Dear Garmin,

I don’t know if anyone told you that you build pretty good hardware but your firmware SUCKS! It’s Nearly March 2010 and your customers still have to fight with an embarrassing Y2010 bug in your code, the UI is horrible and getting anything on or off the device is a pain. I am the not-so-proud owner of an eTrex HCx but I can’t remember the last time I actually used it. Why? Because a Nexus One with My Tracks is way better than anything you have to offer. No need to jump through hoops to get tracks off the device, no proprietary drivers that work with one and a half operating systems and I carry it anyway…

Do you want me back as a customer?

Build the eTrex Android.

Specs:

• rugged version of the Nexus One (same screen, processor, etc.)
• replaceable batteries (with a tiny battery in the device to let me switch batteries without shutting it down)
• better GPS antenna & chips
• tiny solar panel on the back

If you or any other company would build a device like that, you could ask ANY price and I would buy it. So please build it. Please…

I moved to Munich a few month ago – well actually I move to Munich only a few days ago but my stuff is here for a few months already. But anyway, I don’t have DSL yet. There are 6 or 7 WLANs in my building but these damn neighbors know how to set a password. This means I feel like living on a remote island far away from civilization when I’m at home. About an hour ago I brought my GF to the train station and luckily there is a Starbucks with a hotspot. With my iPass account I can access it without paying to 8EUR/h and get my fix of internet today

On Thursday I ordered an Ixus 800 IS with a 2gb SD card from amazon.com as a christmas gift for myself. As promised the camera arrived yesterday morning but without the memory card. Amazon screwed up but why am I writing an article titled “Perfect customer service”?

First I read amazon.de Help but I found no phone number. Then I checked Imprint, where I found a link label Callback service. Less than a second after I entered my phone number, my phone rang. Less than 30sec later I was explaining my problem to a customer service person. I was really suprised as he told me something like “the card is in stock, you will have it tomorrow”. Me: “What?!?” Him: “Yes, I will send it by express. 99.9% of the packages are delivered the very next day.” Me: “Cool, that’s great. Thank you VERY MUCH!”. And for the happy ending the package did arrive today Thank you, Amazon!

I had a strange problem with MySQL the other day. After I optimized a query which took too long I got a error 28. The logfile said:

WARN  [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] SQL Error: 1030, SQLState: HY000
ERROR [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] Got error 28 from storage engine

which is somehow related to

>perror 28
OS error code  28:  No space left on device

I checked my filesystem and no device was full. I expected to see at least one device with 90-something percent use but strangely “No space left on device” means “Hey, there is only 170mb left on /tmp and I need MORE!”. After I moved the MySQL tmpdir to another partition, everything worked like it should. So I guess this is another case of “Why should we provide useful errormessage when we want to sell consulting”^TM.

I have to work with XSL templates again and in addition to XML being a terrible language to write any kind of code in I found this anti-pattern. Read the rest of this entry »

I like Ruby, I really do. But there is one thing I just don’t get. I seems to be good Ruby style to use as much implicit returns as possible. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

At my daytime job I had to rewrite a class which sends a Message to a Queue. Sounds simple? With EJB3 it is reasonably simple and can be done in around 10 lines of code involving lots of lookups. But if you are looking for a reliable solution which works even when the application server reboots every once in a while your code gets messy. My current solution has 120 lines of code and there are still some things to add like buffering of unsent messages. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read this blog entry about switching from Eclipse to Idea, and I fully agree with the author. Read the rest of this entry »

I found this piece via Damien Katz. It is originally from a freebsd mailing list: Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t present my opinion in such a nice way, that’s why I’ll just link to some pages which reflect my opinion of this whole mess.

• “Entschuldigt Euch nicht!”
• “Kotze kübelweise”
• “A little about drawings”
• Was nun, ferner Bärtiger? (thanks, Loxia)

A little bit older, but still very true “If You’re a Christian, Muslim or Jew – You are Wrong”. You can find these ‘offending’ images among a lot of other older images in the Mohammed Image Archive.

Spiegel: Aber es kann im Ernst in unserer demokratischen Kultur keine Frage sein, dass nicht Dänen den Islam angegriffen haben, nicht einmal eine dänische Zeitung, sondern umgekehrt Muslime tragende Grundlagen der europäischen Zivilisation attackieren. Das ist der Kern des Problems und wer das verständnisvoll durcheinander bringt oder gleichsetzt, liegt schief.