Il Ritrovo-Cucina Casalinga Popolare

Where

Wühlischstraße 29, 10245 Berlin N52.50957 E13.45804

Location is at corner and during summer whole sidewalk is filled with tables. There are some tables inside but it is just too hot to sit if you come during sunny day. Whole place does look a little bit shabby.

What

I had pizza that will remain unnamed and I do hope that my forgiveness wasn’t side effect of eating it. On other hand, it may be worth of this little nuisance since pizza was quite good. I cannot say that it was best in Berlin since I haven’t check all other places, but I must admit that it was best pizza I had lately (in any country).

Cost

Pizza is around 8 € which is not too expensive when you take quality into calculation. Beer at 3 € is quite costly but those German beers (I had Berliner) flow so nicely that is impossible to mind too much.

Verdict

I’ll be back.

Schumi

It seems that Michael Schumacher is back in F1 racing. While this is just temporary arragement until Felipe gets better, I will enjoy seeing him again.

I started following F1 while he was in Benetton (1994) and I enjoyed his driving since. While some of his competitive actions were doubtful at best, he was always one who made race worth watching.

I do hope that he will pass physical examinations and that I will have at least one more chance to see him in action.

ESports Heritage Classic

For those hungry of old style Starcraft players eMooseSC is casting eSports Heritage Classic games. For all Boxer fans, it is time of joy since he is actually doing quite well (or was - I know about first games and I am hiding from results myself).

First video of tournament can be found here.

P.S. Sound is quite lousy. :(

Google Voice

Yesterday I got invitation for Google Voice service and I must admit that I was delighted. Those who know me also know that I am sucker for testing new things. Everything can only get better when I get invite from one of my two favorite companies (yes, I love and use both Microsoft’s and Google’s products).

However, this service is limited to US and my Google profile clearly states Croatia, so I must wonder why Google sent me this in first place.

Same situation happened to me with invitation for Microsoft Hohm and that makes me wonder…

Are they just showing me what I cannot get?

[2009-07-19: I gave my invite away. I do hope that he will enjoy it and that Google would not mind it.]

[2009-07-19: It seems that my invite is linked to my e-mail and cannot be used by anyone else. :(]

Starcraft Lectures

Berkeley university is having Starcraft lectures.

I could only find lecture 1, 3, 4 and 6 on YouTube (there is also lecture 10 but sound quality is bellow anything listenable).

I do hope that they will record everything next year.

What to Do When Airline Breaks Your Stuff?

You could try something like this:

No LAN for Starcraft 2

Blizzard decided that Starcraft 2 will not have LAN support.

This decision is quite strange to me. Starcraft as a sport was raised on local network and low latency (just try to do Mutalisk micro on battle.net). I do not know what they did so great to their service too speed it up, but I am quite sure that it cannot be as fast as two computers next to each other. And that is even without thinking how speedy Internet play will be when Starcraft II comes out and all trillions of people try to play it at same time.

I do remember quite a few Starcraft games in hotels where ad-hoc wireless was all it was needed. Those days are gone now…

Presenting

I occasionally do small presentations. Most of them are inside jobs, but sometimes I do find myself in front of unknown people. Here are some tips that I found useful.

Rehearse

Nothing is more important than rehearsing your speech before giving it. You don’t need to do it dozen of times, one or two times is enough. Just make sure that you rehearse it as you will give it. Go through all samples and use a clock. Timing is of essence here.

Check a room

Be sure to get overview of room at least few hours (minutes in worst case) before giving a speech. Check everything that you need: power, network, telephone… If you need it for presentations, make sure it is there or that you are aware of problem. Do not allow yourself to do network troubleshooting in front of audience.

Tea

Drink tea, not coffee. I personally tend to be quite speedy presenter and if you combine that with coffee you get really quick talk that nobody can follow. Give people enough time to absorb information as they get it. However, remember that some enthusiasm is quite a good thing.

I know few presenters that have beer before presentation (or even during) but I must confess that it does not work for me. If I want to give presentation it has to be alcohol-free.

Don’t be late

Don’t be an asshole. Be in room as people pour in. Wait if you think that some more people will come in, but be there.

Going Down

I am currently experiencing major technical difficulties for both my e-mail and web site.

My mail domain had non-default MX record settings (Google Apps) and that was not updated with move to new server. Without noticing, my e-mail account was gone since 2009-06-19. MX records are now corrected, but it will probably be few more hours until DNS gets new data. And then again, I will be e-mailable.

My web site is also down since transfer to new server broke some settings and I broke rest of it.

Long night awaits…

[2009-06-22 02:00: Web site is finally up but not with full functionality. I still need to restore 404 functionality (in case of non-existent file, I used to redirect it to newest version).]

[2009-06-22 03:00: DotNetPanel was a problem. If you don’t put * into sub-code text field it will not warn you, but it will just start displaying “The data is invalid.” page for all http requests. It seems that error checking is unknown discipline in this product. In any case, web page is back up.]

[2009-06-22 03:00: My e-mail is up, but in very weird and uncomfortable setup. Hopefully normal access will be restored soon.]

[2009-06-22 12:00: I also need to thank to my web provider. While this was caused by them while moving me to another server, I must commend their availability in middle of night and during non-working days. I will most definitely stay with them.]

[2009-06-23 08:30: I got first e-mail to my server! It is sent from my web provider so it should take some more time for it to propagate through all DNS caches.]

[2009-06-23 23:30: I finally got my error reporting system back on-line. Some servers send me e-mail to correct address, but big part of them still hasn’t updated their DNS records.]

[2009-06-25: Finally everything works. :)]

Virtual Disk Management From PowerShell

Since my presentation on KulenDayz 2009 is over, I will share here PowerShell scripts for creating and mounting virtual disks under Windows Server 2008 R2. For those who really need it on Windows 7, there is solution with C# dll called from PowerShell (or just use small sample application).

Here are also links to some older post that cover most of what I was speaking about:

• VHD install
• Fixing bootable VHD
• Quick VHD install
• Quick VHD creation

If you are C# soul, you may also want to check my WinDays post.