Peter's Blog

I’m reading, rather listening as I have an audiobook, “Gottland” by Mariusz Szczygieł. It’s about interesting people and facts from Czech Republic. Unfortunately, despite it has been translated into many languages, English is not one of them. Really good read. I’ve learned about many things from Czech culture I’ve got no idea before. First story from the book is about Bata’s family and begins with description of life of Tomas Bata. Great entrepreneur. And as I don’t like people of business, I found them shallow and greedy, Mr. Bata and his family is really interesting. He was not only a businessman, but also a visionary and patriot. Thanks to him and his successors Zlin flourished and so did people of Zlin, and rest of Czech Republic as well.

So I’ve decided to make a trip to his hometown and to see what survived from his empire after WWII and Soviet’s occupation. There is still this big shoe store with walls made of glass, quite impressive. And there is Bata’s museum. There is one story in the book about Bata which I don’t like very much. Bata had big factory and was producing shoes on mass scale, so many shoemakers gone bankrupt as they couldn’t compete with Bata’s prices. One of such people when lost all his money committed suicide along with his wife and child. But before he did it he sent his workshop to Mr. Bata with a letter that he has ruined him. Tomas Bata wasn’t very touched apparently and ordered to place this workshop in the museum with description “that’s how shoes were made before me”. I think I’ve found it in the museum and you can see it below.

There is another story about Bata which I’ve learned when I was studying Management at University. He sent two employees to Africa to find out if there is market for shoes. After some time two telegrams came. First said “Nobody here wears shoes, absolutely no market”, second was “Nobody here wears shoes, big opportunity. Send shoes asap!”. It was real pleasure to see the place where he operated.

With the release of Exchange 2010 Microsoft introduced new Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy now (great book) and found this funny fragment.
Marge Saunders would drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen and upon her return ask her husband, “Would you like to help me bring in the groceries?” Bob Saunders would reply, “No.” Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself. After the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at him and demanding to know why he said no to her question.

“That’s a stupid question to ask,” he said. “Of course I won’t like to help you bring in the groceries. If you ask me if I’ll help you bring them in, that’s another matter.”

I love programmers way of thinking. It’s like in this joke:
Wife sent her husband to buy some groceries and said to him:
- Buy 10 eggs, if there would be pineapples buy two.
So guy gone to shop and asked seller:
- Do you have pineapples?
- Yes – said seller.
- So give me 2 eggs.

Quick note how to list files without directories.

Windows:
dir /a:-d

Linux:
ls -l | grep ^-

Second command should work also in Mac OS X from terminal, but will have to check it just to be sure.

Remote Desktop Gateway is a role of Windows Server that allows you to connect with hosts in your network through its encrypted gateway. I’m quite impressed by this service and decided to write a little HowTo, so it would be easier for others to deploy it. I’ve actually hit two birds with one rock, because I’ve written it using xml and php, so it was opportunity to learn something useful. Final effect can be seen here. As you’ll notice thanks to xml and simple php form you can choose between English and Polish version of text.

If you’ll examine my xml then you’ll see that I still have some problems with links, so I’m keeping it in different tags, but I hope to deal with soon. Current workaround is working fine, but it’s far from being elegant (although it’s not visible to end user at all). Enjoy!

Again thanks to Techcrunch I’ve learned about cool new Internet service – CC Everybody. It’s a blogging/forum service where you can start or reply to a post/thread by sending email to designated email address. You can even cc your personal @cceverybody.com address when you’re exchanging emails with your friends and entire conversation would appear on website. It’s quite cool, I’m thinking about using it to exchange funny pictures with my friends and family. I don’t know about storing email conversation there as everybody can see it, but maybe some discussions on general topics, why not. It’s still in beta, but Techcrunch offers 500 invitations, so if you’ll be fast you should be able to join. One thing that is annoying, as for me, is the fact that when you’ll send email to your designated @cceverybody.com address from the account you’ve supplied when registering, you still have to approve it on site before it would be published. Maybe it’s meant to provide you with more security, as you’ll have another chance to check if you really want to post this content. But I find it really unfriendly.

It reminded me about situation when I’ve sent a joke to everybody in my company. Not everybody found it funny and I’ve got a conversation with my boss. So be careful what you’re posting as it’s very hard (or rather impossible) to delete something from Internet.

If you want to post something on my page you can send email to: pczajkowski @ cceverybody.com (delete spaces).