Tero Pikala

I just upgraded my WP installation. Finally I can blog from my iPhone

Tags: London // Add Comment »

Originally I was planning to use this holiday season to travel somewhere warm but ended up  going to Finland instead. I guess it’s nice to see friends and family there as well but I would have preferred some quality time with fish and corals

Right now I’m waiting in Heathrow airport to get my bag checked in. For some reason self-checking here doesn’t work like anywhere else where you can just skip queus by doing everything yourself but after checking you still need to wait together with everyone else for 30-40 minutes just to drop your bags. Not really nice but at least I have plenty of time.

Provided my flight is on time I’ll be in Turku around 3AM

Tags: London // Add Comment »

Of course, lot of things happened in 4 months. Here’s highlights of my life:

• I moved from Greenwich/Deptford border to Rotherhithe. Not too far away but totally different place. I have first time in my life own outside door. This place is so quiet I can’t believe it; I think I haven’t live anywhere this quiet since I moved away from my parents house in -94.
• I went to Dublin for long weekend with Elina, Markku & Jani mid July.  We ended up drinking way too much (who would have guessed that!) but anyway it was nice to see my friends from Helsinki.
• Hanna & Wesku got married. Really cool wedding at Hotel Kamp and hopefully ok stag party. I went to Helsinki twice in September for them
• I left tmg. I really liked that company but I just refuse to work with 5+ servers making hellish noise less than 2 meters from my desk. But I miss having lunch at Borough Market so much already…
• And I started at Haymarket. I hate commuting all across London to Hammersmith but it seems like a nice place to work in. I’m little bit worried about how often people go for “couple of pints” after work though
• Now I’ve been in Haymarket for almost 2 months and things are “settling down” bit by bit.

Now it’s less than 4 week until I’m back in Helsinki again - and again for wedding!  This time I have no official role so I can enjoy party even more…

Tags: London // 2 Comments »

I moved to new home late June (that’s 4.5 months ago already).

Of course previous tenant had decided not to terminate his ADSL connection properly and I had to wait again about a month before I had connection.

Then in August I got tired of the fan noise from current server and decided to change it - and being careless managed to fry CPU or motherboard. I got replacement parts few weeks ago and now I’ve finally moved everything from old computer to new one.

I have now rather fast Intel Celeron D 3.2GHz with 2GB of memory - and there’s still room for additional 2GB. It has also total of 1.1TB hard disk space. That should be more than enough to run small home server
I know it’s nerdy but this time I decided it’s time to virtualize some services. I have now following virtual machines:

• SSL-VPN with SSLExplorer and SSH server. I’m using it to run Irssi in Screen
• Mail server. Procmail, Fetchmail, Dovecot, Spamassassin. One day I will setup Roundcube webmail here as well.
• Web server. Apache 2.2, PHP, ColdFusion 7, MySQL.

Still under construction is separate server for Micro$oft stuff - I’ll be using .NET in the future as well…

Most important reason for doing this is being able to backup virtual machines easily. If I ever decide to upgrade my computer I only need to backup virtual machines, reinstall base operating system and install VMware. I can also test new server software way easier this way.

Tags: London // Add Comment »

OneSE8 is development I live in now… but only for 3 more weeks until moving to semi-detached house in Rotherhithe.  It has informal, funny and sometimes strange residents forum at http://www.onese8residents.com/forum/ - you need to register and I guess it’s not THAT funny if you don’t live in the area.

Anyway, here’s something I posted there before going away. I guess I’m just interested what the replies are (if any).

—-

After I moved to UK last summer I rented apartment in Indiana Building.

First I kind a thought that I would get used to DLR going past only 5 meters (15 feet?) from my windows - and in a way I did. Now I’m only annoyed by it every morning when I’m trying to sleep that another 5 minutes before going to work. And if I’m watching a movie that I wouldn’t like to be interrupted every 2 minutes by noise way louder than I would consider listening to a movie.

I’m happy that I don’t own flat here. Every time someone uses toilet somewhere in the higher floors hoses wobble inside the wall. I have woken up quite a few times for that - it’s really loud. When I’m away I’ll keep my eyes open for news about flooded Indiana Building since it can’t be more than couple of years until that happens. That will be expensive as hell - who thinks St James will pay for it?

I’m also happy that I don’t have to live under those chain-smokers above me. I finally did use some really nasty words last Saturday when I was eating a sandwich at my “balcony” and huge piece of ash landed on it. It was kind a funny as well but I really hated cleaning your stuff pretty much every time I opened door to my “balcony”.

Not all the posts about concierges have been positive here but I am leaving with positive feelings. Yes, they almost insisted to give me wrong parcel some time ago and yes, sometimes they aren’t there but nothing really beats that feeling when someone says you “Good morning” really meaning it when you are still trying to wake up to get yourself to office in the morning.

Thanks for Dynamic Turtle for a nice telly; it’s not latests HDTV plasma but boy it has nice picture. I hope I can get in one piece to my next apartment - and without anyone breaking their backs.

Thanks for people at The Retreat and new shop; I have always felt welcome to both places. Maybe I’ll even come down to Retreat for a pint or two again - I’m only moving to Rotherhithe anyway.

Tero

Tags: London // Add Comment »

Overall my relocation to London has been quite OK and actually biggest surprises have usually been related to banks! One would think that one of financial capitals of the world would also have the most advanced banking systems in the world. How wrong I was?

I did knew about checks before coming over; I recall last time checks were accepted in shops was sometime mid 90’s in Finland. If I remember right nobody really used them anyway and they were just pieces of paper anyway. I did use check around 1994 to pay for 5000€ worth of computer equipment we mail ordered and did receive some as a graduation gift from relatives (thanks!) in 1992. Those were only times in my life I had seen a check ever.

Back to London in August 2006: My landlord would prefer to get rent paid with check. I tell him that I don’t want to use checks - now I have to send him SMS every time I’ve paid my rent. I also did most of the times.
Couple of weeks ago I decided to move to another flat and needed to pay 350 pounds to property agency. I could only get 300 with my Maestro and went to my local bank to get rest of it. I got some strange response about flooding and couldn’t get money. No prob, I just paid remaining next day.

Today I walked past my bank and decided to confirm that I can get remaining 2k out of my account when I am to pay it to get my keys for new flat. Friendly woman explained to me that to withdraw money from my own account I have to bring my withdrawal/deposit book with me. They did send me one but actually I couldn’t understand why on earth I would need one so I promptly shredded it.  Anyway here any paper with any personal details in it has to be shredded because otherwise it can be used as an evidence of identity - that another story.

I suppose I can get new book from HSBC when I call them but what they should really do is to hire more people from Finnish banks to explain them how to do 21st century banking

Tags: London // Add Comment »

I guess this is my first work related post…

Anyway, I’m a huge fan of automating anything related to work and when I learned about Ant some 3 years ago I was immediately addicted. Being a ColdFusion guy there never was immediate need to learn about build scripts before - but it’s easy to see now how my life could have been much easier for long time before that.
Now when I’m working on my first real Flex project I obviously wanted to use Ant to control pretty much everything.
This sounds easy (and it is when you have the experience) but it took me a while to figure out all the small details. Today I ended up with this build file. Maybe it helps someone who is trying to do something similar.
It can do following

• compile and deploy Flex project in Windows and OS X
• generate documentation from ActionScript classes (asdoc)
• works with external libraries (Cairngorm.swc)
• use either default properties based on platform or custom properties
• additional deployment targets are easily added

I learned some oddities about Ant today:

• sub-targets (antcall) can’t set properties to calling target
• properties can’t be overwritten once set
• taskdef doesn’t seem to accept properties as a path to jar file

I’m sure there are quite a few good reasons for these design choices but it took me a while to find how to do everything I wanted.

Tags: Adobe Flex // Add Comment »

Oh well. I’m not really a fan of prepared food but then again I just don’t have time to make proper food every day just for myself.

Patak’s has reasonably ok Indian meal Chicken Madras. First time I tried it I didn’t believe instructions that say I can heat it in it’s own container (in oven):

And guess what: After I had warmed it up in a oven still getting warm for less than 10 minutes packaging looks like this:

I will try to find their email address and send some complaints. If I would have just left it into oven for 40 minutes it could have been pretty dangerous in my opinion.

Tags: Food // Add Comment »

Banana Store restaurant close to Borough Market has quite interesting idea:

Buy whatever food you want from Borough Market, take it to them and they will cook it for you. It costs 10 pounds per person making it quite reasonable considering that proper meal is easily 30-40 pounds here.

I scanned their leaflet for more information (and some neck bending… )

I haven’t tried this, it’s only commencing tomorrow, but definitely will soon. I just hope their chefs are good, it takes some courage to promise to make food of anything exotic that you can find at the market!

Tags: Food, London // Add Comment »

Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights

Those who have worked with me know that I’m rather sensitive to noise when it comes to programming something that requires me to focus on that task. I’ve read several posts about programmer productivity and it still amazes me how companies continue to ignore these basic things.

When I was at Nokia there was open plan office with some 200 seats. No wonder things evolved to working 3-4 days a week from home and then spending rest of the week at the office drinking coffee and attending some meetings where teleconferencing wasn’t an option. During that time we were so productive that everything was always ready 1-2 weeks ahead of schedule.
Strangest thing about my current office is that someone has decided to put all servers (more than a few) right next to developers. Still after six months I don’t really understand reasoning behind that decision.  Unfortunately my home is next to DLR and it’s not that quiet either so I can’t go back to that partial remote working mode now.

Tags: General // Add Comment »