AND WINTER CAME

After two weeks Christmas holiday in Finland we were ready to return to Bochum, expecting rain. In Finland there was snow, not enough though (never enough for me I guess) and it was quite cold. Most of the days the temperature was around -5∘c, but one morning I got to enjoy temperature of -18∘c, which was nice. Anyway, back to Bochum. As we took the taxi from the airport around noon, it was dry, gray and too warm to wear our winter coats - outside I mean. After two weeks without heating our apartment was cold enough for wearing winter coats inside the house.

Miska finally found use for all my candles. Hundreds of them.. Slowly the apartment started to warm up. I decided to visit a friend and as I was leaving, I noticed it had begun to snow. After three hours as I was returning home, there was 10 centimetres snow! Bochum was all covered in this magical white stuff that makes the world so soft and silent. I dragged Miska out for a walk and enjoyed the winter weather, my weather. I was hopping in the snow, kicking it, throwing it, loving it!

It was winter in Bochum. Even more than it had been in Finland. After 9 years it was really winter and it lasted almost for 10 days. And now it's gone. It's raining. I can see the green grass again. But never mind, it was here! What, you don't believe me? Check out the photos from 5th of January.









PS. Terveiset Lahteen Hennalan perukoille: Jumala on lumet luonut!

Business Reason for More Software Quality

In a world where most code is unnecessarily complex, much of the time of any software developer is just plain wasted. Assuming that a developer uses two hours daily going through some mysterious source code isn't too far fetched. The code can be his own, the details of which he has long since forgotten, or as in most cases, the code might be written by somebody who hasn't quite followed the Good Principles of Coding and instead has produced a confusing pile of programming language statements thrown carelessly together in the desperate hope that testing will take care of any problems in it. The code could have been simple and easy to extend, read and understand, but - alas - that is once again not the case. How come I'm not the least bit surprised? If we had a way of making the source code simpler, our poor developer would probably only need one hour instead of two for achieving the same. With an hourly rate of 50€, we are talking about a monthly saving of 1000€. For each developer.

Tick-the-Code is such a way and DayTick is the training course for it.

How much would you be willing to pay for a training course that saves you 5,000-10,000€ each month? (For a group of ten trainees.)

Need a hobby besides software development?

Here's a delightful hobby for a software developer or computer user: writing haikus.
First, check the rules of the game, see wikipedia.
Then choose a theme: hmm, computer problems. Yeah, that's it.
And voilá: Haiku error messages (link sent by Kaj)

Then just exercise your creative muscle and push out your own:

Page not available
Has the server crashed or what?
Client and user annoyed, both