Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Life

I hate Connex

Connex (yes, their website is broken) is one of companies handling public transport in Prague. They hadle only lines on outskirt of city, centre is handled by Prague Public Transit Co. Inc..

The largest difference between both is:

  1. Connex has half of busses very old and sometimes it looks like they will never reach destination.
  2. Connex never goes on time. Yesterday busses here went exactly between times specified in time table, today I missed the bus because it went several minutes sooner than it should.

Why the hell do such company still have license for public transport?

Troll resistant bugtracker?

I just found out that Mantis is not troll resistant bug tracker. I haven't noticed that in default configuration any reporter can "remind" all registered users and make them monitoring any issue. And there is no way to stop monitoring from Mantis. This is exactly what happened to bug 161.

I removed them using phpMyAdmin and I hope that I didn't break anyting. As next I disabled reminding for reporters in Mantis and I hope I didn't upset too much people. If I did, I'm really sorry.

Update: It looks that user was only too impatient and expected reply…

Biking in Šumava

I spent (longer) weekend by biking in Šumava national park. Wheather was nice and we visit many interesting places (photos will be online later). But I will never ever make a mistake to travel on MTB with people on treking one, they are simply too fast on road (and they affraid leaving it). If you will be nearby, I can recommend you nice (and quite hard) trip starting at Zadov (where we were accomodated) to Churáňov mountain, then through Nicov to watchtower Javorník, following peak to Kašperk castle and then down Kašperské Hory city and back to Churáňov. It's only 45 km, minimal parts on the road and several nice downhills.

Also this was my first real life experience with geocaching as my friend had GPS there. We found about seven caches, several of them were multicaches where you need to visit several places to calculate final location. Nicest trip was to follow Vchynicko-tetovsky kanal, but finding some stages was quite difficult.

Anyway I'm considering buying GPS, it looks like a good toy :-).

How to become number one in market?

On tuesday I realised how to become number one on mobile market. At least what marketing says is number one.

Stop random people in shopping centre and give them free precharged SIM cards. This way you will quickly have largest number of active SIM cards. No matter that those people never paid you anything, but they will be "active" for next year (or how long does card takes to expire when there is no credit). Good job T-Mobile :-).

What version control?

For upcoming Wammu-ng I have to resolve again same question that I solved for many times - what version control to use?

I know I want something distributed. I know I want to go away from arch/bazaar as they are not maintained anymore. However where to go? Mercurial? Bzr? Darcs? All of them seem to be good candidates, but I don't see much difference. I'd like to use something in Python as it's something what I can fix in case of problems (well I don't want to fix that, but who knows …).

I like bzr, but it's still quite moving target. Anyway it has some interesting ideas and it's probably what I will use at the end.

Man gets used to pay by credit card

I pay almost all expenses using credit card as I find it comfortable. I don't need much cash and it's quite widely accepted.

However when you have full basket of goods and you hear announcement that due to technical reasons you can not pay using credit card, you have a problem.

This happened to my girlfriend yesterday. No problem, I will go there with money and everything will be fine. But Murphys law was working as usual, so as soon as I arrived credit cards were again accepted :-).