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October 2010

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The Dev Rev

Posted on 2010-10-15 16:37 by rv

Well, my life has certainly gained momentum. I'm in London right now doing job interviews, and am very glad to find out that there are some interesting companies here that are interested in hiring me. Which is a great confidence boost. At first, starting to look for jobs online from my parent's place, I was full of energy and motivation, ready to get back in the flow. Then, realizing that things took a lot slower that I had wanted, I slowly got used to things and sending out job applications became a bit of a chore. Last week I was spending more time on my hobby programming project than on the job quest.

I've forgotten how much I actually enjoy developing software! That was a shocking realization I had after my first face to face job interview in London. I've been traveling and leisuring since the end of March, basically, and although I'm doing a hobby project it doesn't quite give me the same kick as a grand-scale professional project, like the one I used to manage at AK. I had kind of forgotten the feeling of being enthusiastic about a project, but when the interviewer asked me to describe some of my past accomplishments in software, I found back my enthusiasm and the developer spirit flowed right back into me.

Living at my parent's place for months takes its toll, mentally. Everything's too easy. My mind probably didn't run at full capacity at all while I was living there. It was only at the first job interview that things inside my head revved up again and I was thinking at full speed, suddenly able to remember minute details about my past projects that I otherwise would never have remembered, and being able to solve problems that would be very difficult if my mind was not running at full speed. It was definitely the feeling of flow, knowing that a task is very challenging, but also knowing with 100% certainty that you're able to handle it.

Having regained my developer identity, I now have to decide the next step. In the coming two weeks my life's path will change drastically. And it's about time, too.

 

Posted in Tech , Thoughts

Japan has no soul? part 2

Posted on 2010-10-15 16:21 by rv

Write this a while ago but didn't find a chance to post it yet.

Japan has no soul? That can’t be true! In the context that my friend and I were speaking, we were talking about cities, Tokyo specifically. My buddy tells me that there’s something missing in Tokyo, something inexplicable that other cities like Hong Kong and London do have, but Tokyo doesn’t. What is it? Is it soul? Do you notice this about the city as well? My friend and I both lived near Tokyo for a while. He lives in London right now and I’ve visited London, but only a little. To me, the city that has something missing is London. Rather than talking about concrete stuff like convenience stores, bars or public transportation, we’re talking about the general feel. For me, it’s the mood you get when walking through the city. In London I'm only just starting to feel at home. In Tokyo I feel at home already. Relaxed. At peace. It’s a safe place. I did get this vibe from London at some places, but there's just so much differences between a European city and a Japanese city. The things we did in Tokyo are things that one wouldn't even consider doing in London. It’s just ‘not done’ in Europe to experience a city in the same way as we did Tokyo. That, for me, is what I like about Tokyo.

Counterpoint: a city like London has more character. I talked to a guy who lived in London for 5 years then moved to Amsterdam. He prefers Amsterdam now, says it’s nicer to go out in Amsterdam. Using this person and my experiences of London and Amsterdam as a calibration, I guess I can see, or rather ‘feel’, how one could describe a city to have soul. It’s a very difficult quality to describe though. I can imagine that there is a certain quality that cities like London and Amsterdam have, and that Tokyo lacks. But I can’t pinpoint it. But since we’re being vague, there’s also a lot of vague undescribable things about Tokyo that London and Amsterdam lack. I’d tell you what they were but I can’t describe them. Hah!

 

Posted in Thoughts

Japan has no soul?

Posted on 2010-10-12 21:51 by rv

So my friends tells me. Is this true?

Posted in Japan , Thoughts

Yay EasyJet

Posted on 2010-10-11 15:07 by rv

They will let you book a flight with an xxxx+easyjet@gmail.com email address, but when you try to login suddenly your e-mail address is invalid. Way to go EJ..

Posted in Daily Life , Travel

They'll never learn

Posted on 2010-10-10 19:26 by rv

Posted in Japan

The East Polder

Posted on 2010-10-10 00:44 by rv

In the distant past, at times of high downpour, the Hunze river and the Lake of South Laren would flood. The East Polder was regularly flooded as well. Large portions of the polder would remain wet for a long time and could only be hayed very late in the summer. In the early 20th century quays were constructed, water pumping stations were built and the water was contained. Thus the polder became a suitable place for pastures. Alternately haying and grazing the plots attracts waders like the Redshank and the Godwit. The Foundation for the landscape of Groningen performs, in cooperation with farmers, a bird-friendly management. For example, mowing takes place until after the breeding season (at the end of July).

(text found on an information sign in the polder, freely translated to English by me)

Autumn is here.

 

At the entrance of our block

 

 

In the forest

 

 

Not at the rail bridge

 

Me, I'm more of a summer person. Swimming! Water! Sunshine! Before that, Winter will come. Snow, ice, cold... For now, it's still autumn :)

(Ok, I cheated on that last one... Here's how it really looked like when I saw it.)

Posted in Dutch , Photography

You don't really want the things you want

Posted on 2010-10-09 18:03 by rv

After finishing my cycling trip in Japan, having given up my entire life and planning to return to Holland, I thought of all the things I wanted to do when I got back. I had a lot. First and foremost on the list was to surprise my parents with a glorious arrival at their home on my fully loaded touring bicycle. That didn't turn out very well. My mom didn't notice me and my dad took the other entrance and never even noticed my bicycle. So what else did I want?

Well, what with my obsession of having and organizing data, I planned to preserve our family history digitally. I had a big plan to buy or rent a professional film scanner and spend some time every day scanning our family film archive. Another thing I wanted to do is write down all those stories that my dad tells me, or the stories that my granddad told my dad. I figured I'd at least get the stuff typed out in some document on my PC, then later I could make a wiki page for it, put it online and share it with the rest of my family, who could also add their own anecdotes and stories either directly through the wiki or by e-mailing them to me. My final family-related goal was to learn how to make chicken soup the way my mother makes it.

None of those things ever got done. I've asked myself why, as these things seemed quite important to me while I was cycling. One explanation would be to invoke my own laziness, but I'm not going that route this time. While I am usually the first to point out my laziness to others, I have in fact done a lot of other non-lazy things during this time period. As the title says, my explanation for me not doing all those things is that I mistook the importance of these things.

I'm not saying that the things I've mentioned are unimportant. However, I realized that most of those things on my list wouldn't really change my everyday life. A family archive would be mostly about people I don't even know. People that don't influence my life at all. The part of my family that did influence my life is already here, contained inside my head. No need to write that down as it wouldn't be of use to anyone else. Although our family chicken soup is awesome, even my mom rarely cooks it because it's such a hassle.

While spending at home I did completely different things. I refreshed my knowledge of Android, I'm working on a website in Python+Django that taught me a lot of new skills. I still make time for cycling and running (although that's decreased a lot recently ><;). These things did not appear on any of my to-do lists or goal lists. When the time came, it just became clear that I should do them. My life has a self-sorting function, essentially. Any time I spend trying to disrupt my natural order of things just messes up my life. I can only follow the flow, any attempt to influence it is just an illusion. Don't forget, the brain is a very complicated neural network. By trying to predict what you'll want to do in the future you're essentially creating a less complicated representation of yourself, which might not be entirely accurate. If you let things come to you naturally you are using the full power of your _real neural network, and things make a lot more sense. Don't use the pretend-you to predict goals, use the real-you to find them naturally.

You don't really know what you want, even if you think you do. But life knows, and you'll end up going in the direction that you want even without thinking about it.

 

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged ,

Windows + MySQL + Python == hell

Posted on 2010-10-08 22:45 by rv

At the moment I am thoroughly pissed off at MySQLDB's lack of support for getting the library to work under Windows. The documentation even clearly states that Windows is not supported at all. I can feel the geek anger from here. As a self-respecting programmer, how can you write a library for a cross-platform scripting language that is in fact not supported on a major platform like Windows?

Anyway, after browsing around the net I found several solutions, none of which are good. Essentially the problem is that the installer doesn't work on windows, for various reasons. I'll list here everything you need to do to get the damn thing to work, based on the MySQLDB 1.2.3 version of the library, and the target being Python 2.6. (you can get the Python 2.5 egg of a recent version directly from the MySQLDB site).

  • You need to install MySQL server on your windows PC. The lib won't compile if you don't have MySQL's header files.
  • If you're any MySQL version that is not 5.0 then you need to change the site.cfg file in the mysqldb lib so it has the right version. The setup step might complain about a registry key missing. Just insert it manually if it doesn't exist. Add a 'location' key with the value being the path to your MySQL.
  • You need to compile the damn thing, so you need a compiler. Another post I found mentions installing MS Visual Studio Express 2008 but you're probably beter off installing Cygwin, GCC, G++ and Mingw32.
  • When building the lib, tell Python to use mingw32: setup.py build --compiler=mingw32
  • Theoretically you should now have a working MySQLDB for Python 2.6
Note that the last point says theoretically: I haven't actually gotten to this stage yet as I realized too late that I forgot to install gcc. It's late now and I'm going to bed.

It would be great if people could just precompile this stuff for Python 2.5/6/7 and x32/x64 and then include links to those libs on the front page of mysqldb. I guess that would be too easy.

Update: after installing gcc I still can't get the thing to compile. If you're planning to do things this way you'd better be prepared to edit the python scripts that do the mysqldb build. I recommend using Python 2.5 and the mysqldb egg for p2.5, which is readily available. If you really need python 2.6 or 2.7 then be prepared to suffer for it.

Update2: these distributions should work for most Windows versions. It didn't for me, of course. I am very annoyed right now.

Final update: I installed Python 2.5 and everything went smoothly from scratch. I'm done in 10 minutes. Bleh.

 

 

 

Posted in Tech

Woohoo! London here I come!

Posted on 2010-10-08 11:57 by rv

I'll be in London from the 13th until the 19th. Anymeet wanna one?

Posted in Daily Life

Once upon a time..

Posted on 2010-10-07 21:27 by rv

on the internets:

A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a department manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside.

The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know," said the department manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no," said the hardware engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it and we can be on our way."

"Well," said the software engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

 

Posted in Tech
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