The world worst traveller: beating my own records.

This time I had to travel from Dublin to Valencia, changing planes in Madrid. When I arrive to my second flight, I am elated to find out that the flight has only 4 passengers in an ATR 72 (with capacity for 68 people). I sit down, after double and triple checking it is the right flight (since there is another Iberia flight traveling at exactly the same time to Valencia). I arrive to Valencia quite fast, even before the planned time (I guess a couple of tons make a difference to such an small airplane), just to find out that my luggage isn't there! There were more crew-members than pieces of luggage, but they still manage to delay mine. They sent it to my hotel the following day, no harm done, but it is amazing they can screw up moving 3 suitcases!

Airline prices (or how to make a convoluted system not even operators can understand)

A few months ago I bought a plane ticket and I needed only one way; however, it was cheaper (in absolute terms, not relative or anything fancy) if I bought a return ticket.
As if that weren't enough nonsense, now I had an extra leg I am not going to use, so I'd like to change it to some date when I can effectively use it. After listening to music for 30 minutes the phone operator tells me that changing the date, since it exceeds the maximum stay, is more expensive than buying a one way ticket (and I guess much more than a return).
I think Google will never make a search engine for plane rates. Indexing the web: easy.
Finding the cheapest rate from A to B: hard (heck, I guess it is NP-complete)

This is the kind of people you find in Google...

So, the standard way of doing thing in the music business is:
-You publish crap
-Your sales suffer because you publish crap
-Some of your suffering customers download your stuff even though it is not worth the electricity it takes to download them
-You sue your customers

Now, the new EMI CIO, ex Googler, says that suing your customers is not a good idea, even though the full music industry is going for it. Again this is what I like about working in Google: nothing less than a full-scale revolution is good enough

Travelling salesman with N processors

XKCD applies one more... I have to say that in this case the problem is slightly changed, since it is no longer the travelling salesman, but N customers going to the distribution office, but heck, the joke is still good.

Blackberrying and eating gum

I am getting tired of famous magazines plagiarizing my blog. In this case, Time blatantly copied my post about Google reducing my lifespan. I hope my formula for profits works this time... I have a big time lawyer: his last client was SCO!

How to update Netgear WPN824

In this post I just want to single out a something from my previous post... If you have a Netgear WPN824, the auto-update feature doesn't work. You have to download the firmware image from the website and apply it.
Of course, applying a firmware upgrade is not for the faint of heart. It is one of those cases when reading the manual and following precautions is useful. You have to do it with the device firmly connected to the wall, in a sunny day, without cats, dogs or children around, praying to your favorite deity (in my case, Steve Jobs) that everything goes well.
In a related note, it reminds me of something I learned in my previous jobs. Electric companies don't apply patches to their EMS or other important systems in rainy or windy days, just in case there is a power failure.

The state of plug and play

Today I finally managed to configure my VOIP adapter, a Grandstream Handytone 286. Mind you, it was not easy, to say the least. And that's considering I am a graduate software engineer with 7 years of professional experience; the only way you have a chance is if you fully understand XKCD.
The first strange issue was that my router, a Netgear WPN824, crashed when I plugged the VOIP adapter into it. My first idea was to check if it had the latest firmware; the update system said so, and I went on. Since I had some problems with some VOIP providers and my softphone, and some reports on the Internet said that the firewall could crash the router, I tried to set the adapter in the DMZ. Since my router could only take one server in the DMZ, I had to disable DHCP and manually setup the address, which involved typing the MAC address in the router configuration. As that didn't work -I guess I would have needed to force the expiration of the DHCP address in the adapter- I had to set it statically in the adapter too.
It was really fun to find that the problem was still there: the bloody adapter still crashed the bloody router. I still had a couple of tricks left. I tried disable UPnP, which I read it also caused problems, but to no avail. I was thinking of setting up some port triggering, but I thought that if setting the adapter in the DMZ didn't work, port triggering would be quite useless too.
Going around the router documentation I come across some firmware downloads. I see the versions available and with the corner of the eye I see something strange: the latest version number seems to be different than the one I saw in my router. Fiddling a bit I check and, indeed, I had an old firmware version. All I had to do is a firmware upgrade.
For those of you who have never done it, firmware upgrades is something that really makes a person nervous. If something goes wrong you turn a piece of hardware into a nice decorative ornament; there is no undo, no turning back, it is the point of no return, you cross the Rubicon, you burn the bridges, etc.
Fortunately, the firmware upgrade worked OK and the router no longer crashed. So all I had to configure was the SIP address, the STUN server, the works. That was pretty simple in comparison.
In case you didn't notice the irony of plug and play, I included 11 very technical terms just to configure a bloody VOIP adapter, which took me 2 hours and lots of guesswork to make it work