Long story short, we decided on Cassandra.

Cassandra is more than a key/value store. It's a distributed data store that uses Bigtable's ColumnFamily design, which will allow us to use our data differently than just storing and retrieving data by using keys; we can actually query the data. Anyway, the decision was made to move from MemcacheDB to Cassandra and we had to come up with a migration path. The path we envisioned would be:

• Keep reading and writing from and to MemcacheDB but also write to Cassandra.
• Stop writing to MemcacheDB and start reading from Cassandra first and have MemcacheDB as a fall-back if we can't read from Cassandra.
• In the mean time copy data from MemcacheDB. Keys that are not in Cassandra will be copied, the others will be skipped
• Disable reading from MemcacheDB.

This meant that we had to run with both Cassandra and MemcacheDB at the same time.

While investigating the use of Cassandra, we found out that the Ruby client for Cassandra doesn't deliver. Mainly because Cassandra uses Thrift and the Thrift client for Ruby isn't too good. However, Hector, a Java client for Cassandra, worked flawlessly. This, together with some other discoveries¹ made us decide to move our application from MRI Ruby (the standard Ruby interpreter) to JRuby (a Ruby interpreter on the JVM). The nice thing about JRuby is that we were able to use best of both the Java and the Ruby world. Most Ruby code runs well in Ruby, but sometimes code has to be adjusted a little or sometimes it's better to use a JRuby version of a specific library; one that's more suited for running on the JVM.

So, we added Cassandra support to our application and moved from the standard Ruby memcache client to the JRuby version. The JRuby version is a small wrapper that exposes the same API as the Ruby version and wraps an existing Java Memcache client. However, after some testing, we found out that the way keys are distributed over the MemcacheDB servers is not the same in both implementations. Both implementations used different algorithms to determine which key should be placed on which server. The Java version provides the ability to choose between three different algorithms, while the Ruby version only provides one, but neither one is compatible with the others.

For getting our JRuby application to talk to our MemcacheDB servers, we had two options; patch the Java version so it behaved like the Ruby version, or just run with the Ruby version (JRuby is still Ruby, right?). Initially, we chose the latter option, which seemed to be the quickest fix. Just pop in the gem and you're done.

Right.

In the MRI Ruby version of our application, we used one MemcacheDB client per process (and then running with multiple processes), while in the JRuby version, we had to run with one client per Java thread. The standard Ruby version of the client is not very good with Java threads and apparently, TCP sockets are handled differently in Java then when using the MRI interpreter. Sockets would linger for a very long time and when the MemcacheDB server would be unresponsive for a while and we would try to reconnect, we would end up with a lot of established connections that were never going to be used, but also never closed. The JRuby version didn't seem to have all these problems and is (obviously) much better suited to run in the JVM; it uses nice socket pools and such.

Not to waste time, we started patching the JRuby client to mimic the behavior of it's Ruby counterpart, which worked out pretty well. We still have to test it a little bit more thoroughly, but the first tests look promising.

The last couple of days have been a head-breaking quest, but I think we've finally nailed it. We really need to move to Cassandra soon, since MemcacheDB is only going to give us a lot more headaches. At least I got to code some Java again and I learned quite a few things about MemcacheDB and how sharding actually works. I also learned that MemcacheDB is a bad choice. Implementing it is done fairly quickly (since you can just use a Memcache client), but it doesn't scale and apparently the sharding differs from one implementation to the other (what if you run multiple applications accessing MemcacheDB and all are written in different languages?). It's too bad that we spent a lot of time finding a solution for something that is going to be replaced very soon.

If you're writing a new application and need persistent cache or something other than a SQL database, check out alternatives like Cassandra or MongoDB.

Because we want to serve ads as quickly as possible (and creating the least possible delay on the page that uses ads that are served by us), we cache ads on the ad servers. Some weeks ago however, we noticed that CPU usage was increasing at a very high rate over time. Memory usage was also increasing, but not as quickly as the CPU usage. The memory increase was caused by the fact that we stored ad meta data in memory inside our application. Since we run around 10 Unicorn processes, an ad would be in memory 10 times, but that wasn't such a big deal, since we run with a lot of RAM. The CPU consumption was more worrying. After some investigation we found out that when all ads are loaded in memory, we had a lot of string objects in memory (around 1.2 million) that were retained, since a global cache array would keep a reference to them. In other words, the objects are never garbage collected. But, since ruby 1.8 has a non-generational GC, all objects are inspected by the GC and having 10 processes performing a GC run over 1.2 million objects every now and then, caused a lot of CPU load.

So, we needed a better way of caching. Memcached was our first idea, but having yet another process on which we depend didn't feel like such a good idea. Since it's a local cache, my colleague Kalle came up with the idea of storing our cache data on tmpfs. Our application takes care of filling the cache (since it serializes ad meta data) and reading from it. Invalidating cache items is now done through a git hook, that simply removes a file that has been updated or deleted from tmpfs.

This al lead to a tenth of the memory consumption and  a lot less and constant cpu usage.

The somewhat longer version is that life is great here. Me and Kasia are doing great; I'm having such a great time being with her. Work is great too. I'm doing pretty cool stuff, both coding and tinkering with networks and unix systems to squeeze out every possibility to get even better performance. We're currently serving 50 million ads a day (and yes, online ads.. I sold my soul) with just a hand full of servers, running a Ruby application. The team I'm working with consists of only smart an experienced people, which makes it even better. I'm learning every day.

My Swedish isn't really great yet. I've signed up for a course, but I have to wait some months to start, since it's fully booked. In the mean time I'm doing some Rosetta Stone, but not so much. I hear a lot of Swedish at work, but everybody speaks English, so there is no real need to speak Swedish. Reading is not so hard, since there are a lot of commonalities with Dutch, but speaking is a lot more difficult.  However, I had a small breakthrough yesterday, when I went to the hairdresser. She doesn't speak English, so I was forced to speak Swedish and I had an actual (and pretty decent) conversation with her! I guess it's all about not being shy and just try.

Swedes are friendly people and very modest. Business is somewhat different than in the Netherlands. For example, meetings are different. In the Netherlands, often people go into a meeting with a goal. Decisions should be made. A general consensus is OK, but there should be a result after a meeting. Here it's different. Meetings are for listening to people and talk about the stuff that needs attention, but decisions are made at the coffee machine. I read some articles about this and some said that Swedish mentality is closer to the way people do business in Belgium, but I'm not sure. Belgians seem far more hierarchical; one person is the boss. Here, it's more about compromises and talking.

Some people asked me if Sweden is expensive. I guess it can be, but apart from the alcohol, it feels a bit like the Netherlands. Of course my salary is in Swedish Kronor, so it's harder to compare, but I don't really have the feeling that products are that more expensive here. I must admit that I'm not very price aware, so it's more a gut feeling. VAT is higher; 25% and 12% instead of 19% and 6%, but I guess you get a lot back from that. Alcohol is excessively expensive though. Half a liter (note to Wayne: "I'm sorry sir, I don't know what a liter is") of beer costs roughly Euro 6,50 in a bar and a Mojito is roughly Euro 13,-. Next to that, you can't buy wine or (normal) beer in the supermarket. There is only one company that sells alcohol and it's run by the government and there a bottle of beer is about Euro 1,50. In the supermarket you can buy 3.5% vol. beer, but that just tastes like water.

But you get a lot back for the stuff you pay. Public transport is good. I think it's better than in the Netherlands. Metro runs pretty much on time (in the Dutch meaning of the word) and often. Swedes tend to have a thing for time. If the metro is 3 minutes late, it's late. 13 past the hour isn't a quarter past, it's 13 past. Interesting difference.

Another thing you get is health care. Paying for that is done through taxes, directly. Not through strange systems with insurance companies. If you need health care, you will get it. Everybody is equal. The first 900 kr (90 euro's) per year, you'll have to pay by yourself, and then it's free for 365 days.

How do I know this? Experience. 3 weeks ago I broke my right ring finger. I went snow boarding with a friend and at the beginning of the first run, I touched the ground with my hand while trying to keep balance. It hurt, but I thought that it would be just a contusion. It wasn't even a cool crash or anything and I had been standing on my board for only 5 seconds. I went to the first aid at the slope to have it checked, but the guy there said it was probably only a contusion and that it was just a little bit swollen. so, I continued boarding for a couple of hours. My finger turned blue and purple the next day, but when the swelling disappeared after a couple of days. I still couldn't move it and it still hurt, so I decided to see a doctor and after some x-rays it turned out to be broken. At the hospital, I got a cast that is coming off today. I'm actually sitting at the hospital while writing this piece. I just had x-rays and I have a doctors appointment in an hour. Hope it healed a bit and that they'll take off the cast, because it's really uncomfortable and typing is pretty hard.

I'll try to make some more time in the future to blog and I hope I can get a mobile subscription soon, so I'm able to be online a bit more. But I'm alright!

My task list is almost empty. I sold my car, my dad took care of the beds and tomorrow I will bring the cats to their temporary home. In February I will fly back to get them. The last thing to do is to actually drive. Thursday the 26th at 5 o'clock in the morning, we drive. It's a 16 hour drive through Germany and Denmark and I really can't wait. Over the last weeks I felt a little nervous and excited, I felt stressed, but after yesterday, I feel only excitement. I took care of everything and everything worked out very well, so I am ready!

The second biggy is that my house is rented. Thanks to Wayne, I was able to rent it to a company. The house worried me a bit, since it's not that easy to rent it for the price I wanted to get for it, but it finally worked out.

My cats will stay in the Netherlands for about 3,5 months, since they need a rabies check, 120 days after their vaccination. Through http://clubvan100.rvu.nl I found someone that is willing to take care of them for a couple of months.

The rest was basically canceling  lot of subscriptions, getting the right documents from the Dutch government, canceling my company and so on.

My friend Wayne is going to drive me to Stockholm on the 26th of November. Today I started packing my stuff, since next week we're going to try if everything fits in his car, but from the looks of it, it might fit.

The only things I still need to do is to sell my car and take care of my bed. Since 4 expats will live in my house, I would like to trade my bed (boxspring) for 4 single beds. So if you happen to know anyone, let me know.

The final date comes is really in sight and I can't wait to go. Me and the misses are great and it feels more and more that this has been the right choice.

For real. Not just for a holiday, or something else. I'm moving there to start a new life. Some months ago, I met an incredible girl and fell in love. She's living in Stockholm, Sweden and since I've had a long distance relationship before, I know that being apart for too long is not going to work for me. We spoke about how a relationship would be possible and the only way seems to be close to each other. Because of circumstances, I would be the one that should move and after some consideration, I decided to take the plunge an just go.

Of course, there will be stuff and people that I leave behind. Family and friends, but Stockholm isn't so far (cheap 1.5 hour flights from and to Eindhoven), my house (I will rent it to someone), my company (this was actually the hardest part of the decision) and swimming with my visually impaired friends. I told most of the people close to me about my plans already (I'm really sorry for the people who I didn't tell yet. It's not something personal).

Since I want me and her to be boyfriend and girlfriend like other people, I will rent my own place at first. Next to that, I'm currently looking for a job as a Ruby developer in Stockholm, so if you happen to have connections there or you are looking for a developer in Stockholm, let me know. I deliberately decided to quit my current job, since I also want to build social life. I know it sucks for my current colleagues, but this is something I need to do. Some time ago (before I met her actually), I figured that I don't want to regret stuff I didn't do. Some things I did, I regret, but I learned from my mistakes, but not doing things that I could have done.. It's a whole different story.

My house, I will rent to someone. Preferably to a friend or an acquaintance, so if you would like live in Utrecht, 5 minutes from the central station, in the middle of the great neighborhood of Lombok, let me know. It's a two story house (about 85 m2) with a large living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom (with bath) and a small back yard. I'm considering renting it furnished, but this depends who is going to rent my house (I might do it through a rental company if I don't find someone I know).

Of course there will be things that I'm going to miss (think peanut butter, stroopwafels and other typical Dutch things), but most of all, I'll miss my friends and family. But since flying is cheap, I will still be able to see all of them. Because of the Internet, everybody is only 30ms away. The only thing is that if someone will visit me there, he or she needs to take alcohol, since in Sweden alcohol is very expensive. Swimming every Wednesday, I will miss. If there's anyone out there that wants to do some voluntary work and drive 2 or 3 people from Utrecht to Amersfoort once a week and swim for an hour, let me know. I've been doing this for over 2 years now and I still like it a lot.

Luckily people speak English very well in Sweden, but I've already started learning the Swedish language. I bought Rosetta Stone and I really like it. Swedish isn't so hard for Dutch people; there are a lot of similarities and the grammar is not so difficult (no cases, no conjugation of verbs), so I'll manage.

As said, I already told most people that are really close and I got great support from all of them. Since I've never done this before, I'm very open for advice from anyone. Over the coming months, I'll keep all of you updated on the progress I make on my blog and probably also on Twitter.

All in all, this feels like the right decision and I'm looking forward to living there, in a beautiful country, with a beautiful girl.

And oh, my cats will be moving too

Edit: I forgot to mention the date. I'm moving before the 1st of February 2010

Since we wanted to stimulate social interaction at the festival, we set up an Asterisk server and connected it to the telephony network via SIP. Then we took the whole address book that is published by Eventphone and put it in a database. After writing some scripts, we had the possibility to randomly select a phone extension and call this. After listening to an announcement, the call was put into a conference call. Since not all phones were connected and not everybody picked up, we participated in the calls sometimes, to keep things alive. Normally a person would pick up the phone and we'd pretend that we were also randomly called, so that an actual conversation was held. When more people picked up and added to the call, we stopped talking and let the others (mostly 2) people have their conversation.

The nice thing about this was that everybody reacted in a very positive way. People who were called and also the (not so many) people we told what we were up to were all enthusiastic by the whole thing.

Although the countries I drove through (Germany, Denmark and Sweden) are quite similar, there are some things that I noticed and I need to write down for future reference (I might edit this list over the course of my stay):

• In Germany, a Frikadelbrotchen is something different than in the Netherlands.
• Danish people can't drive. They stick on the left lane, which is quite annoying when you want to put the pedal to the metal.
• Swedish ATMs and other machines that eat credit cards want your card upside down.
• Supermarkets and other shops have an ingenious system of giving you cash change. Everything is automated.
• Swedish highways are great. Not a lot of cars (except around Stockholm).
• Parking is much cheaper in Sweden then in the Netherlands. Where I'm staying, it's 5 SEK (0,50 euro) per hour and 30 SEK (3 euro) for a whole day.
• Traffic lights go to orange before switching to green (we should have this in NL too..)
• Only saw one police car (without cops in it).
• Most people drive exactly the maximum speed.
• There are some nice rock and metal radio stations here in Stockholm. Not only mainstream crap.
• There is a toll system in Stockholm. It's automated with license plate recognition, but I'm not sure if they can read mine and if, where and when I have to pay.
• The bridges in Denmark and the one from Denmark to Sweden is awesome.

• soap4r and ActionWebService don't play nicely. The SOAP implementation that is included in the standard Ruby distribution isn't very nice at all (issues with validating WSDLs), so I tried using soap4r to make SOAP requests to remote services. Single scripts worked eventually, but when including this in a Rails project that also acts as a SOAP server (using AWS), things broke majorly. Not spending too much time, I decided to make SOAP requests from external scripts that I call with exec().
• soap4r doesn't set the xsi:nil attribute to elements that allow this when the content is nil, but the element is a ComplexType. The solution here was to manually construct the SOAP elements (using SOAP::SOAPElement).
• On my development machine (OSX with Ruby 1.8.6) things finally worked fine, but when deploying to a production environment (Linux with Ruby 1.8.7), things broke when calling "id" on a SOAP result object with the message "warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id" and instead of the id in the SOAP result, I got the object_id (which is an internal id for the object and utterly useless for my purposes). The solution here was to not call methods on the result object, but treating it as a Hash. So result.id becomes result['id'].

First of all, don't get me wrong here. I'm totally cool with gay people. I have gay friends and I'm absolutely tolerant on the way people are (I'm not even going to defend myself on this one). But what bothers me is that some gay singer from a tiny country called the Netherlands thinks he's somebody internationally and trying to make a statement by not performing at the EVS. As if the Russians would care. This really shows that Gordon has absolutely no sense of the (in this case) Russian culture. Now, I've been to Russia a couple of times, and I'm no expert on Russian culture, but I have tasted a bit of Russian culture in general and from what I have experienced, I can say that it's so very different from Dutch culture. Here, people would be shocked if a celebrity would cancel a gig for an idealistic reason, but I'm afraid that Russia doesn't work that way. Of course there are gay people everywhere, even in Russia (although most straight Russians would disagree with me), but the general mentality isn't as tolerant and progressive as we have here in the Netherlands. I think we live in one of the most progressive and tolerant countries in the world (or at least I love to think I do), but that doesn't mean that the rest of the world works in the same way and that we should expect that people react the same way as we are used to. (I have the same feeling about forcing democracy on people that are not used to this, but that's something for a different post, I guess). Russians are proud people that have a strong opinion that they don't change for nothing, so why would they care if some gay singer from a tiny country is not going to sing at an already very gay contest? Of course I understand that Gordon wants to make a statement and that he wants to fight for gay emancipation worldwide, but as with many things I think that every culture needs its own way of dealing with issues. If you really want to change peoples views, use the right way. In my opinion, Gordon should perform and use the moment he's performing to make a statement. Do a speech in Russian and tell all Russian viewers what you want them to know. That will at least make the headlines.

Listen to it and let me know what you think. You can download it here.

The default API requires something like:

api_method :get_my_thingy, :expects => [:id => :int, :name => :string], :returns => [Thingy.struct]

When calling this (e.g. with a ruby soap thingy) it looks something like:

soap.getMyThingy(2, "foo")

But I would like to do:

soap.getMyThingy(:id => 2, :name => "foo")

For this to happen, I introduced an OptionStruct:

module ActionWebService
 class OptionStruct < ActionWebService::Struct
 member :id, :int
 member :name, :string
 end
end

After this, the API should be like:

api_method :get_my_thingy, :expects => [OptionStruct], :returns => [Thingy.struct]

See my previous post for the Thingy.struct

If you have any questions/comments/remarks/business proposals, let me know!

I have a model called Customer that I want to expose via my API. After setting up the API controller, I specified the following in /app/services/customer_api.rb:

class CustomerAPI < ActionWebService::API::Base
  api_method :get, :expects => [:int], :returns => [Customer]
end

Implemented with:

def get(id)
  return Customer.find(id)
end

Requesting the WSDL nicely gives the definition of Customer, but when making a request for a specific customer errored with the message "Cannot map Customer to SOAP/OM.". It appears that boolean values (in Ruby presented as true/false) and emtpy values (presented in Ruby as nil), were the problem. SOAP wants them as "true", "false" and "".

I solved this by extending my models with a to_struct() method that returns all attributes in a Struct. I extended both ActiveRecord::Base instances to get the instance method to_struct() inside my models and I extended ActiveRecord::Base class so it would return a Struct. The latter is needed, since the SOAP plugin wants to know the attributes and types of the Struct, without actually creating one. Here's what I did:

To extend ActiveRecord::Base with class methods create a module and put the following in your /config/environment.rb:

require 'model_extensions'
ActiveRecord::Base.send(:extend, ModelExtensions)

Then in the module:

module ModelExtensions
  def struct
    # Check if the DataStruct is already defined
    begin
      eval("#{self}::DataStruct")
    rescue
      # Define the DataStruct class and fill it with
      # members that resemble the model
      class_eval <<-EOF
        class DataStruct < ActionWebService::Struct
          #{self}.columns.map{|c| member c.name.to_s, c.type.to_s}
        end
      EOF
    end
    return eval("#{self}::DataStruct")
  end
end

Now to create a DataStruct in a model, we define the following:

module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    def to_struct
      # Get a DataStruct and instantiate
      struct = self.class.struct.new
      # Set the attributes after clean-up
      self.attributes.each do |k,v|
        v = (v.nil?) ? "" : ((v == true) ? "true" : (v == false) ? "false" : v)
        struct.send("#{k}=", v)
      end
      return struct
    end
  end
end

To finish off, we change the API implementation a bit to the following:

class CustomerAPI < ActionWebService::API::Base
  api_method :get, :expects => [:int], :returns => [Customer.struct]
end

Implemented with:

def get(id)
  return Customer.find(id).to_struct
end

• It is Kevin, but he wouldn't admit it
• Kevin was separated at birth
• Kevin was cloned
• It's Hippie Glen, dressed up as Kevin

Anyway, here are the pictures. Let me know what you think.

PS. We have no clue why this Kevin is pointing at the camera.. Could it be some habit?

In one of my projects, I'm using the will_paginate plug-in, which is pretty cool. Without a lot of stuff, it will give you pagination in your views. It also works for generic Arrays. Anyway, there is one problem. The project I'm working with can contain a lot of records per table. Since will_paginate doesn't act like a named scope (or at least not in this case, since we're not directly calling paginate() on an AssociationProxy, but on an Array) and requires the whole set returned. This is, because it needs the size of the array as well, so it will calculate the total amount of pages and records in the collection. Obviously, this can be quite expensive if you have a lot of records in your table. It will retrieve all records, create objects in the Array and finally cut of just a very small part of it to display. Because of this, we came up with the following solution:

# The amount of objects per page we want to show
limit = $OBJECTS_PER_PAGE

# If the page was set to 0 (shouldn't happen), or nil (yeah, nil.to_i == 0),
# set the offset to 0
offset_page = (page.to_i > 0) ? page.to_i - 1 : 0
offset = limit * offset_page

# Create args hash with which we count
count_args = args.dup

# Add the limit and the offset to the arguments hash
args[:limit] = limit unless args[:limit]
args[:offset] = offset unless args[:offset]

# Count all object that would be there
total_count = objects.count(:all, count_args)

# Find all objects (this is limited)
objects = find(:all, args)

# Create an array filled with nil values, the size of the total collection
objects_array = Array.new(total_count, nil)

# Insert the found objects at the right place in the array
objects_array[(offset)..(offset + limit - 1)] = objects

# Call paginate() on the array with limit and page   
return objects_array.paginate(:per_page => limit, :page => page)

What this does is only getting the required records, using :limit and ffset in find() and an additional count() without :limit and ffset. To make sure that will_paginate gets a collection the size of the total collection, we create an Array filled with nil values, the size of count(). Then we insert the found records in this array.

The only problem is that the whole operation isn't atomic. The count could differ from the real objects array.

I haven't run any benchmarks, but the Rails logs tell me that only a very small subset of the complete table is selected.

Update: Pointed out by Habbie, using SQL OFFSET is very slow. Back to the drawing board.

In the evening we went to a restaurant to celebrate with my Russian friends. Lena's family gave me half a day in a professional music studio to record the vocal tracks for a song I wrote for her a few months back. On Saturday we went there and it was super. I was pretty nervous to sing, but after 4 attempts, the sound engineer had enough stuff to make a mix. After 3 hours of montage, the vocals were ready and I was handed a CD. And no, I'm not going to publish it.

The next day, we were invited to a wedding of Lena's best friend. Very nice and interesting, since it was my first Russian wedding. Weddings there and here are different, but I'll not go into the details now. The experience itself was great. On Monday, the inevitable moment came to fly back. Always hard, but I managed.

The second part of my birthday was the Dutch version. I invited some Dutch friends and we celebrated at my house. The atmosphere was nice, although the party turned out to be a circle-party (typical Dutch party where people sit in a circle talking and I actually hate these kinds of parties), but the all beer and wine finished, someone puked and most were pretty drunk. After midnight we went out to the city center to continue celebrating. The pinnacle of the evening was a round of Vodka, where one of my friends decided to not pour the drink into his mouth, but splashed it into his eyes. Zanas!

Last week we got the keys and we wanted to get the whole thing up and running as soon as possible. Since my sister is an interior decorator and has her own company, we decided to give her carte blance on the interior. We're both male geeks and don't have a lot of knowledge on interior stuff, having my sister do the interior was a very good choice. Since she was thinking about advertising a new service called "office in a day", this was a perfect test case for her. Last week I made some photos of the place and sent them, together with a very basic map to her. On Sunday, she made a design and showed us Monday morning. We both were very excited about the design and the concept behind it, so we rushed to various stores to buy furnitures and office supplies. Since my sister has a big network of people in her business, we were able to get flooring tiles in two hours. We drove to the factory to pick them up and got the whole floor done in an hour or two. We put the furniture together and put the stuff in and the result is amazing! Test case succesful and customer happy! Here are the results:

Of course, I wouldn't be me if I didn't make a shameless plug, so, if you need an awesome interior designer, especially for your office needs, call my sister. You can find more information on her website at http://www.insida.nl

Since I am the proud owner of an iPhone, I handed my new gadget to some people last week and the reactions were quite interesting. Of course, this device is utterly useless for people that can't see (well), since there is only one button on the thing, that doesn't even allow you to call. Now, I notice a lot of touch screen devices appearing lately. Samsung, LG and Noka, among others have neat devices with just a piece of plastic that is used for user interaction. My guess is that in a couple of years, all phones will have touch displays and no more buttons. The same happened with color displays. Some years ago, there were only phones with black/white displays, but nowadays, there aren't a lot of these devices on the market anymore. I'm very curious to see how phone buttons evolve and if there are any manufacturers that keep an eye on visually impaired people. Maybe this is such a small market that it's not profitable, so only smaller companies will produce special (expensive) devices, but I hope not.

It's interesting to see how a whole group of people sometimes is just left out. In 2001, a similar thing happened with the Euro notes. Before, we had the Guilder (Gulden in Dutch) and on every bank note, there were dots of ink that you would be able to feel and would tell you what the value of the note was. This is currently not the case for Euro notes. There is no way to tell what value the note has, except by it's size. The higher the value, the bigger the note, but without any comparison, it's not easy to tell what kind of note you have, without seeing it. The difference between a 20 Euro and a 50 Euro note for example isn't that distinguishable. A lot of blind people carry special devices with which they can measure the size of the note, but obviously, this is very inconvenient. I really don't understand why the good idea of putting dots on a note wasn't inherited when the Euro was introduced.

When the first generation iPhone was there (without SDK) I understand that there was a need for jailbreaking, but nowadays, with a huge appstore, this need seems to be less, at least for normal users. iPhone hackers obviously want to be able to install additional tools on the device, but what I noticed is that the software that you can dowload on a jailbroken iPhone is often pretty crappy. Stuff crashes or doesn't really work the way you want it to (if you can install it at all; SyncJe doesn't on my phone). Since there are lots of free packages at the appstore, I prefer using them, in favour of the ones you can download from other sources. Another problem with these non-appstore packages is that there seems to be a huge number of sources, all providing different packages. Currently there are 2 installer packages (Installer.app and Cydia) which both contain a subset of available packages.

I like centralized repositories that contain packages that went through a quality check. The same applies for my Linux systems, where I don't want to add 100 extra sources to my apt config, just to run specific software, from which I don't know the quality. Of course, the whole appstore thing creates a vendor lock-in, which in a way is kind of bad, but on the other hand often guarantees some sort of quality control.

I happen to use Zyb.com as an online backup for my contacts and calendars. My Nokia played nice with it and synced things with SyncML, but Apple decided not to support this. 3rd party apps aren't really that great or don't support syncing calendars. What I finally did was using the "Funambol" application to sync my contacts with Zyb, but because Apple closed the format of the iCal database, Funambol only does the contacts (same for Synthesis SyncML2iPhone). Then I exported my calendars from the Zyb site to vcalendars and imported them in Apple's desktop iCal application. From there, I could sync my calendar with iTunes.

The problem I'm facing is that I now can sync my contacts from my phone to Zyb, but not my calendar, which kind of sucks. I'm still trying to figure out a way to (except from installing an Exchange server) sync all my things (calendar, notes, etc).

For the rest, things are going well. Last weekend I travelled to St. Petersburg again (for obvious reasons). The weekend was so great. The only thing we did was visit a birthday party of some friends and the rest was just spending time together. I decided to fly from Dusseldorf this time, since it was a lot cheaper than from Amsterdam and the scheduled times were also much better (Friday in the afternoon and back on late Sunday evening). I flew with BlueWings, a German budget company, and the service was nice.

The day after returning, I suffered my usual post-Russia depression, but now I'm doing fine. I know that this was not the last time.

Actually, nothing happened. I'm ok, but kind of busy lately. In short, NYC was great; the HOPE conference was awesome with a lot of interesting speakers, a lot of fun stuff to do and to see. I really enjoyed my time there. The rest of NYC was also nice; I saw the stuff I didn't see before (couple of museums, neighborhoods, building) and with Bart and Ronald, I had a trip (in a Ford Mustang) to Atlantic City.

Russia was also great. Of course, the main thing was my girl and this was awesome. Therefore I'm back in Russia in the beginning of September. Next to that, I took extra Russian classes. I learned a lot, maybe too much. I really need to go over the lessons again to process the boost of information I got.

After coming back home, I really missed Russia. Obiously, her, but also all other people I got to know, the food, the language, the city. So, now I'm still recovering. Since a lot of people that work in my projects were on a holiday over the last two weeks, I've been working a lot to fill in for some of them, but now most of them are back and things are getting back to normal.

All in all, I'm feeling ok, maybe a bit tired from last weeks. I didn't really take rest during my holidays, so I think I'll need to recharge a bit over the coming weekends. And obviously, I can't wait to travel to Russia again!

For the people that missed me online: I'm back

The city is still great. I'm very relaxed and at ease and feel great. Travel journals will come later and especially some reports from Hackers On Planet Earth, next weekend.

After 2.5 hours in the air, we arrived at St. Peterburg airport. Customs took some time, but finally I saw her again in the arrival hall! It had only been 2 weeks since we'd been apart again, but I was so glad to see her again. By bus and metro we went to the apartments we rented and there, we had to say goodbye to Elena, since she had snuk out of the office and had to finish some work until 21:00. This was OK, since there was some unfinished business I had to take care of. First we went to the bakery to pay for the birthday cake I ordered. Katja, a friend of Elena helped me with preparing earlier on and helped me communicating with the girls at the bakery, but only by phone. Finally I payed and understood that the cake (with Miffy/Nijntje on it) would be ready at 16:00 the next day.

Next stop was the restaurant. I called them before and already made a reservation for 15 to 20 people, but they asked me to come to the restaurant before Saturday to discuss the evening. Since we had about 3 hours to take care of this and the restaurant was 45 minute drive from the city center, we took the metro to a train station on the north side of the city from where we wanted to take a train. When we arrived at the metro station we discovered that we took a big detour and found out that we just missed the train by 5 minutes. The next train would go an hour later, so we decided to take a taxi to the restaurant. After about 30 minutes we arrived there and had a nice meeting with an English speaking waitress and the manager. We created a menu and talked about all things involved. At first, the manager didn't allow us to bring our own cake, but after giving her a very sweet look, she finally agreed. All set, we took a bus back to the city and picked up Elena from her work. Here we met some people I worked with in a previous project and finally went to have dinner.

After dinner, Elena showed us a part of the city, next to the Neva river, where all sorts of festivities were, since it was the day that a lot of high school kids graduated. There was a big concert next to the river and lots of people looking at boats on the river. The atmosphere was very good and all people were happy. During this time of year, the sun doesn't go down and I found it pretty awkward to be on the street at midnight without complete darkness. The sun is somewhere on the horizon at 2 o'clock in the morning and it never gets completely dark.

Somewhere at 1 AM, Elena had to go home, so I decided to bring her (we took a car) and went back to the apartment. Jur and I decided to go out for a beer and finally found a nice pub where we could sit outside. Then it was off to bed.

The next day, Jur and I went to get a car we rented, but we couldn't find the rental place so we decided to skip this because we didn't need a car anyway. After, I went to Elena's house to meet her parents for the first time. I'm not a hero when it comes to the meet-the-parents-thing, but now I was even more nervous, since I didn't know what to expect in terms of the language barrier and cultural differences, but finally everything turned out very well. I felt very welcome and after the tour around the house, I had nice conversations with both Elena's mom and dad. I felt at home very quickly.

After some time Elena had to go to the hairdresser to get a new haircut for the evening and I went with her. The girl at the salon did a great job and she looked stunning. After she changed clothes at home we were off to go to celebrate her birthday. First we took a taxi to the apartment, so I could change my clothes and met there Oleg, a friend of Elena. I quickly went to get the cake, which turned out great. Then we took a taxi to the restaurant.

The restaurant was about 40 minutes by taxi and we arrived secondly, just after Julia and her boyfriend Andrei. The table was made and the menu was printed and closed with a seal. The cake was put in to the fridge by the staff. In 30 minutes all guests were there and the party started. Elena got a load of gifts from her friends and lots of flowers. For starters, guests could choose from the menu and as a main course the restaurant prepared a big meat and fish dish, a couple of big plates on the table where people could take from. The food was really good and very tasty and also the service was super. Dirty cutlery was replaced instantly and our waitress was very friendly, but also nice to look at. Especially Jur found her very interesting. Somewhere during the evening, Elena whispered to me that she would get the girls phone number if Jur didn't ask himself. As far as I know, everybody had fun and enjoyed the food, drinks and talks. After dinner we went for a quick walk to the beach, just to look at the sun going down and get some fresh air.

When we got back after 30 minutes, the soccer match between the Netherlands and Russia was about to start. Before, we had decided to watch it at the restaurant, since they had put up a big screen. Even though Jur and I were the only Dutch guys there, we still were dressed in orange. The match was very exciting, but finally Russia turned out to be the stronger team. Too bad for my country, but I think we were lucky to be in Russia when they won and not back home, since the party then really started. People dancing, shouting, singing and going completely crazy. One random guy in the restaurant came to us to thank for the game and was shouting "My friends! My friends" all the time. After taking some pictures with him, I decided to give him my orange "Holland" cap. After some time, we decided to go, but not before Elena got the waitress' (called Maria) number for Jur.  We got a ride from Slava back to the apartment. Since I was completely exhausted, I decided to go to sleep, while Jur decided to go out. He wanted to go to the city center, but since all bridges open during the night, his ride there took him over an hour, but apparently he had a great time there, partying with people in the street.

The next day, I spent some time with Elena in the city center, before going to her parents house again for dinner. This time, Jur joined us also and we had great Middle Asian food, prepared by Elena's dad. After lots of nice stories from her parents, we went back to the city center to check St. Pete's night life. Finally we ended up in a place called Rossi's with lots of girls on the dance floor. After some time, Elena said goodbye, for she was very tired. Jur and I stayed until very late and drank too much.

The day after, we decided to go to Peterhof, the Russian Versaille, but first, Jur and I had to go to some office to get a registration for our visa. After we met with Elena to go to Peterhof. At first, Maria would join us, but since she had exams, she didn't have time. However, she told us that I had left my credit card at the restaurant, but that she woulld take it with her, so we could get it from her. By hydrofoil boat it took about 30 minutes to arrive at Peterhof, which is located on the south side of Spb. Peterhof is a lovely place with lots of fountains, golden statues and nice trees. After walking around for some time and taking pictures, we took a bus back to the city, where we had Sushi at a great restaurant and some cocktails at the 7SkyBar, a trendy bar located on the top floor of a big shopping mall. After this I went back and off to bed and Jur decided to go to the city again to party.

The following day there was news that the invitation for my Russian business visa was ready. Also, we had to get our registration. First Jur and I went to the registration office, only to find out that the registration wasn't finished, but should be picked up later that day. Jur would take care of this after his visit to the Hermitage museum. Me and Elena met in a different part of the city to get my invitation. After this, Maria called where we could meet her so she could give me back my credit card. We met her, but she didn't have much time to talk, because she was going to celebrate her holiday, but told us that we should really call her next time we were in Russia. Then Elena en I went to her parents place for dinner again. Jur was also invited, but spent 2 hours in the queue for the Hermitage, so he decided to get some dinner by himself after the museum. After lovely dinner and a nice conversation, we went to the theater to watch Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Elena got two tickets from her colleagues for this beautiful ballet. Since we were in a big traffic jam while driving there, we were about 10 minutes late. Our tickets said that we had places in a lodge somewhere, but since we were late, they put us in a very nice place, just in front of the stage!

After the ballet, I went back to the apartment again and said goodbye to Elena. On the way, I bought some beers to celebrate our great time in Spb with Jur. At the apartment we drank a bit, just until Jur got a text message from a girl he had met in a taxi, the night before, asking him to join her at a birthday party somewhere in the center. Even though it was going to be a short night (we had to get a taxi at 6 AM back to the airport), he decided to go there anyway. I packed my stuff and fell sound a sleep at 1 AM, for I was exhausted.

At 5:45, my alarm clock sounded and I got up, took a quick shower and waited for the taxi. Elena called that we should go downstairs, because she arrived. 30 minutes we were at the airport. After standing in a queue for security it was time to say goodbye. This part is always the hardest. After a long kiss, I finally went through security. Before check-in we had to wait again in a very big queue, but finally we checked in our stuff. Then through customs, security again and then to the airplane.

Some 2.5 hours later, I arrived on Dutch soil again. Completely exhausted, but it was all worth it. The hardest is the emptiness that sets in after saying goodbye, but I'm going back to Russia in 25 days. I decided to shorten my trip to NYC by one week and then go to see my girl again.

I've already spoken about this with a Russian friend of mine and he already booked seats at a sports bar, somewhere in the city center of Saint-Petersburg. Elena also wants to see this match, so after her birthday, we will go there to watch the game.

Next to that, the place to stay has finally been arranged. Since the 21st of June is mid-summer night (in Russia, they call this white nights, since the sun will not go down), the city is swamped with tourists and other people that want to be there for a lot of festivities. As far as I heard, that weekend there will also be lots of festivities because of students graduating and thus partying. Elena called more than a hundred hotels to check for vacant rooms, but all hotels were booked. Finally she found an apartment in a nice location.

So, all is set and I'm really excited to be in Russia again! I even found a solution for my cats; Sanne offered to look after them and will sit my house as well during my stay in Russia. Super!

Last Saturday morning, I took a plane from Amsterdam and arrived in Kiev around 11:30. She was already there and from the airport we took the bus and metro to the apartment we rented, somewhere in the city center. Kiev is nice city, but since the whole purpose of the trip was to be able to see eachother again, I didn't see too much of it. After spending some time at the apartment, we went out for diner and had sushi in a place across the street. After, we went to the main square and walked around a bit. Then we went back to the apartment to spend the night together.

The following morning, we took it easy and finally went back to the airport, because her flight left at 16:50. After saying goodbye, I went back on my own to the apartment again, since my flight would be at 6:45 the next morning. I figured I should get some sleep, since my taxi would pick me up at 4:00, but I couldn't sleep actually after the lovely time we spent together. I only slept for about 2 hours before I got up. The taxi ride was pretty ok and I even had a chat with the driver, half in English, half in Russian. At 8:40, I landed in Amsterdam again. Since I had a business meeting in the afternoon in Leeuwarden, I rushed back home, fed the cats and took the train to Leeuwarden, which is a 2 hour trip. After the meeting, I went back home, completely exhausted. Luckily, last night I was able to get some sleep finally. Too bad it was only 30 hours I spent with her, but it's only 15 days until I travel to Russia again! Really can't wait.

And here are the before and after pictures:

	Before
	After

Anyway, the following steps allowed me to use the device:

1. Download HuwaweiAktBbo tool from http://www.kanoistika.sk/bobovsky/archiv/umts/ and run (or fist compile and then run) it. This tool does some magic with the usb library and will enable the extra 2 ports on the device.

2. rmmod usbserial and then run "modprobe usbserial vendor=0×12d1 product=0×1003″. This will force the driver to get things going well. (Check with lsusb if the product is 0×1003, since I read it could also be 0×1001)

3. Run the tool you just downloaded. You should now find ttyUSB0-2 in you /dev directory.

To execute the tool (I renamed it to e220setup), I put the following in /etc/udev/rules.d/51-mobiledata.rules:

#/etc/udev/rules.d/51-mobiledata.rules
# Rules for HAUWEI e220
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", SYSFS{idProduct}=="1003",
RUN="/usr/local/bin/e220setup"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB0", SYMLINK="modem", GROUP="dialout", MODE="0660"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB1", GROUP="dialout" MODE="0660"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB2", GROUP="dialout" MODE="0660"

Now the device is setup and you can use /dev/ttyUSB0 to setup your connection. I use wvdial and my config looks like this:

[Modem1]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 460800
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = crtscts

[Dialer kpn]
Username = KPN
Password = KPN
Phone = *99#
Init2 = AT&F
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","fastinternet","",0,0
Stupid Mode = 1
Inherits = Modem1
New PPPD = yes
Dial Command = ATDT
ISDN = 0
Modem Type = Analog Modem