were killed by an earthquake in central Java, Indonesia, today morning. The world media (such as CNN) covered the story during today, but people here in Czech Republic are insensitive to such disaster. When you compare it to another disaster, such as 9/11 terrorist attacks on USA where the death toll was about the same, people don't react the same if the cause is Mother Nature or Al-Quaeda. And I don't mention individual deaths, such as assasinations.

Simply put, three thousand people dead is a horrible number. We should pay attention to what makes people die so quickly in such amounts.

— V 27 2006, 11:07:37 odp. CEST Permalink