Hugo's Blog

As it turns out, the salesperson's claim that I can reclaim VAT when I leave back to Switzerland, was wrong. I can't reclaim VAT, even if I'm living abroad, because I have a South African passport. So what, I must pay VAT in South Africa, and pay import tax in Switzerland? Are they serious? Yea, they are. It sounds like that wasn't the case when we were living in NL back in the early 1990's.

On the other hand, I can't vote! Why? Because I'm living abroad. So while I can't claim back VAT when taking stuff back to Switzerland because I have a passport — I'm enough of a South African citizen/resident for that — I'm not enough of a citizen/resident to be allowed to vote. And that definitely wasn't the case back in the early 90's.

Lovely, aint it, when those in power change the voting laws to ensure they have less competition. Too many non-ANC-voting South Africans spending 2 years in London. Can't have them vote for the opposition now, can we?

[Read more →]

In a couple of ways, in fact. And I'll revisit the topic in the title many times to discuss the different ways in different contexts. For now I'm just rambling, thinking out loud. (I need to start tagging/categorising/sorting posts here ASAP, to make it easier for those interested to follow the interesting stuff, while still providing myself a convenient place to "think out loud". Sorta elsewhere.)

I'm wasting too many resources (mental resources) thrashing about on concerns over code ownership. Life's so much easier if you've got no ambitions of your own and can just develop for your company. Or otherwise "so much easier if you're a start-up" (lol) and can just develop what you want, in the order that you want. No pressure to perform in a particular capacity. (Yes, there's a billion things wrong with this paragraph.)

Methinks I should add, for the record: I am rather new at my job, and this post reflects only my own mental silliness. It really don't say nuthin' about my employer.

[Read more →]

Three British Airays journeys since August - my first was a one-way to Zurich, uneventful. My second, return journey to California, had my baggage miss my flight on the way back. Heathrow Terminal 5 woes? They delivered the next day.

My third was for Christmas and New Year's, arrived back home today. Minus baggage. Quite a mess this time, blame possibly lies with Cape Town or Johannesburg. Yea, a lovely three-leg journey, CPT->JHB->LHR->ZRH, courtesy of booking flights rather late (waiting until I had started work and could talk to my manager).

Current status according to the website they point me to:

Bag 1 Status TRACING CONTINUES. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER

Looking through the details, a couple of things were incorrect/incomplete.

[Read more →]

My plans are something along the following lines:

• 23 December, Somerset West / Stellenbosch area
• 24 December, on the road to Graaff-Reinet
• 25/26 December, Graaff-Reinet
• 28/29 December, Stilbaai/Hartenbos/etc
• 31 December, back home near Somerset West, New Year's gathering
• 1/2 January, Stellenbosch / Somerset West / Worcester / Cape Town ...
• 3 January, flying back to Europe

Hope to see as many people as possible!

In the process of implementing a WordPress-to-mengelmoes import, I'm digging into the getRecentPosts XML-RPC call to be sure of what I'm going to get. Concerns:

• What makes a post "most recent"? Its post id, its creation timestamp, its published timestamp?
• What about draft posts that have not been published yet?

Executive Summary: getRecentPosts simply orders by publishing timestamp, local time. Just like your blog displays. Pretty predictable, the "obvious" thing to do. If you mess with the timestamps, you mess with the order they're imported in, post id's mean nothing. Drafts are interleaved in the stream of recent posts according to their tentative timestamp, and are probably best ignored (skipped over) for syncing purposes. (Maybe a once-off import or special treatment of drafts might be worthwhile, depending on what you're looking for.)

Read on if you're interested in excessively verbose details of rather limited value, noted down while I explored — though the python code examples might be of interest to some.

[Read more →]

As I'm making marks on the on-call planner to say when I won't be available, I'm wondering: what's happening in those three months that I should keep in mind? A weekend in Paris? A trip to London? Someone coming to visit? Anything I can jot down today, before the on-call timetable is drawn up tomorrow, would be useful — ensuring that I don't need to swap out later, or plan around the schedule.

Tentative plans:

• Skiing trip with some Hiking Meetup people, 18 January.
• ISCZ Davos weekend, 27 February to 1 March. (ISCZ == International Ski Club of Zurich.)

I still feel I'm far behind on getting myself educated in my new job. September and half of October flew by at a breakneck speed, and I saw myself more involved in trying to get some things done, than focusing on laying the foundations in getting myself trained up and educated about everything. But I can catch up, not a problem... Just a couple of weeks of good hard work and some focus.

Then the whole Mountain View visit thing ambushed me out of nowhere. I thought I'd go early next year, but that would be harder to do: at that point I should be getting more involved and dependable in my team. So it had to be this year. And then the whole screw-up with my boxes not arriving, and "some time in the future" became "within the next fortnight".

[Read more →]

Due to limited time, lots of impatience on my part, and starting with a "let's get this thing running!" attitude, I didn't start out with exhaustive unit tests. But I certainly do need them, especially because of my impatience.

Unit tests should test any and all Mengelmoes classes to ensure that, for all the typical uses of the API, things work. Because when I launch a new "feature" (such as reducing the number of queries when rendering comments to one query for all the comments versus one query per comment - yuck!) I'm usually too pressed for time and eager to "launch" to do proper manual testing. Testing should be automated.

What I broke with my recent speed-increase, was any comment that rendered to longer than... 500 bytes? Just fixed it, to explicitly set the cache to be a TextProperty instead of allowing it to default to StringProperty.

Bad me. I should have written a unit test demonstrating the bug, before I fixed it, thereby guaranteeing that I never break it again.

My biggest problem right now is that the tasks I have are many (and each small/quick one is rather important), but each switch between tasks gives me a chance to derail again. Is it silly of me to want or need a single big task that I can focus on and get lost in for eight hours a day? A task that has interesting and strong enough rails to keep me from drifting to other rails...

"Just suck it up", jobs are never ideal, never only fun. Everyone must be able to cope with whatever work gets thrown their way. I know that. I just suck terribly, terribly at this particular case. (Reify this paragraph in a certain way, and you "solve" the problem: if I suck so much, I should be able to suck it all up! Hah! Reification is a logical fallacy.)

It is high time for me to start putting together my Christmas and New Year plans. I'm in South Africa from 23 December to 3 January, if I recall correctly. In preparing my plans, the first step is data collection: who is where, when? I have input from ~2 people already.

Friends: if you're reading this and feel like making it really easy for me, send me an email or a Facebook message with your whereabouts/movements. Or if you're feeling more exhibitionistic, drop a comment below. I'll probably send out a couple of emails soon.

I'll start off in the Stellenbosch/Somerset-West area. Will head east, not sure how far. Maybe as far as the border with the Eastern Cape - Graaff Reinet neighbourhood, otherwise maybe only as far as George/Mosselbaai, pop in at Stilbaai... visit Worcester. Paddle some rivers? I'm sadly likely to leave my mountain bike in Zurich. Unless I find a nice bike bag soon, and a reason to bring it along. (My bike can join me for free: BA.)