Torsten Curdt’s weblog

It’s a little awkward that paypal does not provide a “user friendly” way of calculating their fees. Anyone remotely capable of simple math can do it – but still. Let’s say you want to transfer a certain amount of money between two paypal accounts from one EU country to another.

x = amount that needs to be sent
y = amount that is to be received
a = fees in percent
b = fix transaction cost

So the after a simple transformation you get the formular you need

    y = x - x*a - b
<=> x = y + b / (1 - a)

Or you just head over to a third party paypal fees calculator.

Already a couple of months ago it was clear that somehow I need to get hold of the new iPhone 3G. Let me tell you – it was a long journey! When it came out everyone was just going crazy about it. Getting a new iPhone was -to say at least- challenging. Options were either waiting lists or out of stock. But I didn’t really want a locked phone anyway. And I wasn’t very fond of switching carriers. So the waiting began. How long can it take to jailbreak and unlock theses phones? But more importantly: Where could I get one without a contract? Read the rest of this entry »

Call me old-school – but forums have never really worked well for me. Probably worth a post on its own. Anyway – it seems like the CocoaHeads forum also did not really get accepted well. People just forgot to check and it was not easy way to reach all people. So I’ve created a Google Groupe / Mailinglist for CocoaHeads Frankfurt. I am sure it will be low-traffic. Please subscribe!!

Update: You can also subscribe without a Gmail account

Usually ApacheCon is the event to meet people and do some networking. Over the past years session became less important to me. This time on the other hand I am also really looking forward to some of the presentations. So far on my “to see” list:

• Scaling Apache 2.x in all dimensions
• Building scalable web applications and clusters
• Top 10 Scalability Mistakes
• Introducing Mahout: Apache Machine Learning
• Apache Projects on DTrace
• Advanced Reverse Proxy Load Balancing in Apache HTTP Server 2.2
• More Apache Maven Best Practices
• (In)secure Ajax and Web 2.0 Web Sites / Programming Hadoop Map-Reduce
• Dependency Management With Ivy
• Java Monitoring and Trouble Shooting Tools In Action
• mod_wombat: Multithreaded Scripting in the Apache HTTP Server with Lua

Other than that I will joining the media training, there is the BarCamp Apache and the the Hadoop Camp. Plus New Orleans a city I always wanted to visit.

See you soon!

Today is my last day at joost. It has been a great ride. It gave me the opportunity to work with some amazing people. The work has been challenging and I think we achieved a lot. After my little break at the beginning of the year I came back to fix some of the lose ends. Now that this is done it’s time to move on. So I am officially on the job market as of today. But I feel no rush. While I have a couple of freelance jobs lined up that will surely keep me busy for a quite a bit, learning and exploring more new things is also on the schedule.

So what do I want to do?

There are many things that I am interested in. Ranging from Mac/iPhone development to scalable backend architectures – and so much more. But the main point is that is that I want a job that gets me excited. Not just another job in technology X. To quote a friend who has also recently been searching

the job needs to be something that I feel passionate about, something that I want my name publicly associated with and something that I feel I can invest time and energy to make a strong impact and feel proud about. And I need to be properly compensated for it. In this order, but all pieces are important.

I couldn’t have said it better. That’s the job where you get the best value for the money out of me. On top of this there are a few things to consider.

I don’t plan to relocate outside of Germany any time soon. Happy to travel – but chances are very low one can lure me into more. I am fine working remotely. Have done this for years. Either as part of the job and/or through open source. Still I would always prefer to have my team close by. Talking about teams. Small and agile would be great. Technical team lead my current position of choice – but not a requirement.

While I already have a few interesting offers I will take my time to see what’s next. If you think you might have a suitable opening – feel free to contact me via email or talk to me directly. I’ll be around during ApacheCon for example.