1. Your dollar isn't worth a nickel in Europe anymore.
2. When the rental company offers you a free upgrade to a larger, "better" car - don't do it. You will spend a fortune on gas.
3. Switzerland has different plugs than the surrounding countries; so does Italy, but at least you can fit standard euro plugs into Italian outlets.
4. In Europe "double room" room means room for two people, and not room with two beds. If you go by US customs (paying per room and not per person), the hotel will think you are trying to cheat them.
5. If you had argued with the hotel owner, and accidently left something in the room, don't expect to get it back.
6. The Swiss have a huge inferiority complex.
7. Don't trust MapPoint directions - they will route you through mountain hiking trails.
8. Don't leave fresh alpine cheese in a plastic bag in a hot hotel room.
9. Most European hotels don't have 24h reception.
10. When driving in Rome: there is no concept of lanes. Scooters always think they have the right of way.
11. Even though the stamps in Europe are old school, you don't have to lick. They have sponges for that. Just don't go overboard.
12. When arriving in small village hotel, make sure you are at the right address before you unpack =)
13. When going to a small alpine village, don't trust the GPS - be sure to know the hotel name.
14. Not everyone accepts credit cards (especially not B&Bs). Make sure to have cash.

Despite my earlier blog post, I decided to take part in the "sexiest" mortgage calculator contest after all. It seemed like a perfect excuse to give Silverlight 3 a try. The end result may not be the sexiest (I'm a developer, not a designer), but I think it’s fairly functional. Actually, I wish I had a tool like that when I was shopping for mortgages. I had a lot of fun writing this app, and I learned a lot.

 Check it out!

EDIT: Nice – I just stumbled upon a website of Rene de Paula jr that mentions my calculator (translation from Portuguese). News travel fast on the internets =)

Update: The results are in and while I did not win, I had a lot of fun learning Silverlight 3. Here are the submissions that won. Pretty cool, I must admit. They all tend to use standard JavaScript, Google Charts and Flash. I may revise my calculator and use some of their ideas.

• 1st place - http://acodingfool.typepad.com/mortgage/
• 2nd place – http://ditio.net/mortgage/
• 3rd place - http://cullenbreedlove.com/mortgage_calc.php

Some snaps I took today while shopping with my Nokia phone. Not so good quality, but still pretty cool =))

By the magic of Twitter I learned from sizeof about a contest for the “sexiest mortgage calculator”. While my graphics skills leave much to wish for and I won’t participate, I found some cool links for mortgage calculators out there. I wish I knew about these when I was buying a house.

• http://www.mortgagecalculator.org
• http://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/
• http://www.mlcalc.com
• http://www.zillow.com/mortgage/calculator/Calculators.htm
• http://www.agcalc.com/MortgageCalculator.aspx
• http://www.loancalculator.ms/
• My mortgage calculator and comparer

• 1st place - http://acodingfool.typepad.com/mortgage/
• 2nd place – http://ditio.net/mortgage/
• 3rd place - http://cullenbreedlove.com/mortgage_calc.php

My old lawn mower has something wrong with the engine – it smokes a lot and comes to a rapid halt once it gets hot. Obviously that's not very usable.
To finally cut my jungle of a yard I decided to get a new one. Rather than shelling out $300 for a brand new mower, I turned to craigslist. As always, it worked. I found one I liked, the price was right, so I got it. I just wish the seller had more faith in people – he actually made me go to an ATM since he would not accept personal check. Old people…

Anyway, the mower works great! It has a bag so I don’t have to rake. And it’s really quiet, too. Already did the lawn, looking forward to next time =)

A while back I listened to Scott Hanselman’s podcast with Noah Richards about the new Visual Studio 2010 editor. It is a from scratch rewrite using WPF technologies. Noah mentioned that Microsoft will provide many hooks to the editor (via MEF), to make extensibility a snap. The overall message was that culture at Microsoft is slowly changing and that Microsoft is becoming more open (Noah’s apparently being called an “open source communist” by some old-timers).

I am a die hard fan of an open sorce Java editor (yes, Java!) called jEdit. It has many many features, but I love it for its block editing. I often find myself switching from Visual Studio to jEdit to massage my code. I decided to send some comments and suggestions to the VS editor team. I made two simple videos comparing block editing of VS and jEdit and forwarded them to Noah and his product managers. They were interested, but asked me to provide some use cases. This is what I came up with.

Today I searched the blogsphere and what do you know. It seems that Microsoft really did incorporate my feedback. Check out the video Brittany Behrens posted. Looks like she covered all my use cases (fortunately she changed the “dump” method name to a more pc “print”). Noah also blogged about the new features.

You can only imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to see that Microsoft is actually serious about taking feedback from the community. This definitively makes me want to contribute more. And I am that much more excited to give Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 a spin =)

I spotted an article on InfoQ summarizing new futures of the upcoming JDK 7. Coming from a Java background, I was really curious to see what's in store. The article noted several "small language enhancements", so I binged around (yes, I actually used bing), and found the presentation slides from JavaOne by Joe Darcy.

While many of the enhancements make sense, I was really stunned by the "diamond operator" (page 64 of the slides). The point of it is to reduce typing when declaring generic types. Why specify the type twice, if you can do it in one spot?

List<String> myList = new List<>();

This reminded my of the var keyword in C# and the C++0x's new incarnation of the auto keyword. The difference is that the diamond operator occurs on the right-hand-side, while the type is specified on the left. Doesn't seem like a big deal, but in my opinion this idea is very short sighted.

By having the type on the right-hand-side, both C# and C++ allow much more flexibility. They can handle not only type inference of generics, but pretty much of anything. Specifying type on the right is very natural, and mimics assignment "from right to left". It seems silly of Java to ignore this obvious and proven strategy and instead introduce a new operator. This will be confusing for those programmers who do work with many different languages, and will make Java feel out of place and underpowered. For comparison, this is what Java could have had if it adopted the "auto" keyword:

auto a = 5;
auto b = "some string";
auto c = new RegularClass();
auto d = new List<String>()
auto e = obj.getSomething();
for (auto f : collection) { ... }

The above (or their equivalents) are already available in C# 3.0 and in draft C++0x. Unfortunately (judging by Joe's comments) Java 7 will be released without such type inference mechanisms. Disappointing, very disappointing...

My sister is studying Bioengineering at the University of Michigan. She was showing me her group project. As a UM engineering grad I could not believe my eyes. One big WTF. Here's the whole story:

The goal of the project is to develop a portable ultrasound machine that can be used in remote parts of the world - Africa, Amazon forest, rural India - you get the idea. The project is founded by on of the profs, and he wants the machine to be battery powered and as light as possible. Although my sister is a freaking genius, no one in her group is listening to her. The group tried to be too cool and use solar panels and was unwilling to consider alternative power sources.

Light lithium ion battery they spent most of their cash on is very light and portable. It holds charge for a long time. But… you cannot use it while it’s charging. They totally messed up the connections too. So when the machine is recharging (takes “only” 7 hours), it cannot be used. Even if you plug it into the wall socket, the way everything is wired you just cannot use it. WTF? Imagine not being able to talk on your cell when it’s being charged. A complete nonsense.

Solar panels don’t produce that much juice. You need many of them, which makes you sacrifice the portability. Then you need 7+ hours of constant sun to recharge the battery (remember you can’t use the device while it’s charging). What if you want to recharge at night? What if sun is not visible? What if it rains? Instead of the panels my sis wanted to use a crank, or a system of pedals. Throw in a large capacitor, and you can use this any time. Even without the battery. The group’s argument against it? You’d have to provide food for the operator, because he or she would get tired when cranking/pedaling. I’d rather have that and be able to use the machine in any weather and at any time. Sometimes too much technology isn’t good, and old fashion solutions seem most logical.

It’s far too late to implement any of our suggestions. Let’s hope that they get at least a decent grade for the effort…
I guess you can’t send a biomed engineer to do electrical engineer’s job.

Today at work we ran into an interesting issue. Our Windows Forms-based application worked perfectly on the English Windows XP, but it looked weired on the Japanese version. It was quite noticable - size of some UI controls differed by about 2 pixels and the entire layout was out of wack (of course we probably should have been using some sort of layout manager, but that's a different story).

After spending hours debugging this thing we came to realize it was a font problem. WinForms uses Microsoft Sans Serif by default, and its size can be a bit larger on east-Asian systems (I imaginge it's hard to read the pictograms when the font size is small). The solution was simple - all we had to do was to change the font to "MS Shell Dlg" which is an alias to a default system font. That fixed all our sizing issues. Important thing to mention is also that we had to type the font name manually in the resource file; for some reason the designer would not let us select the virtual font.

Let's hope that when we switch to WPF all such issues will be taken care of by the layout managers.

EDIT: We were actually able to go back to not specifying the font (using the default) and just applied the DPI AutoSizeMode property to the form.

This morning Tabatha finally succeeded in filming our hedgehog Ricky running in his wheel. We have seen him running before, but each time we recorded him, the video would be too dark. And each time we turned the light on, Ricky would stop and hide.

This time we moved the wheel, so that it could pickup some light from the hallway. Here he is: