Famous Moleskines notebooks come to Timisoara, and other small Romanian cities, where you can find Carturesti bookstores. Until now, you couldn’t find this brand of notebooks in Romania, and Amazon didn’t ship anything besides books to non-Amazon countries.

I got the small one on my trip to Belgrade, in April 2008, and the medium one on my trip to San Francisco, in September 2008.

I didn’t use them much, though. Only the medium one has some notes, from a couple of conference presentations.

Going from Santa Clara to San Francisco, by public transport, gives you a lot of time to think, since you have to change 2 light trains (VTA, BART) and one regional train (Caltrain) you’ll need roughly 2 and half hours from one place to another. On the way to airport, I had some time to note a few things about my experience there and about ZendCon 2008.

Coming from a smallish country (population of 22 millions) and an even smallish city (population of 400 000) I was impressed by the big distances Americans in these area have to travel daily. If you’re not leaving 5 or 10 km closer to your office, and in a big city, your daily possibilities are limited and is not practical to use the public transport for everything, because you’ll have to spend lots of time commuting (for example this more then 2 hours trip by public transport could have be done in 40–50 minutes by car, there are 70km, after all). We (me and my Ciao colleagues) have lost this time when we had to go from Santa Clara to San Francisco, so didn’t manage to see much. We’ve seen some classic tourist stuff, Golden Gate, the Cable Train, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Mission Street, a Spanish neighborhood we’ve landed in by mistake. Still, it was surreal to see all the things you see in the movies, the exterior fire stairs, the American Police cars, the Transamerica Pyramid building and other landmarks from San Francisco.

These tourist stuff happened on Saturday and Sunday, the first two days I spent here. For the rest of the week, I’ve attended ZendConf in Santa Clara.

More about the conference, in another post.

Just a couple of days before Greenfield Online announced that they will be bough by a private invest firm (hint: google for SRVY and follow the news), Ciao Romania had the new office opening party “Ciao – Open for business”. The party that celebrated the move in the best office spaces a company can buy in this town (City Business Center Timisoara) was celebrated at the Aquarium Restaurant from building’s 6th floor. Along with mere mortals from Timisoara office, were present representatives from Munich office, members of local students organizations and company’s collaborators.

Pictures from this, small for other but important for the company, event can be seen in the Ciao Open for Business album.

While working to add MetaWeblog support to my blog (not that I’m writing lots of stuff here and I need a ‘desktop blogging tool’ to increase my productivity) I found some very helpful links how to add this to a Django based blog. Greg Abbas wrote two tutorials on how to integrate XMLRPC into Django and Metaweblog and Django. Everything fine and dandy until I tried to integrate the XMLRPC part into my system. I’ve started with the ‘arithmetic’ example, but I got the following error message:

xmlrpclib.ProtocolError: <ProtocolError for localhost:8000/blog/metaweblog/: 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR>

It was strange for me to see that my previous play with XML RPC (used in another part of the system) didn’t work either. It worked on the production server, but not on my development machine. One of the major differences between these servers was that I was using python 2.5 on my dev server and python 2.4 on the live server. After I’ve google it around a bit, I found that there were some differences between the 2.4 and 2.5 implementation of xmlrpclib. If you check the release note for python 2.5 there is a small mention:

- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding 
arguments to constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and 
CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.

And incidentally, SimpleXMLRPCServer is used by both XMLRPC implementations.

The fix is pretty easy: add the missing parameters (allow_none – Bool and encoding – String) when you instantiate SimpleXMLRPCServer or any class based on that.

After fixing this, I still had to adapt my models to the Metaweblog API. Thanks to ecto‘s trial version, it wasn’t a very hard job. I prefer to write my posts in Textile so now I have to see how I can make ecto or other blogging tool to let me to that.

On December 2007, I bought my first laptop, a brand new MacBook Pro. A friend brought it to me from US. Since then, I replaced my home computer and my work computer almost entirely (I still have my work mail on the Linux workstation, and I don’t plan to move it on my laptop soon, and I didn’t transfer all the feeds I’m reading from aKregator to NetNewsWire).

After more then 2 months of daily usage, I wrote some notes on what I like/dislike on OS X vs Linux. Perhaps other Linux users that want a prettier user interface will make the switch to another Unix based OS.

Although, a couple of A-list programmers/bloggers/writers already made the switch back to Linux (Ubuntu, mainly), I will give this OS a try (at least the period needed to earn twice the money I spent on this laptop doing freelance jobs).

This photo shows the US layout, which I like compared to the European/Romanian layout. Read more of my notes in OSX vs Linux, two months report