20-IX-2010.

In the blogue, yesterday:

Unprintables

This from a programmer's question on a programmers' forum:

What is the content of those fifteen "boxes"?

The "boxes" are unprintable characters - the guy was trying to edit a field which contains some null-delimited strings, integers and other binary content.

What's it with today's programmers? Have they ever heard what a byte may contain, what's the ASCII value of it, and in how many different formats information can be stored in a file? Have they ever heard of a hex editor? Did they ever look at a hex dump of a file?

Same goes about those who ask questions like "how do I open this kind of file" - a .dat, or anything that's not one of the extensions they know. Sheesh, guys, a hex editor can open any file! If you're surprised that nothing nice happens when you doubleclick it, it doesn't mean you can't open it. Remember, this is Windows (are windows?), doubleclick will work if there's a piece of software which is registered to open that kind of file. If not, well, use what you have. Use TotalCmd's lister, for one.

Seems to me like a bunch of pilots who never heard of doing things without autopilot...

It's probably fitting that I'm writing my first blog entry from Serbia about a subject completely unrelated to the move itself. I would have expected myself to write something about how everything is so much different, not a programmer's rant. Well, such am I, still able to surprise myself. And the blogs about the different world I'm in now will come, when inspiration pumps my sails.

I've also renamed the blogue's title, it's not just „A Yugo in the US“, it's now „A Yugo in the US: back to Serbia“.

The old 6:00 bus to Szeged doesn't work anymore, so we took the one at 6:30 to Subotica. Of course, it took a break in Kikinda, Padej, Senta, Kanjiža, or at least made stops. Easy, we are in no hurry.

There, then, we found no buses across the border, the last one took off at 8:30. The cabbies charge 30€ for a ride, which may be the right price, but we aren't in the mood. So let's take a train, that works.

The girl at the window has a lot of fun with the new app, and some lady ahead of us has just asked for a new kind of ticket, rarely used, which isn't handled by the regular form but requires a different one, which the girl hasn't played with yet. Our šinobus would be leaving now... so we quit the queue and will pay to the conductor. The train dragged its wheels to Bački Vinogradi, where it took half an hour for the border clerk to gather, scan and stamp our passport. The scan is not optical, just lean it against the sensors, but it takes time to send the data and get an ACK back. And then slowly, 15 kmh, to the border. Because the tracks are in such a bad condition that any higher speed, even 25 kmh, would be dangerous, it rocked a lot as it were. At 20m north of the track there's a lickety split highway. Eh... we know that they invested less than zero in railroad in Banat in the last 40 years, but this is Bačka.

Another half an hour on the border - we walked the 40m across it, and now the Hungarians scan our passports. Then we enter into their electric train and get to Szeged in ten minutes.

We went straight to the bank and opened an account. We took some euros to start the account and that was it. In a couple of weeks we can come pick our cards, or they will mail them.

The whole triper is caused by serbian banks being slightly outside the Swift system, i.e. not directly in it but rather via intermediaries. So they have the Swift and Iban codes, but prefixed with their principal's/intermediary's prefix, with an extra S behind, or some other letter. When I first opened an account at the Rajsferšlus* bank, David couldn't pay me through his app, as the app's author, prob'ly somewhere in Canada, hasn't even heard of the existence of any suffixes behind the codes, so even that first field wouldn't pass the validation. So cancel that account, and go to Hungary again, just like 1999.

We had some forints left from 1999, and perhaps we exchanged some 20$, so we had lunch (actually no, it was three times 46$, probably some round number in forints, on the VACU card, but that was after lunch)... some generic pizza in some cheap joint. Lena had a veggie and we had an „erős Pista“ (strong Steve, but strong also means hot, picant), properly spicy. Our old 2000 forint banknote was invalid now, but luckily we had one more, newer.

We got some groceries, not much as we'd have to carry it, and sat to have a coffee. There go two chicks, and calls me by nickname... Classic, where will you meet those whom you rarely see, but in Szeged or Timişoara. That's a tradition, used to happen all the time in the seventies. Lena got seriously annoyed - wherever we go, there's someone who knows me (happened a month ago in Subotica, when the old man spotted me across the square, and I've been there only once before, for a couple of hours). Well, you should know this one yourself, that's Zvezdana from our street.

Going back, there's no bus, the last one went across even before we had that coffee. We got to the railway station, even worse, the last one left an hour and a half ago. Tried to bargain with the cabbies, but they have some screwed up internal scheme, so I can't choose, I have to take the first one in line (out of two), or walk to the some other cab station. The second cabbie, a Bulgarian, said he can't take us here, he's second, but can do behind the corner, pretend we hailed him. My hungarian was rather rusty, I forgot half my vocabulary, and though I understood most of what they were saying, montage of my own sentences went badly.

He charged us 12$ - the other guy asked 30€, and that's only halfway, to the border. We crossed it on foot, looking to hitch some transport. There were five buses, but all long distance, full of gastarbajter or such. We walked a kilometer to the next gas station, and sat there for another coffee. I asked the guard (aka security now) whether there's a cab available. Yup, we have only one in Horgoš, I can call him. Please do. He got him right on, he was 500m beyond the border, coming in. Okay, just tell him to come here.

And he did come, we easily made a deal to pay 40€ to drive us all the way home, about 80km. Too bad I didn't have the routine to lift the pics from the camera with datetimes, and Fujica didn't write the EXIF stuff, so I don't know when we were at home. But we arrived soon enough, sound and safe.

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* reichsversluss, german word for zipper, sounds familiar and easier to memorize than the actual name of the bank; similarly, the italian Intesa is called friteza, a deep fryer.

Mentions: blogue, David Berton, Fujica, gastarbajter, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), šinobus, TotalCmd, triper kombinacija, Zvezdana, in serbian

7-I-2022 - 5-VII-2026